Phoronix

KDE developers wrapped up February 2020 with many fixes and improvements throughout their desktop landscape...

During last month on Phoronix were 276 original news articles and another 18 featured Linux hardware reviews / benchmark articles. Here is a look back at the most popular content and news stories for the month...

For those looking to experiment with a BSD-based desktop open-source platform, GhostBSD has been competing well as one of the few in this field. GhostBSD 20.02 is out and continues being based on TrueOS/FreeBSD stable packages while shipping the GTK-based MATE desktop environment as its out-of-the-box desktop solution...

With how ubiquitous the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is, one may have assumed that for years the software stack was already extensively optimized to insane levels, especially as it concerns the boot time for being able to quickly respond to changes in load... But it turns out there still is some low hanging fruit such as with Amazon's "ENA" network driver and a new patch allowing it to initialize 90 times quicker...

Addressing a two year old bug report over screen rotation not working when running KDE Plasma on Wayland, that support is finally on the way...

On top of the last minute GNOME 3.36 work on scaled/transformed hardware cursors handling, there is some other interesting last-minute Wayland work on the Mutter side...

Coming a month after Weston 8.0 and a few weeks after Wayland 1.18 is Wayland-Protocols 1.19 (and subsequently Wayland-Protocols 1.20 over a snafu) as the collection of Wayland protocol specifications...

On top of all the Godot happenings for its Vulkan rendering support, the code-base for Godot 4.0 is also being cleaned up and among the other improvements being worked on are Wayland and EGL support...

DXVK 1.5.5 is out this weekend as a big update to this Direct3D-over-Vulkan translation layer widely used by Linux gamers in running Windows games with decent speed...

Following yesterday's Wine 5.3 release, Wine-Staging 5.3 was issued as the latest testing/experimental flavor of Wine. Wine-Staging 5.3 is still carrying 800+ extra patches compared to upstream Wine while it has updated its Event FD synchronization code and also added one important addition this cycle...

In 2020 we certainly didn't expect the Linux Gaming Publishing website to appear back online, years after their single server failed and ultimately faded away as one of the promising Linux game porters built up following the collapse of Loki Software...

The Genode operating system framework is out with a new release along with its general purpose Sculpt OS operating system...

While the Qt5 tool-kit on Wayland is in fairly good shape in recent times, the Qt Wayland module that provides the Wayland platform abstraction and helpers for assembly Qt-based Wayland compositors could run the risk of regressing...

For those that have managed to get their hands on the Pinebook Pro as the $199 ARM 64-bit laptop powered by a Rockchip RK3399 SoC and with 4GB of RAM, 1080p panel, 64GB eMMC, and other decent features for the price, mainline Linux kernel support could be in order possibly even for Linux 5.7...

Wine 5.3 is out as the latest bi-weekly development snapshot on the road to Wine 6.0 next year...

Prolific open-source developer Richard Hughes of Red Hat who has been responsible for the creation of PackageKit, the ColorHug colorimeter hardware, GNOME Software, and for the past number of years focused on the Fwupd firmware updating utility and Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) has a new open-source project...

NVIDIA has issued another stable Linux driver release in their long-term 440 series...

The Unity 8 desktop environment that continues to be developed by the UBports open-source community for use on UBports' Ubuntu Touch and ultimately back on the Linux desktop as well have renamed the project...

A new version of the Radeon Open Compute "ROCm" stack is available today but it still doesn't deliver on Navi support...

On top of the Mesa "RADV" Vulkan driver's recent support for using the Radeon GPU Profiler with this open-source driver, RADV is now adding support for the SQTT hardware block on Radeon GPUs for expanding the profiling metrics it is able to expose...

The LLVMpipe CPU-based software rasterizer OpenGL driver within Mesa's Gallium3D now has working tessellation shader support (ARB_tessellation_shader) and can even run Unigine Heaven demo properly, just don't expect good performance...

Landing just in time for GNOME 3.36 is a merge request that has been open for nearly one year on improving Mutter's hardware cursor handling...

The Qt Company has released their first beta of the forthcoming Qt 5.15 tool-kit...

The cost of cloud hosting -- or in particular hosting their own GitLab instance and running continuous integration (CI) support for FreeDesktop.org projects -- is putting financial strain on the X.Org Foundation...

A few days back we reported on a security vulnerability within Intel's KVM virtualization code for the Linux kernel. That vulnerability stems from unfinished kernel code and was fixed for Linux 5.6 Git and is now being back-ported to the 4.4 / 4.9 / 4.14 / 5.5 supported kernels...

The latest benchmarks for your viewing pleasure are looking at the dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 performance up against the dual AMD EPYC 7742 CPUs while using the in-development Linux 5.6 kernel as the first time trying out these highest-end server processors on this new kernel debuting as stable in about one month's time...

The SPICE remote display system developed by Red Hat is up to version 0.14.3 with a few prominent additions...

Mesa's Panfrost Gallium3D driver for providing open-source support for Arm Mali Midgard and Bifrost GPUs now has experimental OpenGL ES 3.0 support...

While test builds have been available for months, out today is Android-x86 9.0-r1 as the first stable release of the Android 9.0 "Pie" series brought to Intel/AMD x86/x86_64 hardware...

AMD Linux kernel graphics driver maintainer Alex Deucher has submitted the company's first batch of graphics driver updates to DRM-Next that in turn is for inclusion with the upcoming Linux 5.7 cycle...

Stemming from incorrect rendering with VA-API and UYVY422 content with AMD Radeon graphics on Linux, a number of fixes were merged today for improving the Gallium3D video code...

Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller recently talked about his vision for the Fedora Project over the next decade and it to become an "operating system factory", among other advancements he hopes to see out of the project in the 2020s. A one-sentence vision for Fedora is now drafted as their vision statement...

The Subversion version control system is celebrating its 20th anniversary...

GCC 8.4 will hopefully be released next week but for now a release candidate is available for testing the latest bug fixes in the mature GCC8 series...

Debuginfod is the Red Hat led debug information HTTP web server distributed as part of elfutils and able to supply on-demand source code and ELF/DWARF debug files to debuggers / IDEs / other compiler tooling. The GDB debugger can now tap debuginfod for on-demand source files and debug information that isn't present on the local system...

Announced last November was the Bytecode Alliance with a goal of running WebAssembly everywhere. This effort by Intel, Red Hat, Mozilla, and others has resulted in a new release today of wasmtime, their JIT-style runtime for WebAssembly on the desktop...

With it being a while now since the PHP 7.4 release and the PHP developers continuing to be busy at work on PHP 8.0 as the next major installment of the popular web programming language, here is a fresh look at the performance of PHP 8.0 in its current state -- including when its JIT compiler is enabled -- compared to releases going back to PHP 5.6...

Go 1.14 is now available as the latest version of this popular programming language backed by Google...

Phoronix Test Suite 9.4-Vestby is now available as one of our largest updates in recent years for our open-source, cross-platform automated benchmarking framework. Almost wanting to rebrand it as Phoronix Test Suite 10, sticking to conventional versioning the Phoronix Test Suite 9.4 release brings numerous result viewer improvements, a lot of polishing to the PDF result exporting, various Microsoft Windows support improvements, new statistics capabilities, some useful new sub-commands, and much more as the latest quarterly feature release.

As we've been expecting to happen with the Linux EFI code being cleaned up before the introduction of a new architecture, the RISC-V patches have been posted for bringing up UEFI boot support...

Besides all the usual hardware enablement activities with the usual names by Intel's massive open-source team working on the Linux kernel, one of the more peculiar bring-ups recently has been around the "Intel Gateway SoC" with more work abound for Linux 5.7...

Prominent Linux and macOS game porting firm Feral Interactive looks like it may be dissolving, (edit) but fortunately turned out to be an accounting error...

SHAREDed is an open-source, cross-platform solution for creating and testing HLSL and GLSL shaders. This "shader IDE" is out this week with SHADERed 1.3 that presents new capabilities...

As an obstacle for upstreaming some particularly older NVIDIA Tegra devices (namely those running Android) is that they have GPT entry at the wrong location or lacking at all for boot support. That missing or botched GPT support is because those older devices make use of a NVIDIA proprietary/closed-source table format. As such, support for this proprietary NVIDIA Tegra Partition Table is being worked on for the Linux kernel to provide better upstream kernel support on these consumer devices...

Announced last March was Monado as an open-source implementation of OpenXR, the Khronos standard for AR/VR. Today marks the first release of Monado as version 0.1 so while it's still early on it is showing much progress...

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver for Linux doesn't see much attention for pre-Broadwell hardware but today it saw a big improvement for Vulkan compute on aging Gen7 Ivybridge/Haswell era hardware...

Intel just sent out their initial pull request of new feature changes/improvements to DRM-Next that in turn is for landing in about one month's time when the Linux 5.7 merge window kicks off. With taking longer than usual to send in their first round of feature updates, this first of several pull requests already amounts to over 400 patches...

The Free Software Foundation is planning to launch their own public code hosting and collaboration platform in 2020...

Linux-friendly industrial PC vendor OnLogic has announced an expanded line-up of their mini PC offerings with Ryzen Embedded processors and also word that next quarter they will be getting into EPYC-powered edge servers...

Manjaro 19.0 is out today as this popular desktop-focused Arch Linux based distribution that is focused on its Xfce desktop spin but also offers other desktop options...