Phoronix

Following the recent Plasma 5.20 beta release, KDE developers have been landing many fixes for the Plasma 5.20 desktop ahead of its official release in October...

On Friday night patches began to appear for "RISC-V Bullet" in the LLVM compiler code-base...

Earlier this year Apple engineers announced Swift System as their new library for low-level system interfaces. They have now open-sourced Swift System while also introducing Linux support...

As a nice Friday afternoon patch series there is the 275k lines of code for wiring up the next-generation AMD Van Gogh APU support under Linux...

Wine 5.18 is out as the newest bi-weekly feature development release...

With having added Tencent's NCNN tests to the Phoronix Test Suite with Vulkan acceleration, here is a look at the real-world impact by using RealSR-NCNN for scaling up with RealSR. Various NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards were tested for this initial NCNN / RealSR-NCNN Vulkan comparison.

Mozilla's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine team have been working on a big update to their just-in-time compiler code. This big update called "Warp" is now enabled in the latest Firefox Nightly builds for offering big speed-ups...

Queued today into the block subsystem's "-next" area ahead of the Linux 5.10 cycle kicking off next month are some MD RAID enhancements...

Ahead of next month's Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 release and the new OpenBenchmarking.org, the milestone was met this week of having 600 different test profiles (benchmarks) available for automated execution via our open-source, cross-platform benchmarking software...

For a while now Oracle engineers and others have been working on Trenchboot as a means of secure launch/boot support when paired with the likes of Intel TXT and AMD SKINIT for trusted execution and configuring each piece of the software boot chain for trusted/secure handling. The latest kernel patches have been sent out for review for secure launching of the kernel...

Oracle's GraalVM has seen language support well outside of Java/OpenJDK from Ruby to WebAssembly to R and Python. The newest language seeing an experimental implementation built atop GraalVM is PHP...

Following word last week that the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan layer was seeing 50~100% performance gains, more details are now available...

After missing the preferred target date of 15 September and the secondary beta target date of this week, Fedora 33 Beta is now on track to ship next week...

Intel continues bringing up the DG1 discrete graphics card under Linux with continued refinements set to hit for Linux 5.10...

It turns out AMD is at least exploring the possibilities around using the Rust programming language in their graphics driver tooling...

One of the most frequent questions received at Phoronix in recent times is whether the "schedutil" governor is ready for widespread use and if it can compare in performance to, well, the "performance" governor on AMD Linux systems. Here are some benchmarks of an AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT using the latest Linux 5.9 development kernel in looking at the performance differences between the CPUFreq governor options of Ondemand, Powersave, Performance, and Schedutil.

The kernel support for Nitro Enclaves landed this week in char-misc-next ahead of the Linux 5.10 cycle kicking off next month...

It was just a few days ago that Arm outlined the Neoverse N2 "Perseus" design as a follow-on to the Neoverse N1 and coming concurrently to the next-generation Cortex-A. Now the company has already jumped on beginning their open-source/Linux enablement work around the Neoverse N2...

PostgreSQL 13.0 is out this morning as the latest major update to this widely-used relational database server...

DragonFlyBSD 5.8.2 is out today as the latest stable version of this popular BSD operating system...

Last month Intel published a whitepaper on TDX as Trust Domain Extensions as a means of better securing virtual machines. TDX allows for isolating VMs from the hypervisor and other non-VMM system software. Intel TDX builds off other recent work around MKTME memory encryption and other features. We are now beginning to see that software side support roll-out along with the also-new Key Locker instructions...

Recent hardware enablement work on the Linux kernel is HPE bringing up UV5 support...

Currently on Fedora the Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) functionality that's there by default can be disabled at run-time via the /etc/selinux/config but moving forward with Fedora 34 they are looking at removing that support and focusing just on disabling via selinux=0 at the kernel boot time in order to provide greater security...

Disman is the display management library forked from LibKScreen as part of KWinFT. Last week at XDC2020 an update was provided on this Qt/C++ library for display management...

NVIDIA has released version 11.1 of their CUDA toolkit that now supports the GeForce RTX 30 "Ampere" series graphics cards...

After talking about Elkhart Lake for months in terms of the Linux patches bringing up this next-generation Intel processor, Intel is announcing it today in the form of the Atom x6000E series. Additionally, following the recent Tiger Lake client processor launch, 11th Gen Core Tigerlake-UP3 has also been announced.

Following Lenovo rolling out Fedora Linux options for their laptops and their other Linux-related announcements this year, Lenovo and Canonical are announcing today nearly thirty different laptops and desktops will begin shipping with the option for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS pre-installed...

With patches pending it will be easier to debug Windows games/applications running under Wine on Linux...

Another batch of AMDGPU kernel driver updates have landed in DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.10 kernel cycle...

The Arch Linux based EndeavourOS that was born out of Antergos Linux has released new builds for September 2020 and also gotten into the ARM Linux game...

LLVM 11.0 was originally scheduled to be released at the end of August while now it looks like that official milestone is coming in the next few days or week...

The latest enablement work landing in the RadeonSI Gallium3D open-source driver is for AMD Dimgrey Cavefish and VanGogh...

As part of a host of announcements for kicking off the virtual Ignite 2020 conference, Microsoft just confirmed they will be releasing their Edge web browser for Linux next month...

Firefox 81 is out this morning as the newest monthly update to the Mozilla web browser...

AMD today announced the Ryzen 3000 and Athlon 3000 C-Series processors for use in Google Chromebooks from multiple vendors...

While the Linux kernel graphics drivers and user-space OpenGL/Vulkan drivers expose a lot of options via sysfs on the kernel side and various environment variables and other tunables in user-space, when it comes to graphical control panels to manage these open-source graphics drivers on Linux there are several fragmented different options. For Mesa drivers, ADRIConf remains the leading option...

The TURNIP driver that is associated with the Freedreno driver effort for providing an open-source Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics hardware can now run atop Qualcomm's KGSL kernel driver...

The beta of the forthcoming Krita 4.4 is now available, which continues on as easily the leading open-source digital painting programs...

Patches pending for VKD3D take this Direct3D 12 to Vulkan translation library up to version 1.2. This library continues advancing in pushing along the D3D12-over-Vulkan performance primarily for Windows games on Linux just as DXVK has done for D3D9 through D3D11...

Sent out on Monday were a last batch of drm-misc-next changes to queue for the Linux 5.10 merge window opening next month...

Version 3.8 of ROCm, the Radeon Open eCosystem, is now available. This release continues making more progress on preparing the ROCm graphics compute stack for the upcoming large AMD supercomputer deployments and other data center usage...

The UBports community has announced the release of Ubuntu Touch OTA-13 as their newest over-the-air update to this Ubuntu mobile operating system...

Following the recent alpha debut of the openSUSE Jump distribution for testing that is working to synchronize SUSE Linux Enterprise with openSUSE Leap, there was an inquiry made about the performance of it. So for addressing that premium member's question, here are some benchmarks carried out recently of the latest openSUSE Leap 15.2 against the openSUSE Jump in its early state against the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed.

With no new indications of Solaris 12 or Solaris 11.next and given the past layoffs and previous announcements from Oracle, today's statement that Solaris 11.4 will remain as their continuous delivery model with monthly SRU releases come as little surprise...

As part of the new OpenBenchmarking.org being developed as part of Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 due out next quarter, some new features were deployed live on OpenBenchmarking.org this weekend...

The Vulkan Portability Extension (VK_KHR_portability_subset) has been released as part of the effort by The Khronos Group in getting Vulkan running on as many platforms as possible, including the likes of Apple macOS/iOS...

As first outlined earlier this year, Intel has been working on the Linux support for Platform Monitoring Technology as a new hardware telemetry feature first introduced with new Tigerlake hardware. It's looking like the initial Intel PMT support will come with Linux 5.10 while further work is being prepared that builds off its foundation...

One of the less talked about open-source graphics drivers talked about is Etnaviv as the reverse-engineered, community-based driver providing OpenGL/GLES support for Vivante graphics IP. While it's still working towards OpenGL ES 3.0 compliance, its performance is currently in some cases competitive -- and even outperforming -- the Vivante proprietary driver...

Not only did Unity Software experience a successful IPO last week but they also rolled out the Unity 2020.2 engine into public beta and with that comes some "major speed-ups" for performance...

Well known KDE developer David Edmundson has been experimenting with a Vulkan-powered KDE Plasma Shell and did manage to get things working with Qt 5.15 using a few modifications...