Phoronix

FreeBSD 11.3 is lining up for release in July while this weekend the first release candidate is available for testing...

Released at the end of May was the huge ZFS On Linux 0.8 release with many new features like native encryption, TRIM/discard support for SSDs, device removal, Python 3 compatibility with its tooling, pool check-points, and much more. Out today is now the first maintenance release following that big release...

Since the release of WSL2 as a Windows 10 Insider Preview update this week, we've been putting the new Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 under some benchmarks compared to WSL1 and bare metal Linux. While WSL2 has improved the I/O performance thanks to the new Hyper-V-based virtualization approach employed by WSL2, the performance has regressed in other areas for running Linux binaries on Windows 10. Here are our preliminary benchmark results.

At the start of May there were the initial patches out of AMD for implementing a better runtime linker in its graphics stack. That code has now been merged into Mesa 19.2 and is being used by the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

Wacom's second-generation Intuos Pro Small digital drawing tablet will be supported by the upcoming Linux 5.3 kernel...

To be exposed via /proc/[pid]/arch_status is a new interface for exposing architectural-specific information for a given Linux process...

To date the open-source AMD "Navi" graphics code inside their LLVM compiler back-end has been focused on the "GFX1010" target but now it's been branched out to also GFX1011 and GFX1012...

The team maintaining MoltenVK for allowing a majority of the Vulkan API to function atop Apple's Metal drivers for macOS/iOS have issued their first big update in two months...

Following last week's release of Chrome 75, Google today issued the first public beta for the Chrome 76 web-browser...

Intel announced at the start of the year their newest Itanium 9700 "Kittson" processors from 2017 would be discontinued with no planned successor for the IA-64 line-up. Given the IA-64 compiler support is already in rough shape for GCC, the GNU developers are planning to deprecate the support for the current GCC 10 cycle and to remove it entirely for GCC 11...

With Intel's Icelake/Gen11 graphics support considered production-ready when on the latest Linux graphics driver components and ahead of the real enablement around their highly anticipated Xe Graphics discrete hardware, it's making for a summer of clean-ups and restructuring within their kernel Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver...

The first alpha release of PHP 7.4 is now available ahead of its feature freeze next month and after a period of betas and release candidates will culminate with the official PHP 7.4.0 release around the end of November...

The Linux 5.3 mainline kernel will be picking up support for enabling Linux guests on the ACRN hypervisor...

If you are a user of the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" Linux graphics driver on laptops and have found no audio support, that is likely to be fixed by an upcoming kernel patch that should make its way to the Linux 5.3 kernel...

As a win for the Ubuntu Server team, the founder of Inkscape and longtime X.Org/graphics developer Bryce Harrington has returned to Canonical...

While Vega M has been on the market for several months as the Radeon graphics processor found on Intel Kabylake-G chips, interestingly in the past few days have been a number of improvements for using the open-source Linux graphics stack on this hardware...

After announcing Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 just over one month ago, Microsoft has begun pushing out WSL2 to its Windows Insider Preview channel...

While looking forward to the long-awaited GIMP 3.0 milestone, in the meantime GIMP 2.10 point releases have tended to be fairly notable and today's GIMP 2.10.12 update is another useful update...

Last year we looked at the Spectre mitigation cost on POWER9 using the high-end Talos II server while now several kernel releases later and also having the desktop Blackbird system in our lab, here is a look at how the Spectre/Meltdown mitigation impact is for an IBM POWER9 4-core processor running Ubuntu 19.04.

CERN, The European Organization for Nuclear Research that is home to the Large Hadron Collider and a lot of other experiments, is experimenting with moving further away from Microsoft products. Due to Microsoft license fee increases affecting their work in the research laboratory and its budget, they established the Microsoft Alternatives "MAlt" project...

The ever important Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) can now handle HiDPI window scaling under Wayland...

Back during CES, Intel announced the Nervana Neural Network Processor for Inference (NNPI) to be powered by 10nm Ice Lake cores. Now ahead of the Linux 5.3 kernel cycle we're seeing the very first signs of the Ice Lake NNPI upbringing for the kernel...

Last week an on-disk GLSL shader cache was proposed for the vintage "R300g" open-source Gallium3D driver for this OpenGL code supporting through the Radeon X1000 (R500) series. That shader cache support has now been merged into Mesa 19.2...

The first release candidate for the next major release of the DragonFlyBSD operating system is now available for testing...

While Oracle backs the VM VirtualBox virtualization software, they increasingly are offering new solutions around KVM virtualization. Hitting general availability (GA) status this week is the Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager...

Following Monday's release of Wine 4.10, Wine-Staging 4.10 is now available as the latest work on this bleeding-edge / testing version of Wine for running Windows applications and games on Linux and other platforms...

During the AMD Zen 2 + RDNA launch event they highlighted some of the new instructions to find with the Zen 2 processor but there is at least one more...

Proton 4.2-7 is out as the latest version of Valve's downstream of Wine that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

We now have a tentative release date for the big Debian 10 "Buster" release...

While eagerly looking out for the Navi/RDNA enablement for the upcoming Radeon RX 5700 / RX 5700XT graphics cards, which should be out soon, in the mean time some other work-in-progress code has been queued as additional material that will make it for the Linux 5.3 cycle...

The open-source folks maintaining the LLVM-based Intel Graphics Compiler for use by their NEO compute stack for Linux released this week another update...

After being delayed by a few weeks due to a few blocker bugs, Mesa 19.1 as the quarterly feature update to this open-source multi-vendor graphics driver stack has been released! Mesa 19.1 is a huge update with several new drivers, performance optimizations, more mature support for existing Vulkan drivers, and other changes...

Rob Clark, the longtime leader of the Freedreno driver initiative providing open-source 3D graphics for Qualcomm Adreno hardware and who just recently jumped to Google to continue driver work, is using his new Chromium.org email address for flipping on UBWC in this driver...

The Radeon Open Compute (ROCm) stack will begin to support the Intel Kabylake-G chips with the "Vega M" graphics...

Kent Overstreet who has been developing the Bcachefs out of the BCache code has announced core feature work has wrapped up, he's very happy with how the work has panned out, and potentially could be merging the code into the Linux kernel soon if the review is pleasant...

Earlier this month we reported on a new Google Summer of Code project making use of NSA software to help with firmware reverse engineering. So far that effort seems to be paying off of using Ghidra...

KDE Plasma 5.16 is out today as the latest major update to the modern KDE desktop...

Recently I provided a fresh look at the Radeon VII Linux gaming performance (as well as comparing AMDVLK vs. RADV) now that I have a Vega 20 graphics card running great under Linux after the pre-production VII had failed. One of the other areas I was curious to see how the Linux performance evolved in the few months since the original Radeon VII Linux benchmarks was checking on the ROCm OpenCL performance. Here are those results up against NVIDIA with their proprietary Linux graphics driver.

After being an experimental option in DragonFlyBSD for more than the past half-decade, HAMMER2 is the new default file-system of this FreeBSD derivative...

This weekend I was out the AMD E3 event learning more about their third-generation Ryzen processors as well as their equally exciting AMD Radeon RX 5700 series Navi hardware. Being at the event, one could reasonably deduce the Linux support will be great and it does appear to be that way building upon their improvements of earlier GPUs and Zen processors. It does appear to be that way while obviously we will begin testing soon of these new processors and graphics cards. At least for the Zen 2 processors, I am confident in their Linux support while on the Navi side we are awaiting Linux driver support but I am optimistic it will work out nicely. Now that the initial embargo has expired, here are more details on these new AMD products launching 7 July and my Linux information at this time.

NVIDIA just released a new stable Linux driver in the 430 long-lived series...

Wine 4.10 is out today rather than last Friday due to Wine founder Alexandre Julliard being on holiday, but that bi-weekly development release is out today...

With last week's release of Chrome 75 I have now wrapped up some benchmarks seeing how the performance of the updated Google web-browser compares to that of the current Firefox 67 stable release as well as Firefox 68 beta, including with WebRender activated. Here are those latest Linux web browser benchmarks.

The AMDVLK 2019.Q2.5 driver was released this morning as the newest open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems wishing to use this official driver as an alternative to the Mesa RADV driver...

For those running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with the default GNOME Shell desktop experience, the latest stable release update of Mutter now fixes the support for running on high refresh rate (above 60Hz) displays...

Released for E3 week is Vulkan 1.1.111, but it's not particularly exciting...

Continuing on from the story a few days ago about R300 Gallium3D seeing a big performance fix after being regressed in recent years, another potential bonus is in store...

Using the Zstd compression algorithm to compress the Linux kernel image has been brought up again with new patches expected in the coming weeks...

Why not start off your morning with a waffle? Waffle 1.6 was just released as this long-running but recently silent project providing a library that allows deferring OpenGL and windowing system selection until run-time for making software more portable across today's mobile systems and desktops and supporting both X11 and Wayland, among other possible options...

Following KDE's 2017 goals, they are now looking to revise their goals or double-down on their current goals, so they could use your help in determining their road-map moving forward...