Phoronix

An interesting summer internship at Google has led to an experimental effort to get Microsoft Windows running via Kexec from Linux. The engineers involved have been implementing enough of the EFI Boot Services to be able to kexec Windows from Linux...

Last week AMD published their RDNA instruction set architecture documentation. That's a bit heavy reading unless you are a driver developer or low-level engine developer, but for those wanting a bit of a higher-level look at AMD's new RDNA graphics architecture, today they uploaded a new slide deck...

Since Microsoft's first preview release of Windows Terminal earlier this summer it's been entertaining to watch its evolution with the Redmond giant trying to make a first-rate terminal emulator for Windows and one that can appease veteran Linux users...

We're less than two months out until the annual X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC) and the featured presentations for this three-day event have now been announced...

One of the long-time work-in-progress patch series has been realized in time for next month's GNOME 3.34 release... Mutter when acting as a Wayland compositor will allow starting XWayland on-demand, or rather only running it when needed to handle an X11 client/application...

While a new Proton 4.11 release came out last week as a big Valve update that included pulling in DXVK 1.3, Philip Rebohle who leads work on this Direct3D-over-Vulkan layer today released DXVK 1.3.2 as the latest update for improving the Windows/Direct3D on Linux gaming experience...

The GlusterFS network attached storage file-system developed by Red Hat with a focus on cloud computing is the latest open-source project eyeing the removal of 32-bit (i686) software support...

With the AMD Radeon RX 5700 / RX 5700 XT Linux driver support maturing and the early optimizations/fixes and lingering feature work now calming down for the Linux 5.3 kernel and within RadeonSI/RADV for the imminent branching of Mesa 19.2, here is another look at how the Navi performance stands today compared to AMD Vega graphics cards and the high-end NVIDIA Pascal and Turing graphics cards.

The GNU Compiler Collection 9.2 release should be out next Monday while until then a release candidate was issued today for testing...

Canonical developer Daniel van Vugt had another busy week continuing to focus on upstream GNOME performance improvements...

With the long-awaited Haiku R1 beta having happened at the end of last year and other modern features/support getting squared away, the developers behind this open-source BeOS-inspired operating system have begun investigating their OS performance and making necessary performance optimizations...

Debian 10.1 along with Debian 9.10 are expected to be released on 7 September...

LLVM stable point release manager Tom Stellard has released LLVM 8.0.1 as the first minor update to this spring's LLVM 8.0 code-base...

Linus Torvalds released Linux 5.3-rc3 on Sunday night and it was to his surprise that it was even smaller than the previous week's release candidate...

IWD is the multi-year effort by Intel's open-source group to create a new Linux wireless daemon that could potentially replace WPA-Supplicant. IWD 0.19 is the new release available that arrived at the end of the weekend and carrying new features...

If all goes well Mesa 19.1.4 will be released on Tuesday as the newest stable point release to this collection of OpenGL/Vulkan drivers for Linux systems. Mesa 19.1.4 is bringing around four dozen patches that accumulated over the later half of July and it's particularly heavy on Intel ANV and Radeon RADV Vulkan driver fixes...

Debian's annual developer conference, DebConf, wrapped up last week in Curitiba, Brasil. The slide decks and video recordings for many of those presentations are now available...

Currently when passing "-flto" for enabling Link-Time Optimizations with the GCC compiler, it defaults to using a single core/thread for carrying out the optimizations and code generation. There has been support for specifying a number of threads to use for carrying out this link-time work in parallel while finally in GCC 10 that is being enabled by default...

Monado as an open-source implementation of the Khronos OpenXR standard for AR/VR devices continues taking form though isn't quite ready yet for end-users...

Intel's modern "Iris" Gallium3D driver has exposed GLSL 4.60 compatibility (the shading language requirements for OpenGL 4.6) but when creating an OpenGL compatibility context it's been at 1.40 for the old OpenGL 3.1 requirements. Fortunately, the compatibility mode now too exposes 4.60 support...

There is one month to go until KDE's annual Akademy developer conference in Milan while open-source contributors to this desktop environment remain hard at work over the summer on making various improvements...

Shared one month ago was the initial work done on implementing a Vulkan renderer for Godot, the increasingly-used open-source cross-platform game engine. That Godot Vulkan support continues maturing along with other features that will form the basis of Godot 4.0...

One of the many interesting Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects this year has been to improve the Wine support on NetBSD. Thanks to student developer Naveen Narayanan, that is becoming a reality...

Merged for the GCC 9 compiler release that launched earlier this year was the preliminary AMD Radeon "GCN" GPU compiler back-end. In that initial release it wasn't particularly useful as the GPU offloading bits for the popular programming APIs/models wasn't supported so for now could just run some basic single-threaded programs. But now those interesting GPU offloading bits are pending for GCC 10...

Earlier this week the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" added support for Wave32 with compute shaders on the new Navi graphics processors. That RADV Wave32 support has now been extended for more shader types...

The Qt Company on Friday issued the release candidate for the upcoming Qt Creator 4.10 integrated development environment...

Hot on the heels of the upstream Wine 4.13 release following a long summer retreat, Wine-Staging 4.13 is now available with the latest testing/experimental patches re-based atop the newest Wine code...

Intel's NEO OpenCL run-time stack has been living by the "release early, release often" mantra with continuing to see frequent new updates for this OpenCL stack...

In addition to the Intel DRM driver landing lots of feature code into DRM-Next for the Linux 5.4 kernel cycle coming up in September, the DRM-Misc-Next crew for collecting core infrastructure changes and work to the smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers has also been seeing new 5.4 work...

Wine 4.12 was released back on 5 July while finally today has been succeeded by Wine 4.13, which is normally seeing updates on a two-week release cycle...

Eric Anholt who has near single-handedly been developing the V3D driver stack (formerly known as "VC5") for use by the Raspberry Pi 4 and other newer Broadcom boards as well as maintaining the mature VC4 driver stack he developed for previous Raspberry Pi boards has left Broadcom. But Broadcom's loss is to Google's open-source gain...

In addition to GNOME's involvement and stewarding of the Outreachy program (back to the days when it was known as GNOME's "Outreach Program for Women"), they have just launched an Inclusion and Diversity Team to help the desktop environment community become more inclusive...

While this year's GCC 9 compiler release brought initial support for AMD Zen 2 processors with the Znver2 target, the support was sadly incomplete. While the GCC 9 support added some of the new instructions, it wasn't complete (such as RDPRU support remains missing) and the cost tables and scheduler model were not updated from Znver1 to account for the microarchitectural changes. Thankfully, SUSE's compiler experts recently fixed up this support for the GCC 10 compiler and more recently were able to get it back-ported for the upcoming GCC 9.2 for the Linux distributions that will upgrade to that point release. Here are some benchmarks looking at the performance impact of that updated AMD Zen 2 compiler code.

Intel's open-source driver team has sent in their initial batch of kernel graphics driver changes to DRM-Next for material that will be targeting the Linux 5.4 cycle later this year...

With this week's release of the Chrome 76 web browser, here are some fresh benchmarks of that latest Google web browser release compared to Firefox 68 on Ubuntu Linux...

The MATE desktop environment is becoming usable on Wayland thanks to its support being provided by the Mir display stack...

Linux Mint 19.2 "Tina" is now officially available in its Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce flavors while continuing to be powered off the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS base...

While GCC and Clang are now competing neck-and-neck on Linux x86_64 when it comes to the performance of generated binaries, when it comes to each of their initiatives to transition to Git it looks like LLVM will take the cake...

AMD has published their instruction set architecture documentation for their new RDNA 1.0 architecture found on their new Radeon RX 5700 series GPUs and other forthcoming products...

System76 will be announcing the Adder WS laptop next week as their new high-end Linux laptop offering that features a 4K OLED display...

While Steam Play continues getting better for allowing more Windows games to run on Linux to enhance the overall Linux gaming ecosystem, Valve's latest monthly data for Steam shows another month-to-month decline in usage at least on percentage terms...

While we've already seen the RADV Vulkan driver land their slated support for Navi 12 GPUs on top of the recently launched Radeon RX 5700 "Navi 10" graphics cards, today is the first time we're seeing patches from AMD to wire in the support to the AMDGPU DRM Linux kernel driver for this next iteration of Navi...

Over the course of July, Intel's rolling-release Clear Linux distribution shifted from Linux 5.1 to the brand new Linux 5.2 kernel, pulled in the latest GCC9 branch compiler fixes, updated to Python 3.7.4, rolled out a new OpenJDK build, and had many other package updates and original optimizations applied...

Intel today announced 11 new 10th Gen "Icelake" CPUs for 2-in-1s and laptops...

For those wondering what the SMT performance impact is for new Zen 2 processors, here are some tests done using a Ryzen 9 3900X with Ubuntu Linux when testing at the default 12-core / 24-threads and then again when disabling SMT to look at just the twelve physical cores...

Up until now the Intel Linux graphics driver hasn't had to worry about supporting multiple devices concurrently since, well, it hasn't been a possibility. But with the first Intel Xe discrete GPU hardware expected to arrive next year, the "i915" kernel driver has begun seeing restructuring work to support multi-GPU setups, or what most commonly will be Intel integrated graphics paired with a discrete Xe GPU...

Releasing on schedule was the GNU C Library 2.30 release. Glibc 2.30 brings with it more optimizations and new features for this all-important part of the GNU toolchain...

GNOME's Sysprof profiler continues on a trajectory of becoming an incredibly versatile component for developers looking to maximize performance and efficiency under this desktop environment. Sysprof already picked up a number of new features for GNOME 3.34 but work is not yet finished...

Xfce 4.12 was released in February 2015 while finally getting ready to succeed that is the long talked about Xfce 4.14 that is expected to ship this month...

AMD dominated the Linux hardware conversations and benchmarking in July with their 7/7 launch of their 7nm Ryzen 3000 series "Zen 2" processors and Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" processors. Of the 273 original news articles on Phoronix during July and the 19 featured Linux hardware reviews / benchmark specials, AMD news and Linux benchmark results tended to dominate many of the top spots...