Phoronix

The Librem 5 smartphone is still advertised as shipping in Q3'2019 though it looks next to impossible with just one month left in the quarter. Purism CTO Nicole Faerber presented at CCC's Camp 2019 and the phone wasn't demoed but pictures of the Librem 5 PCB were on display...

Just last month Microsoft was roped back into the discussion of exFAT support for Linux with an independent user looking to have Samsung's exposed exFAT open-source driver merged. That didn't happen yet, but Microsoft today published the exFAT file-system specifcation and is encouraging support for Linux...

It's been over one year since the introduction of the Mozilla Thunderbird 60.0 series while today Thunderbird 68.0 was made as the next official update...

After learning of the UP-Squared SBC maker board this summer when this Intel Apollolake single board computer was added to Coreboot, the company sent over a review sample and for the past number of weeks have been putting this mini board through its paces and performance tests.

Intel open-source developer Kenneth Graunke who is the lead developer on their "Iris" Gallium3D driver has landed a new performance optimization in Mesa to help their Gen11/Icelake graphics performance...

The FFmpeg library up to this point has supported AMD's Advanced Media Framework (AMF) library just on Windows for H.264/HEVC encoding on GPUs. The Windows code-path makes use of DirectX while now AMD AMF support for Linux via Vulkan is now exposed by the latest FFmpeg code...

After mentoring a Dell student intern over the summer, Red Hat's Richard Hughes has announced their work today on the GNOME Firmware Updater...

Facebook's HHVM implementation that started off as a high performance PHP5 implementation but is now just focused on powering their own Hack programming language is beginning to see some of its code rewritten in Rust...

SwiftShader. Google's CPU-based implementation that originally was focused on OpenGL ES and Direct3D 9, now has Vulkan 1.1 support in tow...

The GNOME Foundation has kicked off their Coding Education Challenge for promoting programming around free/open-source software and with Endless Computers providing the $500,000 USD for prize money...

Total War: Three Kingdoms is the newest Linux game port from Feral Interactive and saw a same-day release back in May. While back then it was said there weren't benchmarking capabilities for this game, there now is a test profile. For those wondering how Three Kingdoms performs on Linux, here is a twenty way graphics card comparison using the newest AMD Radeon and NVIDIA drivers.

The beta release of Unity 2019.3 is out today for this wildly popular cross-platform game engine...

Earlier this summer we checked out the Logic Supply Karbon 300 as a well-built and very durable Linux-friendly PC for low-power environments. That Karbon 300 came equipped with a low-power Apollo Lake Atom processor while today the company announced the Karbon 700 with higher-wattage Core and Xeon CPU options for high performance IoT / edge computing...

As a possible sign that AMD Navi 14 graphics cards could be coming sooner rather than later, support for Navi 14 is slated to be back-ported to the Mesa 19.2 release due out in a few weeks rather that entered its feature freeze earlier this month rather than waiting for next quarter's Mesa 19.3...

Valve's Wine-based Proton for powering Steam Play to run Windows games on Linux is seeing more exciting work in their 4.11 branch...

For those wondering how Google manages the Linux kernel sources they use for shipping on the dozens of different Chromebooks and maintaining the support for the respective cycles, Douglas Anderson of Google presented at last week's Embedded Linux Conference in San Diego on the matter...

A number of months have passed since having anything new to report on the progress of the LLVMpipe software driver, but David Airlie now has landed a number of improvements to this LLVM-leveraging "soft" OpenGL driver for Mesa 19.3...

Drew DeVault released Sway 1.2 overnight as the newest feature update for this popular Wayland compositor inspired by the i3 window manager...

Just prior to yesterday's Linux 5.3-rc6 kernel release, a change was pulled into the code-base that disables the advertising of RdRand support on older AMD CPUs/APUs...

Stemming from recent discussions over Intel's Linux enablement for Intel's Lightning Mountain SoC that characterized it as a "AIRMONT_NP" for a "network processor" even though it's not limited to networking use-cases, and with Intel's proliferation of different CPU cores in general, the Linux kernel is seeing some cleaning up of their different Intel CPU names...

With Debian 10 "Buster" out the door and Python 2 hitting end-of-life at the end of the year, Debian is working on their process of removing Python 2 packages that don't get ported to Python 3 and Ubuntu is working on similar action for their Python 2 packages not found in upstream Debian...

Joshua Ashton has released D9VK 0.20 "Frog Cookie" as the newest version of this project mapping Direct3D 9 over Vulkan to help improve the Windows gaming on Linux experience...

The VKMS virtual kernel mode-setting driver is seeing support for PRIME import added to it so this software solution can be used for helping to test multi-GPU PRIME configurations on Linux even without the hardware attached...

While AMD's next-gen Renoir APUs are Vega-based and not Navi, beyond the initial Linux driver enablement seen over the past few weeks coming out a few days ago were a set of patches just getting the power management in order...

FFmpeg has landed a "deshake" OpenCL filter to its code-base to serve for video stabilization support...

Ultimately the goal is to get Valve's Steam client running on NetBSD using their Linux compatibility layer while the focus the past few months with Google Summer of Code 2019 were supporting the necessary DRM ioctls for allowing Linux software running on NetBSD to be able to tap accelerated graphics support...

One month ago was the release of KernelShark 1.0 as the GUI for visualizing Ftrace Linux kernel traces. While v1.0 was a big step forward and switched from GTK to Qt, KernelShark 2.0 is already in planning with more features...

Linus Torvalds today released the sixth weekly test release of the upcoming Linux 5.3 kernel. It also happens to be 28 years to the day since Linus Torvalds announced the original Linux kernel...

The FreeBSD project has published their Q2'2019 summary that outlines the various accomplishments for this open-source operating system project over the past quarter...

Vulkan 1.1.121 is the newest Sunday morning update to the Vulkan graphics/compute API. In addition to various bug fixes/clarifications to the documentation, there is a new Vulkan extension around device coherent memory support from AMD...

As the end of the summer nears and KDE's Akademy conference approaches, development is busy as ever on this open-source desktop environment...

It was just last month that DragonFlyBSD pulled in Radeon's Linux 4.4 kernel driver code as an upgrade from the Linux 3.19 era code they had been using for their open-source AMD graphics support. This week that's now up to a Linux 4.7 era port...

VMware engineer Nadav Amit who previously pursued "Optpolines" and other possible performance optimizations in light of Spectre / Meltdown vulnerabilities is now proposing patches for deferring PTI flushes to help with addressing the performance overhead caused by Meltdown...

Robert Foss of Collabora was back at the Linux Foundation's Open-Source Summit this week to present the latest state of open-source graphics drivers in the embedded space...

Hardware vendor Ampere Computing with their impressive ARM servers is doing a great job on closely following their hardware's Linux performance as part of a rigorous continuous testing regiment or ensuring quality, compatibility, and stability while being fully-automated...

Mesa's RADV Radeon Vulkan driver just saw a big performance optimization land to benefit APUs like Raven Ridge and Picasso, simply systems with no dedicated video memory...

LG Electronics has been exploring improvements around hibernation/suspend-to-disk to speed-up the Linux boot process for consumer electronics rather than performing cold boots and as part of that is working towards upstream optimizations...

This week saw OpenGL 4.6 support finally merged for Intel's i965 Mesa driver and will be part of the upcoming Mesa 19.2 release. Not landed yet but coming soon is the newer Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver also seeing OpenGL 4.6 support...

While called the Open-Source Summit, the event is primarily about Linux as after all it's hosted by the Linux Foundation. But at this week's Open-Source Summit in San Diego, Deb Goodkin as the executive director of the FreeBSD Foundation presented. Deb's talk was of course on FreeBSD but also why FreeBSD and Linux developers should work together...

It has been almost two years since the release of Enlightenment 0.23 while surprising E23 has now surfaced...

Taking place back in May at the beautiful Skamania Lodge in Washington was Intel's OSTS 2019 for their annual Open-Source Technology Summit that traditionally was internal-only but has begun opening up including allowing external participants this year. I was at OSTS 2019 and it's by far my highlight of the year with many really great sessions and a lot of useful networking at the event. Intel's open-source team has now shared some video recordings from this open-source/Linux event...

Wayland's Weston 7.0 was released on Friday with the newest features for this reference compositor implementation...

Wine 4.0.2 is out today as the second stable point release to this year's Wine 4.0 cycle...

AMD Raven Ridge APUs were a rough launch particularly on Linux where even with the latest motherboard BIOS updates and Linux kernel I am still hitting occasional stability issues, so when the opportunity arose recently to try out the Ryzen 5 3400G as the successor in the Picasso family, I was interested. Fortunately, AMD Picasso APUs have proven to be in better shape on Linux so here is the initial round of performance tests for those interested in the AMD Linux performance on Ubuntu.

After having been submitting various feature updates to DRM-Next the past few weeks of new graphics driver feature code to introduce in Linux 5.4, a final pull request was sent in today with the remaining feature work slated for this next version of the Linux kernel...

Following Spectre/Meltdown, the Linux CPU microcode updating was made serial while now a new patch pending for the Linux kernel would restore the behavior to be parallelized in order to speed-up the process for large core count servers...

While NVIDIA recently began publishing more hardware documentation, don't expect it to make an immediate difference in the quality of the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver. Today the pull request was sent to DRM-Next of the Nouveau kernel driver changes for the upcoming Linux 5.4 cycle and there isn't much to get excited about...

While VKD3D continues to be under heavy development, Valve already appears pleased with it enough that it's now being built as part of their Wine-based Proton software for powering Steam Play on Linux...

Currently the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver doesn't automatically adjust the video memory clock speeds when running a multi-monitor setup since it's more complicated to gracefully handle when scanning out to two or more displays. But a set of currently experimental patches will allow memory clock switching support on multi-monitor setups with the AMDGPU DC code...

With Qt 6 becoming an increasing development focus and Qt 5 already seven years old, Ubuntu developers are looking at finally removing Qt 4 ahead of their 20.04 Long-Term Support release...