Phoronix

Just some quick, friendly holiday reminders...

As part of Lenovo offering Linux pre-loaded on more laptops and desktops, they have been working on upstream improvements themselves along with their partners at Red Hat and others. One of the latest Lenovo-contributed improvements to the kernel is palm sensor support for newer ThinkPad notebooks...

Systemd 247 is out today as the latest major version of this Linux init system. Like most systemd releases, systemd 247 is very heavy on new features...

PHP 8.0 is out today as expected as a major update to this widely-used programming language for server-side programming and other purposes...

Unigine 2 remains one of the most visually stunning game and simulation engines out there. That's even with still using OpenGL (or Direct3D 11 also on Windows) while their Vulkan renderer remains in the works. Unigine 2.13 is out this week as their latest iteration of this visually incredible engine with first-rate Linux support...

OpenZFS 2.0 is getting quite close to release but isn't over the finish line yet and this week brings the seventh release candidate...

While the Radeon RX 6800 series is now shipping that was developed under the Sienna Cichlid codename, there are other fishy codenames remaining and are seeing more work for the Linux 5.11 kernel that will officially open development in December and then likely reaching stable in February...

For those with some extra time around the US Thanksgiving holiday, the Arcan display server/environment is out with a new release. This is the interesting project that's powered in part by a game engine, offers X11 and Wayland compatibility, ported to BSDs, and more recently has been exploring VR and other desktop innovations...

The Godot Game Engine has been funding work on a GPU-based texture compressor to deal with the issue that importing textures to this leading open-source game engine can often be painfully slow...

Blender has been gaining a lot of ground this year with numerous prominent organizations now backing its development (just most recently, Facebook) and just at the end of summer they delivered Blender 2.90 while out today is Blender 2.91...

PHP 8.0 is scheduled for release tomorrow on the US Thanksgiving day. PHP 8.0 brings with it many new language features on top of the opt-in JIT compiler support. Here is a look at some of the PHP 8.0 changes along with a quick look at the near final performance of PHP 8.0 on an AMD EPYC Linux server...

Last week a new vulnerability was made public for IBM POWER9 processors resulting in a mitigation of the processor's L1 data cache needing to be flushed between privilege boundaries. Due to the possibility of local users being able to obtain data from the L1 cache improperly when this CVE is paired with other side channels, the Linux kernel for POWER9 hardware is flushing the L1d on entering the kernel and on user accesses. Here are some preliminary benchmarks looking at how this security change impacts the overall system performance.

Thanks to work by AMD and SUSE engineers, the Linux kernel could soon be seeing frequency invariance support for EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors for yielding greater performance and power efficiency...

While Metro Exodus can run on Linux right now via Steam Play, 4A Games is still working on a port of this popular game to Linux and Mac systems...

The Qt Company has just announced Qt 6.0 Release Candidate 1 as what should be the second to the last test build ahead of the big Qt 6.0 toolkit release next month...

Just yesterday Raspberry Pi fans were celebrating that the V3DV driver is now officially Vulkan 1.0 conformant for supporting this modern high performance graphics/compute API atop the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer. Today another milestone was reached with V3DV...

This week marked the release of Vulkan 1.2.162 with the ray-tracing extensions now finalized. As such Intel's stellar open-source team has begun landing their work around Vulkan ray-tracing ahead of the Xe HPG hardware availability that will support this functionality...

While the new Radeon RX 6800 series is suited for 4K gaming, a number of premium readers inquired about seeing 1440p gaming benchmarks for the cards. Now that all the initial launch coverage is out of the way, here is a look at the Radeon RX 6800 / RX 6800 XT with 15 graphics cards in total for this round of Linux gaming benchmarks focused at 1440p...

In addition to shipping the much anticipated GTK 4.0, this toolkit driven by the GNOME desktop environment is making more plans for an exciting 2021...

AMD has updated their collection of software offered under their "GPUOpen" umbrella for Radeon RX 6000 series / RDNA 2 compatibility...

Given the recent Intel presentation alleging AMD Ryzen laptop performance being worse on battery relative to the AC vs. battery performance seen with Intel EVO notebooks featuring Tiger Lake processors, I ran a mini comparison on my side to see whether there is any merit to Intel's information when testing under Ubuntu Linux.

Earlier this year we mentioned Greg Kroah-Hartman working on a new READFILE system call. The goal of this new syscall is for reading small and medium files more efficiently by having one call to read a file straight into a buffer without having to use the separate open/read/close system calls. It's looking like that system call is back on the table and could be mainlined now that there's a possible user...

LibreOffice 7.1 was branched this weekend that also marked the hard feature freeze for this next half-year update to this open-source office suite. LibreOffice 7.1 Beta has now shipped ahead of next month's release candidate and the additional test releases in January before going gold in early February...

There are two interesting bits of news today pertaining to open-source Vulkan drivers being officially conformant with the Vulkan 1.0 specification in passing the necessary Vulkan CTS tests...

An interesting solution built off Intel's oneAPI Level Zero is the open-source "ZLUDA" that is providing a "Level Zero CUDA" implementation for being able to run programs geared for NVIDIA CUDA atop Intel UHD / Xe Graphics hardware...

WireGuard's adoption continues growing with it recently having the accomplishments of being back-ported to Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, coming to Android 12, upstreamed into OpenBSD, and other accomplishments this year. The WireGuard developers have now also updated their port of this secure VPN tunnel technology for Micrsoft Windows...

Longtime open-source developer Mike Blumenkrantz who has been an Enlightenment developer for many years and was working for Samsung's Open-Source Group prior to its demise jumped into the open-source Linux graphics world this year. While being unemployed he began hacking on the Zink Gallium3D code that allows generic OpenGL acceleration over the Vulkan API. He quickly got the code to the point of OpenGL 4.6 support and quite compelling performance compared to where Zink was at earlier this year. Now it turns out he will continue with his Linux graphics adventures thanks to funding from Valve...

While in 2021 we might begin to see PipeWire replacing PulseAudio by default at least on bleeding-edge distributions like Fedora, for now PulseAudio still is the dominant sound server used by desktop Linux distributions. Rolling out today is PulseAudio 14.0...

Last week we delivered AMD Radeon RX 6800 / RX 6800 XT Linux benchmarks and the performance was great both for Linux gaming as well as the OpenCL compute performance. But for as good as those Big Navi numbers were on the open-source Linux graphics driver stack, they are now even better.

GNU Guix 1.2 is out today as both an update to the cross-platform package manager as well as the Guix System Linux distribution...

Intel held a virtual event last week to basically plead their case that AMD Ryzen laptops are coming up short on battery-powered performance compared to their own offerings. It was all Windows focused, but at least given their emphasis now on battery performance gave me another opportunity to prod over the lackluster state of Intel DPTF support on Linux with it not being pleasant out-of-the-box and one of the few areas encumbered by blobs or lack of public documentation...

While NVIDIA has supported its own vendor-specific Vulkan ray-tracing extension on Windows and Linux since the GeForce RTX GPUs originally debuted, they are moving quick to support the Khronos ray-tracing extensions for Vulkan given the industry adoption and games coming to market likely opting for using the KHR version...

With Wine on an annual stable release cadence for shipping new stable feature releases generally at the beginning of each calendar year after a year's worth of bi-weekly development snapshots, Wine 6.0 is due for release around January...

Earlier this year Vulkan ray-tracing arrived in provisional form while with today's Vulkan 1.2.162 specification update this functionality has been promoted to stable and ready for broad industry support...

Red Hat for several years now has been working on PipeWire to overhaul audio/video stream management on Linux while being able to fill the duties currently managed by the likes of PulseAudio and JACK and being engineered with Wayland and Flatpak security in mind among other modern Linux technologies. With Fedora 34 next spring they may try to ship PipeWire by default in place of JACK, PulseAudio, and even legacy ALSA...

This New Year's Eve will mark one year since the announcement of the in-development Reiser5 file-system. While the outlook for getting Reiser5 upstreamed into the mainline kernel remains murky given the out-of-tree status of Reiser4, Edward Shishkin does continue advancing this latest Reiser file-system iteration...

In marking the US Thanksgiving week, the Black Friday / Christmas shopping season, and just another week grinding away during the COVID-19 pandemic while seeing depressed ad rates on top of ad-block users hurting our ability to continue producing new and exciting Linux/open-source content, here is our Phoronix Premium special for the holidays to show your support while getting discounted access to enjoy the site ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits...

Linux 5.10-rc4 last weekend was still rather heavy on changes but this evening now brings Linux 5.10-rc5 and unfortunately the situation has not improved.....

The Kodi HTPC software formerly known as XBMC is now up to a beta state for their big version 19 "Matrix" release...

MPV as the open-source, cross-platform media player based long ago off the MPlayer/MPlayer2 code-base is out with a new feature release ahead of the holiday season...

Flatpak and the Flathub "app store" and build service are rolling out a new repository format in order to scale better now that there are around one thousand applications on Flathub...

For those looking for some technical open-source/Linux video content to enjoy this weekend, the Debian crew has been hosting a virtual MiniDebConf devoted to gaming and all of the material is online...

Greg Kroah-Hartman has issued new point releases for all of the Linux kernel series he is still maintaining as a result of that IBM POWER9 processor vulnerability plus other random fixes that have accumulated...

It's been twenty-five years to the day since GIMP was started as an open-source image editor and in turn sparked the creation of the GTK tool-kit...

For over one year the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) has supported case-folding for optional case-insensitive file/folder support. The past number of years F2FS has also supported FSCRYPT-based file encryption. But now as we roll into 2021, support is finally seemingly ready for mainline in supporting casefolding with encryption enabled...

Out this weekend is Phoronix Test Suite 10.2-Harstad Milestone 1 as the first development snapshot of this next quarterly feature update to our cross-platform, open-source benchmarking software...

Within Intel's vast open-source software ecosystem and much of the attention being on oneAPI as their preferred programming model for developers these days and there being multiple different open-source Intel graphics compiler back-ends, one that is often forgotten about is the Intel C for Metal Compiler that on Friday saw a new release...

In addition to squaring away the Radeon RX 6000 series RDNA 2 support and promoting the Arcturus support for the new GPU found within the AMD MI100 accelerator, this month AMD open-source Linux driver developers have been devoting a fair amount of work towards power optimizations...

Ahead of the holidays the KDE development work is as busy as ever from Plasma 5.21 to its large desktop application set...

Google engineers have sent out their latest patches for allowing the mainline Linux kernel to be built with LLVM Clang link-time optimizations (LTO) for greater performance and possibly size benefits...