Phoronix

Vulkan 1.2.140 is out as the latest version of the Vulkan API for high performance graphics and compute. Besides the usual assortment of documentation clarifications/fixes, this round does bring two new extensions...

Exciting times in Mozilla land as in addition to the recent Wayland improvements along with Flatpak availability and WebGPU support coming together, the newest Firefox Nightly builds now have AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) support...

For the x86_64 Zhaoxin CPUs made in China and based on VIA Centaur IP there is now proper support for them within the GNU C Library...

Since its mainlining in Mesa 20.0, the Valve-backed ACO compiler back-end for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver has been helping to reduce game load times and often increasing overall Linux gaming performance both for native titles as well as those on Steam Play with Proton+DXVK/VKD3D. With Mesa 20.1 releasing in the coming weeks, here are some recent benchmarks showing the RADV+ACO performance on Mesa 20.1-devel compared to RADV using its default AMDGPU LLVM back-end.

For a number of months now Google engineers have been working on FSCRYPT inline encryption capabilities for EXT4 and F2FS. The work is designed to offer better encryption performance on modern SoCs by having the encryption/decryption happen within the block layer as part of the bio and in turn leveraging the inline encryption hardware on modern Arm SoCs. The work still isn't merged but looks like it could be getting closer...

The Freescale "FEC" Ethernet driver used by select i.MX SoCs will be seeing better performance on the next kernel release...

Linus Torvalds just announced the Linux 5.7-rc4 kernel release is up for testing...

A new target for Linux's Device Mapper is EBS, the Emulated Block Size...

Long overdue but for Lenovo ThinkPad laptops sporting two fans, the Linux 5.8 kernel will see the ability to control both fans...

Valve has published their Steam Survey results for April, which is the first full month where the US and still much of the world has been in lockdown over the coronavirus, and thus interesting to see how it has impacted the gamer metrics...

The first alpha release of the Enlightenment 0.24 window manager / Wayland compositor with new features and other improvements...

The "open-source Windows" ReactOS project has upgraded its build environment leading to much newer versions of key compiler toolchain components...

Intel's OpenCL Intercept Layer remains focused on debugging and analyzing OpenCL application performance across platforms. It hadn't seen a new release, however, in two years but that changed last month...

KDE developers remain as busy as ever during the global lockdown around the coronavirus...

Linux 5.8 will see support for next-generation Marvell/Aquantia network chipsets...

Monado, the open-source OpenXR run-time implementation for Linux, has been advancing quite well since we last reported on it back in February with its inaugural v0.1 release...

The open-source Godot Game Engine lead developer Juan Linietsky has published a new Vulkan progress report, the first in three months, and as such there are a lot of changes...

A day after announcing the 10th Gen Core "Comet Lake" S-Series CPUs, the Intel open-source engineers have volleyed their first patches for bringing up the graphics on next-gen Rocket Lake...

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...