Phoronix

We are getting mighty close to the release of FreeBSD 12.1 as the next installment of FreeBSD 12 for 2019. It's looking like FreeBSD 12.1 will indeed be ready to set sail in early November...

While mid-way through the Linux 5.4 development cycle with RC4 due out on Sunday, a number of memory management fixes just hit the mainline kernel...

While three weeks have passed since the previous Wine development release compared to the usual two week cadence, Wine 4.18 is out today and isn't too busy on the feature front but there are more than three dozen bug fixes...

While we normally hear of rewriting code from Python and other scripting languages into C/C++ when its a matter of performance, in the case of Oracle Solaris it was taking old C code and modernizing it in Python 3 to yield a ~17x performance improvement...

As another release in time for weekend gamers, DXVK 1.4.3 was released today as the newest update for this library mapping Direct3D 10/11 to Vulkan for accelerating the Wine/Proton-based Linux gaming experience...

For those wondering if -- or how much -- of a performance impact mitigations still make regarding Spectre for Intel's long-awaited 10nm+ Ice Lake processors, here is the rundown on the mitigation state and the performance impact.

After Google dropped the open-source WireGuard app from their Play Store since it contained a donation link, the app has now been restored within Google's software store for Android users but without the donation option...

While swapping around CPUs for the AMD EPYC vs. Intel Xeon Cascade Lake testing of Facebook's RocksDB enterprise workload testing, I also took the opportunity for running some other recently updated test profiles on these EPYC/Xeon parts under test...

As a change for next year's Xfce 4.16, the xfce4-panel now exposes a preferences option for those preferring "dark modes" of GTK themes...

It looks like as soon as Linux 5.5 is where the AMDGPU kernel driver could be ready with Panel Self Refresh (PSR) support for enabling this power-savings feature on newer AMD laptops...

While normally we don't cover hardware start-ups on Phoronix, Pensando Systems has just exited stealth and given their focus will be heavily involved with Linux and in fact already have their first kernel driver mainlined...

AMD developer Marek Olšák has landed a "mega cleanup" to the Gallium3D Mesa state tracker code around its NIR intermediate representation handling...

Fedora developers had been trying to ship Fedora 31 for their original release target of next Tuesday, 22 October, but that isn't going to happen due to remaining blocker bugs...

If you are planning to run the newly-released Ubuntu 19.10, among the initial round of stable release updates is an important kernel fix...

Ubuntu 19.10 "Eoan Ermine" has hit mirrors today for an on-time release of this six-month non-LTS installment to Ubuntu Linux...

NVIDIA today introduced their first beta driver in the 440 Linux branch and it's quite an exciting release!..

Following the benchmarks earlier this month looking at PostgreSQL 12.0 on AMD EPYC Rome versus Intel Xeon Cascade Lake there was interest from Phoronix readers in wondering how well Rome is doing for other modern enterprise database workloads. One of those workloads that was recently added to the Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org is Facebook's RocksDB, the company's embedded database that is forked from Google LevelDB. With RocksDB being designed to exploit many CPU cores and modern SSD storage, here are some benchmarks looking at how the Xeon Platinum 8280 stacks up against various new AMD EPYC 7002 series processors.

Theo de Raadt released OpenBSD 6.6 today as the newest feature update to this popular BSD operating system known for its security focus...

Google open-sourced their Bazel build system four years ago while today it reached version 1.0 for this multi-language, multi-platform build solution...

The first development snapshot of Phoronix Test Suite 9.2-Hurdal is now available ahead of the stable release later this quarter...

With Project Trident moving away from a TrueOS/FreeBSD base to instead Void Linux, if you are looking for a good BSD-based desktop operating system it largely comes down to the likes of MidnightBSD and GhostBSD providing good out-of-the-box setups. As for GhostBSD, they are reaffirming their commitment to using TrueOS/FreeBSD and MATE as their official desktop...

AMD open-source developer Marek Olšák on Wednesday released libdrm 2.4.100 as the newest feature update to this Mesa DRM library...

RADV Vulkan driver developer Bas Nieuwenhuizen of Google has ventured into kernel space in working on format modifiers support for Vega/GFX9 and newer...

In addition to this week being exciting for the Ubuntu 19.10 release due out on Thursday followed by the kicking off of the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS "Focal Fossa" cycle, Ubuntu maker Canonical coincidentally made their financial statement filings in the UK this week where they are headquartered that gives a fresh look at their financial performance ahead of a possible IPO in the next few years...

With Ubuntu 19.10 "Eoan Ermine" releasing tomorrow (17 October), development is about to kick-off for the next Ubuntu development cycle under the codename Focal Fossa...

While we had been eager for Intel's goal of defaulting to their new Gallium3D OpenGL Linux driver by EOY2019, it looks like that is going to swing by one quarter with the plan now for Mesa 20.0 at the end of Q1...

Now with more Librem 5 smartphones from their first batch now shipping, Purism has begun sharing more photos of the current hardware as well as the state of their Linux-based PureOS software stack...

For those thinking of playing with Ubuntu 19.10's new experimental ZFS desktop install option in opting for using ZFS On Linux in place of EXT4 as the root file-system, here are some quick benchmarks looking at the out-of-the-box performance of ZFS/ZoL vs. EXT4 on Ubuntu 19.10 using a common NVMe solid-state drive.

The upcoming release of Arch's Pacman 5.2 is bringing support for compressing packages with Zstd which ultimately will provide faster package installs on Arch Linux...

In the newest development code of GNOME Shell and Mutter for GNOME 3.36, Graphene integration has begun to replace some elements of Clutter...

While there is an ever increasing number of open-source developers focusing on the Linux graphics stack with the GPU drivers and related infrastructure, it's quite a different story when it comes to the Linux input side. It's basically one developer that has been working on the Linux input improvements for the past number of years...

Apparently Google doesn't appreciate donation links/buttons within programs found on the Google Play Store even when it's one of the main sources of revenue for open-source programs. WireGuard has been reportedly dropped over this according to WireGuard lead developer Jason Donenfeld...

With the recent release of LLVM 9.0 the RISC-V back-end was promoted from an experimental CPU back-end to being made "official" for this royalty-free CPU ISA. Work though isn't over on the LLVM RISC-V support with new features continuing to land, like link-time optimizations (LTO) most recently being enabled within the Clang 10 code...

Khronos president Neil Trevett was at this month's XDC2019 conference in Montreal and he clarified their position on accepting conformance submissions by the open-source drivers...

Mesa's TURNIP Vulkan driver that provides open-source Vulkan API support for Qualcomm Adreno hardware in recent weeks has been back to seeing new activity and this week more useful contributions are being made...

Longtime FUSE developer Miklos Szeredi of Red Hat has been working on a new "FUSE2" FUSE kernel driver for implementing file-systems in user-space...

Thanks to a Linux kernel fix that is likely to be back-ported to the various stable series, highly threaded software running under CFS quotas for enforcing CPU limits are about to be much faster. At least in a synthetic test case, the kernel fix yields a 30x improvement in performance...

A few days after the xf86-video-amdgpu 19.1 release, xf86-video-ati 19.1 is out as the newest X.Org driver release for older ATI/AMD graphics processors...

With picking up the Dell XPS 7390 with Intel Core i7-1065G7 for being able to deliver timely benchmarks from Intel's long-awaited 10nm+ Icelake generation, one of the first areas we have been testing is the Iris Plus "Gen 11" graphics performance. In this article are our initial Windows 10 vs. Linux graphics performance numbers for Ice Lake.

Feral Interactive revealed today that Shadow of the Tomb Raider will be released for Linux on 5 November...

Plasma 5.17.0 is out as the newest desktop feature release from the KDE project...

While it is already exciting to have the Ubuntu 19.10 desktop easily support installations to a root ZFS file-system, moving ahead with their original Zsys effort it should be even more exciting for Ubuntu storage possibilities on both the desktop and server...

Several Red Hat developers are looking at improving the CPU thermal management capabilities for Fedora Workstation 32 and in turn possibly helping Intel CPUs reach better performance...

User-space API additions and changes (granted, no ABI breakage permitted for the mainline Linux kernel) to Linux Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers is done fairly easily by their developers and possibly without enough thought. Linux DRM subsystem co-maintainer David Airlie has issued a proposal that would make user-space API alterations more strictly reviewed...

LLVM developers had been planning to transition to the Git revision control system in place of SVN by the time of their developer meeting in October. It looks like that goal will be realized on the same-day as kicking off that annual developer meeting...

Project Trident has been one of the lesser known BSD distributions derived from TrueOS (formerly PC-BSD) and making use of the FreeBSD package set. But moving forward the distribution is looking to reinvent itself as a derivative of Void Linux...

Python 3.8.0 is out today as the latest major release for this popular programming language...

Details are still light on Jasper Lake, but volleyed onto the public mailing list today was the initial support for the Jasper Lake PCH within the open-source Linux graphics driver side...

PyPy 7.2 is out today as a big update for this alternative Python implementation that currently provides interpreters for compatibility with Python 2.7 and Python 3.6...

Debian 10 "Buster" already is making use of IPTables' Netfilter back-end by default in their path to deprecate IPTables while for Debian 11 the deprecation will continue further...