Phoronix

Krita 4.2 is out today as the newest feature release for this feature-rich, multi-platform open-source digital painting software...

For those with DisplayLink adapters for USB-driven display docks or devices like the ZenScreen, the support for Wayland should be in better standing with GNOME 3.32.1 (or newer) including if using the DisplayLink proprietary drivers...

Nearly a year ago we reported on the initial work done by Intel's Linux team on adding new CPU instructions for Tremont CPU cores, in particular the new UMWAIT instructions for enhancing power-savings during idle periods. That code continues to be revised for the UMWAIT kernel support but it has yet to be mainlined...

One of my personal biggest issues with using the GNOME Shell on Wayland has been the sluggish multi-monitor performance with driving dual 4K displays on my main workstation. Fortunately, GNOME is moving closer to resolving the fundamental issue and that could happen possibly with this current GNOME 3.34 cycle...

The Blackbird has arrived for testing! As written about last week, the Blackbird has begun shipping and is in mass production as the micro-ATX POWER9 system that is the little brother to Raptor Computing System's long-standing, high-performance, fully open-source Talos II workstation. The Raptor Blackbird is lower-cost while being able to handle up to 160 Watt Sforza 8-core processors, dual DDR4 ECC memory modules, one PCI Express 4.0 x16 slot, dual Gigabit Ethernet, and other common features of desktop/workstation motherboards.

Google has another experienced open-source graphics driver developer on its staff and could mean further Linux graphics ecosystem improvements...

If you have been curious about Intel's Clear Linux distribution given its stellar performance, usability improvements now with its new desktop installer and forming of the Clear Linux Developer Edition, and growing industry adoption, tomorrow they are hosting a public event in Santa Clara, California...

Mesa 19.1 should be out any day now as the new quarterly feature release for this collection of open-source graphics drivers predominantly used on Linux systems. While we cover the Mesa development features on a near daily basis, here is a recap of all the exciting changes and new features to find with the upcoming Mesa 19.1.

Purism just published a monthly summary of their activities pertaining to the Librem 5 smartphone this month. They continue working on their software stack with the Librem 5 developer kit but there still is no sign of their production hardware design yet or if they'll be able to ship next quarter as planned...

Red Hat's Alexander Larsson has just released Flatpak 1.4.0 as the new stable version of this Linux application sandboxing tech formerly known as XDG-App...

Ranger is the on-demand ranger generator being worked on for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) by Red Hat's compiler experts for the past several years. Following a recent update on the effort, it looks like Ranger might land for next year's GCC 10 release after failing to make it in time for GCC 9...

While there are the Debian/RPM packages offered of the Radeon Open Compute (ROCm) stack for Linux users on supported distributions, the new "ROCm Enablement Tool" could assist in setting up this GPU compute stack on supported Linux distributions and elsewhere...

The bleeding-edge Arch Linux distribution has resorted to dropping the GCC 9.1 compiler from testing due to a data corruption bug...

The Intel Gallium3D driver has seen another performance optimization now merged into the Mesa 19.2 development code for its stable release next quarter...

Canonical's Alan Griffiths today announced the release of Mir 1.2 as the latest version of their display stack that -- since the abandoning of their mobile/convergence plans -- has morphed into providing Wayland support. With Mir 1.2, there is more X11/XWayland work in tow along with enabling new functionality for Mir-based shells...

At Intel's keynote today at Computex, Icelake was the main subject of their presentation. Icelake mobile CPUs aren't shipping today but are said to be coming out this summer...

Continuing on with our benchmarks this month of the newly-released GCC 9 compiler, here are some additional numbers for the AVX-512-enabled Intel Core i9 7980XE processor on Ubuntu Linux when testing tuning for various AVX widths...

Curious whether the recent Microsoft Windows 10 Version 1903 (May 2019 Update) improved the multi-threaded performance at all for the likes of the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX, I recently carried out some benchmarks looking at Windows 10 1903 against the former Windows 10 Version 1809 release benchmarked against both Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS and the latest Ubuntu 19.04.

For open-source fans, adding to AMD's exciting day also happens to be a new AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver update...

In addition to AMD announcing their Ryzen 3000 line-up, Arm also used today at Computex 2019 to announce their new Cortex processor as well as a new Mali graphics processor and machine learning chip...

NVIDIA announced the EGX platform from Computex 2019 for accelerating AI at the edge. But if that news doesn't interest you, they also announced in June will be the formal Quake II RTX ray-traced game port release and will be open-source...

At Computex today AMD announced their initial 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen desktop processor line-up launching on 7 July along with the Radeon RX 5700 series...

Being well past the period of submitting new feature material for Linux 5.2, on Friday the Intel Linux graphics driver developers sent in their initial slew of patches to DRM-Next of material they want to have in the Linux 5.3 kernel...

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 5.2-rc2 as the first kernel test release following the closure of the merge window last week and subsequent RC1...

DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has been reworking the virtual memory (VM) infrastructure within their kernel and it's leading to measurable performance improvements...

Intel has jumped ahead of AMD and NVIDIA news expected tomorrow in their Computex 2019 keynotes with some pre-announcements...

With Mesa 19.1 due to be released in the coming days as the quarterly update to this open-source OpenGL/Vulkan driver stack, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at how the current Intel (i965) OpenGL and ANV Vulkan drivers performance compare to that of the existing Mesa 19.0 stable series.

For those concerned by the kernel's most recent data corruption bug involving LVM, dm-crypt, and Samsung SSD drive combinations leading to FSTRIM/Discard wiping too much data, the issue should be resolved in the newly-minted Linux 5.1.5 kernel...

Wine-Staging continues chugging along and as of the version 4.9 release is more than 830 patches atop the upstream Wine code-base...

Sadly it didn't make it in time for the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.16 release, but come Plasma 5.17 there will be working screen sharing support under Wayland...

For years there have been open-source developers working on plumbing support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) displays into the Linux desktop stack and it looks like the Direct Rendering Manager driver support is slowly but surely getting there...

Merged this week to the X.Org Server code-base was an EGL-based GLX provider for helping XWayland and allowing some games to run nicely now under this X11 code-path for Wayland compositors. While not yet merged, another interesting bit of XWayland code is now under review as a merge request...

In addition to Firefox 68's WebRender slated to deliver much better performance, another headlining feature of this next Mozilla Firefox web-browser update is BigInt support...

GNOME 3.33.2 is now available as the latest development snapshot in the trek towards this September's GNOME 3.34...

The Pango layout engine library that's been around for nearly two decades and used by GNOME's GTK and other software hasn't seen much love lately. Fortunately, Matthias Clasen and others are envisioning some improvements to this library and modeling it more around the HarfBuzz shaping engine work...

As a forewarning to those using LVM, dm-crypt, and Samsung solid-state drives, this combination in some manner(s) may lead to data corruption if using the Linux 5.1 kernel...

If all goes well, Mesa 19.1 could debut as soon as next week. Here is a look at how the AMD Radeon Polaris and Vega performance is looking with Mesa 19.1 relative to Mesa 19.0 stable.

A possible optimization being worked on for the Intel Linux graphics driver is allowing the eLLC (eDRAM) of Iris Pro Graphics on Skylake hardware and newer to support caching of the display buffers...

RPM 4.15 is due out this year as the latest RPM4 update and Fedora 31 is planning to make prompt use of RPM 4.15 given its new/improved features...

While FreeBSD 12 is the latest and greatest stable series since the end of last year, for those still on FreeBSD 11 there is the 11.3 update due out for release in July while this weekend the first beta was issued...

In order to meet the July release target for Blender 2.80, there is now an API and user-interface freeze on this next feature update for this leading open-source, cross-platform 3D modeling software...

Just days after the previous Intel open-source OpenCL compute runtime stack update, another tagged version is now available and it's good news for Broadwell owners...

Mule Creek Canyon is the PCH to be paired with Intel Elkhart Lake processors. Elkhart Lake as a reminder is the Gemini Lake SoC successor that will feature Gen11 class graphics and now thanks to the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver we know that new PCH is the Mule Creek Canyon...

Wine 4.9 is available for testing as the newest bi-weekly development release marching towards Wine 5.0...

AMD Raven Ridge APUs have been out for more than one year now and at least under Linux can still be quite problematic depending upon the particular motherboard BIOS and other factors. Fortunately, while Raven 2 and Picasso APU support is appearing to be in better shape, the AMD open-source developers haven't forgot about these problematic Raven 1 systems...

GNOME 3.34 feature development continues at full-speed with a lot of interesting activity this cycle particularly on the Mutter front. On top of the performance/lag/stuttering improvements, today Mutter saw the merging of the "X11 excision" preparation patches...

Vulkan 1.1.109 was released today as the latest update to this graphics/compute specification ahead of the US holiday weekend...

Now with MDS / Zombieload being public and seeing a 8~10% performance hit in the affected workloads as a result of the new mitigations to these Microarchitectural Data Sampling vulnerabilities, what's the overall performance look like now if going back to the days of AMD FX Vishera and Intel Sandybridge/Ivybridge processors? If Spectre, Meltdown, L1TF/Foreshadow, and now Zombieload had come to light years ago would it have shaken that pivotal point in the industry? Here are benchmarks looking at the the performance today with and without the mitigations to the known CPU vulnerabilities to date.

Given the significant performance benefits to Arm's Scalable Vector Extension 2 (SVE2), they are working on ensuring the open-source Linux compiler toolchains support these new CPU instructions ahead of SoCs shipping that support this big addition...

A notable improvement was merged into the "xserver" Git tree for the eventual X.Org Server 1.21 release that will improve the support for various Linux games relying on XWayland for running under a Wayland compositor...