Phoronix

Today perhaps will be the most interesting day since the start of the pandemic... It's finally the day where AMD Zen 3 desktop CPUs are expected to be revealed in just about one hour's time! Stay tuned, but before that virtual event, here is a word on the Linux prospects and support for these upcoming AMD CPUs...

Following last month's release of GNOME 3.38, out today is GNOME 3.38.1 as the first point release to this H2'2020 Linux desktop environment...

With this quarter's Mesa 20.3 the Gallium3D "Clover" state tracker providing OpenCL support finally can handle version 1.2!..

Tencent developers have proposed "DMEMFS" as a virtual file-system with the intent of helping to save system memory on large servers such as in public cloud environments...

It looks like for Linux 5.11 there could be lower power usage during video playback on DCN 2.1 hardware, namely AMD Renoir...

Launched at the start of the year was the Kubuntu Focus as a polished KDE laptop while now it's been succeeded by a second-generation model...

Patches from a Google engineer allow run-time average power limiting (RAPL) support for AMD Zen processors within the Linux PowerCap driver...

While GIMP 3.0 development drags on, the GIMP 2.10.x stable series continues seeing new and interesting point releases. Out today is GIMP 2.10.22 that now supports the AV1-based AVIF image format for import and export...

At the end of September there were Mesa patches posted for the "Dimgrey Cavefish" at the same time as also posting VanGogh APU support for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. The AMDGPU Linux kernel driver support has now been posted for the Dimgrey Cavefish...

DXVK 1.7.2 was just released as this popular library for mapping Direct3D 9/10/11 atop the Vulkan API primarily for accelerating Windows games on Linux via the likes of Steam Play (Proton) and Wine...

Complementing yesterday's large GPU compute comparison with the GeForce RTX 3080 across many different workloads, today's article is looking at the Blender 2.90 render performance for this consumer Ampere $699+ graphics card.

Ready to move past the tumultuous year that is 2020, Intel's open-source developers responsible for the OpenVINO toolkit today issued version 2021.1 with some big ticket additions...

Last month marked the release of the 455.23.04 beta driver for NVIDIA Linux users in providing support for the GeForce RTX 3080 and 3090 graphics cards. The NVIDIA 455.28 Linux driver is out today as their first official 455 series release and also stable RTX 3080/3090 Ampere support...

The virtual OpenZFS Developer Summit got underway on Tuesday with many interesting talks on the open-source work around the ZFS file-system...

Linaro is working on the DTPF framework for the Linux kernel for meeting legal requirements around the maximum allowed case/contact temperature of devices...

Synaptics has contributed RMI4 F3A support for Linux 5.10 to better the support for newer laptop touchpads...

While the feature-packed OpenZFS 2.0 is on track for releasing before year's end as the evolution of ZFSOnLinux and now with FreeBSD support and many other improvements in tow, for those riding the ZFSOnLinux 0.8 stable series out today is v0.8.5...

It looks like the upcoming Linux 5.10 kernel cycle will be the first to bring initial support for UEFI booting on RISC-V hardware...

Chrome 86 is out today as the latest feature release to Google's cross-platform web browser...

Yesterday I finally received a GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card from NVIDIA for being able to deliver the first of our Linux benchmarks on the new RTX 30 Ampere series. What is immediately clear is the huge performance uplift for OpenCL and CUDA workloads with the RTX 3080 compared to its predecessors. The raw performance and even performance-per-dollar is staggering out of the GeForce RTX 3080 with the initial tests carried out on Ubuntu Linux. Linux gaming benchmarks will be out in the days ahead but for now is a look at the RTX 3080 compute performance across dozens of benchmarks and going as far back as the GeForce GTX 980 series for comparison.

Even with the tumultuous year due to the coronavirus pandemic, The Qt Company is still on track for delivering the Qt 6.0 toolkit release before year's end...

Last week open-source developers at Intel began sending out Linux patches for supporting hybrid CPUs particularly ahead of 12th Gen "Alder Lake" coming to market with a mix of Golden Cove and Gracemont cores. Following that article last week, more patches hit the list in exposing the hybrid CPU topology to user-space...

F2FS as the Flash-Friendly File-System has long supported transparent file-system encryption via Linux's FSCRYPT framework but now Google engineers are working on allowing the file-system metadata to also be encrypted...

Due to DXVK recently beginning to require Vulkan Transform Feedback (VK_EXT_transform_feedback) for this Direct3D translation layer popular with Linux gamers, Intel open-source developers have gone back and now implemented transform feedback support in the Intel "ANV" driver for Haswell era "Gen 7" graphics...

U-Boot 2020.10 released on Monday as the latest quarterly feature update to this open-source bootloader popular with embedded devices...

Git 2.29 is on the way with today marking the availability of the initial release candidate...

Python 3.9 is out today as the newest feature update to this extremely popular language in open-source crowds...

With upstream work Red Hat is engaged in for supporting HP and Lenovo laptops on Linux, a new standardized sysfs interface is being discussed for exposing the performance-profile option on newer laptops so users can more easily select their desired laptop power/performance characteristics...

While the wiesn (Oktoberfest) was cancelled this year, a few Phoronix readers inquired whether I was going to offer the traditional "Oktoberfest special" sale for Phoronix Premium to help support our daily Linux/open-source news, hardware reviews, and benchmarking during this turbulent year. So, yes, here is our annual Oktoberfest special if you would like to show your support during these COVID times...

Vulkan 1.2.156 was released this morning and while it's a small revision to the API documentation it does come with a new extension...

NVIDIA's online GTC 2020 event kicks off today with a ton of announcements coming across the wire but not one many Linux users have been clamoring to hear more about...

Last year NVIDIA announced the Jetson Nano at $99 USD as their lowest-priced ARM SBC board to date focused on inference, robotics, and other GPU-accelerated tasks in a small, low-power form factor. The Jetson Nano at $99 USD is already significantly cheaper than the other numerous Jetson boards over the past several years while now today they are introducing a $59 board.

AMD released an updated Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver at the end of September that went seemingly unnoticed. Only today when seeing "20.40" firmware binaries hitting the linux-firmware.git tree was I even aware of this updated packaged AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver focused on enterprise distributions...

Canonical kernel engineer Andrea Righi has sent out an updated patch series implementing opportunistic memory reclaim support as a way of forcing the kernel to attempt to reclaim system memory...

Windows x86 binaries can now run on POWER9 hardware under Linux with Wine thanks to Hangover...

Presumably with Xe-HP in mind, Intel engineers continue working on adding DMA-BUF support to the Linux kernel's RDMA code...

The Free Software Foundation on Sunday marked thirty five years since its founding by Richard Stallman...

With the new OpenBenchmarking.org that's been out in public form since last month and being developed as part of the soon-to-be-released Phoronix Test Suite 10.0, here is the latest feature now enabled in making it much easier for quickly carrying out high-level processor (CPU) and graphics card (GPU) component comparisons along with other improvements...

While normally the Linux kernel sees its stable releases after about seven weeks worth of release candidates, today Linux 5.9-rc8 was issued in allowing an extra week of testing...

It's been eight years already since the launch of the OUYA game console built atop Android and initially driven up by hype as a new low-cost gaming platform only to turn out to be a commercial failure. Razer bought out OUYA's software assets in 2015 and last year finally shutdown all of the console services. But if you still have the OUYA hardware it soon may start running off the mainline Linux kernel...

The Linux 5.9 kernel could be released as soon as today but more than likely will be pushed back to next Sunday given Torvalds' comments last week and continuing to see plenty of merge requests in recent days. But in any case when Linux 5.9 does ship very soon it comes with an abundance of new features and improvements...

SHADERed as the open-source, cross-platform shader integrated development environment now has a compute shader debugger built-in...

Linux 5.10 will bring a new driver for the Intel MAX10 BMC...

If you frequently put your system(s) through hibernation cycles, the performance should be much better beginning with the soon-to-start Linux 5.10 cycle...

The EXT4 file-system with the upcoming Linux 5.10 kernel has an optimization yielding big benefits for file overwrites in some circumstances...

The first patchwork is building up for Intel's "Meteor Lake" on Linux...

Intel updated their programming reference manual this week with some interesting new additions, primarily around user interrupts and the enhanced hardware feedback interface...

KDE developers for more than one year have been working to evolve the default Breeze theme and the work by the KDE Visual Design Group is finally paying off with the initial "Breeze Evolution" changes landing...

The first release candidate of TVM 0.7, the Apache incubator project providing a deep learning compiler stack, is now available...

XCP-ng as the open-source hypervisor built atop XenServer is preparing for its 8.2 LTS release while this week marked the availability of the first beta...