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Updated 2025-09-15 23:00
Wayland's Weston 8.0 Reaches Alpha With EGL Partial Updates, Headless OpenGL
Weston release manager Simon Ser on Friday released the Wayland's Weston 8.0 reference compositor in alpha form...
Linux 5.5 KVM Adds POWER Support For Secure Guests/VMs
IBM's work from over a year ago in working towards secure virtual machines on POWER hardware is finally coming to fruition with Linux 5.5 due out early next year...
Mesa 20.0 Now Includes Intel's Gallium3D Driver To Build By Default
As part of the ongoing effort for Intel's plans to use their new Gallium3D OpenGL Linux driver by default on next quarter's Mesa 20.0 for Broadwell "Gen8" graphics and newer, another step in that direction was achieved on Friday...
Linux 5.5 Adds NFS Client Support For Cross-Device Offloaded Copies (Server To Server)
With NFSv4.2 is the server-side copy (SSC) functionality with the Linux 5.5 kernel's NFS client-side support for that support in allowing "inter" copy offloads between different NFS servers...
GRUB Now Supports Btrfs 3/4-Copy RAID1 Profiles (RAID1C3 / RAID1C4 On Linux 5.5+)
When it comes to the storage/file-system changes with the in-development Linux 5.5 kernel one of the most prominent end-user-facing changes is more robust RAID1 for Btrfs with the ability to have three or four copies of the data rather than just two copies, should data safety be of utmost importance and concerned over the possibility of two disks in an array failing...
Debian Developers Take To Voting Over Init System Diversity
It's been five years already since the vote to transition to systemd in Debian over Upstart while now there is the new vote that has just commenced for judging the interest in "init system diversity" and just how much Debian developers care (or not) in supporting alternatives to systemd...
Wine 5.0 Code Freeze To Begin Next Week
As expected by Wine's annual release cadence, next week Wine 5.0 will enter its code freeze followed by release candidates until this next stable Wine release is ready to ship around early 2020...
Google Reaffirms Commitment To Kotlin Programming Language For Android
The Kotlin programming language on Android has become very popular and Google announced today nearly 60% of the top 1,000 Android applications are using Kotlin code in some capacity. Beyond their announcement earlier this year of Android development being Kotlin-first, as they look forward to 2020 will be more Kotlin + Android action...
Ardour Digital Audio Workstation Finally Adds Native MP3 Importing Support
While lossy compression audio formats like MP3 are not recommended for use within professional audio tasks, for those using the open-source Ardour digital audio workstation (DAW) software as of today there is finally native MP3 import support...
Systemd-homed Looks Like It Will Merged Soon For systemd 245
Announced back in September at the All Systems Go event in Berlin was systemd-homed as a new effort to improve home directory handling. Systemd-homed wants to make it easier to migrate home directories, ensure all user data is self-contained, unify user-password and encryption handling, and provide other modern takes on home/user directory functionality. That code is expected to soon land in systemd...
RadeonSI NIR Benchmarks Show Great Progress With Mesa 20.0
With AMD last week having enabled OpenGL 4.6 for their RadeonSI OpenGL Linux driver when enabling the NIR intermediate representation support, you may be wondering how using NIR is stacking up these days compared to the default TGSI route. Here are some benchmarks on Polaris, Vega, and Navi for comparing this driver option that ultimately allows OpenGL 4.6 to be flipped on.
A General Notification Queue Was Pushed Back From Linux 5.5 Introduction
Red Hat has been working on a "general notification queue" that is built off the Linux kernel's pipe code and will notify the user-space of events like key/keyring changes, block layer events like disk errors, USB attach/remove events, and other notifications without user-space having to continually poll kernel interfaces. This general notification queue was proposed for Linux 5.5 but has been pushed back to at least 5.6...
NetworkManager Adds Support For Enhanced Open / Opportunistic Wireless Encryption
Opportunistic Wireless Encryption (OWE) provides a means of encrypting wireless data transfers without having any secret/key. Opportunistic Wireless Encryption is advertised as Wi-Fi Certified Enhanced Open...
GCC 10's C++20 "Spaceship Operator" Support Appears To Be In Good Shape
One of the prominent additions coming with the C++20 programming language is the consistent comparison operator, or "spaceship operator" as it's commonly referred to. The support was merged for GCC 10 last month ahead of entering stage three development while this week some more improvements were made to the implementation...
Linux 5.5 Lands Broadcom BCM2711 / Raspberry Pi 4 Bits
Following last week's Arm architecture updates for Linux 5.5, sent in via four pull requests on Thursday was all the new and improved hardware enablement for the SoCs and single-board computer platforms...
Some Of The Possible Changes Coming For The Desktop With Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
While we aren't even half-way through the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS development cycle yet, Ubuntu's Trello board provides a look at some of the changes and new features being at least considered for this next Ubuntu long-term support release...
Debian Installer Bullseye Alpha 1 Released
Debian 11 "Bullseye" isn't expected to be released until well into 2021 but out today is the first alpha release of the Debian Installer that will ultimately power that next major Debian GNU/Linux release...
NVIDIA Looks To Have Some Sort Of Open-Source Driver Announcement For 2020
Start looking forward to March when NVIDIA looks to have some sort of open-source driver initiative to announce -- likely contributing more to Nouveau and we're crossing our fingers they will have sorted out the signed firmware situation to unblock those developers from delivering re-clocking support to yield better driver performance...
Purism Announces Librem 5 "USA" Model For $1999 USD
Purism announced today a Librem 5 USA model of their smartphone that has the same specifications and features of their Librem 5 Linux smartphone but manufactured in the US. That pushes the 720x1440 display, i.MX8M, 3GB RAM, 32GB eMMC, 802.11n device from $699 USD to $1,199 USD. Update: Errr the price was raised now apparently to $1999 USD...
Intel Publishes oneAPI Level 0 Specification
Back at SC19 Intel released a beta of their oneAPI Base Toolkit for software developers to work on performance-optimized, cross-device software. Complementing that initial software beta is now the oneAPI Level 0 Specification...
An Extensive Look At The AMD Naples vs. Rome Power Efficiency / Performance-Per-Watt
Since the AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" series launch in August we have continue to be captivated by the raw performance of AMD's Zen 2 server processors across many different workloads as covered now in countless articles. The performance-per-dollar / TCO is also extremely competitive against Intel's Xeon Scalable line-up, but how is the power efficiency of these 7nm EPYC processors? We waited to deliver those numbers until having a retail Rome board for carrying out those tests and now after that and then several weeks of benchmarking, here is an extensive exploration of the AMD EPYC 7002 series power efficiency as well as a look at the peak clock frequencies being achieved in various workloads to also provide some performance-per-clock metrics compared to Naples.
BeOS-Inspired Haiku Continues Working On 64-bit ARM, Other Hardware Improvements
The open-source Haiku operating system project working off inspirations from BeOS continued to be quite active over the past two months in adding various modern features and fixes to their platform...
Lima Gets Tiling While Vulkan Turnip Lands SSBO + Compute Shaders
Even with the holidays fast approaching Mesa developers continue to be quite busy in landing new features ahead of next quarter's Mesa 20.0 release. The Lima Gallium3D driver and Turnip Vulkan driver are the latest benefiting from the Git code...
Libinput 1.15 Is On Approach With Various Improvements/Fixes For Linux Input Handling
Peter Hutterer has been preparing libinput 1.15 as the next update to this open-source input handling library used by Linux systems both on X.Org and Wayland...
Mesa Developers Weigh Renaming Gallium "State Tracker" To "API"
In addition to the discussion over potentially dropping non-Gallium3D drivers from Mesa or otherwise potentially forking a portion of the code, AMD's Marek Olšák made a separate proposal about renaming the Gallium3D "state tracker" concept to being "API" implementations...
F2FS File-System Gets More Fixes With Linux 5.5
The Flash-Friendly File-System continues to be refined and with the forthcoming Linux 5.5 kernel are more improvements albeit largely bug fixes...
Chromium's Ozone Wayland Back-End Is Now Considered Beta, Aiming To Ship Next Year
For years there has been work on a Wayland back-end to Ozone, the Google component for abstracting user-interface elements and input/window handling among other tasks across platforms. It looks like in 2020 the Ozone Wayland support will be in good standing and promoted out of beta...
Firefox 71 Linux Performance Isn't Looking All That Great
With each new release of Firefox we set out to see how the performance is looking on the Linux desktop. One discovery we've made is that when using Intel's Clear Linux the Firefox performance is a lot more competitive to Google Chrome than we traditionally see on Ubuntu Linux. But with Firefox 71 we're seeing the performance trending lower compared to Firefox 69 and 70...
Mesa 19.3 Might Release Next Week But For Now There's RC6 With Several ACO+RADV Fixes
Mesa 19.3 continues running behind schedule but stands chances for releasing next week if the lingering blocker bugs are closed...
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER Linux Performance
For those looking to spend less than $200 USD on a graphics card, the recently launched NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER offers great value starting at $159 USD and working well with the NVIDIA Linux driver for providing decent 1080p Linux gaming performance as well as OpenCL / CUDA support. Here are benchmarks of the GTX 1650 SUPER alongside a total of 18 lower-end/mid-range AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on Ubuntu Linux.
Qt 5.14 On Track For Releasing Next Week With New Scenegraph Renderer, Better HiDPI
While missing the original release target of the end of November, The Qt Company is buttoning up Qt 5.14 for debut next week. Today, however, marks the release candidate availability for those wanting to test out this forthcoming Qt5 release prior to more of the development efforts shifting to Qt 6.0...
AMD's GPUOpen Releases Vulkan Memory Allocator 2.3
AMD's GPUOpen team has released their first official update to the open-source Vulkan Memory Allocator project in nearly one year...
Canonical Announces "Ubuntu Pro" For AWS
Looking to further capitalize upon the popularity of Ubuntu in the cloud, Canonical today announced Ubuntu Pro premium images for Amazon's EC2 cloud...
Mesa Devs Discuss Potentially Dropping Non-Gallium Drivers Or Forking Code For Gallium
Longtime open-source AMD graphics driver developer Marek Olšák has kicked off a discussion over the possibility in the not too distant future of either dropping non-Gallium3D drivers from Mesa (and moving them off to a maintenance branch or the like) or forking some of Mesa's existing code to allow it to be better optimized for Gallium3D use-cases. Due to raised concerns, other possibilities are also being expressed like simply moving ahead with optimizing the Mesa code-base for Gallium3D at a cost of potentially hitting dead code more often with the classic drivers...
RadeonSI Lands SDMA Copy Support For Vega/GFX9
The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has finally landed SDMA copy support for Vega/GFX9 graphics hardware, which should principally benefit compute shaders and other cases...
Linux 5.5 Begins Plumbing Secure Boot Infrastructure For POWER9
With the PowerPC changes for the Linux 5.5 kernel comes the initial infrastructure work on preparing to be able to handle a Secure Boot implementation for POWER9 hardware...
Linux 5.5 Provides Knob To Toggle ASPM Link States Individually - Better Power-Savings
ASPM can be a big boost to help power-savings on Linux laptops and desktops as shown by a prominent kernel regression a number of years ago. However, a number of Linux drivers are forced to disable Active State Power Management (ASPM) due to quirky/buggy hardware where it ends up not being sane to enable that power-saving feature by default. But with the Linux 5.5 kernel is support for toggling ASPM link states via sysfs as an easy-to-perform manner for achieving better power-savings with friendly devices...
Open Source Firmware Conference 2019 Videos Posted
Taking place back in September at Google and Facebook facilities was the Open-Source Firmware Conference (OSFC 2019). For those not able to attend, video recordings of those talks are now freely available online...
Before Ending 2019, Vintage SiS X.Org Driver Sees A New Release
xf86-video-sis 0.12.0 is available this week as a new version of the SiS display driver for X.Org systems in supporting Silicon Integrated Systems' display hardware...
AMDGPU Fixes For Linux 5.5 Include AMDKFD For PowerPC, Fix For Old ATI R100/R200 GPUs
Following last week's big batch of DRM graphics driver updates for the Linux 5.5 merge window, AMD and the community engaging in Linux 5.5 testing have now sent in their first round of fixes for this next version of the Linux kernel...
Linux Mint 19.3 Enters Beta With HiDPI Support Finally Nearing Completion, New Default Apps
The beta release of Linux Mint 19.3 "Tricia" is now available for testing in the default Cinnamon desktop flavor as well as MATE and Xfce spins...
GNOME Shell + Mutter Had A Busy November With Some Big Performance Optimizations
The GNOME developers were particularly busy last month with various improvements to GNOME Shell and Mutter for increasing the usability of the desktop and optimizing its performance / power-savings...
Mir 1.6 Released With New Wayland, DispmanX Platform Support
Mir 1.6 is out today with the latest batch of features for this Ubuntu-focused display server that offers Wayland client compatibility...
Amazon Talks Up Big Performance Gains For Their 7nm Graviton2 CPUs
We weren't too enthusiastic about the performance of Amazon's initial Graviton ARM-based CPU cores offered via their Elastic Compute Cloud, but their next-gen Graviton2 CPUs that are "coming soon" should be much more capable for good ARM Linux performance...
DXVK 1.4.6 Released With More Game Fixes For Direct3D 10/11 Over Vulkan
DXVK 1.4.6 is out this morning as the first update in two weeks for this widely-used project allowing Direct3D 10/11 games to run atop Vulkan on Linux systems with Wine/Proton...
Phoronix Test Suite 9.2 Released For Open-Source, Cross-Platform Benchmarking
Phoronix Test Suite 9.2-Hurdal is available today as the newest quarterly feature release to the Phoronix Test Suite for automated, cross-platform and open-source benchmarking...
AMD Launches Ryzen V1000/R1000 Embedded Processors For Small Form Factor PCs
AMD today announced the Ryzen V1000 and Ryzen R1000 series embedded processors intended for mini PCs and other small form factor PCs...
Firefox 71 Available With New Kiosk Mode, New Certificate Viewer
Today marks the last Mozilla Firefox feature update of 2019 with the release of Firefox 71.0...
Arm's Mali T720 Now Stable With Panfrost Gallium3D On Mesa 20.0
The Panfrost Gallium3D driver that is the open-source OpenGL community-led driver for supporting Arm Mali Midgard/Bifrost architectures now has stable support for the T720 GPU...
OmniOS Updated With Latest Intel Microcode, Better LX Zones Support For Newer Distros
OmniOS, the Illumos/OpenSolaris-derived platform focused on delivering an enterprise-quality open-source OS, is out with a new update today...
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