Phoronix

Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller recently talked about his vision for the Fedora Project over the next decade and it to become an "operating system factory", among other advancements he hopes to see out of the project in the 2020s. A one-sentence vision for Fedora is now drafted as their vision statement...

The Subversion version control system is celebrating its 20th anniversary...

GCC 8.4 will hopefully be released next week but for now a release candidate is available for testing the latest bug fixes in the mature GCC8 series...

Debuginfod is the Red Hat led debug information HTTP web server distributed as part of elfutils and able to supply on-demand source code and ELF/DWARF debug files to debuggers / IDEs / other compiler tooling. The GDB debugger can now tap debuginfod for on-demand source files and debug information that isn't present on the local system...

Announced last November was the Bytecode Alliance with a goal of running WebAssembly everywhere. This effort by Intel, Red Hat, Mozilla, and others has resulted in a new release today of wasmtime, their JIT-style runtime for WebAssembly on the desktop...

With it being a while now since the PHP 7.4 release and the PHP developers continuing to be busy at work on PHP 8.0 as the next major installment of the popular web programming language, here is a fresh look at the performance of PHP 8.0 in its current state -- including when its JIT compiler is enabled -- compared to releases going back to PHP 5.6...

Go 1.14 is now available as the latest version of this popular programming language backed by Google...

Phoronix Test Suite 9.4-Vestby is now available as one of our largest updates in recent years for our open-source, cross-platform automated benchmarking framework. Almost wanting to rebrand it as Phoronix Test Suite 10, sticking to conventional versioning the Phoronix Test Suite 9.4 release brings numerous result viewer improvements, a lot of polishing to the PDF result exporting, various Microsoft Windows support improvements, new statistics capabilities, some useful new sub-commands, and much more as the latest quarterly feature release.

As we've been expecting to happen with the Linux EFI code being cleaned up before the introduction of a new architecture, the RISC-V patches have been posted for bringing up UEFI boot support...

Besides all the usual hardware enablement activities with the usual names by Intel's massive open-source team working on the Linux kernel, one of the more peculiar bring-ups recently has been around the "Intel Gateway SoC" with more work abound for Linux 5.7...

Prominent Linux and macOS game porting firm Feral Interactive looks like it may be dissolving, (edit) but fortunately turned out to be an accounting error...

SHAREDed is an open-source, cross-platform solution for creating and testing HLSL and GLSL shaders. This "shader IDE" is out this week with SHADERed 1.3 that presents new capabilities...

As an obstacle for upstreaming some particularly older NVIDIA Tegra devices (namely those running Android) is that they have GPT entry at the wrong location or lacking at all for boot support. That missing or botched GPT support is because those older devices make use of a NVIDIA proprietary/closed-source table format. As such, support for this proprietary NVIDIA Tegra Partition Table is being worked on for the Linux kernel to provide better upstream kernel support on these consumer devices...

Announced last March was Monado as an open-source implementation of OpenXR, the Khronos standard for AR/VR. Today marks the first release of Monado as version 0.1 so while it's still early on it is showing much progress...

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver for Linux doesn't see much attention for pre-Broadwell hardware but today it saw a big improvement for Vulkan compute on aging Gen7 Ivybridge/Haswell era hardware...

Intel just sent out their initial pull request of new feature changes/improvements to DRM-Next that in turn is for landing in about one month's time when the Linux 5.7 merge window kicks off. With taking longer than usual to send in their first round of feature updates, this first of several pull requests already amounts to over 400 patches...

The Free Software Foundation is planning to launch their own public code hosting and collaboration platform in 2020...

Linux-friendly industrial PC vendor OnLogic has announced an expanded line-up of their mini PC offerings with Ryzen Embedded processors and also word that next quarter they will be getting into EPYC-powered edge servers...

Manjaro 19.0 is out today as this popular desktop-focused Arch Linux based distribution that is focused on its Xfce desktop spin but also offers other desktop options...

Now hitting about mid-way through the Linux 5.6 kernel with early fallout having been addressed, we've been ramping up our testing/benchmarking of this next major kernel release. Here is our initial experience with the AMDGPU driver on Linux 5.6...

OpenSUSE Leap 15.2 has rolled past its alpha phase and is now producing rolling-release beta builds for this version of openSUSE built off the SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 sources...

The Linux Mint crew continues maintaining Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) as a fall-back should anything ever happen to Ubuntu or their ability to deliver an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution. Available now in beta is Linux Mint Debian Edition 4...

Intel open-source developers have contributed support for VA-API acceleration of HEVC REXT "Range Extensions" content with the widely-used FFmpeg library...

Mir 1.7.1 was released on Monday and while a point release it's quite a big one...

At least not another hardware vulnerability, but CVE-2020-2732 appears to stem from unfinished code within the Intel VMX code for the Linux kernel's Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) support...

Pending GNOME Mutter changes in conjunction with the new PipeWire 0.3 will offer a big improvement in making use of GNOME's screencasting support from Wayland sessions...

While GIMP 3.0 remains elusive as the long overdue GTK3 port of this leading open-source image manipulation program, the GIMP 2.10 stable series continues seeing a lot of decent improvements in their subsequent point releases. GIMP 2.10.18 is out today following a botched GIMP 2.10.16 release...

As it's been a few weeks since last running a Mesa open-source driver comparison on AMD Radeon graphics hardware, here are some fresh Mesa 20.1-devel benchmarks just a few weeks so far after the Mesa 20.0 branching. These latest Mesa 20.1-devel benchmarks were also run a second time when enabling the RADV ACO shader compiler back-end that's been a focus by Valve developers in enhancing the Linux gaming experience. These results are compared to Mesa 19.2.8 as a baseline for the open-source driver support offered out-of-the-box by Ubuntu 19.10.

Aaron Griffin is stepping down as the Arch Linux Project Leader, who has led the distribution since 2007 where under his tenure Arch Linux boomed in popularity. With him stepping away due to minimal time to invest in the project, a process for selecting a new leader has formed...

While the Linux 5.5 kernel landed Broadcom BCM2711 SoC and Raspberry Pi 4 enablement, one of the loose ends has been getting the open-source "VC4" DRM driver wired up for the display hardware on this latest Raspberry Pi. Patches are now pending for VC4 DRM to provide that display support and could potentially see it mainlined for Linux 5.7...

Besides Clear Linux delivering often leading x86_64 Linux performance at run-time, when it comes to boot performance it has also been at the forefront -- in some configurations, can boot in 300 ms. Intel has invested significantly in ensuring Clear Linux boots as fast as possible for when running in the cloud or on containers in order to respond to increased demand as quickly as possible as well as for use-cases like Clear Linux within automobiles where they need to get automobile cameras active within two seconds of power on. One of their many kernel patches could be on its way to the mainline kernel...

Intel today formally announced their "Cascade Lake Refresh" Xeon processors with higher clock speeds in some cases but also more aggressive pricing to go up against the AMD EPYC 7002 series...

Canonical's Daniel Van Vugt continues focusing on GNOME performance optimizations and this past week still managed to squeeze another optimization out of the near-final GNOME 3.36...

For four years we have been seeing Intel Secure Guard Extensions (SGX) bring-up for the Linux kernel and that work continues with the Intel SGX Enclaves support now having been sent out for review twenty-seven times as it tries to work its way towards the mainline Linux kernel...

There still is no sign of the long overdue X.Org Server 1.21 but the changes for it continue to build up particularly on the XWayland front...

Following the PCI Express 6.0 announcement from last summer that called for 64 GT/s transfer rates, version 0.5 of the PCIe 6.0 specification is now out for evaluation...

In addition to PipeWire 0.3 having shipped last week, also making it out a few days prior was a development snapshot in the road to PulseAudio 14.0...

Linus Torvalds is out today with the Linux 5.6-rc3 kernel as the latest weekly release candidate for Linux 5.6 that will be releasing as stable approximately in one month's time...

Netrunner 20.01 is out today as the 20th release for this Debian + KDE focused project over its ten year history...

While two weeks past the Linux 5.6 merge window some late changes for the C-SKY CPU architecture were accepted today...

For those that have been wanting to take the experimental Reiser5 for a test drive since being announced at the end of 2019, new versions of the Reiser4 and Reiser5 file-system kernel patches have been posted...

As part of clearing up the relationship between the FSF and GNU and seeking to add more clarity to the GNU Project, Richard Stallman has announced a document outlining the structure and administration of the project...

For some interesting Sunday debates in the forums, how important to you is having a completely open CPU design? Additionally, is POWER dead? This comes following interesting remarks by an industry leader this weekend...

This week in particular saw a lot of fixes in the KDE space for a wide variety of bugs...

FSCRYPT as the file-system encryption framework for the Linux kernel and is currently wired up for EXT4, F2FS, and UBIFS to offer native encryption capabilities is currently seeing improvements so the separate casefolding (case-insensitive) file/folder support can work on encrypted directories...

AMD's Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 20.Q1.1 Linux driver release was made available this week as their newest quarterly driver installment intended for use with Radeon Pro graphics hardware...

PipeWire is the Red Hat engineered project aiming to offer better audio/video stream handling on Linux that integrates well with Flatpak and can optimally handle use-cases currently covered by the likes of PulseAudio and JACK. This week marked the release of PipeWire 0.3 as another big step forward for the effort...

Going back to the start of 2020 we've been seeing a few patches here and there around AMD Family 19h, almost certainly Zen 3. That patch work has continued with a few more bits out this week while hopefully more bring-up is on the horizon ahead of the Linux 5.7 merge window opening in just over one month's time...

Big "open-source" achievements aren't too common for NVIDIA or Microsoft much less together, but thanks to their open-source work on the DXC DirectXCompiler it's possible to easily convert HLSL DXR shaders to SPIR-V for Vulkan...

Google's Summer of Code initiative for getting students involved with open-source development during the summer months is now into its sixteenth year. This week Google announced the 200 open-source projects participating in GSoC 2020...