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Our past tests have shown that while most Linux distributions default to "none" for their I/O scheduler on NVMe solid-state storage, that isn't necessarily the best scheduler decision in all cases. Here are tests using the Linux 5.0 Git kernel using laptop and desktop hardware while evaluating no I/O scheduler, mq-deadline, Kyber, and BFQ scheduler options.

While we have talked about the possibilities of writing a Vulkan Wayland compositor and there was even a short-lived Vulkan renderer for KDE's KWin, it's also possible to write a X11 window manager around the Vulkan interfaces...

While Linux 5.0 isn't even out yet, there are a lot of changes building up for the Linux 5.1 cycle that have us excited...

Besides having a dedicated Intel GPU to look forward to in 2020, the effort around creating an open-source RISC-V architecture based graphics processor continues being spearheaded by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton and other libre hardware developers...

Ben Skeggs, the Nouveau DRM maintainer employed by Red Hat, has sent in the big batch of open-source NVIDIA driver changes slates for the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel...

Linus Torvalds announced the release of the Linux 5.0-rc7 kernel on Sunday night...

Wine developers André Hentschel and Stefan Dösinger have been working on "Hangover" as a means of running Windows x86/x86_64 applications on 64-bit ARM (AArch64) Linux and Android or even Windows for ARM. They are out today with the project's first alpha release...

At the start of the month Intel open-sourced SVT-AV1 aiming for high-performance AV1 video encoding on CPUs. That complemented their existing SVT-HEVC encoder for H.265 content and already SVT-AV1 has been seeing nice performance improvements. Intel now has released SVT-VP9 as a speedy open-source VP9 video encoder...

For those that have been wanting to try out the near-final Sway 1.0, this Wayland compositor has made its way into the Debian archive albeit only in the "experimental" section for now...

If you are in the market for an AMD Ryzen Threadripper or AMD EPYC heatsink that fits within 4U height requirements, the Noctua NH-U9 TR4-SP3 is still easily the best option available. I'm now running the NH-U9 TR4-SP3 in five different EPYC/Threadripper systems in the racks and they work out splendid...

Geary 0.13 is out today as a big step-up for this GNOME e-mail client for the Linux desktop...

Wine 4.2 debuted on Friday and now the latest Wine-Staging release is available that continues carrying hundreds of extra patches re-based atop upstream Wine to provide various experimental/testing fixes and other feature additions not yet ready for mainline Wine...

Sunday mornings mean another weekly recap of the KDE improvements made, thanks to the great analysis by KDE developer Nathan Graham. While Plasma 5.15 was released this week, the KDE developers are already hard at work on KDE Plasma 5.16...

The initial version of the WireGuard open-source secure VPN tunnel is now available for macOS, following the WireGuard for iOS port a few months prior. But sadly on the Linux front, the kernel bits still have yet to be mainlined...

The newest addition to the Freedreno Gallium3D driver for open-source 3D on Qualcomm graphics hardware is enabling OpenGL compute support for A6xx series hardware...

While the Linux kernel has shipped Cgroups V2 as stable since early 2016, on Fedora and most other Linux distributions it hasn't been enabled by default over the original control groups "Cgroups" implementation. But come Fedora 31 later this year, they are now planning to make it the default...

Of the many free software projects under the GNU umbrella, there aren't many games. One of the only titles is GNU FreeDink, which is out this weekend with its newest update after several active weeks of development...

The previously mentioned work on improving ETC2 support for older generations of Intel graphics has now been mainlined for Mesa 19.1...

While Ubuntu may no longer be using Compiz by default as the compositing window manager, the Compiz project is still alive as marked by today's Compiz 0.9.14.0 release...

Debian 9.8 is available this weekend as the latest bug-fix / security fix update to Debian GNU/Linux "Stretch"...

Queued for mainlining with the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel cycle is initial support for Bitmain SoCs. Bitmain is the Chinese company that started out designing ASICs for Bitcoin mining with the Antminer and other products. The company has also been venturing into designs for artificial intelligence and deep learning...

The latest addition to AMD's open-source Linux kernel driver is supporting BACO on Vega 12...

A set of 38 patches have been sent out that wire in support for the VK_KHR_shader_float16_int8, VK_AMD_gpu_shader_half_float, VK_AMD_gpu_shader_int16, and VK_KHR_8bit_storage extensions to the RADV driver within Mesa...

With Windows 10 Version 1903 inching closer as the "April 2019" Update, Microsoft published a blog post on Friday night outlining the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) changes they are making in this next installment of the operating system...

While the current Wayland/Weston release cycle is a bit behind schedule, it has allowed time for another addition to be made to the Weston 6.0 compositor...

It's been a while since Valve issued a new Proton update for their spin of Wine that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux. Fortunately, in time for any weekend gaming, a new Proton release is now available...

It was just a few weeks ago that Intel open-sourced the SVT-AV1 project as a CPU-based AV1 video encoder. In the short time since publishing it, there's already been some significant performance improvements...

The second bi-weekly development release following last month's stable debut of Wine 4.0 is now available for testing...

Mir 1.1 was released back in December as the first post-1.0 feature update while now preparing for release is the Mir 1.1.1 maintenance milestone...

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS), which serves up system BIOS/firmware files from many different vendors as well as various devices so that hardware can see firmware updates under Linux and be updated via Fwupd, has served up more than five million firmware images...

Announced at the end of January was the Samsung 970 EVO Plus as the first consumer-grade solid-state drive with 96-layer 3D NAND memory. The Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSDs are now shipping and in this review are the first Linux benchmarks of these new SSDs in the form of the Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500GB MZ-V7S500B/AM compared to several other SSDs on Linux.

For those using the Virgl3D driver stack for having OpenGL acceleration within KVM guest VMs with VirtIO-GPU that is then accelerated by hosts, there are performance optimizations that have just landed in the Mesa 19.1 development code...

The Nouveau kernel driver has queued patches for introducing Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support for this open-source NVIDIA driver as a step forward to its OpenCL/compute opportunities...

The Linux 5.1 kernel is bringing a new driver_async_probe= option for specifying a list of drivers that can be probed asynchronously to speed-up the boot process...

There's no shortage of quirky HID hardware out there. With the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel cycle will be more fixes/workarounds for such consumer devices...

It's sure been a busy week in the Intel open-source graphics driver space... The latest improvement is a patch series providing better context restoration in the case of GPU hangs...

Under a late change proposal for Fedora 30, the DNF package manager's "best" mode might be enabled by default...

Following a small delay, Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS is now available as the latest point release to the Bionic Beaver for a Valentine's Day debut...

The Intel DRM/KMS kernel driver will soon see PSR2 panel self refresh capabilities enabled by default for allowing more power-savings on Intel-powered ultrabooks/notebooks...

The Panfrost Gallium3D driver that was recently merged into Mesa 19.1 will soon have better support for the Mali T600/T700 series graphics...

Yesterday's patches introducing RadeonSI primitive culling via async compute yielded promising initial results, at least for the ParaView workstation application. I've been running some tests of this new functionality since yesterday and have some initial results to share on Polaris and Vega...

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A big patch series was sent out today amounting to 42 patches and over four thousand lines of code for introducing the concept of memory regions to the Intel Linux graphics driver. The memory regions support is preparing for device local memory with future Intel graphics products...

Stemming from Clear Linux detailing how they optimize Python's performance using various techniques, there's been reader interest in seeing just how their Python build stacks up. Here's a look at the Clear Linux Python performance compared to a few other configurations as well as Ubuntu Linux...

Arm Holdings today announced ARMv8.1-M as their newest M-series architecture with enhancements around signal processing and machine learning for embedded devices...

It missed the GNOME 3.32 Beta by a week, but out today is the WebKitGTK 2.23.90 release, the downstream of the WebKit web layout engine focused on GTK integration and used by the likes of GNOME Web (Epiphany)...

The Linux kernel is getting a new ring for Valentine's Day... io_uring. The purpose of io_uring is to deliver faster and more efficient I/O operations on Linux and should be coming with the next kernel cycle...

Lennart Poettering has just tagged the systemd 241 update that includes the "system down" security fixes and other improvements to this widely-used Linux init system...

Back during the Intel Architecture Day event in December, Intel confirmed that finally with Icelake "Gen 11" graphics there is Adaptive-Sync support after talking about it for several years. While they didn't explicitly mention Linux support, they've been largely spot on for years with supporting new display features on Linux and this should be the case as well with Adaptive-Sync and their next-generation graphics...

While disabling Windows Defender or other anti-virus programs may partially help offset the performance losses imposed by running Windows Subsystem for Linux, a.k.a. "Bash for Windows" or Ubuntu and other distributions running natively atop Windows 10 and now Windows Server 2019, it's not the root cause of the I/O performance bottleneck and is not a recommended course of action...