Phoronix

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...

It's been seven years since the release of libX11 1.6.0 for this central X11 library while on Friday was replaced by the libX11 1.7 series. The release is primarily made up of fixes but leading to the version bump is a new API that allows for applications to recover from I/O error conditions rather than being forced to exit...

We should be getting near the end of the Wine 5.xx development releases with the timed Wine 6.0 release likely to come in early 2021, but for now Wine 5.22 is out with the latest feature work for running Windows programs and games on Linux and macOS...

Coreboot 4.13 is out today as the latest tagged version of this open-source firmware platform supporting a wide range of hardware...

For those curious about the hardware potential out of Apple's in-house M1 processor powering new Mac Book Pros and Mac Mini, for the past week we have been running benchmarks of this ARM-based processor and have a number of benchmarks to share today looking at how the performance compares to prior Intel-powered Macs along with the Rosetta 2.0 performance for running x86_64 binaries on ARMv8.

Xfce 4.16 had been aiming to release in October~November as part of their new timed release approach but that has now slipped into the December~January time-frame but today saw the availability of the second pre-release...

CVE-2020-4788 is now public and it's not good for IBM and their POWER9 processors... This new vulnerability means these IBM processors need to be flushing their L1 data cache between privilege boundaries, similar to other recent CPU nightmares...

Being sent in as a "fix" this week to the Linux 5.10 kernel is removing the experimental flag for the Arcturus GPU, days after AMD announced the MI100 accelerator at SC20...

Two months ago Qt 5.15.1 released with over 400 bug fixes and today the second point release of Qt 5.15 LTS is out with another nearly two hundred fixes...

Well this will be interesting to see what NVIDIA use-case pans out... NVIDIA engineers are working on a Vulkan extension for making use of RDMA memory...

The fallout should be minimal and hopefully not impact any Phoronix readers, but as Mesa rolls into 2021 it is looking to drop support for loading DRI1 graphics drivers...

This summer Intel disabled frame-buffer compression for Gen12 Tiger Lake graphics. While FBC helps conserve memory bandwidth and can be beneficial to power-savings, under-run issues and related problems resorted Intel to disabling this common feature for Tiger Lake...

Earlier this year we reported on Linux kernel work for better handling Windows games/apps that make system call instructions that bypass the Windows API. Directly making the system calls without going through the WinAPI has become an increasingly common occurrence for modern Windows games, likely as part of their Digital Rights Management schemes. Syscall User Dispatch is now the latest take on that effort...

The second release candidate of Mesa 20.3 is now available for testing ahead of its likely stable debut in early December...

Announced during the summer was Intel's Maple Ridge controller in the form of the Intel JHL8540 / JHL8340 chips as their first discrete Thunderbolt / USB4 controllers. Linux support for the Intel Maple Ridge controller is now on the way...

The last piece of the puzzle to the open-source AMD Radeon RX 6800 / RX 6800 XT driver support is now upstream in its respective location...

While it was just two days ago that AMDVLK 2020.Q4.4 was released, AMD has made good on their word to provide punctual AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver support for their new RDNA 2 "Big Navi" graphics cards and that has resulted in a new AMDVLK release...

Mir 2.2 is out this morning as the newest update to this Wayland compositor and display server...

The Inclusive Naming Initiative has been formed by various industry players to make "consistent, responsible choices to remove harmful language" from software...

In addition to AMD and Xilinx bringing ROCm to FPGAs, another interesting open-source/Linux milestone for the company being acquired by AMD is their publishing of the AI Engine open-source kernel driver with ambitions for upstreaming it...

Google engineer Joel Fernandes sent out the ninth version of their "core scheduling" patches for the Linux kernel that allows for allowing only trusted tasks to run concurrently on the same CPU core -- in cases where Hyper Threading is involved to safeguard the system against the possible security exploits...

Now here is some darn interesting software news from SC20... AMD, which is in the process of acquiring Xilinx, is bringing the Radeon Open eCosystem "ROCm" stack to Xilinx hardware...

While Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) support wasn't a focus for the initial Radeon RX 5000 "Navi" graphics cards by AMD engineers, that is fortunately changing for both the RX 5000/6000 series moving forward. With the Radeon RX 6800 series there is at-launch support available with working OpenCL provided by the "ROCr" (runtime) path in their packaged driver. Now that we have looked at the Radeon RX 6800 Linux gaming performance here are some initial OpenCL compute benchmarks between NVIDIA and AMD Radeon on Linux.

Radeon Software for Linux 20.45 is now available as the Radeon RX 6800 series launch driver for Linux systems...

Today is the big day: Big Navi is shipping! This also means we can talk at length finally about the Linux support and performance for the Radeon RX 6800 series and how well they perform for Linux gaming. Here is a look at the Linux driver state for these initial RDNA 2 graphics cards and their performance capabilities with the multiple different open-source driver stacks available.

The Qt Company has released their public beta of the forthcoming Qt Design Studio 2.0, their software for quickly and easily designing user interfaces with an emphasis on UI design for non-programmers...

More improvements are coming to Mesa 21.0 following last week's merging of the Direct3D 12 Gallium3D driver that is being used by Microsoft for supporting OpenGL/OpenCL-on-Direct3D 12...

For those trying to setup their Linux systems to be "Big Navi"-ready if purchasing one of the new graphics cards today, some more last minute fixes have landed within Mesa...