Firefox 76 Enabling VA-API Wayland Acceleration For All Video Codecs

With the upcoming Firefox 75 there is VA-API GPU-based video acceleration working on Wayland. While this built off FFmpeg, the initial code was limited to supporting H.264 while for Firefox 76 that is being extended...


Mesa 20.0.2 Released With The Latest Fixes, Principally Helping Intel + Radeon Graphics

Mesa 20.0.2 is out this evening as the latest stable bug-fix update for the Mesa Q1'2020 driver series...


NVMe SSD Systems May Boot Slightly Quicker With Linux 5.7

Systems making use of NVMe solid-state storage may see slightly faster boot times with the Linux 5.7 kernel this summer...


LibreOffice 7.0 Git Adds Skia-Based Text Rendering Support

With the in-development LibreOffice 7.0 one of the headlining changes is making use of Google's Skia library and with that is Vulkan rendering support. That initial implementation was using Skia to draw the UI while now it's also picking up text rendering responsibilities...


Linux 5.7 Getting Driver To Deal With More Buggy & Funky Looking Mice

Linux 5.7 continues the trend of the community taking up new drivers being created to support different peripherals under Linux that amount to dealing with quirky/buggy behavior of the hardware...


Ubuntu 20.04 LTS A Nice Upgrade For AMD Ryzen Owners From 18.04 LTS

Particularly for those on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS or derivative distributions based on the current long-term support base, moving to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS due out next month will yield some nice improvements particularly for those on newer platforms like the AMD Ryzen 3000 series. Here are some benchmarks at how the Ryzen 9 3900X performance is looking between Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS, Ubuntu 19.10, and the current Ubuntu 20.


Intel

Intel P-State Driver Preparing To Migrate From "Powersave" To Passive Schedutil Default

It looks like in the next one or two kernel releases we could see Intel transitioning their CPU frequency scaling governor default from the long-standing powersave to the modern schedutil governor. It's now believed schedutil should be at least as good as powersave...


Is Clear Linux Just A Toy Distribution By Intel?

A user experimenting with Clear Linux had an opinion to share on their mailing list and referred to it as a "toy" distribution and some of our readers have expressed similar opinions on it. Here is the response by one of the Intel developers central to Clear Linux's development...


Devuan 3.0 "Beowulf" Reaches Beta For Debian 10 Without Systemd

Devuan 3.0 "Beowulf" has finally reached beta as a spin of Debian 10 "Buster" created without a dependence on systemd...


IO_uring Is Maturing Well On Linux For Faster & More Flexible I/O - Benchmarks On Linux 5.6

Since its introduction in Linux 5.1, IO_uring has been coming together quite nicely and getting better with each new kernel release. IO_uring is the effort for delivering faster and more efficient I/O by avoiding excess copies and other efficiency improvements over the existing Linux AIO code. Here are some comparison benchmarks off Linux 5.6 Git...