Phoronix

Mozilla engineers have been making good progress on being able to ship a Flatpak'ed Firefox web browser for better security/sandboxing and easier distribution on Linux systems...

Last week Basemark launched their Basemark GPU 1.2 benchmark that now includes Linux support alongside all other major supported desktop and mobile operating systems. We've been testing out this Linux version with OpenGL and Vulkan support on both AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce hardware.

Compression experts Rich Geldreich and Stephanie Hurlburt with their Binomial consulting firm are about to release a high-quality open-source compression codec for GPUs...

Intel's open-source Compute Runtime for OpenCL and now oneAPI support on Linux has added oneAPI Level Zero support...

Fujitsu has contributed support for their high-performance A64FX ARMv8-based CPU cores to the LLVM Clang compiler...

Memcached 1.6 was released on Sunday as a big update for this popular open-source distributed memory caching system...

While the Debian archive continues to be built with the GCC compiler by default and will likely remain that way for the foreseeable future, Debian developers do continue experimenting with building the Debian archive under LLVM's Clang...

Linus Torvalds has unveiled the fifth weekly release candidate to the forthcoming Linux 5.6 kernel...

After running behind schedule from the planned release last month and an extra release candidate being warranted, LLVM 10.0 should be releasing this coming weeks along with its sub-projects -- most notably, the Clang 10.0 C/C++ compiler. Here is a look at the big ticket items of LLVM/Clang 10.0...

Not many AMD Radeon Linux gamers have been using the "sisched" SI machine instruction scheduler in recent times. This non-default scheduler hasn't been well maintained. Additionally, when on the RADV Vulkan driver, using the Valve-backed compiler back-end has been far superior. As such, SISCHED has now been gutted out of Mesa...

While the cross-distribution AppStream specification standardizes the software component metadata for use by Linux software centers/stores, it turns out many open-source developers aren't interested in or time limited by learning the spec and maintaining the metadata. As such, Matthias Klumpp has now developed the MetaInfo Creator for easily creating this important cross-distro metadata for packages...

Not only have GNOME developers been fixing many bugs this week ahead of the 3.36 stable desktop release next week, but coincidentally KDE developers were also going heavy on the bug fixes this week...

In preparing for the GNOME 3.36 stable release due out on 11 March, GNOME Shell and Mutter issued their final v3.36.0 releases on Saturday...

Over the past year Debian developers have been working towards APT 2.0 while now it is officially released for the advanced package tool on Debian, Ubuntu, and other DEB-based platforms...

Linux 5.4 brought a preliminary Microsoft exFAT file-system driver after Microsoft made the exFAT specification public and encouraged the support for Linux. But with the Linux 5.7 kernel this spring, a new exFAT file-system driver is going to land that is a much improved version of the earlier code...

Going back about two years has been work by Linaro on "thermal pressure" support for the scheduler so that it can make better task placement decisions among CPU cores when any of the core(s) are being restricted by running too hot. That work is now set to finally land this spring with the Linux 5.7 kernel...

Ubuntu 20.04 is coming out next month and will be the first LTS release with Ubuntu desktop ZFS support available for the root file-system after it was made easy-to-deploy the Ubuntu desktop on ZFS last cycle. One of the areas being expanded upon with the ZFS support has been Ubuntu's Zsys daemon for offering extra functionality for ZFS-based setups...

The Qt Company has put out the first public beta of the Qt Creator 4.12 integrated development environment focused on Qt/C++ development...

The Khronos Group has released Vulkan 1.2.134 as their newest revision to this high-performance graphics/compute API...

Intel's performance-oriented Clear Linux distribution recently added support for using F2FS as the root file-system so we were curious to run some benchmarks on it for how it stacks up against EXT4.

The second and final release candidate for the GNOME 3.36 milestone is now available for testing this weekend ahead of the official GNOME 3.36.0 debut next week...

Systemd 245 RC2 was released just earlier this week while now it has been succeeded by the stable release of systemd 245...

For those that have been looking out for an AMD Linux laptop powered by a Ryzen 4000 series processor, Acer is set to launch a new laptop at least in Germany that could be quite appealing to Linux users...

The latest Intel Linux graphics driver optimization being worked on is asynchronous page-flipping...

It turns out the Point-to-Point Protocol Daemon (PPPD) used for dial-up models, DSL, and other point-to-point network setups on Linux has been bugged for the past seventeen years with a buffer overflow vulnerability that could lead to remote code execution at the system level...

For those wondering how the Threadripper 3990X is performing with the upcoming Linux 5.6 kernel, here are benchmarks of a recent development snapshot of Linux 5.6 as well as benchmarking all of the major kernel releases going back to Linux 5.1...

Mesa's OpenGL threading "glthread" support has been around for a while but come Mesa 20.1 next quarter will be further improvements to this performance feature...

Following the release of Mesa 20.0 in mid-February, the first point release to this quarter's Mesa 3D feature series is now available...

GNOME Genius, one of the oldest GNOME programs and what served as the desktop's original calculator, has finally been ported to GTK3 and seen a new release in 2020...

Samba 4.12 is out this week as a big update to this prominent SMB/CIFS implementation for file exchange and printer sharing predominantly with Microsoft Windows systems...

D9VK (now part of DXVK) developer Joshua Ashton has proposed a set of patches to Wine's Vulkan library (Winevulkan) that should help with performance...

The Panfrost open-source, reverse-engineered Arm Mali Gallium3D driver is seeing work on a new driver-specific IR and compiler back-end...

BSD-focused vendor iXsystems has developed FreeNAS as their community-oriented NAS operating system while TrueNAS is what they ship on their storage solutions. FreeNAS and TrueNAS have been derived largely from the same code-base. Moving forward to TrueNAS 12.0 later this year, iXsystems is unifying FreeNAS and TrueNAS...

LLVM 10.0 was supposed to be released at the end of February but is running slightly behind schedule and now there is a third and unscheduled final release candidate...

One of the new Intel drivers up for testing that is currently in the USB-next for the forthcoming Linux 5.7 kernel cycle is the Intel PMC Mux Control driver...

The Yum successor DNF on Fedora and Red Hat Linux distributions (among other select RPM distributions) is soon embarking on its fifth major iteration...

Going back to last September has been work within Linux's AMDGPU kernel driver on enabling encrypted vRAM support with "Trusted Memory Zone" functionality. Now it's looking like a kernel release in the not too distant future could be enabled this support by default...

Continuing on with our Blender 2.82 benchmarking for this open-source 3D modeling software update that debuted last month with numerous improvements, here are some fresh benchmarks of the CUDA and OptiX back-ends for NVIDIA GPU acceleration...

Given the continuously evolving state of the open-source Radeon Linux graphics drivers in particular, here are fresh AMD Radeon vs. NVIDIA GeForce Linux gaming benchmarks with the latest Linux graphics drivers as we begin March 2020. Besides the latest NVIDIA 440.64 Linux driver, on the Radeon side was Mesa 20.1-devel paired with the Linux 5.5.5 kernel and also having the RADV ACO back-end enabled.

Multipass is the software developed by Ubuntu-maker Canonical that is advertised as "a mini-cloud on your workstation" that provides an Ubuntu command-line in "just a click" with native hypervisor support...

The i3-inspired Sway Wayland compositor is seeing work carried out for it to support Adaptive-Sync / Variable Rate Refresh...

For those making use of the GCC 8 compiler series, GCC 8.4 is out with all of the bug fixes collected since GCC 8.3's release in February of last year...

Linspire is still kicking in 2020 as the Linux distribution formerly known as "Lindows" more than a decade ago. Linspire 8.7 is out today with a renewed emphasis on trying to get legacy Windows PCs migrated to Linux...

Following last week's release of the big Phoronix Test Suite 9.4 update that brought result viewer enhancements, continued Windows improvements, and a lot of other new functionality, Phoronix Test Suite 9.4.1 is out as the first and likely only point release of the 9.4 series...

One of the developers involved with the GCC efforts around more parallelization / multi-threading within the compiler itself has offered his skills to the LLVM team. Though as part of LLVM's growing embrace of the MLIR intermediate representation will also be better multi-threading within compilers like Clang...

Valve has finally fixed an annoying bit about logging into the Steam client from the Linux desktop in recent months...

Released last month was the big OpenShot 2.5 release that brought hardware acceleration for video encode/decode via VA-API and NVENC/NVDEC, SVG vector graphics support, Blender 2.8+ integration support, import/export to Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro, and much more. Out now is OpenShot 2.5.1 with a few more improvements sprinkled on top...

In our many benchmarks of the System76 Thelio Major over the past month (and more on the way!) with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X, besides the sheer power of that 64-core / 128-thread processor, many are quick to comment on the pictures of the System76 chassis that they manufacturer in-house. This week the company is expanding their line-up of System76 Thelio cases...

Khronos announced last year they would be looking to pursue an analytic rendering API and following the evaluation they have decided to move it forward...

Ampere Computing, the ARM server start-up founded by former Intel president Renee James and staffed by many former Intel folks, is today announcing Altra as their next-generation server processor. Ampere started off with the assets of AppliedMicro's X-Gene ARMv8 IP and that turned into the Ampere's eMAG as a decent entrant into the field two years ago. But now with more resources and engineering talent under their belt, they are now preparing to ship the Ampere Altra as up to 80 cores per socket and based on Arm's latest Neoverse N1.