Phoronix

LVFS, the Linux Vendor Firmware Service, that pairs with Fwupd integration for offering firmware/BIOS updates to Linux users could be offering up more than ten thousand distinct firmware files before the end of the calendar year...

DXVK 1.1 is out this weekend in time for some weekend Linux game testing. This library, which is used for implementing Direct3D 10/11 over Vulkan for the benefit of Windows games running on Linux under Wine/Proton (Steam Play), has new abilities and performance enhancements with today's update...

Continuing on from yesterday's Linux OS comparison/benchmarks on Intel 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable Cascade Lake CPUs, here are some follow-up tests focusing on the video encode performance for this dual Xeon Platinum 8280 server when focusing on Intel's high-performance "Streaming Video Technology" (SVT) encoders for VP9, AV1, and H.265/HEVC...

By the time the next Linux kernel is released it will have been roughly a year and a half since the Spectre and Meltdown CPU speculative execution vulnerabilities went public and the mitigations started appearing within the kernel. Finally now it's being discussed again by upstream developers over improving the switches / tunable knobs for easily configuring these performance-degrading mitigations...

If you are looking for some kid-friendly Linux gaming this weekend, SuperTuxKart 0.10 has reached release candidate maturity with its LAN/Internet multiplayer support...

While Cascade Lake Xeon Scalable processors launched just this week, already with their successor "Cooper Lake" we are looking forward to Intel supporting the BFloat16 floating-point format designed for machine learning workloads. GNU's Gas now has assembler/disassembler support for BF16 instructions...

Beginning with next week's Wine 4.6 development release, this program for running Windows games/applications on Linux/macOS will now support a shared Wine-Mono installation rather than requiring this open-source .NET implementation to be installed per-prefix. The benefit of this change is reducing the disk space if you keep around multiple Wine prefixes and likely a speedier creation of new prefixes...

For those making use of Canonical's LXD project for Linux containers, version 3.12 is now available ahead of this month's Ubuntu 19.04 release...

Derek Foreman, formerly of Samsung Research (Open-Source Group), who had been serving as the release manager of Wayland and the Weston compositor for the past number of release cycles is stepping down from his role...

With the open-source Godot game engine's 3D engine and 2D display efforts both panning out well, the developers are working to combine the two a bit to offer "pseudo 3D" support for those using the cross-platform engine for 2D games...

If you are still making use of Mesa 18.3 (or older), Mesa 18.3.6 is now available as the last planned update for this quarterly release stream as users should begin considering an upgrade to Mesa 19.0.x if not wanting to ride the 19.1-devel cycle...

Following the initial launch benchmarks earlier this week of the Intel 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable "Cascade Lake" 8280 processors, I proceeded to run some benchmarks of different Linux distributions (operating systems) to ensure the Linux support panned out across the major platforms and while at it also comparing the performance between these different flavors of GNU/Linux. With this powerful Gigabyte Server sporting dual Xeon Platinum 8280 processors for a combined 56 cores / 112 threads, 12 x 32GB DDR4-2933MHz memory, and Samsung NVMe storage, Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS, Ubuntu 19.04 Beta, Fedora 29, CentOS 7, Debian 9.8, and Clear Linux were tested to look at the performance of the brand new Cascade Lake.

KDE is anticipating to ship the official Applications 19.04 update in two weeks, but for testing this weekend is their release candidate now that this collection of KDE applications is under a feature freeze...

Just days after the most recent POCL 1.3 release candidate, the Portable Computing Language 1.3 release is now officially available for an open-source project allowing OpenCL kernels to be executed on CPUs...

The newest compiler back-end proposed for merging into the LLVM compiler code-base is for the NEC SX-Aurora VE (Vector Engine) accelerator card...

The Xen Project announced this week the release of Xen 4.12 as the latest feature update for this widely-used virtualization hypervisor...

In the AI races for dedicated hardware accelerators, Habana Labs is off to an early lead when it comes to having a mainline, open-source kernel driver and now is also the first AI processor having a back-end implemented within Facebook's Glow AI open-source compiler...

For the past few years there has been the ASpeed "AST" DRM display driver for the PCI graphics device and running on the host CPU. Coming to the next kernel cycle, Linux 5.2, is a driver for the ASpeed BMC SoC's graphics display hardware for ARM-based BMC systems...

If you are looking for some motivation to try out this week's Fedora 30 beta build, it's shaping up to be another massive feature update as outlined by Red Hat's Christian Schaller...

Announced last October by a Google engineer was KUnit as a Linux kernel unit testing framework and a proper solution unlike some of the current in-tree kernel testing facilities. The latest KUnit patches have been volleyed for review while waiting to see if it will be accepted soon into the mainline kernel...

Purism announced today they are partnering up with Private Internet Access (PIA) for offering out-of-the-box VPN services to Librem 5 smartphone users as well as offering the VPN integration inside their Debian-based PureOS for Librem 13/15 laptop users...

Back in November marked the Linux release of Warhammer II, powered by Vulkan for this high profile Linux game port by Feral Interactive. Feral announced today they are aiming for a timely release of the Linux/macOS port of the game's newest DLC...

Marek Olšák of AMD has merged his latest performance-enhancing feature into RadeonSI Gallium3D: the enabling of displayable DCC on Raven Ridge / Raven 2 APUs...

While the crowd-funding campaign has long been used up for working on the Allwinner VPU support via reverse-engineering for the mainline Linux kernel, Bootlin continues advancing the "Cedrus" driver particularly in getting the H.264 decoding to work...

The Linux "Lockdown" patches to restrict the running kernel image from being modified and to strengthen the boundary between UID 0 and the kernel continues to be revised. Matthew Garrett at Google who is now leading this Linux security effort is hoping to get the code into Linux 5.2 but that remains to be seen -- on Wednesday the thirty-second revision to these patches were posted...

Adding to the list of features to get excited about with PostgreSQL 12 is support for GSSAPI encryption...

The-Forge, a rendering framework that has supported Vulkan on Linux for the past year, is now a lot more interesting as it's newest release now opens up Vulkan ray-tracing support for both Windows and Linux...

The Portable Computing Language implementation of OpenCL for execution on CPUs and other use-cases is buttoning up its next release as POCL 1.3...

Mer, the fork of MeeGo that aimed to provide a free alternative to Maemo for Nokia devices, is now finally merging with Sailfish OS...

The high resolution scrolling support in Linux 5.0 has been a headache to say the least. After being ejected from Linux 4.20 following early fall-out, the support was merged for Linux 5.0 but the user-space support has yet to stabilize...

Last week were tests looking at the Firefox/Chrome web browser performance on eight Linux distributions but how does the situation look if adding Microsoft Windows 10 to the equation? Well, this article addresses that question as we looking at how well Chrome and Firefox compare Windows 10 vs. Linux on the same system and using the latest releases of these web browsers.

With it approaching two months since the release of systemd 241, Lennart Poettering and his gang of systemd developers are putting the finishing touches on systemd 242 with a release candidate now being available...

Released a few weeks ago was NetworkManager 1.16 with WireGuard integration, WiFi Direct/P2P connection handling, and other new Linux networking features. NetworkManager 1.17.2 has now been kicked off as the first development release towards the next version...

Alongside many other data-centric announcements yesterday, Intel quietly released the Wi-Fi 6 AX200 802.11ax wireless adapters formerly known by the Cyclone Peak codename...

It's been busy recently testing Intel's new Xeon Platinum 8280 Cascade Lake processors as well as the in-development Linux 5.1 kernel following the recent closure of its merge window. Interestingly, at least for this combination, Linux 5.1 is running even faster for these new Cascade Lake processors in some workloads...

A few weeks back Intel's next-gen OpenGL Linux driver, the Iris Gallium3D initiative, picked up support for fast color clears in order to boost performance. That initial support was for Skylake "Gen 9" and newer while now Broadwell "Gen 8" graphics have this functionality in place...

Intel's 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable Cascade Lake processors are officially launching today! Last month we were briefed out at one of Intel's campuses in Oregon and have been testing the new Xeon Platinum 8280 processors in recent days. In this article is a look at what's new with Cascade Lake as well as our preliminary Ubuntu Linux performance figures for the Xeon Platinum 8280 processors.

In this morning's Intel Xeon "Cascade Lake" launch article joined by initial benchmarks of the high-end 2 x Xeon Platinum 8280 processors there are dozens of benchmarks compared to various AMD EPYC and IBM POWER9 processors. If you are wanting to compare your own system's article to a smaller set of focused results, this article is for you with some additional reference figures under a variety of different workloads...

Epic Games today released Unreal Engine 4.22 and while they continue to support Vulkan and offer native Linux support, this engine update is more exciting this time around on the Windows side...

GCC 9 is just weeks away from being officially released while today IBM engineers added support for new "arch13" processors to this next compiler update...

The public beta of Fedora 30 is now available for testing as the latest installment to this Red Hat developed Linux distribution now riding with the very latest packages like the GNOME 3.32 desktop...

Jean Hertel who has spent the past year developing ADriConf as as the Advanced DRI Configurator is now looking for this project to officially live within Mesa...

Blend2D is a cross-platform C++ vector graphics library aiming to compete with the likes of Cairo...

In the one year that the Panfrost Gallium3D driver has been coming together for open-source, reverse-engineered support for Arm Mali Midgard/Bifrost hardware, it's been making a lot of progress in what it's capable of running atop this Mesa driver...

With Intel Comet Lake support queued for Linux 5.2, Intel's open-source developers have queued the support into their Mesa code for their OpenGL/Vulkan user-space drivers...

SPURV is a new open-source initiative out of Collabora for "running Android next to Wayland" with the Android app windows being rendered alongside Wayland Linux applications and having full 3D acceleration support...

With the start of a new month, Valve has just published their updated monthly Steam figures showing the Linux gaming market-share and more...

As the first step towards the plans to have a Vulkan back-end to WineD3D itself for Wine mapping older versions of Direct3D to Vulkan, an initial Vulkan adapter implementation was merged today...

Marek Olšák of AMD kicked off the new month by finally landing support for the ARB/KHR extensions around parallel shader compile support...

Philip Rebohle, the lead developer of DXVK for accelerating Direct3D 10/11 on Linux systems by mapping the API to Vulkan, has released the newest point release for this library used by Steam Play (Proton) / Wine gamers...