Phoronix

This past week at the Open Source Summit Europe in France there were several past Outreachy interns that shared their work on contributing to the Linux kernel and related open-source projects. Several of these projects have resulted in useful additions to the Linux kernel...

It's been a while since last having any new features to report on in regards to the Linux kernel's livepatching infrastructure for applying kernel updates without system reboots. With the Linux 5.5 there is a big addition to livepatching and that is support for tracking the system state changes...

Godot 4.0 continues to be worked on with much excitement by lead developer Juan Linietsky and others. While continuing to advance the Vulkan code in general for its introduction in Godot 4.0, over the past month most of the development efforts were focused on global illumination...

For those wondering what KDE developers are up to at the start of November, KDE's Nate Graham has published his latest weekly blog post highlighting the new developments in the KDE space...

IBM developers and others continue exploring the potential for address space isolation in the Linux kernel to reduce the risk of leaking sensitive data in attacks like L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF), MDS, and other vulnerabilities. Though this does increase the complexity of the kernel code and the performance hit is still to be evaluated...

Intel's Mika Westerberg who continues overseeing the Linux kernel's Thunderbolt code has prepped more changes ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.5 cycle...

In recent years we have seen prominent automobile manufacturer BMW engaging more with open-source and Linux. At this week's Open-Source Summit Europe / Embedded Linux Conference Europe they talked more about their increasing usage of Linux from their assembly line to within automobiles...

With the C++17 support in the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) already being quite mature for about two releases/years, when the GCC 11 development cycle opens they are looking at enabling their GNU dialect of C++17 to be the default standard when compiling C++ code...

Along with Intel sending in their last feature pull to DRM-Next for Linux 5.5, AMD has done the same in sending their lingering AMDGPU feature work for queuing ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.5 merge window...

The Rust-written "rav1e" AV1 video encoder continues working on better performance potential with recent Intel/AMD CPUs...

Fresh off last night's Wine 4.19 uncorking, Wine-Staging 4.19 is out as the experimental blend of Wine with more than 800 patches for experimental/testing patches atop the upstream code-base for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms...

With the start of a new month we are always eager to see what Valve reports via their "Steam Survey" for Linux usage (among other stats) for the month prior. The October 2019 numbers are now published but they don't indicate any Linux change in marketshare but with some odd indications...

Wine 4.19 is out today as the project's first development release for November and as we get quite close to the feature freeze / RC period for Wine 5.0 that will be out in early 2020...

With Qt 6.0 planned for release in late 2020, KDE developers are thinking about the eventual KDE Frameworks 6.0 for when they plan to transition to the evolutionary Qt 6 tool-kit. The first of likely several developer sprints around KDE Frameworks 6 will be happening already in late November...

Thanks to Red Hat's Hans de Goede there is another optimization to GNOME's Mutter around XWayland full-screen gaming...

The open-source vkBasalt project is the independent effort implementing AMD Radeon Image Sharpening / Contrast Adaptive Sharpening technique as a Vulkan post-processing layer that can be used regardless of the (Vulkan-powered) game. With vkBasalt 0.1 also now comes the ability to apply FXAA...

During October on Phoronix there were 287 original news articles and 27 featured-length Linux hardware reviews / benchmark articles, all written by your's truly. Here is a look back at the most popular Linux hardware happenings and other open-source/Linux news for the past month...

Intel's open-source crew has submitted the last of their feature updates to their "i915" Direct Rendering Manager graphics driver for staging in DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.5 kernel cycle...

NVIDIA's Nitin Gupta continues working on proactive compaction for the Linux kernel's memory management code...

MidnightBSD is one of the easy-to-use, desktop-focused BSDs that makes it easy to run GNOME and other desktops like Lumina atop its FreeBSD base. MidnightBSD 1.2 was released on Halloween as an update providing updates to its base system and various fixes...

Dell has been offering the Dell XPS 7390 in "Developer Edition" form with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS for this newest XPS generation using 10th Gen Comet Lake CPUs while now they have added more hardware configuration options...

Following last week's release of Chrome 78, Google today promoted Chrome 79 to their beta channel...

While we long to finally see GIMP 3.0, GIMP 2.10.14 is out as the newest stable update for this leading open-source image manipulation program...

With Mesa 19.3 having been branched yesterday, hitting Git master today as an early change for Mesa 20.0 is an overhaul to the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver's buffer object (BO) allocation code...

The Khronos Group has launched the Vulkan Unified Samples Repository, a Git repository on GitHub for Khronos-reviewed, high-quality Vulkan code samples...

The performance of Fedora 30 on multiple systems has generally been coming up short compared to the likes of Ubuntu, Clear Linux, and openSUSE Tumbleweed. With this week's release of Fedora 31 I was hopeful that the performance would be more competitive to other prominent Linux distributions, but sadly that doesn't appear to be the case. Here are some initial benchmarks of Fedora Workstation 31 compared to Fedora Workstation 30, Clear Linux 31450, and Ubuntu 19.10.

Linux Mint 19.3 "Tricia" will be out before Christmas and continuing to further refine this desktop focused Linux distribution...

Gaming on ARM-based boards like the Raspberry Pi will soon have the potential for running much better thanks to a series of ARM Assembly optimizations that were just merged into SDL2...

The mainline Linux kernel continues to see better support for Oracle VM VirtualBox with more of the guest drivers reaching the mainline kernel to provide a vastly better out-of-the-box experience...

The Qt Company has released version Qt 3D Studio 2.5 of their 3D UI creation software originally derived from code that NVIDIA volleyed as open-source...

Microsoft's Windows Insider Preview Build 19013 has introduced memory reclamation support for Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2)...

Thanks to the BSD wizards at iXsystems, FreeBSD has received an important performance fix/optimization around their ZFS file-system code...

The newest feature of systemd is... a new logo...

Mesa 19.3 feature development is now officially over and Mesa 20.0 is open for development on Git master. This final Mesa series of 2019 comes with many exciting OpenGL and Vulkan drivers...

Similar to the flurry of Radeon driver activity in buttoning things up ahead of the Mesa 19.3 feature freeze, the Intel open-source crew has landed some last-minute bits around the Tiger Lake "Gen 12" enablement...

While we are getting late into the Linux 5.4 cycle, there still is some interesting AMDGPU work settling down...

CodeWeavers' Derek Lesho has been working on Vulkan shared memory support for Wine to expose some interesting use-cases...

With Mesa 19.3 scheduled to be branched today and that marking the end of feature development for this next quarterly installment to these open-source Linux OpenGL/Vulkan drivers, developers are in a mad rush landing last minute improvements. The open-source Radeon driver support has a lot to stand in particular from today's work...

For those interested in running Android on x86 Intel/AMD hardware, the Android-x86 project is still churning along but while Google is onto Android 10, this project is still tracking Android 8 Oreo...

Today the Intel Core i9 9900KS is shipping at $513 USD for this specially-binned Coffeelake CPU that is capable of achieving a 5.0GHz all-core turbo frequency. The all-core 5.0GHz turbo is great, but it remains an eight-core / sixteen-thread 14nm processor going up against AMD's similarly priced Ryzen 9 3900X. Here are our initial benchmarks of the Core i9 9900KS compared to the Core i9 9900K and Ryzen 9 3900X.

Intel's IWD wireless daemon for Linux systems that could potentially replace WPA_Supplicant has reached the big 1.0 milestone...

Deprecated for the upcoming GCC 10 compiler release and set for removal in GCC 11 one year later is the CC0 representation code that is being used for handle condition codes in GCC back-ends. That in turn means a number of older CPU targets will be removed in GCC 11 should they not receive some development attention to transition them to the modern MODE_CC representation...

While many fled from GitHub to GitLab following Microsoft acquiring the code hosting service, GitLab has come under a bit of fire of its own with plans they had been working on around telemetry support that would begin tracking its users and potentially sharing the data with third-party firms...

We first wrote about the Landlock Linux security module in 2016 with its aspirations for offering powerful security sandboxing abilities. Landlock has seen revisions every few months and this week marks the 11th time the patches have been volleyed for this interesting sandboxing Linux Security Module (LSM)...

In addition to Mir's other road-map items around replaceable renderers and hybrid graphics driver support, it also turns out the Canonical developers involved are working on expanding the graphics platform support...

The open-source MoltenVK is out with another new update based against the Vulkan 1.1.126 specification and allowing the Vulkan API to be used on Apple's macOS and iOS by mapping those calls to the underlying Metal graphics drivers...

Cleaning up of the Pango layout engine library as some much needed housekeeping by GNOME developers resulted in shifting to the Harfbuzz library for font loading. That quietly meant dropping support for bitmap fonts from Pango, which is now reaching Linux desktop users when upgrading to the Pango 1.44 stable release...

Debian Project Leader Sam Hartman has determined it's necessary to pursue a general resolution among Debian developers over their init system policy and whether to still care about init system diversity outside of systemd...

Fedora 31 is now officially available as the latest update for this prominent Linux distribution backed by Red Hat and continuing uninterrupted under IBM's ownership of Red Hat...

For those curious about the performance of AMD Radeon open-source Linux gaming out-of-the-box on the newly released Ubuntu 19.10, here are those benchmarks compared to the Radeon driver state on Ubuntu 19.04. Additionally, there are benchmark results if manually upgrading your Ubuntu 19.10 installation to using the in-development Linux 5.4 kernel and Mesa 19.3 for the very newest AMD Linux driver support.