Phoronix

LibreOffice 6.4 is out today as the latest feature update to this cross-platform, open-source office suite...

While developers are hard at work on Godot 4.0 with Vulkan support, that release won't be ready until mid-2020 so as a result Godot 3.2 is out today as their latest stable release and serving as a "long-term support" release until transitioning to Godot 4...

Intel's Andy Shevchenko sent in the x86 platform driver updates on Monday for the newly opened Linux 5.6 merge window. There is the never-ending work on dealing with quirky Windows-focused laptops to adding new Intel hardware support and other additions...

With LLVM Clang 9.0 and Linux 5.3 together it became possible to build the mainline Linux kernel with this non-GCC compiler. The x86_64 Linux kernel Clang-based kernel builds has continued to improve through newer kernel releases. This follows the mainline AArch64 (64-bit ARM) Linux kernel mainline build by Clang too, which has been of much interest by different hardware/software vendors. There hasn't been much Clang'ing kernel efforts for other architectures, but it turns out with Clang 10 and Linux 5.6 will be another working combination, this time for IBM s390...

The Time Namespace, which was originally proposed back in 2018 for allowing per-namespace offsets to the system clocks, has finally entered the mainline kernel in early 2020 with the in-development Linux 5.6 kernel...

The very exciting networking subsystem updates have made it into the Linux 5.6 kernel...

Mozilla's Thunderbird mail client has been rather neglected the past several years with all the focus on the Firefox web browser, but as the next step forward for this mail/RSS client is now placing it under the newly-formed MZLA Technologies Corporation...

It turns out Sony is now maintaining the mainline Linux kernel's hid-sony input driver in an "official capacity now across various devices." This hid-sony driver is what traditionally has supported the various PlayStation controllers and other input devices for their hardware. But their newfound "official" support for this open-source input driver could lead to interesting predicaments...

One of the work items we have been keen to monitor during the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS development cycle is tracking the happenings around Zsys, the Ubuntu/Canonical led utility for helping to administer ZFS On Linux systems. In ending out January, Zsys now has more functionality in tow...

We remain quite excited to see Godot 4.0 this year that most notably is working on Vulkan API support...

While Mesa 20.0 will be entering its feature freeze this week and branching ahead of the stable release expected in about one month, for now the Mesa 19.3 series is the newest available for stable users...

As part of the Linux 5.6 development dance, Ingo Molnar began sending in all of the pull requests this morning for the different areas of the Linux kernel he oversees...

XCP-ng, the Xen-based enterprise-focused hypervisor offering a Xen Server Linux distribution, has released a beta of its next feature release while formally becoming part of the Linux Foundation hosted Xen Project...

Flashing the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP) onto devices is now a lot easier thanks to the Android Flash Tool...

After last week looking at the AMD/Intel/NVIDIA contributions to the mainline Linux kernel over the past number of years, there were reader requests for seeing how some of the top distributions compare namely Red Hat, SUSE, and Canonical...

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE today sent in all of the sound driver updates for this next version of the Linux kernel...

Herbert Xu sent in all of the crypto subsystem changes on Tuesday for the in-development Linux 5.6 kernel. Interesting us the most out of this crypto work is the AMD Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) driver...

Intel last night made public two more data leakage disclosures, which tie back to Zombieload and November's TAA issue...

The EFI kernel code has seen a variety of clean-ups and low-level improvements to it for the Linux 5.6 cycle...

Another alternative to slow initramfs generation could be distributing pre-built initramfs images to users. An additional benefit of that is possibly better security with measured boot capabilities, a matter currently being discussed by Fedora stakeholders...

AppStream was started in 2011 as a means of drawing up cross-distribution (XML-based) standards for describing software components/packages metadata and for repositories to describe software collections. Now nearly a decade later, AppStream 1.0 should be coming in the next few months...

Linux power management subsystem maintainer Rafael Wysocki is punctual as always in sending in his feature pull requests for the new merge window...

Unfortunately it wasn't a trouble-free experience at launch but with time Raven Ridge APUs have been getting cleaned up on Linux for a pleasant experience, thanks in part to the Google Chromebook play that has also seen these newer AMD APUs seeing HDCP content protection support and PSP / TEE trusted execution functionality...

SELinux maintainer Paul Moore sent in the Security Enhanced Linux updates for the 5.6 merge window, which amounts to "one of the bigger SELinux pull requests in recent years."..

The FreeBSD project has issued their last quarterly status update for 2019...

Last month were benchmarks of RAID benchmarks on four hard drives in not visiting the Linux HDD RAID performance in a while. Stemming from that article were requests of fresh tests of the SSD RAID performance on Linux 5.5 Git, so here are those results for single drive performance and RAID0 / RAID1 / RAID5 / RAID6 / RAID10.

Btrfs in the now-stable Linux 5.5 kernel is exciting for its new RAID1C3/RAID1C4 capability allowing three/four copies of data rather than just two while looking ahead to Linux 5.6 is further feature work on this Linux file-system...

In ruffling feathers of open-source Qt fans, The Qt Company announced a series of changes today to help foster their commercial business...

Chris Lattner, the founder of the LLVM compiler stack and sub-projects like the Clang C/C++ compiler front-end, has joined RISC-V firm SiFive...

Fresh off the Linux 5.5 release, the Free Software Foundation Latin America crew has debuted their GNU Linux-libre 5.5 downstream that continues to be focused on deblobbing the kernel of drivers requiring proprietary firmware and stripping out other code/functionality that is contingent upon non-free software bits and removing the ability to load closed-source kernel modules...

Following last month's release of the big Qt 5.14 tool-kit, Qt 5.14.1 is out this morning as the first point release...

With Wine 5.0 having released and the Git tree back open for feature work, we're quite looking forward to see what new material will land following this feature freeze that was in effect the past two months...

SUSE's Borislav Petkov sent in the (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability) updates for the Linux 5.6 kernel on this first day of the new merge window...

Habana Labs, the AI start-up being bought out by Intel, is still striving towards upstreaming their Gaudi processor support code for AI training...

Following the Linux 5.5 kernel release one of the first pull requests sent in is for the hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates. Dominating the HWMON interest this cycle is a long overdue SATA temperature monitoring driver and vastly improving the k10temp driver for AMD Zen desktop and server CPUs...

More than a decade after Apple acquired the CUPS source-code and its lead developer, that developer, Michael Sweet, recently parted ways with Apple...

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 5.5 as stable...

Linux 5.5 is likely to be released later today and with that are many new features. But as soon as 5.5 is released it marks the opening of the Linux 5.6 merge window and this next kernel has us particularly exciting... It's certainly shaping up to be one of the most exciting kernel cycles in recent times with many blockbuster features and improvements...

MPV 0.32 is out today as the newest update to this open-source video player based on MPlayer...

Formally announced earlier this month was Kubuntu Focus as the most polished KDE laptop we've ever tested. Besides offering a great KDE desktop experience, the Kubuntu Focus offers high-end specs while now there is a slightly cheaper base model introduced...

Dracut that is used for generating the initramfs image on Linux distributions like Fedora / RHEL, Debian, openSUSE, and many other distributions could be much faster...

Fedora IoT already uses swap-on-ZRAM by default given IoT devices are often running with limited amounts of RAM, but for Fedora Workstation 33 the developers are looking at enabling SWAP-on-ZRAM by default for all new installations...

KDE developers were busy as always this week working to polish up the forthcoming KDE Plasma 5.18 and other areas of their open-source desktop stack...

The widely-used SQLite embedded database library saw its first major release of 2020 this week...

Earlier this month I wrote about Intel SST Core-Power patches as part of Intel's Speed Select's functionality for more control over per-core power/frequency behavior based upon the software running on each core. The "core-power" profile support appears ready now for Linux 5.6...

As shown yesterday the new video BIOS of the Radeon RX 5600 XT paired with the corrected SMC firmware on Linux yields impressive performance improvements that -- similar to Windows -- allows the card to compete better with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2060. For Linux users, activating the Valve-funded ACO compiler back-end for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver helps turn up the competition even more...

It's already been over nine months since the release of Solus 4 while now this popular Linux desktop distribution has been succeeded by Solus 4.1..

Patches written two months ago for Intel's ANV open-source Vulkan driver have now been merged ahead of the imminent Mesa 20.0 feature freeze and branching...

Some exciting news this week for Firefox users running on Wayland.....

In addition to the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver's on-disk shader cache and in-memory shader cache there is now a "live shader cache" to help with deduplication of compiled shader objects...