Phoronix

Sway 1.5 is out as a big feature update to this Wayland compositor inspired by the i3 window manager. A big user-facing feature with Sway 1.5 is support for Adaptive Synchronization / Variable Refresh Rate, such as AMD FreeSync...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee formally signed off today on allowing Fedora 33 desktop variants to default to using the Btrfs file-system rather than the existing EXT4 default or other alternatives...

Valve and CodeWeavers have rolled out a release candidate of Proton 5.0-10 as the newest update to their Wine-based software powering Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

The FreeBSD project has published their Q2'2020 status report that outlines their nearly-complete work on migrating from Subversion to Git plus many hardware support improvements for this BSD operating system and more...

The Matrox G200 series desktop graphics cards released in the late 90's are now seeing open-source DRM kernel driver support emerge in 2020...

Longtime open-source Intel Linux kernel graphics driver developer Chris Wilson has out a big new set of patches...

The GCC crew is preparing to issue their first stable point release to the GCC 10 series next week...

LLVM 11 feature development has ended with the code having been branched in Git this morning and the first release candidate expected shortly...

WebAssembly has seen much greater industry interest and adoption than Google's former Native Client (NaCl) effort for sandboxed applications that can be run within web browsers. Native Client hasn't seen any real activity in years and continues fading away...

Intel's Elkhart Lake as the Denverton successor for ultra-low power use-cases has a few more device IDs now in place for the Gen11 graphics...

It's been over a half-year already for the current libinput 1.15 series for this input handling library used on both X.Org and Wayland environments. But libinput 1.16 is finally en route with the first release candidate out today...

While being very eager to learn more about Intel next-gen Ice Lake Xeon processors as their move in the server space finally from 14nm to 10nm+, we continue to learn new tid-bits from the open-source Linux kernel activity...

Flow Queue Proportional Integral controller Enhanced (FQ-PIE) that has been mainline for a while in the Linux kernel's networking code will now be supported as an option for the default queuing discipline (qdisc) with the Linux 5.9 kernel...

JEDEC today published their long-awaited JESD79-5 DDR5 SDRAM standard...

Building off last year's successful Ryzen Threadripper 3000 series and the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X that launched back in February, today AMD is announcing the Zen 2 based Ryzen Threadripper PRO processors targeted for workstation usage.

The open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver stack reached a new milestone today with the user-space code in Mesa 20.2 finally flipping on the Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) support...

The storage capabilities for ReactOS as the "open-source Windows" project has long been in poor shape relative to the other subsystems, but ReactOS Deutschland has hired a developer to work full-time on making improvements in storage and related areas...

For those thinking of picking up one of the new AMD Ryzen 3000XT series processors and weighing whether it's worthwhile on your budget picking up DDR4-3600 memory or other higher frequency DDR4 modules, here are some fresh benchmark results with the Ryzen 9 3900XT looking at 100 different tests on Linux and showing how the performance changes from DDR4-2133 through DDR4-3800...

The patches talked about last month for a new "energy efficiency" tunable for the Intel P-State driver for Kabylake / Coffeelake CPUs is set to go into Linux 5.9 for those wanting to increase the energy efficiency of these CPUs on Linux albeit with reduced performance...

A new feature that's been in development for a while with the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) looks set to land with the forthcoming Linux 5.9 cycle...

In addition to Linux 5.9 poised to bring ARMv8 Memory Tagging Extension support (MTE), another ARM architectural feature now queued up for introduction in this next kernel cycle is Translation Table Level support...

The newest addition to Mesa's RADV Radeon Vulkan driver is support for the recently published VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state extension...

With the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" recently switching its default to the ACO shader compiler back-end that is developed with the support of Valve rather than the existing AMDGPU LLVM back-end that is the official open-source AMD shader compiler solution, here are some fresh Linux gaming benchmarks of the RADV driver on the in-development Mesa 20.2 comparing the now-default RADV+ACO configuration against that of the RADV AMDGPU LLVM back-end.

With systemd 246 releasing soon, it looks like the new out-of-memory daemon will be merged shortly afterwards in allowing sufficient time for testing ahead of systemd 247...

Several months have passed since there was any news to report on KDE Frameworks 6 but the coronavirus pandemic as well as Qt uncertainties have not caused KF6 development to slow down for this next-generation set of KDE add-on libraries complementing Qt...

Canonical's Daniel Van Vugt has been engaged in several weeks now in optimizing GNOME for a faster 4K experience particularly when using Intel graphics but many of these optimizations pan out for other GPUs and resolutions too. Over the past week he's been working on yet more optimizations...

The first public beta of the forthcoming Qt Creator 4.13 integrated development environment is available for testing...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.8-rc5 and he is not particularly enthusiastic about its size with this being the largest RC5 release candidate of any of the Linux 5.x series...

Intel's open-source compiler engineers have been quite timely in getting the Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) support out in the relevant components since Intel formally outlined AMX in last month's programming reference manual...

Recently there have been a lot of open-source Linux patches flowing concerning Intel's bring-up of their DG1 discrete graphics card for developers. That work continued this week with the latest patches in wiring up LMEM support...

At this week's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) meeting, more features were approved for the Fedora 33 release due out this fall...

This week Canonical and Google announced they were working together to bring the Flutter application toolkit to Ubuntu/Linux. Flutter is the cross-platform, open-source UI toolkit developed by Google for use from Android to Linux and iOS and Fuschia as well as for web interfaces...

While Lenovo recently committed to certifying more systems for Linux use and upstreaming drivers / hardware support for Linux moving forward, there remains a backlog of existing Lenovo devices that still have less than desire Linux support. But thanks to Red Hat and others, the hardware support does continue advancing...

Linux creator Linus Torvalds had some choice words today on Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (AVX-512) found on select Intel processors...

The toolchain support for the Synopsys DesignWare ARC HS processors is now ironed out with the GNU C Library (glibc) finally mainlining the ARC port...

Kernel developers appear to be eager to debate the merits of potentially allowing Rust code within the Linux kernel. Linus Torvalds himself has made some initial remarks on the topic ahead of the Linux Plumbers 2020 conference where the matter will be discussed at length...

While Mozilla has been gradually enabling WebRender out-of-the-box in more Windows configurations with succeeding Firefox releases, up to now there hasn't been much visible effort in getting WebRender enabled out-of-the-box for any Linux configurations. But fortunately that is finally changing...

While KDE Plasma 5.19 is already in fairly good shape with regards to its Wayland session, Plasma 5.20 is looking to offer even better support for this native Wayland environment along with many other enhancements...

Merged overnight into the Linux kernel source tree are the new guidelines concerning the use of "inclusive terminology" for future code...

Not to be confused with Clang as the well known C/C++ compiler front-end for the LLVM compiler, Cling is a separate project as an interactive, JIT-based C++ interpreter. Cling has been in development for years and at least partially is looking to upstream where possible back into LLVM...

Stemming from the recent GNU glibc work on better handling modern CPU optimizations with newer instruction set extensions across Intel and AMD product families, the concept of x86-64 micro-architecture feature levels is being talked about by open-source/Linux developers...

Landing in the block subsystem's "-next" tree today is ZNS support for NVMe drives...

Following the 130+ benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 3000XT series earlier in the week looking at the CPU/system performance on Ubuntu Linux, here is our first look at the Linux gaming performance with putting the Ryzen 9 3900XT up head-to-head against the Intel Core i9 10900K.

Landing in the GNU Compiler Collection 11 (GCC 11) codebase this morning is the Sapphire Rapids and Alder Lake enablement...

Intel has shipped its second quarter open-source Media Driver release that provides accelerated video encoding/decoding capabilities on Linux systems...

The ACPI CPPC (Collaborative Processor Performance Control) Linux CPUFreq driver continues to be improved upon...

Wayland's Weston compositor has provided a weston-info utility to display information on supported Wayland extensions and versioning along with other details of the Wayland compositor environment. That utility is now being spun out as wayland-info as a Wayland compositor-agnostic utility for displaying this information...

For those looking for an RGB lighting and fan speed controller system that works under Linux, the Corsair Commander PRO is slated to see support with the upcoming Linux 5.9 kernel cycle...

On top of Intel Gen12/Xe Graphics bringing other media engine improvements and much better 3D graphics support, another exciting element of the next-generation Intel graphics is now confirmed: GPU-accelerated AV1 video decoding!..

A Google engineer is looking to discuss at this year's Linux Plumbers Conference the possibility of allowing in-tree Rust language support...