Phoronix

While looking forward to the long-awaited GIMP 3.0 milestone, in the meantime GIMP 2.10 point releases have tended to be fairly notable and today's GIMP 2.10.12 update is another useful update...

Last year we looked at the Spectre mitigation cost on POWER9 using the high-end Talos II server while now several kernel releases later and also having the desktop Blackbird system in our lab, here is a look at how the Spectre/Meltdown mitigation impact is for an IBM POWER9 4-core processor running Ubuntu 19.04.

CERN, The European Organization for Nuclear Research that is home to the Large Hadron Collider and a lot of other experiments, is experimenting with moving further away from Microsoft products. Due to Microsoft license fee increases affecting their work in the research laboratory and its budget, they established the Microsoft Alternatives "MAlt" project...

The ever important Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) can now handle HiDPI window scaling under Wayland...

Back during CES, Intel announced the Nervana Neural Network Processor for Inference (NNPI) to be powered by 10nm Ice Lake cores. Now ahead of the Linux 5.3 kernel cycle we're seeing the very first signs of the Ice Lake NNPI upbringing for the kernel...

Last week an on-disk GLSL shader cache was proposed for the vintage "R300g" open-source Gallium3D driver for this OpenGL code supporting through the Radeon X1000 (R500) series. That shader cache support has now been merged into Mesa 19.2...

The first release candidate for the next major release of the DragonFlyBSD operating system is now available for testing...

While Oracle backs the VM VirtualBox virtualization software, they increasingly are offering new solutions around KVM virtualization. Hitting general availability (GA) status this week is the Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager...

Following Monday's release of Wine 4.10, Wine-Staging 4.10 is now available as the latest work on this bleeding-edge / testing version of Wine for running Windows applications and games on Linux and other platforms...

During the AMD Zen 2 + RDNA launch event they highlighted some of the new instructions to find with the Zen 2 processor but there is at least one more...

Proton 4.2-7 is out as the latest version of Valve's downstream of Wine that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

We now have a tentative release date for the big Debian 10 "Buster" release...

While eagerly looking out for the Navi/RDNA enablement for the upcoming Radeon RX 5700 / RX 5700XT graphics cards, which should be out soon, in the mean time some other work-in-progress code has been queued as additional material that will make it for the Linux 5.3 cycle...

The open-source folks maintaining the LLVM-based Intel Graphics Compiler for use by their NEO compute stack for Linux released this week another update...

After being delayed by a few weeks due to a few blocker bugs, Mesa 19.1 as the quarterly feature update to this open-source multi-vendor graphics driver stack has been released! Mesa 19.1 is a huge update with several new drivers, performance optimizations, more mature support for existing Vulkan drivers, and other changes...

Rob Clark, the longtime leader of the Freedreno driver initiative providing open-source 3D graphics for Qualcomm Adreno hardware and who just recently jumped to Google to continue driver work, is using his new Chromium.org email address for flipping on UBWC in this driver...

The Radeon Open Compute (ROCm) stack will begin to support the Intel Kabylake-G chips with the "Vega M" graphics...

Kent Overstreet who has been developing the Bcachefs out of the BCache code has announced core feature work has wrapped up, he's very happy with how the work has panned out, and potentially could be merging the code into the Linux kernel soon if the review is pleasant...

Earlier this month we reported on a new Google Summer of Code project making use of NSA software to help with firmware reverse engineering. So far that effort seems to be paying off of using Ghidra...

KDE Plasma 5.16 is out today as the latest major update to the modern KDE desktop...

Recently I provided a fresh look at the Radeon VII Linux gaming performance (as well as comparing AMDVLK vs. RADV) now that I have a Vega 20 graphics card running great under Linux after the pre-production VII had failed. One of the other areas I was curious to see how the Linux performance evolved in the few months since the original Radeon VII Linux benchmarks was checking on the ROCm OpenCL performance. Here are those results up against NVIDIA with their proprietary Linux graphics driver.

After being an experimental option in DragonFlyBSD for more than the past half-decade, HAMMER2 is the new default file-system of this FreeBSD derivative...

This weekend I was out the AMD E3 event learning more about their third-generation Ryzen processors as well as their equally exciting AMD Radeon RX 5700 series Navi hardware. Being at the event, one could reasonably deduce the Linux support will be great and it does appear to be that way building upon their improvements of earlier GPUs and Zen processors. It does appear to be that way while obviously we will begin testing soon of these new processors and graphics cards. At least for the Zen 2 processors, I am confident in their Linux support while on the Navi side we are awaiting Linux driver support but I am optimistic it will work out nicely. Now that the initial embargo has expired, here are more details on these new AMD products launching 7 July and my Linux information at this time.

NVIDIA just released a new stable Linux driver in the 430 long-lived series...

Wine 4.10 is out today rather than last Friday due to Wine founder Alexandre Julliard being on holiday, but that bi-weekly development release is out today...

With last week's release of Chrome 75 I have now wrapped up some benchmarks seeing how the performance of the updated Google web-browser compares to that of the current Firefox 67 stable release as well as Firefox 68 beta, including with WebRender activated. Here are those latest Linux web browser benchmarks.

The AMDVLK 2019.Q2.5 driver was released this morning as the newest open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems wishing to use this official driver as an alternative to the Mesa RADV driver...

For those running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with the default GNOME Shell desktop experience, the latest stable release update of Mutter now fixes the support for running on high refresh rate (above 60Hz) displays...

Released for E3 week is Vulkan 1.1.111, but it's not particularly exciting...

Continuing on from the story a few days ago about R300 Gallium3D seeing a big performance fix after being regressed in recent years, another potential bonus is in store...

Using the Zstd compression algorithm to compress the Linux kernel image has been brought up again with new patches expected in the coming weeks...

Why not start off your morning with a waffle? Waffle 1.6 was just released as this long-running but recently silent project providing a library that allows deferring OpenGL and windowing system selection until run-time for making software more portable across today's mobile systems and desktops and supporting both X11 and Wayland, among other possible options...

Following KDE's 2017 goals, they are now looking to revise their goals or double-down on their current goals, so they could use your help in determining their road-map moving forward...

With KDE Plasma 5.16 soon to be released, development is heating up for KDE Plasma 5.17. As such, it's been another busy work in KDE development land...

GL_MESA_EGL_sync is a new OpenGL extension for extending EGL's KHR_fence_sync synchronization behavior into the desktop OpenGL space...

While waiting on a flight delay yesterday, I was trawling through GitHub checking out different open-source projects, in this case Vulkan projects, and pleased to see that Chamferwm still exists. For those that missed our earlier coverage of Chamferwm months ago, it's a Vulkan-powered X11 compositor / window manager...

In addition to SUSE continuing to advance the Btrfs file-system, Western Digital has also been working on a big patch series around providing native support for zoned block devices...

A new addition to the LLVM code-base this week is initial support for IBM's MASS vectorization library...

At the end of May I wrote about Intel's Iris Gallium3D driver achieving performance optimizations with new NIR I/O vectorization functionality. The open-source Arm Mali "Panfrost" Gallium3D driver has now wired into this code too for better performance...

Linus Torvalds released Linux 5.2-rc4 about twenty-four hours early due to travel plans. But even with the shortened week, Linux 5.4-rc4 is coming in light...

The Haiku operating system that is the open-source inspiration from BeOS continues with a busy 2019 following their R1 beta towards the end of last year...

Another month brings another update to the KDE Frameworks that complement the functionality provided by the Qt5 tool-kit...

For years most BSDs have supported a "TTY keyboard status request" to display status information at the terminal about the current foreground process and its CPU time consumed among other possible metrics. After being talked about in the past as a possible feature candidate, this functionality is now available in patch form to debate...

For those using Virgl to enjoy Gallium3D-based OpenGL acceleration to guest virtual machines on Linux, the Mesa 19.2 release paired with the latest Virgl renderer library should provide a very significant speed-up...

Version 2.5 of the Radeon Compute Stack (ROCm) was released on Friday as the newest feature release to this open-source HPC / GPU computing stack for AMD graphics hardware...

Those at UBports continuing to independently advance Ubuntu Touch have put out a fresh status update on their work, including the long-awaited Unity 8 and Mir upgrade...

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) that introduced an "AMDGCN" GPU back-end in the compiler with the new GCC9 release is now prepping Vega 20 support in the GCC 10 development code...

On Friday the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) signed off on the plan to upgrade RPM for Fedora 31...

Another weekend, another new FreeBSD test release is now available for evaluation...

Git 2.22 was released today as the newest release of this highly popular distributed revision control system...