Phoronix

As the end of the summer nears and KDE's Akademy conference approaches, development is busy as ever on this open-source desktop environment...

It was just last month that DragonFlyBSD pulled in Radeon's Linux 4.4 kernel driver code as an upgrade from the Linux 3.19 era code they had been using for their open-source AMD graphics support. This week that's now up to a Linux 4.7 era port...

VMware engineer Nadav Amit who previously pursued "Optpolines" and other possible performance optimizations in light of Spectre / Meltdown vulnerabilities is now proposing patches for deferring PTI flushes to help with addressing the performance overhead caused by Meltdown...

Robert Foss of Collabora was back at the Linux Foundation's Open-Source Summit this week to present the latest state of open-source graphics drivers in the embedded space...

Hardware vendor Ampere Computing with their impressive ARM servers is doing a great job on closely following their hardware's Linux performance as part of a rigorous continuous testing regiment or ensuring quality, compatibility, and stability while being fully-automated...

Mesa's RADV Radeon Vulkan driver just saw a big performance optimization land to benefit APUs like Raven Ridge and Picasso, simply systems with no dedicated video memory...

LG Electronics has been exploring improvements around hibernation/suspend-to-disk to speed-up the Linux boot process for consumer electronics rather than performing cold boots and as part of that is working towards upstream optimizations...

This week saw OpenGL 4.6 support finally merged for Intel's i965 Mesa driver and will be part of the upcoming Mesa 19.2 release. Not landed yet but coming soon is the newer Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver also seeing OpenGL 4.6 support...

While called the Open-Source Summit, the event is primarily about Linux as after all it's hosted by the Linux Foundation. But at this week's Open-Source Summit in San Diego, Deb Goodkin as the executive director of the FreeBSD Foundation presented. Deb's talk was of course on FreeBSD but also why FreeBSD and Linux developers should work together...

It has been almost two years since the release of Enlightenment 0.23 while surprising E23 has now surfaced...

Taking place back in May at the beautiful Skamania Lodge in Washington was Intel's OSTS 2019 for their annual Open-Source Technology Summit that traditionally was internal-only but has begun opening up including allowing external participants this year. I was at OSTS 2019 and it's by far my highlight of the year with many really great sessions and a lot of useful networking at the event. Intel's open-source team has now shared some video recordings from this open-source/Linux event...

Wayland's Weston 7.0 was released on Friday with the newest features for this reference compositor implementation...

Wine 4.0.2 is out today as the second stable point release to this year's Wine 4.0 cycle...

AMD Raven Ridge APUs were a rough launch particularly on Linux where even with the latest motherboard BIOS updates and Linux kernel I am still hitting occasional stability issues, so when the opportunity arose recently to try out the Ryzen 5 3400G as the successor in the Picasso family, I was interested. Fortunately, AMD Picasso APUs have proven to be in better shape on Linux so here is the initial round of performance tests for those interested in the AMD Linux performance on Ubuntu.

After having been submitting various feature updates to DRM-Next the past few weeks of new graphics driver feature code to introduce in Linux 5.4, a final pull request was sent in today with the remaining feature work slated for this next version of the Linux kernel...

Following Spectre/Meltdown, the Linux CPU microcode updating was made serial while now a new patch pending for the Linux kernel would restore the behavior to be parallelized in order to speed-up the process for large core count servers...

While NVIDIA recently began publishing more hardware documentation, don't expect it to make an immediate difference in the quality of the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver. Today the pull request was sent to DRM-Next of the Nouveau kernel driver changes for the upcoming Linux 5.4 cycle and there isn't much to get excited about...

While VKD3D continues to be under heavy development, Valve already appears pleased with it enough that it's now being built as part of their Wine-based Proton software for powering Steam Play on Linux...

Currently the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver doesn't automatically adjust the video memory clock speeds when running a multi-monitor setup since it's more complicated to gracefully handle when scanning out to two or more displays. But a set of currently experimental patches will allow memory clock switching support on multi-monitor setups with the AMDGPU DC code...

With Qt 6 becoming an increasing development focus and Qt 5 already seven years old, Ubuntu developers are looking at finally removing Qt 4 ahead of their 20.04 Long-Term Support release...

Google's Simon Glass who is part of the Chromium / Chrome OS team presented at this week's Embedded Linux Conference in San Diego on U-Boot...

NVIDIA last week quietly released a second update to CUDA 10.1...

Following Chromebooks switching to BFQ and other distributions weighing this I/O scheduler for better responsiveness while maintaining good throughput capabilities, beginning with Fedora 31 there will be BFQ used as well...

Released nearly one month ago was the systemd 243 release candidate while the official update has yet to materialize. It looks though like it may be on the horizon with a second release candidate being posted today...

There have been a lot of announcements pertaining to Qt as of late, most of which have been about forthcoming efforts around Qt 6 development. A new announcement out of The Qt Company catching us off-guard is their plans for the tool-kit on micro-controllers...

Linux kernel development activity has shown light on a new Intel SoC we haven't anything about to date... Lightning Mountain...

The second development release of the forthcoming Phoronix Test Suite 9.0-Asker is now available for testing...

The UBports community that maintains the (currently 16.04 LTS derived) Ubuntu Touch have now shipped OTA-10 as their newest over-the-air feature update...

Intel's Clear Linux team on Wednesday announced their Deep Learning Reference Stack 4.0 during the Linux Foundation's Open-Source Summit North America event taking place in San Diego...

Coming two weeks after the GNOME 3.34 beta is the second and final beta ahead of next month's official GNOME 3.34 release set for 11 September...

Intel's new open-source OpenGL Linux driver "Iris" Gallium3D that has been in development for the past two years or so is getting ready to enter the limelight. Months ago they talked of plans to have it ready to become their default OpenGL driver by the end of the calendar year and with the state of Mesa 19.2 it's looking like that goal can be realized in time. With our new tests of this driver, in most games and other graphics applications the performance of this Gallium3D driver is now beyond that of their "classic" i965 Mesa driver.

In kicking off the Open Source Summit that has returned to San Diego, the Linux Foundation has announced the formation of the Confidential Computing Consortium in collaboration with Intel and other companies...

Purism has published their latest monthly update on the status of their Librem 5 Linux smartphone. They continue bringing up the software stack and tweaking the kernel support, but no word on their finalized hardware design nor if they still plan to ship in Q3'2019 as they continue advertising...

Two years after the OpenGL 4.6 specification was announced, Intel's open-source OpenGL Linux driver is now officially advertising the support after today landing the remaining SPIR-V enablement work...

Going along with Intel this morning announcing their 10th Gen "Comet Lake" processors, Dell has just announced their new XPS line-up with these new processors and it does include a new Linux-loaded Developer Edition laptop...

Earlier this month Intel announced 11 Icelake CPUs for laptops and 2-in1s under their 10th Gen CPU line-up. Today the company announced the 10th Gen Comet Lake CPUs also for 2-in-1s and laptops...

Red Hat developer Bastien Nocera has announced Low-Memory-Monitor as a new project he's been tackling to try to help with the Linux desktop use-cases when responsiveness issues due to low RAM / memory pressure problems. Low-Memory-Monitor paired with complementary solutions could help improve the Linux desktop's handling on low-end systems and other desktops/laptops when simply running short on RAM...

With Xfce 4.14 having finally been released last week following a four year development cycle, prominent Xfce developer Simon Steinbeiß has begun talking about the now-started Xfce 4.16 development cycle...

AMD has been publishing a lot of documentation recently covering their RDNA architecture used initially by the "Navi" graphics processors. They have published ISA documentation and a slide deck, among other material, while now they have published a higher-level whitepaper covering the architecture...

As a change that will affect Debian 11 "Bullseye" but not the current Debian 10 "Buster" or older is the distribution's decision to remove the old MIPS architecture...

Thanks to Sony using LLVM Clang as their default compiler toolchain for their PlayStation game console, they continue making improvements to the AMD Btver2/Jaguar code for optimized performance. The Jaguar APU is what's in the current PlayStation 4 while we've already seen contributions from Sony to improve the Zen CPU support ahead of their next-generation console...

Blender 2.80 made its hugely anticipated debut just under one month ago while already Blender 2.81 is looking interesting and will hopefully be out in November...

Netrunner 19.08 "Indigo" was released on Tuesday as the newest version of this KDE-focused desktop Linux distribution...

Yesterday we shared that Mesa 19.2's release process would finally be getting underway with the first release candidate expected today following the code branching. Sure enough, that process began but now prominent Intel open-source graphics developer Jason Ekstrand is looking to get the OpenGL 4.6 support into this release...

In addition to the news out of the OpenPOWER Summit in San Diego that the POWER ISA is going open-source and the OpenPOWER Foundation becoming part of the Linux Foundation, Raptor Computing Systems shared they plan to launch a new standard ATX motherboard next year that will feature OpenCAPI connectivity...

This week marks one year since Valve rolled out their Proton beta for Steam Play to allow Windows games to gracefully run on Linux via this Wine downstream catered for Steam Linux gaming. It's been crazy since then with all of Valve's continued work on open-source graphics drivers, adding the likes of FAudio and D9VK to Proton, continuing to fund DXVK development for faster Direct3D-over-Vulkan, and many other infrastructure improvements and more to allow more Windows games to run on Linux and to do so well and speedy...

While we haven't heard anything yet about Oracle's plans for Solaris post-11.4 whether that means Solaris 11.4 or the reportedly killed Solaris 12, Oracle today did release Solaris 11.4 Stable Release Update 12 as their newest installment for their supported Solaris operating system release...

The big POWER announcement appears to be that the POWER instruction set architecture is being contributed to the open-source community and the OpenPOWER Foundation is becoming part of the Linux Foundation...

The long-running Linux "Lockdown" patches were sent out again overnight for their 40th time but it remains to be seen if these security-oriented patches will be pulled in for the upcoming Linux 5.4 cycle...

The GNU toolchain has already been preparing for Cooperlake CPUs as the successor to Cascadelake as well as supporting the new instruction set extensions, but finally today the support for -march=cooperlake was merged to GCC 10 for conveniently exposing the new CPU target in the GNU Compiler Collection. At the same time, -march=tigerlake was also added...