Phoronix

AMD has kicked off the new week with the release of AMDVLK 2020.Q3.5 as their official open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems derived in part from the same sources as their Windows Vulkan driver...

FuryBSD 2020-Q3 is out as the newest quarterly feature release to this BSD distribution built atop FreeBSD and focused on providing a pleasant desktop experience and one that can function as a LiveDVD for trying out the desktop BSD without installation...

Back in late 2018 there was the decision by The Qt Company to deprecate Qbs in favor of CMake. The Qbs build system hasn't been actively worked on by The Qt Company in one year but some community members have been still hacking on it leading to today's Qbs 1.17 release...

Linus Torvalds announced Linux 5.9-rc5 this evening as the newest weekly test release of the forthcoming Linux 5.9 kernel gearing up for a stable release in October...

The recent rumors panned out and NVIDIA just announced they have reached a definitive deal with SoftBank to acquire Arm...

Last week we reported on a Linux 5.9 kernel regression following benchmarks from Linux 5.0 to 5.9 and there being a sharp drop with the latest development kernel. That kernel regression was bisected to code introduced by Linus Torvalds at the start of the Linux 5.9 kernel cycle. Unfortunately it's not a trivial problem and one still being analyzed in coming up with a proper solution. So the short story is it's a work-in-progress while this article has some additional insight and benchmarks done over the course of the past few days.

Back on Friday there was Mark Shuttleworth's comments following some friction within the Ubuntu community and uncertainty over roles. After thinking about it over the weekend, he has decided to go ahead and work to reinstate the Ubuntu Community Council...

Intel-owned AI startup Habana Labs is working on expanding their "Gaudi" support to now include the NIC network interface found on this AI training accelerator hardware...

Lukas Larsson of Erlang Solutions is proposing "BeamAsm" as a JIT compiler for the Erlang virtual machine...

Following the very delayed Xfce 4.14, the Xfce 4.16 release is progressing with plans for releasing this year. Xfce 4.16pre1 was released at the end of August while it was the release announcement that was delayed for this lightweight desktop environment update...

The second development release of the forthcoming Phoronix Test Suite 10.0-Finnsnes is now available for testing...

GNOME 3.38 is due for release next week while the second and final release candidate is now available as one last chance for testing...

Breaking this weekend is word that NVIDIA and Arm are reportedly close to a deal in which the graphics giant would be acquiring the UK-based chip designer from SoftBank in a deal worth $40 billion USD or more...

While FreeBSD 13 is aiming for release around March of 2021, FreeBSD 12.2 is on the way for releasing next month as the next stable installment...

AOMP 11.9 was released on Friday as AMD's LLVM-based compiler with Clang for C/C++ and Flang for Fortran in offloading capable OpenMP code to Radeon GPUs...

The Wasmer 1.0 alpha release is now available for running WebAssembly programs anywhere. Wasmer is about providing a universal runtime for WebAssembly (WASM) that can run across platforms / operating systems and also embed into other programming languages. Wasmer leverages WebAssembly principles to provide safety around untrusted code on top of its other design features...

KDE Frameworks 5.74 is out as the latest monthly update to this collection of KDE libraries complementing the Qt5 tool-kit...

Rebased atop yesterday's Wine 5.17 upstream release, the experimental/testing blend of Wine is out with a new update that comes in at just under 650 patches compared to the official Wine code-base...

Akademy 2020 took place virtually this week as the annual gathering of KDE developers...

Wine 5.17 is out this afternoon as the latest bi-weekly development snapshot in the Wine 5.x series leading up to Wine 6.0 in early 2021...

GameMode 1.6 is out as the Linux daemon developed by game porting firm Feral Interactive for setting the CPU frequency scaling governor and other helpers when launching games in an effort to enhance the Linux gaming performance and then returning the system to its prior state after the game has quit...

As part of re-testing all hardware prior to major GPU/driver launches, here is a look at the latest NVIDIA OpenCL/CUDA performance on Linux -- complementing the recent Blender 2.90 benchmarks and the latest NVIDIA vs. AMD Linux gaming performance. In still waiting to find out when we will get any NVIDIA Ampere hardware for Linux testing, I have been having some benchmarking fun and extended this to a 24-way graphics card comparison back to Maxwell in looking at not only the raw GPU compute performance but also the performance-per-Watt / power consumption and GPU thermal values.

Mesa 20.3 feature development continues progressing nicely...

Security researchers from Amsterdam have publicly detailed "BlindSide" as a new speculative execution attack vector for both Intel and AMD processors...

The Qt Company announced their planned development hosts for Qt 6.0 around continuous integration and the platforms they intend to support for Qt 6.0, some that are no longer set to be supported, and other targets they plan to support later on in future Qt 6.x releases...

The latest Intel oneAPI software release is a new monthly update to their LLVM-based oneAPI Data Parallel C++ (DPC++) compiler...

For the past number of weeks there have been discussions ongoing about the "loss of leadership" within the Ubuntu community and as part of that the Ubuntu Community Team and Ubuntu Community Council having faded away in recent years. Following a lot of comments on the Ubuntu Discourse, Mark Shuttleworth has chimed in with his thoughts and work moving forward...

The Linux 5.0 to 5.9 kernel benchmarking posted this week showed TensorFlow Lite running slower since the Linux 5.5 kernel... On top of looking at the new Linux 5.9 regressions, I also spent some time bisecting and figuring out what happened for TensorFlow Lite last year that has at least for the system under test caused it to run slower for all the kernel releases this year as shown in the aforelinked article.

As work that should come together during the GNOME 3.40 cycle, the power-profiles-daemon project has just tagged its "v0.1" inaugural release as part of the work on better power management handling / power profiles easily configurable from the GNOME desktop...

The latest functionality Microsoft is adding to their Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) is support for attaching and mounting physical disks within WSL2...

Being merged today to Mesa 20.3-devel were some improvements aiming to help with display presentation jitter and hopefully avoid stuttering in the frame-rate...

While Zen 3 is just around the corner, current-generation Ryzen Threadripper and EPYC processors continue to impress particularly for build boxes and tasks like bisecting the Linux kernel's massive codebase...

X-Plane has long been Linux-friendly and one of the most realistic flight simulators available while today it's taking a big step forward with its 11.50 release and the much anticipated introduction of its new rendering engine with Vulkan support...

The big set of patches for Raspberry Pi 4 / BCM2711 display support with the VC4 DRM driver will finally be merged next month for the Linux 5.10 cycle...

With Intel Xe LP / Tigerlake adding AV1 accelerated video decode, the Intel open-source developers are working to expose their AV1 hardware acceleration through the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) for usage by the likes of FFmpeg and other multimedia software...

While there aren't too many Windows games out there still popular and supporting AMD's Mantle graphics API that was the precursor to Vulkan, open-source developer Clément Guérin continues work on his "GRVK" initiative for mapping Mantle on top of Vulkan as a learning exercise and for allowing those still relevant Mantle-supported games to in turn run on Vulkan...

Polishing up Qt 5.15 since its May release is now Qt 5.15.1 as the first point release in this last Qt5 series ahead of Qt 6.0 later this year...

It should come as little surprise in general but making use of Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) for multimedia encode/decode is a big deal for performance. While one could hope that by 2020 most open-source encoders were already extensively utilizing AVX(2), that isn't yet the case with the latest being AOM-AV1 picking up another optimization...

Recently carrying out some benchmarks of all major kernel releases from Linux 5.0 through Linux 5.9 ended up yielding some surprising performance changes with the in-development 5.9 kernel. Here's details on this historical look at the kernel performance and what's going on with the Linux 5.9 kernel slowdowns.

It's been widely expected AMD will launch their next-generation RDNA 2 graphics cards and Zen 3 processors in Q4 as they previously reported as well as leaks pointing to October reveal dates. Today the company is sharing actual dates for said announcements...

Systemd developers are still hoping to introduce systemd-oomd as part of the next release...

Along with Intel's SVT-AV1 0.8.5, another open-source AV1 video encoder seeing a new release this week is the Rust-written rav1e...

Wired up in Mesa 20.3-devel is a new DriConf option override_vram_size for overriding a smaller amount of video memory to report to the program/game being run. This is intended for development/debug purposes...

Chinese company Zhaoxin that continues working on x86_64 CPUs based on VIA Centaur Technology is working on supporting their "7" family processors with the Linux kernel...

Proposed last year were a set of patches aiming to improve the Intel virtual GPU "vGPU" performance in para-virtualized cases by having optimizations around the shared memory region between the guest and Intel GVTg code. With optimizing the workload PV submission and PPGTT PV updates, the glxgears performance could improve by 30~50% while for large media/3D workloads was more around a 4% average improvement...

With GNOME 3.38 due to be released next week, the GNOME Shell and Mutter development blog has put out their overview of all the improvements and new features to expect...

Google engineers today celebrating pushing the Android 11 sources to the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP) as part of the official Android 11 release...

For four years now since Fedora 25 the default GNOME Shell desktop environment has been using Wayland by default. Next spring with Fedora 34, the KDE Spin is finally planning a similar migration to use Wayland by default with the KDE Plasma desktop...

Intel's September 2020 security advisories were posted today and include four security advisories around nine vulnerabilities...

When looking at the performance of Zink's OpenGL over Vulkan implementation just about one year ago the performance had a lot to be desired. But since then they have patches bringing it all the way to OpenGL 4.6 compared to the OpenGL 2.1 days and there has also been a lot of work on the performance. The performance at least for select operations is now turning out better than even the developers were expecting...