It has surprisingly taken until the Linux 5.4 kernel in 2019 to potentially have a single unified way for calculating the size of a member of a struct within the kernel: Linux 5.4 is looking at adding a new sizeof_member macro for handling this purpose...
ZFS On Linux 0.8.2 is out with fixes in order to provide compatibility with the brand new Linux 5.3 stable kernel while retaining support still going back to the Linux 2.6.32 days...
The engineers maintaining Intel's open-source Scalable Video Technology (SVT) encoders today released SVT-AV1 0.7 as the newest feature update to their speedy AV1 video encoder...
While Richard Stallman resigned as president of the Free Software Foundation last week, he just announced he'll be continuing as head of the GNU Project...
While Windows itself has begun offering Tar and OpenSSH support among other integration improvements for traditional Linux administrators, it's possible to seamlessly integrate Linux commands within the PowerShell thanks to some features of PowerShell intermixed with Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux...
We finally have our hands on NVIDIA's current RTX 20 SUPER graphics card line-up and have been putting the RTX 2060/2070/2080 SUPER cards through their paces under Linux. For the first of our long awaited NVIDIA RTX SUPER Linux benchmarks, first up is a look at the Linux gaming performance under a variety of native OpenGL/Vulkan games as well as Steam Play (DXVK+Proton) titles while testing a total of 26 graphics cards this round on the very latest AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce drivers.
Now that the first (beta-ish) batch of Librem 5 smartphones is shipping, Purism has published the first video showing the phone in its current state in action...
One of the most interesting Google Summer of Code projects this year was the student effort to work on better parallelizing GCC's internals to deal with better performance particularly when dealing with very large source files. Fortunately -- given today's desktop CPUs even ramping up their core counts -- this parallel GCC effort is being continued...
If looking for a new WiFi router to go with the RYF-pending, 802.11n-based Purism Librem 5 or just want a wireless network as libre as possible, the Free Software Foundation has announced an 802.11n WiFi router now available that respects the user's freedoms...
There were already 18 new PCI IDs for Intel's open-source OpenGL/Vulkan Linux graphics drivers for forthcoming Comet Lake processors with UHD Graphics, but now it appears there are even more models en route...
It was back in July 2018 that GCC's conversion to Git was becoming a massive headache and now more than a year later it's looking like that switch from Subversion to Git is still weeks if not months from becoming official...
With CompuLab's incredibly well engineered Airtop 3 fan-less computer that is built to meet rugged industrial requirements while being loaded with an 8-core/16-thread Xeon CPU, NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 graphics, 64GB of RAM, and NVMe solid-state storage, here is an interesting benchmark comparison of Ubuntu 19.04, Clear Linux, and openSUSE Tumbleweed. Given the interesting system under test, not only is the raw performance being looked at but also the performance-per-Watt / AC power consumption and CPU thermal differences between these Linux operating systems.
After a month worth of delays, Mesa 19.2 is now officially available as the latest quarterly feature update to this collection of open-source graphics driver components...
While the Linux 5.4 merge window doesn't even end until this weekend, as is usual traditional with the DRM-Next cutoff having been weeks ago, the open-source DRM driver developers are already working on their changes for what will ultimately go into Linux 5.5. On the AMD side, the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver already has some interesting work accumulating...
While the Linux 5.4 cycle just officially began last week and its feature merge window not even over until this weekend, given there are AMD EPYC load balancing improvements and many other kernel improvements in general, I was eager to fire up the in-development kernel on the EPYC 7002 "Rome" series to see how the performance is looking...
On top of many other changes for Fedora Workstation 31, this next release of Fedora Linux continues to improve the experience for proprietary multimedia codecs where the patents have lapsed...
The WireGuard open-source secure network tunnel won't be mainlined for Linux 5.4 but there finally is an action plan for getting this promising network security tech into the kernel...
The Qt Company has announced the availability of the Qt 5.14 Alpha release ahead of this half-year tool-kit update due out before year's end. Qt 5.14 is also the second to the last in the Qt5 series with an increasing amount of work shifting to Qt6 that is expected to debut towards the end of 2020...
The SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface) pull requests to the Linux kernel normally don't get us excited, but they do when it comes with word of big performance enhancements. There are several SPI performance improvements this round but exciting us the most is the work done on the Broadcom SPI driver for Raspberry Pi hardware...
Moving towards their oneAPI beta release next quarter, the Intel developers are as busy as ever advancing their LLVM-based SYCL compiler and run-times for Windows and Linux...
Epic Games' Brandon Schaefer (and in fact former Canonical developer working on Ubuntu's Mir display server) has contributed a new SDL2 video driver back-end for offscreen rendering...
In squeezing to shipping in Q3, Purism announced today their first batch of Librem 5 Linux smartphones are beginning to ship. In the process, we see the first actual photos of the Librem 5...
It's looking like RSEQ support might be added to the GNU C Library with the Glibc 2.31 release in a few months time. The "restartable sequences" support was added last year to the Linux kernel and the numbers have been quite promising for the performance benefits...
AMD's AMDVLK open-source Vulkan Linux driver recently fell off its weekly release wagon with the last release being nearly one month ago. But today they finally tagged their next milestone and given the time that's lapsed there are a number of new features and improvements...
Released yesterday was The Surge 2 third-person action RPG game by Deck13 and sequel to the earlier The Surge game. While only released for Windows and consoles, thanks to Valve's Steam Play there is same-day support on Linux...
Longtime X11 developer Keith Packard -- who these days is focused full-time on RISC-V while working for SiFive -- has released Picolibc 1.0 as a new libc implementation for embedded systems...
With Ubuntu 19.10 one of the changes we have been looking forward to the most is the planned Ubuntu desktop installation support atop ZFS as a root file-system and Canonical's related work around the new ZSYS daemon. It's looking like the basic ZFS root installation support will make it in time for next month's Ubuntu 19.10 release but more advanced installation features won't be ready in time...
Traditionally with the Linux graphics drivers there are PCI ID tables littered in multiple places throughout the driver stack from the DRM/KMS kernel drivers to the Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers but also the potential for other areas like the increasingly less common DDX drivers and other components. AMD is looking to address the proliferation of PCI IDs throughout the stack and the maintenance burden of having to keep the list of IDs in sync across the different components...
Just a week past the previous Proton update, Proton 4.11-6 is out today from Valve as the latest version of their Wine downstream powering Steam Play...
Fedora Workstation 31 when it debuts at the end of October should be another great release for the Fedora project and continuing to ship with the bleeding-edge yet stable packages and latest upstream innovations...
After last week making waves by open-sourcing their C++ standard library and opening up their new console/IDE font, this week was kicked off by releasing .NET Core 3.0...
Similar to their Deep Learning Reference Stack for delivering better AI / deep learning performance on Xeon Scalable CPUs, Intel has now released the Database Reference Stack 1.0 for optimizing performance on their DC Persistent Memory...
A majority of our benchmarking of Intel's new Gallium3D OpenGL open-source driver is done with various "Gen9" graphics hardware given its proliferation and not yet having any Icelake Gen11 graphics hardware for Linux benchmarking. But with the Iris Gallium3D going back to supporting Broadwell "Gen8" graphics, here is a fresh look at how that oldest supported Intel hardware is working for this new Linux open-source OpenGL driver compared to the current default "i965" Intel OpenGL driver too.
Red Hat's Andrea Arcangeli sent out an interesting patch series on Friday to micro-optimize the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to enhance the VMEXIT performance in wake of Spectre mitigations...
While AMD has provided open-source Radeon RX 5700 series (Navi 10) support since launch and that code since worked into the various mainline code-bases from the Linux kernel to Mesa, one kink in their support has been their binary microcode images not being available from the reference linux-firmware.git location as needed to initialize the hardware. That Navi 10 firmware/microcode issue has finally been rectified with the images landing this morning...
Jiri Kosina on Sunday sent out the HID subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 5.4 kernel. The HID pull once again features support for several new devices particularly on the Logitech side...
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