Phoronix

XDC2020 as the annual gathering of X.Org developers was due to take place in Poland this year but the COVID-19 pandemic has caused it to be yet another conference happening exclusively online. Day 1 of XDC2020 has just begun...

Compression expert Rich Geldreich who previously worked for the likes of Valve and Unity prior to co-founding his own consulting firm has now made the Crunch and LZHAM technologies available under the public domain...

After over a half year working on this new version, Rav1e 0.4 is on the way but first is the alpha milestone out today...

Gentoo Linux is looking to improve the kernel maintenance experience by offering up Ebuilds that make it easier to maintain the kernel through the package manager -- including prebuilt binary kernels...

We still don't have our hands on the GeForce RTX 3080 yet and remains to be seen when we will get our hands on RTX 30 series hardware for Linux testing, but at least there's a pretty good rhythm for how the NVIDIA Linux support will play out...

It turns out the Radeon RX 6000 series will have AV1 hardware video decode capabilities...

Yet another new file-system being worked on for the Linux/open-source world is NVFS and has been spearheaded by a Red Hat engineer...

Unvanquished was one of the most promising open-source game projects nearly a decade ago with its "Daemon" engine but since abandoning their monthly alpha release regiment and their beta/stable releases never materializing either, it's been relatively quiet the past few years. But their developers have been persisting and today they are announcing that following a three-year cleanup the game is fully free/open-source including all assets under applicable licenses...

OpenJDK 15 is out today as the latest general availability release for this open-source Java implementation...

IBM announced today at the OpenPOWER Summit 2020 that they are contributing the A2O POWER processor core and Open Cognitive Environment to the OpenPOWER community...

The Vulkan System Integration working group has decided to publish their work-in-progress extension on VK_EXT_present_timing as their effort to expose the presentation engine's display details and better allow scheduling a present to happen at a specific time...

The Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) that is used by their Linux OpenCL/Level-Zero compute stack as well as now being used by their Windows graphics driver and potentially their Linux OpenGL/Vulkan drivers in the future is out with a new release...

For just over a decade the Lightworks high-end, cross-platform video editing software has been owned by EditShare after it was acquired from Gee Broadcast. Now though LWKS Software Ltd has been established and acquired this video editing software from EditShare...

One of the interesting Intel Linux graphics driver patches to be sent out last year were for per-client engine reporting to allow on a per-application/process basis to see how the GPU's render/blitter/video engines were being utilized...

The plans to shrink the Fedora install media by ramping up the compression settings were rejected at last week's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee meeting...

Linus Torvalds has decided to do away with the "soft scrollback" functionality found in the FBCON and VGACON kernel code as a sign of the times...

Ahead of the RDNA 2 / Navi 2 reveal on October 28, AMD has shown off the first official render of a Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card...

Prior to tagging Mutter 3.38 for this week's GNOME 3.38 desktop release there was a last-minute change around the DMA-BUF screencasting feature...

Microsoft engineers are sending out new kernel patches in looking to expand the Linux support around the Microsoft Hypervisor (Hyper-V)...

AMD today released a new version of their Radeon GPU Profiler utility for Linux and Windows systems for profiling games/applications on Radeon graphics hardware under both Linux and Windows...

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" with its ACO back-end by default is now winning nearly across the board against not only AMD's AMDVLK Vulkan driver with LLVM back-end but also AMDGPU-PRO with the proprietary shader compiler back-end.

With Lenovo working to expand their Linux line-up and already Fedora being offered on the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8, more Linux support improvements are on the way...

AMD has kicked off the new week with the release of AMDVLK 2020.Q3.5 as their official open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems derived in part from the same sources as their Windows Vulkan driver...

FuryBSD 2020-Q3 is out as the newest quarterly feature release to this BSD distribution built atop FreeBSD and focused on providing a pleasant desktop experience and one that can function as a LiveDVD for trying out the desktop BSD without installation...

Back in late 2018 there was the decision by The Qt Company to deprecate Qbs in favor of CMake. The Qbs build system hasn't been actively worked on by The Qt Company in one year but some community members have been still hacking on it leading to today's Qbs 1.17 release...

Linus Torvalds announced Linux 5.9-rc5 this evening as the newest weekly test release of the forthcoming Linux 5.9 kernel gearing up for a stable release in October...

The recent rumors panned out and NVIDIA just announced they have reached a definitive deal with SoftBank to acquire Arm...

Last week we reported on a Linux 5.9 kernel regression following benchmarks from Linux 5.0 to 5.9 and there being a sharp drop with the latest development kernel. That kernel regression was bisected to code introduced by Linus Torvalds at the start of the Linux 5.9 kernel cycle. Unfortunately it's not a trivial problem and one still being analyzed in coming up with a proper solution. So the short story is it's a work-in-progress while this article has some additional insight and benchmarks done over the course of the past few days.

Back on Friday there was Mark Shuttleworth's comments following some friction within the Ubuntu community and uncertainty over roles. After thinking about it over the weekend, he has decided to go ahead and work to reinstate the Ubuntu Community Council...

Intel-owned AI startup Habana Labs is working on expanding their "Gaudi" support to now include the NIC network interface found on this AI training accelerator hardware...

Lukas Larsson of Erlang Solutions is proposing "BeamAsm" as a JIT compiler for the Erlang virtual machine...

Following the very delayed Xfce 4.14, the Xfce 4.16 release is progressing with plans for releasing this year. Xfce 4.16pre1 was released at the end of August while it was the release announcement that was delayed for this lightweight desktop environment update...

The second development release of the forthcoming Phoronix Test Suite 10.0-Finnsnes is now available for testing...

GNOME 3.38 is due for release next week while the second and final release candidate is now available as one last chance for testing...

Breaking this weekend is word that NVIDIA and Arm are reportedly close to a deal in which the graphics giant would be acquiring the UK-based chip designer from SoftBank in a deal worth $40 billion USD or more...

While FreeBSD 13 is aiming for release around March of 2021, FreeBSD 12.2 is on the way for releasing next month as the next stable installment...

AOMP 11.9 was released on Friday as AMD's LLVM-based compiler with Clang for C/C++ and Flang for Fortran in offloading capable OpenMP code to Radeon GPUs...

The Wasmer 1.0 alpha release is now available for running WebAssembly programs anywhere. Wasmer is about providing a universal runtime for WebAssembly (WASM) that can run across platforms / operating systems and also embed into other programming languages. Wasmer leverages WebAssembly principles to provide safety around untrusted code on top of its other design features...

KDE Frameworks 5.74 is out as the latest monthly update to this collection of KDE libraries complementing the Qt5 tool-kit...

Rebased atop yesterday's Wine 5.17 upstream release, the experimental/testing blend of Wine is out with a new update that comes in at just under 650 patches compared to the official Wine code-base...

Akademy 2020 took place virtually this week as the annual gathering of KDE developers...

Wine 5.17 is out this afternoon as the latest bi-weekly development snapshot in the Wine 5.x series leading up to Wine 6.0 in early 2021...

GameMode 1.6 is out as the Linux daemon developed by game porting firm Feral Interactive for setting the CPU frequency scaling governor and other helpers when launching games in an effort to enhance the Linux gaming performance and then returning the system to its prior state after the game has quit...

As part of re-testing all hardware prior to major GPU/driver launches, here is a look at the latest NVIDIA OpenCL/CUDA performance on Linux -- complementing the recent Blender 2.90 benchmarks and the latest NVIDIA vs. AMD Linux gaming performance. In still waiting to find out when we will get any NVIDIA Ampere hardware for Linux testing, I have been having some benchmarking fun and extended this to a 24-way graphics card comparison back to Maxwell in looking at not only the raw GPU compute performance but also the performance-per-Watt / power consumption and GPU thermal values.

Mesa 20.3 feature development continues progressing nicely...

Security researchers from Amsterdam have publicly detailed "BlindSide" as a new speculative execution attack vector for both Intel and AMD processors...

The Qt Company announced their planned development hosts for Qt 6.0 around continuous integration and the platforms they intend to support for Qt 6.0, some that are no longer set to be supported, and other targets they plan to support later on in future Qt 6.x releases...

The latest Intel oneAPI software release is a new monthly update to their LLVM-based oneAPI Data Parallel C++ (DPC++) compiler...

For the past number of weeks there have been discussions ongoing about the "loss of leadership" within the Ubuntu community and as part of that the Ubuntu Community Team and Ubuntu Community Council having faded away in recent years. Following a lot of comments on the Ubuntu Discourse, Mark Shuttleworth has chimed in with his thoughts and work moving forward...

The Linux 5.0 to 5.9 kernel benchmarking posted this week showed TensorFlow Lite running slower since the Linux 5.5 kernel... On top of looking at the new Linux 5.9 regressions, I also spent some time bisecting and figuring out what happened for TensorFlow Lite last year that has at least for the system under test caused it to run slower for all the kernel releases this year as shown in the aforelinked article.