Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 36 min ago
NVIDIA's Latest Open-Source Project Is Their NVDLA Deep Learning Compiler
Two years ago NVIDIA announced the NVDLA as an open-source hardware project with this "NVIDIA Deep Learning Accelerator" to be a free and open architecture for inference accelerators. NVIDIA has now expanded the open-source software ecosystem around NVDLA...
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X Benchmarks On 11 Linux Distributions
Now that BIOS updates over the past month have resolved the early boot issue with Ryzen 3000 processors and thus the new AMD CPUs playing nicely with modern Linux distributions, here is the long-awaited benchmark comparison of the Ryzen 9 3900X + X570 system benchmarked across an array of different Linux distributions... In fact, 11 Linux OS releases in total were tested on this high-end 12-core / 24-thread desktop processor.
Chrome 77 Released With Serial API, WebVR 1.1 & Any Element Can Provide Form Data
Google has rolled out Chrome 77 into their stable channel as the newest version of their lightning fast web browser for Linux...
AMD "Trusted Memory Zone" Encrypted vRAM Support Coming To Their Linux GPU Driver
AMD Trusted Memory Zone support is a new feature being worked on for their open-source graphics driver that works in conjunction with the graphics hardware for being able to encrypt portions of the video memory...
Arm Joins The Compute Express Link Bandwagon (CXL)
Arm has now joined Intel, HP Enterprise, Google, Microsoft, Dell EMC, and others in backing the new Compute Express Link (CXL) effort as the interconnect for future accelerators...
Acer Begins Publishing UEFI Firmware Updates For Linux Users On LVFS For Fwupd
Following a lengthy evaluation period, Acer is the latest hardware manufacturer offering firmware updates for their products via the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for easily applying these updates from the Linux desktop with Fwupd...
GNOME 3.36 Pegged For Release On 11 March, More Stable Point Releases Come To GNOME
With the big GNOME 3.34 release coming out this week, the GNOME 3.36 release schedule has now been published...
How Intel's Clear Linux Team Cut The Kernel Boot Time From 3 Seconds To 300 ms
Intel engineer Feng Tang spoke at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference in Lisbon, Portugal on how the Clear Linux team managed to boot their kernel faster. They started out with around a three second kernel boot time but cut it down to just 300 ms...
F2FS Will Have Faster Case-Insensitive Lookups With Linux 5.4
The EXT4 case-insensitive lookup optimization added to the file-system with the current Linux 5.3 cycle has been ported to the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) for the upcoming Linux 5.4...
MoltenVK Continues Improving The Vulkan Experience On macOS/iOS
A new release of MoltenVK is now available that is updated against Vulkan 1.1.121 for allowing much of this graphics/compute API to function under Apple's macOS and iOS platforms by remapping the Vulkan calls to Metal...
Intel's Gallium3D Linux Driver Now Exposes OpenGL 4.6
Just a few weeks after Intel's i965 OpenGL driver in Mesa added GL 4.6 support, the "Iris" Gallium3D driver is now exposing OpenGL 4.6 support too...
Fedora 32 Looking At Switching Firewalld From Iptables To Nftables
While Fedora 31 isn't even out yet, looking ahead to the Fedora 32 release next spring is a plan to switch firewalld as Fedora's default network firewall from its existing iptables back-end to the more modern nftables back-end...
Intel Issues Second Release Of Its Rust-Written Cloud-Hypervisor For Modern Linux VMs
Intel's open-source crew has released version 0.2 of its primarily Rust-developed Cloud Hypervisor and associated firmware also in Rust...
AMD Linux Improvements Pending Around FreeSync Low Frame Rate Compensation
Sadly too late for the upcoming Linux 5.4 merge window, but for Linux 5.5 it looks like there will be a FreeSync improvement around low-frame-rate compensation...
The Intel SVT-VP9 Performance Boost Across 10 Intel/AMD Systems
As a follow-up from this weekend's article about Intel's SVT-VP9 video encoder running much faster on AVX2 CPUs from both Intel and AMD, here are the results now before/after for ten different systems with this open-source CPU-based VP9 video encoder...
The New Features Of LLVM 9.0 & Clang 9.0 - Includes Building The Linux x86_64 Kernel
The LLVM 9.0 release is running a few weeks behind schedule but should be out in the days ahead along with other LLVM sub-project releases like Clang 9.0. Here's a look at what's on tap for this half-year update to the LLVM compiler infrastructure...
Ubuntu 19.10 To Boot Faster Thanks To LZ4 Compression
Ubuntu's kernel team has decided to switch to LZ4 kernel image compression beginning with Ubuntu 19.10 in order to speed-up the boot times...
Another Navi 14 Workstation GPU Patch Turns Up For "Pro-XLM"
Yesterday we reported on two Navi 14 device IDs being added for "workstation SKUs" while today a third has appeared...
Intel's Gallium3D Driver Gains Optimization For Helping With Java OpenGL Performance
In our recent Mesa 19.2 benchmarks of Intel's old and new (Gallium3D) OpenGL Linux drivers one of the rare areas where the new "Iris" driver performed behind the classic driver was with "j2dbench" that stresses the Java OpenGL pipeline. At the time it was unknown why the new driver was performing subpar for this Java graphics test, but now at least there's one optimization so far in addressing that shortcoming...
KDE's Kate Text Editor Plans Improvements To Better Compete With Atom
During this week's KDE Akademy 2019 conference there was some planning discussions around improving the Kate text editor...