Phoronix

For those tantilized by the prospects of gaming on RISC OS, SDL2 has been seeing early mainline work on supporting this long-standing operating system...

Following Netflix's AV1 adoption with collaborating with Intel on the SVT-AV1 encoder, now using AV1 streaming for Android users, and others around this advanced royalty-free video codec, Netflix is now exploring AVIF as their next-gen image format...

New stable and development releases of Mesa3D are available for providing the latest open-source Linux graphics driver experience for OpenGL and Vulkan...

For those that enjoy our daily open-source/Linux news each and every day of the year along with all of our original Linux benchmarking / hardware review content, you can show your support this Valentine's Day with a special offer...

Blender 2.82 is out as the second update over last year's big Blender 2.80 release...

As has been known for a while now, AMD Ryzen Threadripper processors really show their true potential on Linux with often significant increases to the performance thanks to the kernel's better scalability compared to Microsoft Windows. While Microsoft has made some improvements in this area over the past year, with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X 64-core / 128-thread HEDT processor it really shines on Linux. In this article are benchmarks of Windows 10 Professional and Windows 10 Enterprise against Linux on the Threadripper 3990X when going from 16 cores to 128 threads for seeing how the three operating systems are scaling.

While many in the Linux community still cringe when hearing Imagination Tech's PowerVR given the troubling state of their graphics drivers over the years, in 2020 it looks like they are pursuing a new open-source graphics driver project...

After recently ending feature development on Qt 5.15, the alpha release of this forthcoming tool-kit is now available...

OpenSSH 8.2 is out this Valentine's Day as the leading SSH suite. Besides working to disable the SSH-RSA public key signature algorithm due to SHA1 collision attacks, OpenSSH 8.2 also comes with new features...

PHP 7.4 should be landing in the Ubuntu 20.04 archive in the next week or so...

A new driver already queued in the power management code for the Linux 5.7 cycle not opening up until April is a "tiny power button" driver...

Clear Linux looks poised to join the ranks of the few Linux distributions allowing it to run off an F2FS root file-system...

While the open-source Intel "ANV" and Radeon "RADV" Vulkan drivers get talked about a lot, one of the lesser known Vulkan drivers within Mesa is Turnip but it's been gaining steam recently...

It's been years since last hearing anything about sisched as the SI machine instruction scheduler that started out for the RadeonSI OpenGL driver and was ultimately supported by the RADV Vulkan driver too...

Proton 5.0-2 is out with fixes over last week's big Proton 5.0-1 release that brought many features to this Wine 5.0 downstream focused on powering Valve's Steam Play for running Windows games nicely on Linux...

Intel Blackhole Render support was finally merged today for the new Intel "Iris" Gallium3D OpenGL driver default, the older i965 driver for pre-Broadwell hardware, and also the Mesa state tracker for Gallium3D drivers...

Here are some fresh numbers looking at the current performance of various AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors up against Intel Xeon Cascade Lake processors when using an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS development snapshot and also upgrading to Linux 5.5 as the latest stable kernel. Beyond raw performance, power efficiency and performance-per-dollar for these different server CPUs are being compared as well for these sub-$5000 processors.

Flatpak 1.6.2 is out and users are encouraged to upgrade due to a recent Flatpak + OSTree regression that leads to slow install times...

Beyond the Linux kernel patches presented earlier this week for AMD SEV-ES "Encrypted State" support, another Linux patch series out overnight provides another improvement to Secure Encrypted Virtualization with AMD EPYC server processors...

The release of the long sought after GTK 4.0 is one step closer to finally becoming reality with the slightly delayed GTK 3.98 now being available for testing...

Making use of Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) and Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) is currently being talked about by Mesa developers for their release builds in potentially squeezing out better performance...

Quibble is a new open-source bootloader that supports booting Windows XP through Windows 10 and opens up new possibilities like booting a Windows installation off Btrfs...

It's been a while since last having any new magical optimizations to talk about by DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon, but on Wednesday he landed some significant temporary file-system "TMPFS" optimizations for better throughput including with swap...

It looks like the Cavium/Marvell OCTEON MIPS-based processor support is being restored for Linux systems after some of its drivers were briefly removed...

Collabora under contract with SK Telecom has been working on Hwangsaeul as a new open-source platform for relaying security system surveillance video feeds from multiple sources, recording them on the centralized server, and supports connected clients for watching the feeds...

Given this week's release of Firefox 73 stable that also puts Firefox 74 into beta state, here are fresh Firefox browser benchmarks of Firefox 72/73/74 on Ubuntu Linux with and without WebRender as well as how it compares to the current state of Google Chrome.

After a one week delay, Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS is available today as the newest long-term support point release...

Since the release of Linux 5.6-rc1 that is coming in as a very feature-packed kernel, here are benchmarks of Linux 5.5 stable up against Linux 5.6-rc1 on a few of the systems tested so far while more results are in-progress...

While Linux 5.5 is out in the wild now as the latest stable version of the Linux kernel, it turns out some Intel kernel graphics driver patches were overlooked and this can spell trouble for some users...

One of the letdowns of the forthcoming Linux 5.6 kernel is that AMD's long-awaited Sensor Fusion Hub "SFH" open-source driver wasn't ready in time for merging this cycle, but it continues moving forward with hopes of seeing it in Linux 5.7...

RISC-V's Supervisor Binary Interface "SBI" is the interface between the platform-specific firmware and the running operating system or hypervisor for interacting with the supervisor execution environment in the higher privileged mode. The Linux kernel has been working to support a newer version of the SBI that is more extensible moving forward...

With the big Linux 5.6 kernel on the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver side there is finally accelerated support for the GeForce RTX 2000 "Turing" graphics cards (when paired with binary-only microcode). With that initial cut support is no GeForce 16 series Turing support, but that is now on-deck for Linux 5.7...

There is experimental work pending that plumbs support into MEMFD for creating "secret" memory areas. This secret memory support would then be exposed to user-space for different use-cases...

Wayland 1.18 is out today as the first update to the core Wayland code in nearly one year...

One of the interesting takeaways from my pre-launch briefing with AMD on the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X was AMD representatives actually recommending Clear Linux for use on this 64-core / 128-thread HEDT processor and the platform to which they've found the best performance. Yet, Clear Linux is an Intel open-source project. In any case, here are benchmarks of how Clear Linux performs against other Linux distributions on the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X within the System76 Thelio Major. And, holy crap, with the Threadripper 3990X on Clear Linux I managed to build the x86_64 default Linux kernel in under 20 seconds!

While the Godot 4.0 release is still months away from seeing its stable debut with the new Vulkan renderer, the Vulkan renderer branch was today merged to mainline...

While since 2016~2017 AMD has been posting Linux kernel patches for Secure Memory Encryption (SME) and Secure Encrypted Virtualization, coming out this morning is finally the first public patch series wiring up the Linux kernel for SEV-ES as further enhancing virtualization encryption...

The KDE community has released Plasma 5.18 as the newest version of their desktop and a release that is also a long-term support release, succeeding the aging Plasma 5.12 LTS...

Just as scheduled, earlier this month the feature freeze went into effect for Qt 5.15 as the last major step for Qt5 before seeing Qt 6.0 hopefully arrive towards the end of the year...

Mozilla Firefox 73 is available this morning as the latest update to this open-source cross-platform web browser...

Red Hat's Stratis storage project for offering enterprise storage capabilities on Linux to compete with the likes of ZFS and Btrfs while being built atop LVM and XFS saw the first update to its daemon of 2020...

Following this weekend's GNOME 3.36 beta, WebKitGTK 2.27.90 is available as a snapshot of this GTK-catered version of the WebKit layout engine on its path towards version 2.28...

With the recently released Linux 5.5 and its new features, one of the prominent changes on the storage front was the Btrfs file-system picking up new "RAID1C3" and "RAID1C4" modes for allowing either three or four copies of RAID1 data across more drives to potentially allow up to three of four drives to fail in a RAID1 array while still being able to recover that data for this file-system with its native RAID capabilities...

Now that the merge window is over for Linux 5.6, where the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver managed GeForce RTX 2000 "Turing" series accelerated support, a new feature addition landed Monday in the Nouveau kernel development tree for the next cycle...

While not yet suitable for gamers or serious end usage, the Radeon "R600" Gallium3D driver that supports the Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 (pre-GCN) graphics cards now has an experimental NIR back-end...

For those still fond of the GNOME 2 desktop environment, the MATE Desktop Environment that's been living on as a continuation fork of GNOME2 is out with its version 1.24 update...

For those that may be looking to run an air-cooled AMD Ryzen 9 3950X especially in a rack-mount 4U chassis, here are some recent results I did from some testing using a Noctua NH-U9S with two 92mm fan configuration. Additionally, these results contain performance metrics from both CPUFreq Ondemand vs. Performance governors as an additional point of interest...

While there are a lot of new end-user features with Linux 5.6, there are also some changes not yet mainlined. Here are six that come to mind as missing out on the Linux 5.6 merge window...

For those using OpenBLAS as your BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) implementation, OpenBLAS 0.3.8 was released this weekend and coming with it are more AVX2/AVX-512 kernels and other optimizations...

AMD this morning announced the Radeon Pro W5500 as their latest workstation graphics card designed for modern design and engineering needs...