Phoronix

The KDE Slimbook is getting a big upgrade in the form of the ProX and ProX 15 that are powered by AMD's Ryzen 7 4800H "Renoir" processor for offering much better performance and all-around better specs...

With LLVM Clang 9 and Linux 5.3 the mainline kernel can be built following a years-long effort to be able to build the mainline Linux x86_64 kernel with Clang rather than GCC, which followed the AArch64 efforts in a similar achievement. Now with Linux 5.9 coming later this year, the i386 / 32-bit x86 mainline kernel will also now be capable of building under Clang...

Out this evening is OpenRGB v0.3 as the newest feature release of this open-source RGB lighting control solution that works on both Windows and Linux. ASUS, ASRock, Corsair, GSKILL, Gigabyte, Kingston, MSI, Razer, and Thermaltake are among the brands of devices supported by this growing software package...

Version 0.13 of the Build2 build toolchain is now available, the open-source project inspired by the Rust programming language's Cargo system but instead tooled for C/C++ while serving not only as the build system but also a package and project manager...

LLVM 10.0 released back in March and today marks the first point release finally shipping. Normally they try to be a bit more punctual in shipping the seldom point releases to LLVM but today marks LLVM 10.0.1 finally being available, just over one month out from the planned LLVM 11.0 debut...

Back in June when Arm disclosed their Straight Line Speculation (SLS) vulnerability affecting their modern ARM processor designs there wasn't a whole lot of attention. It seems SLS is serious enough that Arm is working on bringing their compiler-based mitigations to existing GCC releases beyond it already being in the current development code...

Fedora like most distributions ship their Wine packages as-is at the defaults, but for Fedora 33 we could see DXVK used by default on Wine in place of the conventional WineD3D back-end for Direct3D 9/10/11 usage...

AMD today officially revealed their Renoir-based Ryzen 4000 APUs. Unfortunately though for enthusiasts, at least for now these APUs are just available for pre-built systems and OEMs...

Back in May the folks at TUXEDO Computers in Germany launched their first AMD Linux laptop. That device though was a letdown in being based on a previous-generation AMD Ryzen 3000 series mobile processor rather than the far better Ryzen 4000 "Renoir" processors. Fortunately, today they announced the Pulse 15 laptop that comes in Ryzen 5 4600H and Ryzen 7 4800H processor options...

AMD has just issued their first new open-source AMDVLK Vulkan driver release in several weeks...

A new version of the Eclipse OpenJ9 JVM implementation was released last week with many fixes and other improvements over its prior release...

Jiving with all the recent rumors, the latest Linux kernel patch work further spells out clearly that Intel Alder Lake will feature a hybrid core design akin to Arm's big.LITTLE architecture...

In looking beyond the massive Fedora 33 release in development, Fedora developers have begun discussing options for allowing better memory testing on their distribution for evaluating possible faulty RAM issues that otherwise often get mixed in with other software bugs and other sporadic behavior...

Along with Linux 5.9 set to add NVMe ZNS support for the spec surrounding placement of data within zones, more broadly this next kernel is positioned to bring dm-crypt support for zoned block devices...

Merged just over one week ago to the mainline kernel were inclusive terminology guidelines following the recent discussion among upstream developers. The Linux sound subsystem has begun preparing patches for Linux 5.9 to overhaul their naming conventions as a result...

While Fedora 33 desktop variants are aiming to use Btrfs by default, non-desktop environments are not and Red Hat remains committed to XFS and their Stratis Storage technology for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Coming to Fedora 33 will also likely be Stratis 2.1 for offering the latest on that front...

Surprising many in the open-source community in recent weeks was the LibreOffice 7.0 release candidate branded as a "Personal Edition". While still being free/open-source software and no licensing change, the traditional LibreOffice build was going to be marketed as "Personal Edition" to differentiate from other stakeholders that may market their professional/enterprise services around this cross-platform, open-source office suite. Those Personal Edition plans are now officially being reverted from next month's LibreOffice 7.0 release...

For those looking at an NVMe PCIe M.2 solid-state drive enclosure for connecting to USB 3.1/3.2 systems, Sabrent offers a nice option with their EC-TFNB enclosure that is constructed out of aluminum, 100% tool-free, and runs well. I recently bought this Sabrent USB 3.2 enclosure along with the Sabrent Rocket Q 2TB NVMe solid-state drive, which offers nice performance for a PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD and the 2TB capacity can be found for just about $250 USD.

Over the past several months there has been work on Intel's Linux kernel graphics driver for async page-flipping to yield better performance. That work was revised against today for hopefully making it into a kernel release in the near future albeit too late for Linux 5.9 but regardless nice to see this work moving forward...

A few months back we wrote of experimental work for creating "secret" memory areas with memfd and now that work has turned into the secretmemfd system call that is under review...

Vulkan 1.2.148 was released on Sunday with two new extensions...

While the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver allows pre-GCN AMD graphics card owners continue making use of their graphics cards, there are diminishing returns with newer games requiring Vulkan that is not supported by pre-HD7000 series hardware as well as far greater performance and efficiency improvements in the more recent generations. In any case, if you are still using a Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 series graphics card, some new life is being pushed into the open-source driver via the in-development NIR back-end...

The latest FFmpeg multimedia library code can see faster H.265 video encoding with the Video Acceleration API when running on Icelake and newer Intel graphics...

While Linus Torvalds has been concerned by the size of Linux 5.8 at times, he just released Linux 5.8-rc6 and so far things are looking good...

In addition to this week bringing an AMDGPU pull request with new GPU support and initial Intel DG1 graphics card support as material for DRM-Next to in turn land with Linux 5.9 in the weeks ahead, there was also another DRM-Misc-Next pull with further material to these smaller drivers...

When it comes to open-source audio software, the Ardour digital audio workstation and Audacity audio editor are the two flagship offerings. But Zrythm continues advancing as another promising open-source digital audio workstation project. Zrythm is currently in a late alpha stage with its newest release this weekend but a beta appears to be on the horizon...

Riding off Friday's Wine 5.13 release, an updated Wine-Staging is now available coming with 669 patches atop the code-base...

Intel's IWD wireless daemon for Linux systems has been seeing work in recent days on integration around WiFi Display support, a.k.a. WFD / Miracast...

The Lutris open-source gaming platform manager that also makes it easier installing Windows games via Steam is now employing the Valve-backed VKD3D-Proton fork for Direct3D 12 over Vulkan...

While DragonFlyBSD has its own, original HAMMER2 file-system, for those needing to access data from EXT2/EXT3/EXT4 file-systems, there is a brand new "ext2fs" driver implementation for this BSD operating system...

For those looking for another rolling-release Linux distribution to try and one whose roots trace back to the legendary Mandrake Linux, OpenMandriva has been working to establish its own rolling-release spin for those preferring the latest software packages as opposed to their conventional releases. Additionally, OpenMandriva is nearing the end of its i686 repository offering while continuing to work with Wine and 32-bit games...

Debian 9.13 is now available as the last planned update for the Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" series...

Way back in 2010 it was announced that Lightworks would be going open-source as this high-end, non-linear and cross-platform video editor solution. This video editing system has been used by many films over the years from The Wolf of Wall Street to Bruce Almighty to Moulin Rouge to Pulp Fiction as well as many other movies and television shows while also being approachable enough that it's used by less advanced video editing enthusiasts. Lightworks going open-source would be a big win, but ten years after their failed plans were announced they finally have shed some light on why such move away from being a proprietary application never materialized...

At the end of June was the first batch of AMDGPU changes queued for DRM-Next to in turn go into the Linux 5.9 kernel when that cycle opens up in August. On Friday a second batch of feature changes for this open-source AMD Radeon kernel graphics driver was submitted...

This week KDE developers have seen a lot of bug and regression fixes materialize for Plasma and other components...

Git 2.28-rc1 was released on Friday in stepping towards the next feature release for this widely-used, distributed revision control system...

Ahead of the official release expected in early August, the second release candidate of LibreOffice 7.0 is now available for testing...

The Panfrost Gallium3D driver providing open-source OpenGL driver support for Arm Mali Midgard and Bifrost hardware has another feature tacked on as of Friday night...

Wine is out with its latest bi-weekly development summer blend for running Windows applications and games on Linux and other platforms...

The Monado open-source OpenXR runtime for AR/VR headsets is making progress on integrating open-source positional tracking capabilities...

For about one and a half months now I have been using the AMD Ryzen 7 4700U as my main laptop paired with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. It's been working out very well for not even being the top-of-the-line AMD Renoir SKU. Here is some additional commentary for those thinking about one of the new AMD laptops with Linux use...

Microsoft's newest open-source Linux software is ProcMon for Linux, a rewritten and re-imagined version of its Processor Monitor found on Windows within their Sysinternals suite...

It looks like the syscall user redirection support could soon be mainlined to the kernel for this new Linux feature that was originally motivated by helping Windows games running on Wine...

Well this is a huge Friday morning bummer: the GNU C Library (glibc) is dropping support for the very interesting Restartable Sequences (RSEQ) as some design changes need to be made, thus restarting work on restartable sequences...

There is finally a new release of the Thunderbird mail/RSS client available as the annual update to this longtime Mozilla mail client. Thunderbird 78 is the new version out and serves as an Extended-Support Release with many improvements in tow...

Longtime FreeBSD/Linux network stack developer and former Qualcomm Atheros engineer Adrian Chadd is back to working on FreeBSD wireless networking improvements...

Joining Sway 1.5 for an exciting week in the Wayland space is an update to Cage, the Wayland compositor designed for kiosk-like experiences...

Fedora 33 is easily shaping up to be one of the biggest releases ever for this long-time Linux distribution formerly known as Fedora Core. It's just not a few big features like Fedora desktop variants defaulting to Btrfs but even just on feature count alone it's looking by far to be one of the biggest at least in a number of years if not ever...

On top of the recent UVD video decode for AMD Radeon "GCN 1.0" GPUs with the AMDGPU kernel driver to complement the existing Radeon kernel driver support, these aging "Southern Islands" graphics cards also continue to see patchwork on enabling "Display Core" (DC) display support with the AMDGPU driver option...

With the Intel 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable (Cascade Lake) processors having turned a year old in April and next month marking one year since the launch of the AMD EPYC 7002 (Rome) series, here are fresh benchmarks of the dual Xeon Platinum 8280 versus the AMD EPYC 7742 when testing the Linux software stack from early 2019 and then again using a bleeding-edge Linux software stack as of this month. This shows how the Linux software performance has evolved over the past year for both Intel and AMD on the server front as well as how the current top-end SKUs are competing right now.