Phoronix

For those sticking to stable releases of Mesa3D there is Mesa 20.2.2 now available as the latest point release...

Following yesterday's Wine 5.21 release is now an adjoining Wine-Staging update that carries over 700 patches on top of it for testing purposes...

New Wasmtime and Wasmer releases appeared this week for advancing WebAssembly on the desktop...

For fans of the Arch Linux distribution their Arch Conf 2020 virtual presentations have all been posted now for your enjoyment...

Following yesterday's launch-day AMD Ryzen 9 5900X/5950X benchmarks that showed the utter domination of Zen 3 carrying over just fine in the Linux realm, today we are looking at the performance of the Ryzen 5 5600X on Ubuntu against other Intel/AMD processors. The Ryzen 5 5600X is AMD's new $299 USD part that offers six cores / twelve threads and incredible uplift still over Zen 2 / Zen+ processors while outperforming Intel's Comet Lake competition.

Wine 5.21 was just released as one of the smaller bi-weekly updates this year...

Zink as the Mesa Gallium3D implementation putting OpenGL 3.x/4.x on top of the Vulkan API is now offering near-native performance...

GIMP 2.99.2 is finally available as their "first step" towards releasing GIMP 3.0 that most notably transitions from the GTK2 to GTK3 toolkit...

VKD3D-Proton as the Valve-backed fork of Wine's VKD3D for mapping the Direct3D 12 API atop Vulkan is now supporting more features with today's v2.0 release and thus handling more Windows games running on Linux with Steam Play...

Back in August we reported on Red Hat engineers developing Stalld as a new Linux service for detecting stalled threads and also allowing select threads to be boosted based on policy. In the months since Stalld continues to be developed and recently saw new releases...

FlightGear 2020.3 is out today as the newest feature update to this long-standing, open-source flight simulator software package...

It's not across the finish line at least yet but Mesa 20.3 just merged today the initial prep changes needed for exposing OpenCL 3.0 support within the Clover Gallium3D state tracker...

For the past several months there have been a number of Intel Linux DRM patch series around "big joiner" support and that is looking like it may soon be finished up for allowing support for driving 8K displays off a single port...

An initial round of predominantly AMDGPU kernel driver patches have been called upon for pulling into DRM-Next as new feature work for Linux 5.11...

Following the news that we were first to report last month on Intel starting open-source public patches for Vulkan ray-tracing in preparation for their forthcoming Xe HPG graphics card, the initial prep work for that Vulkan ray-tracing support has now been merged in time for Mesa 20.3...

While the Sony PlayStation 5 isn't beginning to ship until next week there is now support within the widely-used SDL2 library for its controllers...

Not only are AMD Ryzen 5000 series completely dominating in performance but they could soon see open-source Coreboot support as an alternative to the proprietary firmware/BIOS. Project X is an interesting effort around blob-free Coreboot/Oreboot support on AMD Zen...

The AMD Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 9 5950X are hands-down incredible winners. While processor company marketing claims are sometimes dubious and not necessarily relevant to Linux users and their open-source workloads/software, after testing the Ryzen 9 5900X and 5950X the past several weeks the performance has been incredibly compelling with significant single and multi-threaded performance uplift over Zen 2 and easily thrashing Intel's current desktop offerings with over 200 benchmarks conducted for launch-day.

After just publishing the results of 200+ Linux benchmarks under many diverse workloads for the Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 9 5950X we see the 16~20% performance lift is very real and very broad from obscure open-source niche software through high profile programs... What about the Linux gaming performance? This article offers a first look at the Ryzen 9 5900X/5950X Linux gaming performance compared to Zen 2 and the Core i9 10900K while being the first of several Linux gaming performance articles coming out this month.

For those fond of the Sega Saturn video game console controllers from the mid-90s, the Linux 5.11 kernel has a fix so a common USB adapter for them will behave nicely...

The V3DV Vulkan driver that provides support for the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer can now run the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan translation layer...

Upstream Linux kernel developers are looking at changing some of their Spectre mitigation defaults around what's applied to SECCOMP threads by default in part due to the performance hit as well as other reasons...

It was just a few days ago that AMD engineers released AMDVLK 2020.Q4.2 as their newest open-source Radeon Vulkan driver snapshot while that has already been succeeded by version 2020.Q4.3...

Fedora 33 was just released at the end of October but already a number of change proposals are building up for Fedora 34 due out next spring...

While the Linux 5.10 merge window passed a week and a half ago, similar to the Navi Blockchain SKU being added as a "fix", the Green Sardine enablement is also being submitted as a fix for this current kernel version...

In addition to Mesa 20.3 seeing RadeonSI support for EGL protected surfaces backed by the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver with Trusted Memory Zone support, AMD's graphics driver developers have now added support for secure/protected video acceleration playback to their Mesa driver code...

If the recent releases of KDE Plasma 5.20 and GNOME 3.38 didn't fulfill your wishes for a dream Linux desktop and are looking for something lightweight, LXQt 0.16 is out today...

With C++20 one of the major features added is that of modules as a modern alternative to that of conventional C++ header files for packages. The C++20 modules code for the GNU Compiler Collection that has been in the works for several years is now under review and could potentially still land for the GCC 11 release next year...

Beginning in Dell's 2021 laptop models they are providing hardware-based "privacy buttons" to disable microphone and camera support. In preparations for more Dell laptops coming to market with these buttons, a Dell privacy driver is being prepared for the Linux kernel...

One of the areas of the Qt 6.0 toolkit with the greatest number of improvements is on the Qt Quick 3D front...

There's still more than one month to go until the Linux 5.11 merge window kicks off but Intel open-source developers have already submitted their initial batch of kernel graphics driver updates to DRM-Next...

With Intel Gen12 Xe-LP / Tiger Lake supporting AV1 accelerated decoding, Intel has provided this support via their open-source media stack on Linux that is then exposed via the Video Acceleration API (VA-API). Intel has now landed their patches for supporting VA-API AV1 decode with FFmpeg...

In addition to OpenIndiana Hipster 2020.10 having just been released, OmniOS v11 r151036 as another operating system long ago derived from OpenSolaris is also out with a big new release...

The trek to OpenZFS 2.0 continues with the fifth release candidate now being outed...

With Mesa 20.3 that should be released as stable in December there is working Arm Bifrost graphics support for the open-source Panfrost Gallium3D while looking past that this Arm Mali driver is going to be focusing on better performance and desktop OpenGL 3.1 support...

Cincoze is a brand we previously haven't tested at Phoronix but is a Chinese manufacturer of embedded computers. The company's recently introduced GM-1000 is advertised as a "Machine Vision Embedded Computer" geared for a variety of industrial applications in being constructed within a well engineered aluminum enclosure that is fan-less thanks to an array of heatpipes and chassis serving as a heatsink while offering MXM-based GPU expansion and a total system power budget of up to 360 Watts.

Given Intel's very fresh Tiger Lake platform, our latest benchmarking with the Core i7-1165G7 within the Dell XPS 9310 is seeing if running the in-development Linux 5.10 kernel means any performance or power changes for this latest-generation Intel mobile CPU with Xe/Gen12 graphics...

While Qt 6.0 is aiming to ship in December there are many open bugs against the Qt code-base. Given the increasing number of P1 priority bug reports that are the highest besides the "P0" build breakage bug reports, developers are discussing what to do with these bugs and the merits of their current priority classifications...

We haven't heard much of traditional Linux gaming on any ARM-powered Qualcomm notebooks as it would rely on the likes of Hangover for running Windows x86_64 games on ARM, but the Turnip Vulkan driver within Mesa has a necessary feature for now being able to run DXVK with the Direct3D 10_1 (v10.1) feature level...

The Linux x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels have taken shape this year for different feature/performance levels based on a CPU's capabilities. Both LLVM Clang 12 and GCC 11 are ready to go in offering the new x86-64-v2, x86-64-v3, and x86-64-v4 targets...

AMD mentioned Fine-Grain Clock Gating as one of the new features for the Radeon RX 6000 series with "Big Navi" but it will also be present with the next-gen Van Gogh APU too. The Linux driver patches for bringing up FGCG are under review...

Monado as the open-source OpenXR implementation has been working on support for Google's Android platform...

Valve has published their latest Steam Survey results. For October 2020 the Linux gaming marketshare pulled back or at least not keeping up with the pace of Steam's growing user-base...

The Zink Gallium3D driver that implements OpenGL on top of Vulkan has been on quite a roll recently... Beyond reaching OpenGL 4.6 support in yet-to-be-merged patches and passing ~97% of the Piglit OpenGL tests and increasingly good performance compared to Intel's OpenGL driver, the latest interesting milestone is seeing initial work on bringing Zink to macOS...

Following the successful shipping of Fedora 33, Red Hat developers have begun proposing more changes for future Fedora releases...

For any of you that happen to still be relying on the out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system or interested in the technical design of Reiser5, these file-system drivers have been updated for Linux 5.9 compatibility...

Following this summer's big round of layoffs at Mozilla, the organization's deep learning open-source speech-to-text engine has been among the projects considered at risk. Fortunately, at least for now, DeepSpeech is still moving forward and is up to version 0.9...

Landing in Mesa 20.3 during this final week of feature development is support in RadeonSI Gallium3D for EGL_EXT_protected_surface. This long-standing EGL extension allows surfaces/windows to beset as protected and in which case the contents are only accessible to secure accesses. Outside/insecure accesses to the window (surface) contents are blocked...

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is today announcing a new and unexpected single board computer: the Raspberry Pi 400. It's more of a single-keyboard computer that offers slightly higher performance than the Raspberry Pi 4.

The third alpha release of Kodi 19 "Matrix" was released on Sunday for this popular multi-platform HTPC software...