Phoronix

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...

The release candidate of OPNsense 20.1 is available this weekend, the FreeBSD/HardenedBSD-based networking/firewall OS that forked from pfSense now a half-decade ago...

One of the features that didn't materialize in time for Wine 5.0 as the annual stable Wine release was the work-in-progress Vulkan back-end to WineD3D. Rather than going from Direct3D to OpenGL as WineD3D currently does, there has been efforts to introduce a Vulkan back-end similar to the likes of DXVK...

Coming a few weeks past DXVK 1.5.1 is now version 1.5.2 and it brings with it quite a number of improvements...

Weston 8.0 was released today as the newest version of this reference Wayland compositor...

Yesterday I put together some statistics on the AMD vs. Intel contributions to the upstream Linux kernel during the 2010s, but a request coming in off that was how do NVIDIA's contributions compare. Here is a look at the NVIDIA contributions to the Linux kernel over the past decade...

Earlier this week AMD launched the Radeon RX 5600 XT and as shown in our Linux launch-day review it offers nice performance up against the GTX 1660 and RTX 2060 graphics cards on Linux with various OpenGL and Vulkan games. Complicating the launch was the last-minute change to the video BIOS to offer better performance, but unfortunately that led to an issue with the Linux driver as well as confusing the public due to the change at launch and some board vendors already shipping the new vBIOS release while others are not yet. Fortunately, a Linux solution is forthcoming and in our tests it is working out and offering better performance.

Everything is aligning that the Linux 5.5 kernel is likely to be released this coming Sunday rather than being pushed off for another week of testing...

As more last minute work for the upcoming Mesa 20.0 is initial OpenGL tessellation support for Intel's OpenSWR driver...

NVIDIA on Thursday introduced Nsight Graphics 2020.1 that to its profiling support can now handle OpenGL + Vulkan interoperability for games/applications making use of both APIs. While not many game engines / apps are yet using the likes of OpenGL 4.6 ARB_gl_spirv, Nsight is ready...

While the Linux 5.5 kernel isn't even released yet, it's ideally coming out on Sunday should there not be a one week delay. But in any event Arm's Will Deacon has already sent in the pull request of the ARM architecture changes for Linux 5.6...

The MIPS-based SGI Octane IRIX workstations were first introduced in the late 90's while recently there has been a resurgence in the work on getting these vintage PCs running off a mainline Linux kernel...

After missing their original target of transitioning to Intel Gallium3D by default for Mesa 19.3 as the preferred OpenGL Linux driver on Intel graphics hardware, this milestone has now been reached for Mesa 20.0!..

ZFS On Linux 0.8.3 is out today as the first official update to ZoL since last September...

While the Linux 5.5 kernel is expected to be released as soon as this Sunday, a last minute change to the AMDGPU DRM driver makes the Renoir graphics no longer treated as experimental. With that, there is open-source support out-of-the-box rather than being hidden behind a kernel module flag...

In addition to WireGuard being part of "net-next" as the networking subsystem material targeting the upcoming Linux 5.6 cycle, there is another big last minute addition to the networking space: the Flow Queue PIE packet scheduler has been merged...

As last minute material for Mesa 20.0 is making Valve's "ACO" AMD compiler back-end for the RADV Vulkan driver in better shape for GFX6/GCN1.0 graphics hardware...

Driven by curiosity sake, here is a look at how the total number of AMD and Intel developers contributed to the upstream Linux kernel during the 2010s as well as the total number of commits each year from the respective hardware vendors...

LibreOffice 6.4 is set to be released in the coming days while succeeding that will now be LibreOffice 7.0...

Flatpak 1.6 was an exciting update for this Linux application sandboxing/distribution tech in that it started laying the foundation to support a paid app store but elsewhere in the code-base a security issue came about...

Last year Linux kernel developers began removing support for Intel's Memory Protection Extensions (MPX) and that looks like it will be finished up in the forthcoming Linux 5.6 cycle...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 entered public beta this week as the latest installment to RHEL8...

As we have been eagerly talking about for the past week, the Linux kernel's k10temp driver was updated for better AMD CPU CCD temperatures and voltage/current reporting. Those improvements have been quickly evolving thanks to the work of the open-source community with AMD still sadly holding the datasheets concerning the power/temperature registers close to their vest. A new version of k10temp was sent out on Wednesday...

While Apple still isn't officially supporting the Vulkan graphics/compute API in remaining focused on their Metal drivers, MoltenVK at least has been updated for Vulkan 1.2 in allowing developers to target this Vulkan-to-Metal abstraction layer for macOS and iOS...

Mesa developers are planning to end feature work on Mesa 20.0 next week as this first quarter update to the Mesa 3D graphics stack...

Android 9.0 "Pie" is approaching two years of age and already succeeded by Android 10, but on the Android-x86 front the 9.0 release is finally getting closer...

Ahead of the forthcoming dav1d 0.6 release, this open-source AV1 video decoder has begun implementing AVX-512 optimizations targeting Intel Ice Lake processors...

Sway 1.4 is out today as the newest version of this i3-inspired Wayland compositor that has a growing following...

GhostBSD 20.01 is out today as the first release of 2020 for this desktop-focused BSD operating system built off FreeBSD...

As part of our many Linux benchmarks in ending out the 2010s we ran tests looking at CentOS 6 through CentOS 8, seven years of Ubuntu Linux performance, and various other Linux distribution benchmarks and testing other important pieces of open-source software over time. One of the additional comparisons now wrapped up is looking at the performance of Debian GNU/Linux going back from the old 7 series through the current 10 stable series and also Debian Testing. Tests where relevant were done out-of-the-box with the default security mitigations and again with mitigations disabled.

Out this morning is AMDVLK 2020.Q1.1 as AMD's first official open-source Vulkan driver code drop of the new year...

GameMode, the open-source daemon led by the game porters at Feral Interactive for dynamically optimizing Linux system performance when running games, is out today with version 1.5 as its newest feature update...

The Khronos SYCL standard as a single-source C++-based programming model for OpenCL is one of the exciting elements for Intel's GPU compute plans with the forthcoming Xe graphics cards and fits into their oneAPI umbrella. They just released their SYCL Compiler and Runtimes 2019-12 release with numerous updates...

A "pin_on_cpu" system call has been proposed for the Linux kernel as a new means of letting user-space threads pin themselves to specific CPU cores...

Given yesterday's release of Wine 5.0 I was curious to run some development stats on Wine Git as of the 5.0 release tag for seeing how development is trending on this wildly popular program among Linux users especially for running Windows games and applications...

Following last week's release of Vulkan 1.2, Vulkan 1.2.132 was released on Tuesday as the first maintenance/point release to this major Vulkan API revision...

At last week's Linux.Conf.Au conference was an interesting presentation by longtime X developer Keith Packard on the early days of the pre-X.Org X Window System, the collapse of Unix, and how his views formed on copyleft licenses for building thriving communities...

Wine 5.0 has been released as stable as the annual timed release of this software for running Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms...

In meeting the plans for releasing Wayland 1.18 in February, the alpha release of this Wayland update is now available...

As announced back at CES, the Radeon RX 5600 XT is being launched as the newest Navi graphics card to fill the void between the original RX 5700 series and the budget RX 5500 XT. The Radeon RX 5600 XT graphics cards are beginning to ship today at $279+ USD price point and offers great Linux support but with one last minute -- and hopefully very temporary -- caveat.

Canonical's Daniel Van Vugt continues working on a variety of interesting performance optimizations for upstream GNOME as well as other usability enhancements for this desktop environment. One of the latest items being tackled is improving the quality of background images on GNOME...

Canonical this morning has announced Anbox Cloud for containerized workloads using Google's Android as the guest operating system...

Fedora 32 could be two spins lighter with two little known variants of Fedora Linux set to be removed unless maintainers step up...

The Genode operating system framework that's been going strong for over a decade and continuing to employ a micro-kernel architecture continues to plan for an interesting future...

The modern F18/Flang Fortran front-end to LLVM had been set to land in the LLVM mono repository last Monday that could have made it included as part of the LLVM 10.0 branch set for that day. The LLVM 10.0 branching happened as planned but the landing of this Fortran support did not...

For months we have seen various Intel open-source Linux graphics driver patches that begin preparing for multi-GPU support where in moving forward with their Xe graphics cards there could be the iGPU + dGPU setup or even multiple Xe graphics cards in a single system. So far those Intel Linux multi-GPU preparations have been focused on their kernel-space driver while now it's reaching into user-space with their Vulkan driver seeing early infrastructure changes...

Following last month's Debian init system diversity vote where the Debian developers decided on a general resolution of focusing on systemd but support exploring alternatives, the official Debian Policy has been updated to reflect that...

One of the changes planned for Fedora 32 has been to enable EarlyOOM by default to better handle low memory situations either due to the system running with minimal RAM or under memory pressure. But the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has yet to reach a decision over this default...

Earlier this month many Phoronix readers were interested in our fresh tests of the XanMod-patched Linux kernel for boosting the desktop and workstation performance compared to Ubuntu's default Linux kernel. Among many patches, XanMod does pull in some kernel patches from Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux, so we figured it would be interesting to see how the XanMod'ed Ubuntu compares to Clear Linux performance.