Phoronix

While the Mesa "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver's "ACO" back-end was developed and funded by Valve with gaming in mind to optimize game load times and help with delivering optimal performance, it turns out ACO works damn well for some Vulkan compute workloads too...

For a while now there have been references to "Vivaldi" as a new Chromebook keyboard firmware for future devices. References in Chromium OS repositories have pointed to expanded keyboard layouts and other new features with Vivaldi. Coming with the Linux 5.10 kernel is now a new HID driver for supporting some of the differences with Vivaldi...

Valve has updated their monthly Steam Hardware/Software Survey statistics for September and they indicate the closest we've seen in a while for Steam on Linux closing back in on the 1.0% threshold...

The Ubuntu 20.10 "Groovy Gorilla" beta is now available for testing of Ubuntu Desktop / Cloud / Server products as well as derivatives like Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, and Xubuntu...

The third release candidate of OpenZFS 2.0 is now available for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation currently for Linux and FreeBSD platforms...

The first release candidate of the big PHP 8.0 is now available for testing...

Linux 5.10 is set to bring a major rework to the Spectre mitigation handling for the 64-bit ARM architecture...

It's always great starting off a new month seeing new work on low-level kernel optimizations...

When Intel announced 11th Gen "Tiger Lake" last month it wasn't clear how long it would be until seeing systems actually appear with these new processors. Fortunately, the new Dell XPS systems with Tiger Lake and Intel EVO certification are on sale beginning today with shipping dates reported to be later this month...

Mesa's Vulkan software implementation built atop LLVMpipe was developed as Vallium (Vulkan + Gallium3D) but has been renamed to Lavapipe within Mesa 20.3...

While Plasma 5.20 isn't shipping until later this month, already for Plasma 5.21 down the pipe is a big change and that is the optional support for systemd starting up of the Plasma session. This can lead to faster startup/load times and other improvements while even the process of bringing up the systemd support helped uncover other KDE bugs...

From new hardware releases to figuring out that Linux 5.9 performance regression to interesting open-source software advancements, September was an interesting trek with 259 original articles on the site and another 15 featured articles / multi-page Linux hardware reviews...

Following yesterday's release of the finalized OpenCL 3.0 specification, open-source Intel developers have released OpenCL Intercept Layer 3.0...

In addition to the last minute AMDGPU fixes for Linux 5.9 that include work on the RDNA2 new GPU support and promoting Navi 12 out of the experimental status, an initial batch of fixes for AMDGPU were also sent in to DRM-Next on Wednesday in addressing early fallout from the new feature code slated for Linux 5.10...

One of the fundamental changes with Fedora 33 is making use of systemd-resolved by default for network name resolution. A number of users testing out Fedora 33 on desktops and servers have run into various issues with systemd-resolved and sought to revert and delay this default behavioral change until a later release...

GTK4 continues running behind earlier release plans, but GTK 3.99.2 is out today as another development snapshot towards the upcoming GTK 4.0 release...

A batch of fixes to the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver were sent in today for Linux 5.9. While AMDGPU fixes this late in the kernel cycle tend to not be too notable, this time around there are some prominent items worth covering...

Following last week's news of Firefox Nightly flipping on their new JIT "Warp" update I was eager to run fresh benchmarks of the current Firefox releases compared to Google Chrome under Ubuntu Linux.

Just in time for the end of the quarter Intel's open-source multimedia team has released the Media Driver 2020.3 package for the Intel graphics accelerated media encode/decode component on Linux platforms...

Back in April was the provisional release of OpenCL 3.0 with making CL 2.x features optional while adding async DMA extensions and more. Today the finalized version of OpenCL 3.0 has been released plus also introducing an official Khronos OpenCL SDK...

The sixth spin of Intel DG1 discrete graphics card patches have now been sent out for review, amounting to just about 700 lines of new driver code due to building off the existing DG1 work and more broadly the Gen12/Xe support that's been refined in mainline for months. With these patches it would appear the Intel DG1 is then in good shape under Linux but due to the timing is unlikely to be mainlined until a stable kernel release in early 2021...

Last week on the GNU toolchain side was initial work on supporting Intel Key Locker while this week Key Locker support has come to LLVM...

NVIDIA's Linux Vulkan beta driver build has moved from the 450 series that it's been on for a while to the current 455 branch...

NVIDIA software engineer Zi Yan sent out on Monday his latest "1GB PUD THP" patches in aiming to boost application performance on Linux for software making use of large amounts of RAM...

For those making use of the "MT76" WiFi driver for Mediatek MT76 series wireless support, the Linux 5.10 kernel should be a nice upgrade...

As we approach the end of Q3'2020 there have been 783 original news articles on Phoronix this quarter and another 40 featured reviews / multi-page articles. Here is a look back at what's been keeping readers informed during this turbulent year...

Intel's compiler experts in Moscow have been working on OpenCL C 3.0 support for the LLVM Clang compiler front-end...

The open-source Panfrost graphics driver, which is now backed/supported by Arm after starting as a reverse-engineering effort, has picked up support for the Mali G72 GPU...

In addition to Fedora Workstation 33 switching to Btrfs, there are a number of key components updated in Fedora 33 as well as finally enabling link-time optimizations (LTO) for package builds that make this next Fedora Linux installment quite interesting from a performance perspective. Here are some initial benchmarks of Fedora Workstation 32 against the Fedora Workstation 33 Beta on an Intel Core i9 10900K system.

The beta of Fedora 33 is available this morning ahead of the official release expected at the end of October for this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution...

While yesterday brought the release of Intel's oneAPI 1.0 specification, the interesting news today is that oneAPI support is coming to AMD Radeon graphics cards...

Following the news yesterday of NetBSD changing its default X11 window manager after two decades with TWM to now using CTWM by default, some wondered why they don't jump on the Wayland bandwagon...

MoltenVK 1.1 is out as a big update for this graphics translation layer for getting the Vulkan API running on macOS and iOS devices by translating calls to Apple's Metal API...

Mesa 20.2 has managed to release just before the end of the the quarter. This Mesa Q3'2020 graphics driver update is coming out about one month behind schedule but the wait is worthwhile given many open-source OpenGL and Vulkan driver updates...

Mir 2.1 has been released as Canonical's project around offering a set of libraries for constructing Wayland shells particularly with Snap confinement support and other Ubuntu-focused features...

Hobbyist developers are trying once again to get a Motorola 68000 back-end merged into the upstream LLVM compiler. Yes, the M68k processors that are some 30+ years old...

A new version of Stratis is ready to go as Red Hat's open-source storage solution built atop LVM and XFS for offering easy and modern local storage management on Linux systems that aim to rival the likes of Btrfs and ZFS but without having to rely on a new file-system...

WayVNC 0.3 released today as the Wayland VNC server built atop the WLROOTS library...

Micron's Mpool is at the heart of their HSE Open-Source Storage Engine in providing an object storage media pool built atop block storage devices. Micron engineers are now looking at possibly having Mpool upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel...

After announcing oneAPI at the end of 2018 and then going into beta last year, oneAPI 1.0 is now official for this open-source, standards-based unified programming model designed to support Intel's range of hardware from CPUs to GPUs to other accelerators like FPGAs. Intel's oneAPI initiative has been one of several exciting software efforts led by the company in recent years while continuing to serve as one of the world's largest contributors to open-source software.

Building off Friday's release of Wine 5.18 is now an updated Wine-Staging that adds just over 600 patches atop the upstream code-base for delivering experimental/testing features...

AMD driver developers today released AMDVLK 2020.Q3.6 as their latest open-source snapshot of their official Vulkan graphics driver...

It was just earlier this summer that the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) crossed 17 million firmware downloads while today the Linux hardware community is celebrating that already surpassing 20 million downloads!..

It's 2020 and NetBSD has changed its default X11 window manager after more than two decades with TWM...

Version 8.4 of OpenSSH has been released and among its wide assortment of changes is a lot of continued work on FIDO/2FA key handling...

Vulkan 1.2.155 is out this morning as a small weekly update over last week's spec revision that brought the Vulkan Portability Extension 1.0 for easing software-based Vulkan implementations running atop other graphics APIs...

Broadcom engineers have prepared their Linux network driver infrastructure for supporting 200G link speeds...

Rob Clark who founded the Freedreno/MSM driver project and current Googler sent in the MSM direct rendering manager driver updates targeting the upcoming Linux 5.10 merge window. This time around the Adreno kernel graphics/display driver has some notable additions...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.9-rc7 as the newest weekly test candidate for Linux 5.9. Due to the regressions encountered this cycle and prominent issues being resolved late, he's looking at releasing Linux 5.9 in two weeks time rather than next week...

Given the interest from the RealSR-NCNN Vulkan benchmarks on various NVIDIA and AMD Radeon graphics cards looking at this neural network inference framework with the task of upscaling an image by 4x the resolution using RealSR, here are some more benchmarks of the NCNN framework accelerated by Vulkan on different GPUs under Ubuntu Linux...