Phoronix

A day after the GNOME 3.37.4 development release, out today is GNOME 3.36.4 as the latest stable point release for the current desktop series...

Linus Torvalds has decided to up the compiler build requirement for the Linux kernel to GCC 4.9...

Open Usage Commons is a new organization announced today that is backed by Google for helping open-source projects in managing their trademarks...

SUSE is upping their container game by acquiring Rancher Labs...

Intel has today made public more details on their next-generation Thunderbolt connectivity that brings more features while offering USB4 specification compliance. Thunderbolt 4 is coming with forthcoming Tiger Lake laptops...

Intel CPUs have long supported LBR for last branch records as a means of recording the branches to which software has taken along with exposing other control flow information. This has relied upon model-specific registers while with future Intel CPUs this is being folded into a more universal CPU architectural feature. Support for Intel "Arch LBR" is set to come later this year with the Linux 5.9 kernel...

The proposal for using Btrfs by default on the Fedora desktop is gaining a fair amount of traction and interest from the community and could possibly move ahead but further testing and decisions are still to be made...

Released on Tuesday was GNOME 3.37.3 but missing the mark in time for that proper milestone were the all important GNOME Shell and Mutter components. But a few hours past the mark, they were released and come with some big changes...

The Panfrost Gallium3D driver providing open-source OpenGL support for Arm Mali graphics hardware now has working multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) for Arm Midgard hardware...

NVIDIA appears to have quietly promoted CUDA 11.0 to its stable channel...

PTGui as one of the leading panorama photo stitching software programs on Windows and macOS has finally been ported to Linux...

Gentoo's Project Android is out with a new stage3 Android prefix tarball for those wanting to enjoy a Gentoo experience atop a rooted Android device...

F2FS as the Flash-Friendly File-System for Linux continues to see a lot of interesting developments for this file-system beginning to appear on more Android devices and elsewhere given its feature set from flash optimizations to native encryption and compression capabilities...

Complementing this morning's AMD Ryzen 5 3600XT / Ryzen 7 3800XT / Ryzen 9 3900XT Linux benchmarks, here is a side-by-side look at the Ryzen 9 3900XT up against the Core i9 10900K and the Ryzen 5 3600XT up against the Core i5 10600K for these competing processors. This is a quick look at how these competing models stack up in the 130+ benchmarks utilized so far...

GNOME 3.37.3 is out today as the newest development snapshot working towards the September release of GNOME 3.38...

After the AMD Ryzen 3000XT series was announced last month, these new higher-clocked Zen 2 desktop processors are shipping today. Here are 130+ benchmarks on each of the Ryzen 5 3600XT, Ryzen 7 3800XT, and Ryzen 9 3900XT parts compared to various Intel and AMD CPUs. Tests under Ubuntu Linux and also complemented by performance-per-Watt / power and performance-per-dollar data points.

The Khronos Group today continued with their relatively recent trend of the past few years of open-sourcing their conformance tests. The OpenXR conformance tests are now open-source...

It looks like the long ongoing work for compressing the Linux kernel image with Zstd might finally soon be mainlined, potentially for next month's Linux 5.9 cycle kicking off as the "v6" patches sent out this week were done as a Git pull request...

Introduced alongside CentOS 8 last year was CentOS Stream as a developer-focused, rolling-release of CentOS/RHEL. With those processes getting squared away and CentOS recently debuting its RHEL 8.2 rebuild, CentOS Stream is beginning to see new and interesting material...

Earlier this year was news of GNU Guix wanting to replace their Linux kernel usage with the Hurd microkernel. For those interested, the project recently began producing system images with indeed Hurd wired up for this software distribution...

Experimental patches under discussion for the GNU C Library (glibc) would make it easier to dynamically load optimized libraries (shared objects) on systems depending upon the CPU in use and its hardware capabilities. This glibc-hwcaps work stems from the desired work on being able to better leverage Linux performance optimizations on AMD Zen-based systems but the hardware capabilities patches themselves can help any CPU microarchitecture family in more easily shipping optimized support...

The mouse reporting functionality offered by the Linux VT console is rather basic and seemingly seldom used by text-based, mouse-aware programs. However, a series of patches was sent out this week for improving the implementation to provide for more xterm-like mouse reporting...

While upstream Wine developers continue working on VKD3D for providing a Direct3D 12 to Vulkan translation layer for Wine, a developer on Valve's Proton team has now forked it as Proton-VKD3D for focusing their efforts on getting the D3D12 support moved along for Proton that powers Steam Play...

Yes, it's true the LibreOffice builds in recent days -- including the new LibreOffice 7.0 RC1 -- have "Personal Edition" branding for the open-source builds. But given user concerns, The Document Foundation board has issued some clarifications to try to ease any immediate rumors, etc...

For those that have been considering the Seagate FireCuda 520 as a PCI Express 4.0 NVMe solid-state drive, here are some benchmarks under Ubuntu Linux with this ZP500GM3A002 drive.

With just about one month to go until the official release, the first release candidate is out today of the LibreOffice 7.0 open-source, cross-platform office suite software...

The Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard is now firmed up as H.266 as the successor to H.265/HEVC...

It was just a few days ago that the LLVMpipe OpenGL software rasterizer within Mesa finally achieved OpenGL 4.0 support while today it has crossed both OpenGL 4.1 and 4.2 milestones...

Building upon Intel working on GNU toolchain support for AMX, the newly-detailed Advanced Matrix Extensions being introduced next year with "Sapphire Rapids" Xeon CPUs, the GCC compiler support has been sent out in patch form...

The 64-bit ARM code building up for the Linux 5.9 cycle is set to mainline Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) support as another security improvement inbound...

While last Sunday Linus Torvalds was concerned over a big Linux 5.8-rc3 release, this Sunday he is reporting that Linux 5.8-rc4 is on the smaller side...

The Monado open-source OpenXR runtime has seen a lot of features added this year and the most recent is support for OpenXR's XR_EXTX_overlay extension to allow for multi-application / overlay rendering...

Edward Shishkin continues pursuing development of new file-system functionality for Reiser5, the next-generation evolutionary advancement over the controversial Reiser4 file-system...

Back in April I wrote about patches for enabling FBC on the Intel 865 chipset nearly two decades after that chipset first shipped. Those patches didn't yet hit the mainline Linux kernel but they were revived again this week...

Following the drm-misc-next pull request to DRM-Next last week that exposes VRR ranges via DebugFS and other improvements, another round of DRM-Misc-Next material has now been sent in for queuing ahead of the Linux 5.9 cycle...

While the Arm Cortex-A77 was announced last year and already has been succeeded by the Cortex-A78 announcement, support for the A77 has finally been upstreamed to the LLVM Clang compiler...

Binutils 2.35 was branched this weekend as this important component to the open-source Linux ecosystem...

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Prominent upstream Linux kernel developers are working on adding "inclusive terminology" guidelines to the Linux kernel coding style requirements...

Back in May we reported on work being done for a readfile() system call to read small files more efficiently. Greg Kroah-Hartman has now volleyed those patches for review on the kernel mailing list for this improvement for reading small to medium file sizes on Linux systems...

Wine-Staging at one point was traditionally 800+ testing/experimental patches on top of the upstream Wine code-base, even as recently as March when it was 850+ patches. Thanks to more work being upstreamed, last month it hit just over 700 patches and now with today's release of Wine-Staging 5.12 it represents a delta of just 665 patches...

KDE developers remain very active with improving this open-source desktop environment even amid the coronavirus pandemic...

The Khronos Group is celebrating the US Independence Day with the release of a new Vulkan spec...

Back in early 2017 "Mircade" was introduced as an arcade-style game launcher on Ubuntu powered by Mir. We hadn't heard much of Mircade since 2017 but the effort is still alive for this Mir-based launcher that can trigger various apps to run under Wayland/Mir...

While recent Firefox releases have seen VA-API video acceleration working when running natively under Wayland, the Firefox 80 release later this summer will bring VA-API support by default to those running on a conventional X.Org Server...

Wine 5.12 is out for the US Holiday weekend testing...

There may be some brief, intermittent downtime this weekend as all of the Phoronix Media web server infrastructure is being upgraded. This also marks the first time in Phoronix's 16+ year history that the servers are AMD powered, thanks to the incredible success of the EPYC 7002 "Rome" series...

XDC 20 was set to take place this September in Poland but is now moving to an online event as a result of the ongoing coronavirus / COVID-19 pandemic...

Given the reignited discussions this week over Btrfs file-system performance stemming from a proposal to switch Fedora on the desktop to using Btrfs, here are some fresh benchmarks of not only Btrfs but alongside XFS, EXT4, F2FS, and for kicks NILFS2 was also tossed into the mix for these mainline file-system tests off the in-development Linux 5.8 kernel.

Intel's open-source Compute Runtime stack for providing OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support for their graphics hardware has now rolled out support for the DG1 Xe discrete graphics card...