Phoronix

Linux game porter Ethan Lee has taken a break from his FNA-XNA/FAudio/Wine hacking to add support to the SDL2 library for the GameCube controller adapter intended for Nintendo's Wii U / Switch devices...

The first development milestone release of Phoronix Test Suite 8.8-Hvaler is now available for your open-source, automated benchmarking needs on Linux, BSD, Windows, and macOS operating systems...

Paolo Bonzini submitted the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes for the Linux 5.1 kernel on Friday, much later in the cycle than normal. This isn't due to some big ticket features landing but rather "some ugly factors" in the form of tracking down some bugs and ended up dropping some premature optimizations...

Similar to Microsoft Windows, KDE Plasma 5.16 is picking up an option on the shutdown screen for letting users reboot into their UEFI setup screen where supported...

With broader availability expected soon for Intel Optane NVDIMMs backed by 3DXPoint memory, which offers a new means of speedy persistent memory, patches have landed in Linux 5.1 to optionally treat this persistent memory just like system RAM...

While there is the Panfrost Gallium3D driver that has been advancing rapidly within mainline Mesa for Arm's Mali newer Midgard/Bifrost architectures, the Lima driver might finally see the light of day in mainline Mesa for Mali's older 400/450 series graphics engine...

Knoppix, one of the first "live" Linux distributions that dates back to the year 2000 and still continues to see occasional updates, is out today with Knoppix version 8.5 in celebration of the latest Chemnitzer Linux Days event...

The Andrew File-System (AFS) continues to evolve as a distributed file-system. Over the past year and a half there's been a lot of activity to AFS in the mainline Linux kernel, including material slated for the in-development Linux 5.1 kernel but then Linus Torvalds ended up having to un-pull the changes...

Adding to the big list of changes to find with the yet-to-be-released GTK4 toolkit is some refactoring around the entry widgets to improve the text entry experience as well as making it easier to create custom entry widgets outside of GTK...

NetworkManager 1.16 is now available as the newest feature release for this widely used Linux networking configuration component...

Scaleway, the European cloud company we previously have talked about on Phoronix for their usage of Coreboot on servers, this week announced new "general purpose" VMs powered by AMD EPYC processors. Curious about the performance, I fired up some benchmarks.

Wine 4.4 is out this evening as the latest bi-weekly point release for allowing Windows programs and games to run on Linux and other platforms...

It was in July of last year that Swedish private equity firm EQT Partners acquired SUSE from Micro Focus. That deal is now closed and SUSE is marking its independence today while proclaiming to be the largest independent open-source company...

Feral Interactive has released GameMode 1.3 as the newest feature release to this open-source Linux system daemon to dynamically optimize the CPU/GPU/system state when launching Linux games and to return the system to its normal state when you are done gaming...

Purism has today shared some details on their planned hardware kill switches for the upcoming Librem 5 Linux smartphone...

The AMD driver developers maintaining the AMDVLK open-source Vulkan Linux driver did a "Pi day" driver update that is quite exciting as it enables six new extensions, with the most notable being that transform feedback appears to be officially advertised...

If all goes well, the first stable updates to Wayland and the Weston compositor for 2019 will be released in just a few days...

While the DNF package manager as the "next-generation Yum" has been in development for over a half-decade and has been the default over traditional Yum for a number of Fedora releases, it's still causing headaches for some and a subset of users still desiring that DNF be renamed to Yum...

LLVM has a new patch for at least some benchmarks can yield big performance benefits for GPU offloading...

For those relying upon ZRAM to provide a compressed block device in RAM for cases like using it for SWAP or /tmp, with Linux 5.1 you might find it performing better than earlier kernels...

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) continues being supported by more Android-powered mobile devices and with this uptick in user activity is resulting in more fixes and low-level improvements to the file-system...

DXVK lead developer Philip Rebohle has released version 1.0.1 of this popular project that enhances Wine-based Linux gaming by allowing Direct3D 10/11 to be re-routed atop Vulkan drivers...

I certainly recommend that everyone uses full-disk encryption for their production systems, especially for laptops you may be bringing with you. In over a decade of using Linux full-disk encryption on my main systems, the overhead cost to doing so has fortunately improved with time thanks to new CPU instruction set extensions, optimizations within the Linux kernel, and faster SSD storage making the performance penalty even less noticeable. As it's been a while since my last look at the Linux storage encryption overhead, here are some fresh results using a Dell XPS laptop running Ubuntu with/without LUKS full-disk encryption.

NVIDIA has introduced its latest RTX-less, lower-tier Turing GPU... The GeForce GTX 1660 is now available starting at $219 USD...

It's coming a bit late considering the X.Org Server bits were added back in 2015 along with the xf86-video-modesetting support, but within xf86-video-amdgpu Git and pending for xf86-video-ati is support for the TILE property in dealing with tiled displays...

Libinput is fairly mature at this stage for offering a unified input handling library for use on both X.Org and Wayland Linux desktops. Libinput has largely reached a feature plateau with new releases no longer coming out so often and no glaring gaps in support. With it already being a half-year since the last major release, libinput 1.13 is now being buttoned up for release and available today is the first release candidate...

Since last week the big set of DRM driver changes has been part of the mainline kernel for Linux 5.1 while working its way to mainline now are a couple of early fixes to the AMDGPU driver...

The newest feature addition for systemd is supporting L2TP, the Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol, as part of its networking code...

It's busy as ever for the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver developers bringing up support for upcoming hardware like the recently published driver patches for Comet Lake, continuing to tweak the maturing Icelake "Gen 11" graphics, and also plotting the necessary re-engineering of the driver needed to bring-up Intel's in-development "Xe" discrete graphics. And Intel developers this evening sent out their initial enablement work for Elkhart Lake...

In seeking to improve the out-of-the-box experience when running the Ubuntu desktop as a guest virtual machine within VMware's products, Ubuntu is planning on having the open-vm-tools-desktop package be automatically installed for providing a better initial experience...

GNOME 3.32, which is codenamed "Taipei" given the location of GNOME.Asia Summit 2018, has been officially released on time...

Google today rolled out their first public beta/development release of the upcoming Android Q that will be formally released in the second half of 2019...

Mesa 19.0 has finally been released! It's more than two weeks late, but it should be worth the wait given all the improvements in this quarterly feature update to this open-source graphics driver stack...

It's been over one year since Godot 3.0 debuted and today it's finally been succeeded by the release of Godot 3.1, the latest feature update for this leading cross-platform, open-source game engine...

The Flatpak 1.3 unstable series has kicked off starting the latest round of feature work to this leading Linux sandboxing / app distribution technology...

One month since the release of ROCm 2.1, the Radeon Open Compute stack has now been succeeded by ROCm 2.2...

Barring any last minute delays, GNOME 3.32 is expected to ship today as the latest six-month update to this popular open-source desktop environment. GNOME 3.32 personally has me quite excited more so for the improvements -- and bug fixes -- over "new" features, but here is a look at some of what there is to get excited about with this latest update to the GNOME 3 desktop...

With the Raspberry Pi Foundation recently having begun rolling out a Linux 4.19-based kernel to Raspberry Pi boards, here are some benchmarks looking at the performance of two Raspberry Pi systems with the new Linux 4.19 kernel compared to its previous 4.14 kernel.

While we are looking forward most to Icelake with the new "Gen 11" graphics, Intel has been working on Comet Lake for introduction this year as a Coffeelake derived successor to Whiskey Lake for desktops and mobile devices. The patches needed for Comet Lake graphics driver support on Linux are now pending...

Over the past day there has been some notable NIR improvements landing in Mesa 19.1...

Mesa 19.1 has added support for the GLX extension to create an OpenGL / OpenGL ES context that doesn't generate errors -- assuming the driver supports the likes of KHR_no_error. For applications/games acquiring their GL/GLES context in this no-error mode, it can yield possible performance benefits...

Google has released version 73 of the Chrome/Chromium web-browser today...

TURNIP is the newest Mesa-based Vulkan driver in development that provides open-source support for this graphics/compute API on Qualcomm Adreno hardware...

Ted Ts'o sent in the main EXT4 feature pull request today for the Linux 5.1 kernel merge window while David Sterba sent in a secondary batch of Btrfs material...

Thanks to the Qualcomm / Linux Foundation Code Aurora, patches are pending for the Freedreno MSM DRM kernel driver to allow the latest-generation Adreno 600 series hardware to leave its "secure" mode...

It's been a while since last running any P-State/CPUFreq frequency scaling driver and governor comparisons on Intel desktop systems, so given the recent release of Linux 5.0 I ran some tests for looking at the current state of affairs. Using an Intel Core i9 9900K I tested both the P-State and CPUFreq scaling drivers and their prominent governor options for seeing not only how the raw performance compares but also the system power consumption, CPU thermals, and performance-per-Watt.

It's been just one week since Linux 5.0 was christened followed this weekend by the first point release and now that brand new kernel is shipping to users of Intel's rolling-release Clear Linux platform...

Recent kernels like Linux 4.20 brought various performance enhancements to FUSE, the kernel code allowing for file-systems to run in user-space. With Linux 5.1 there is additional FUSE optimization work...

For those habitually riding the bleeding-edge open-source Radeon graphics driver stack, there are some updated firmware files now available for newer AMD graphics processors...

Fedora 31 will likely be enabling various GCC security hardening flags by default in trying to further enhance the security of the software in its repositories and those building software on their own Fedora systems...