Phoronix

Following the Proton 5.0-7 release candidate from a few days ago, this critical part of Valve's Steam Play is now available for weekend gamers...

While many don't look upon Oracle's open-source software contributions too eagerly, some new patches out by their team can dramatically benefit Linux kernel boot times and they are working on getting it upstream. The numbers are already very promising and further work is also underway to make the improvement even more tantalizing...

While waiting to see what NVIDIA will be doing on the open-source driver front that has been pushed back, NVIDIA made a surprise open-source announcement today...

In addition to Intel sending in new feature code to DRM-Next, AMD developers on Thursday also sent in their AMDGPU/AMDKFD feature updates for Linux 5.8...

Intel's server software team continues working on Cloud-Hypervisor as a Rust-written hypervisor for modern Linux VMs. Cloud-Hypervisor has been picking up a lot of features and out today is another pre-1.0 feature release...

Intel's graphics driver team continues amassing more changes for Linux 5.8...

GhostBSD 20.04 is out as the newest monthly update to this desktop-focused operating system built off the FreeBSD base...

During the course of April while much of the world was in lockdown, there were plenty of interesting happenings in the Linux/open-source and hardware space to keep enthusiasts interested while social distancing from the release of Linux 5.6 to the releases of Fedora 32 and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, among other milestones...

System76 released today Pop!_OS 20.04 as their in-house Linux distribution built off Ubuntu 20.04 LTS but with many customizations on top...

With about a month and a half since GNOME 3.36 debuted, GNOME 3.37.1 is out today as the first development release towards GNOME 3.38 due out this September...

The GNU Compiler Collection 10 stable release (GCC 10.1) is on track for releasing in early May...

Redis 6.0 is out to end out April as this widely-used, open-source in-memory key-value database solution...

Intel today is announcing their 10th Gen Core "Comet Lake" S-Series processors led by the Core i9 10900 series that the company claim is now the world's fastest gaming processor and offers clock speeds up to 5.3GHz.

AMDVLK 2020.Q2.2 has been issued today as the company's latest open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver based off their official driver source tree...

Raspberry Pi today announced their newest product, the High Quality Camera, which starts at $50 and supports interchangeable lenses...

Besides those systems now seeing Schedutil by default as the CPU frequency scaling governor and some Radeon gaming performance gains to note, the performance of Linux 5.7 in our testing thus far has largely been on track with Linux 5.6 stable...

Released on Wednesday was AOMP 11.5 as the latest version of the AMD/ROCm compiler based off LLVM Clang and focused on OpenMP offloading to Radeon GPUs...

The X.Org Board of Directors elections wrapped up this week with four new members now serving this organization that oversees the X.Org Server, Mesa, Wayland, and other critical Linux desktop infrastructure...

Mesa 20.1 feature development is now over with it being branched from Git master and subsequently Mesa 20.1-RC1 being released this evening...

Popcorn Linux has been a multi-year effort out of Virginia Tech's Software and Systems Research Group for distributed thread execution across systems and even potentially different ISAs/accelerators given today's heterogeneous hardware...

It looks like AMD Zen 3 CPUs will finally be supporting PCID! And memory protection keys are coming too, at least according to AMD's latest programmer reference manual...

A premium supporter was asking this week whether for those newly-upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS if the graphics stack is in good enough shape or if I would recommend running Mesa 20.1-devel for better AMD Linux gaming performance... The short answer, sans any particular changes you are after in Mesa 20.1-devel, the bigger gain for running on this new Ubuntu release is to instead enable RADV+ACO as a much more pressing boost...

VESA announced today version 2.0 of the DisplayPort Alternate Mode specification...

Adding to the last minute AMD Radeon additions for making the Mesa 20.1 feature cut-off is enabling displayable DCC support for Navi 12 and Navi 14 graphics processors...

Longtime Linux DRM developer Noralf Trønnes has written a new driver for Linux to serve generic USB display purposes. This driver was written following his idea of turning a Raspberry Pi Zero into a USB to HDMI display adapter...

If you are still running any pre-Sandybridge Intel hardware, you should really consider upgrading to modern hardware for the performance and efficiency gains... But should you still be tied to an old i865-based system, there is an improvement coming in 2020 for Linux users...

Back in 2018 Microsoft announced Shader Conductor as one of their newest open-source projects at the time for cross-compiling HLSL to other shading languages like GLSL. Out this morning is Shader Conductor v0.3...

Jolla announced today Sailfish OS 3.3 "Rokua" as the newest version of their Linux-based smartphone platform...

The Trinity Desktop Environment is marking its tenth anniversary with a new release of this desktop forked from the KDE 3.5 code-base...

BLAKE3, the cryptographic hash function that advertises itself as being "much faster" than the likes of SHA1 and MD5 and its predecessor BLAKE2 while being more secure and highly parallelizable has seen an experimental implementation for GPU-based acceleration using the Vulkan API...

There's been a lot of interesting work hitting Mesa Git this week ahead of the Mesa 20.1 code branching and feature freeze. Merged this afternoon was a rather simple optimization benefiting Gen11 (Icelake) and newer for their open-source Vulkan driver, it's such a simple change it is almost surprising it took so long to benefit...

QEMU 5.0 is out today for this processor emulator that is a key piece to the Linux virtualization stack...

Valve along with their comrades at CodeWeavers are preparing Proton 5.0-7 as the newest version of their Wine-based software powering Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

Last month we provided some early benchmarks looking at the Ubuntu 20.04 X.Org vs. Wayland gaming performance under GNOME 3.36, but now that Ubuntu 20.04 LTS has been officially released, here is a look at the AMD Radeon Linux gaming performance across a wide variety of desktops on both X.Org and Wayland where supported.

Fedora 32 has officially been released as the latest installment of this Red Hat supported community Linux distribution known for its bleeding-edge features and packages...

The Intel P-State driver has been going through a number of improvements recently including transitioning to the "Schedutil" governor by default on some systems so far in this governor making use of scheduler utilization data. But Intel's graphics team meanwhile has been working on P-State changes to improve the GPU-bound energy efficiency and that is now spun as a new "adaptive" governor...

One of the many new features coming in Mesa 20.1 is experimental NIR support for the vintage Radeon "R600g" driver. That NIR back-end isn't yet to feature parity but is now one step closer with tesselation support now being available along this code path...

Con Kolivas is out with his Linux 5.6-ck1 optimization patch-set and version 0.199 of the MuQSS scheduler. This re-base against the Linux 5.6 stable kernel is coming late due to Kolivas leading a team making 3D printed COVID-19 equipment in Australia...

After the merge request was open for more than a half-year, Mesa 20.1 has landed a Vulkan device selection layer for choosing between multiple Vulkan-enabled GPUs on a given system as the default device...

Those running the RADV Vulkan driver on AMD APUs could soon find themselves having even better performance in select games...

Announced back on 14 April were AMD's newest members of the EPYC 7002 "Rome" family, the 7Fx2 high frequency processors. Back on launch day we posted the AMD EPYC 7F52 Linux benchmarks for that 16-core/32-thread CPU with a staggering 256MB cache and clocking up to 3.9GHz. In this article today are our initial benchmarks of the EPYC 7F32 as the 8-core/16-thread processor yielding a 128MB L3 cache and clock speeds up to 3.9GHz.

Micron announced today the "World’s First Open-Source Storage Engine Designed for SSDs and Storage Class Memory"... Or simply put, yet another key-value store database and this time designed for high performance SSDs and persistent memory...

For the past five months there has been a bug report affecting the likes of Pop OS 19.10 and Fedora 31 over the GNOME Shell Calendar server using "20~25% CPU all the time" and "every 2-3 seconds or so there is a CPU usage spike where the calendar processes eat something like 20-25% of the CPU." That is significant on modern CPUs as well as on battery life for laptops while finally the issue has been fixed...

While the Open Sound System (OSS) usage hasn't been prevalent on Linux systems in many years, on NetBSD there still is some software making use of the OSS interfaces in not supporting the native NetBSD audio interfaces. Better OSS compatibility via a translation layer is available while ultimately they are working on transitioning more open-source software to support the native interfaces...

The Qt Company has published an initial release schedule for Qt 6.0...

The new spi-amd driver looks like it could make its debut in Linux 5.8...

Following the release a few weeks back of the Intel Media Driver Q1-2020 update for this open-source Linux video encode/decode driver for Intel graphics, their first pre-release of the Q2-2020 driver update is now out for testing...

Just days after Canonical shipped the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS "Focal Fossa" release, Ubuntu 20.10 "Groovy Gorilla" is now open for development...

OpenCL 3.0 is being released today in provisional form. OpenCL 3.0 is making OpenCL 2.x functionality now optional to make it better suited for a range of devices plus there is new functionality introduced like subgroups, extensions for asynchronous data copies, and more.

The routine Vulkan 1.2.139 maintenance update brings with it two new extensions...