Phoronix

Arm Holdings has been developing their next-generation "Komeda" Direct Rendering Manager driver and they believe it's ready for mainline integration with the upcoming Linux 5.1 cycle...

Unity Tech has put out their first public beta of the upcoming Unity 2019.1 game engine update. There's some notable work on both the Linux and Vulkan fronts...

GNOME 3.32 is shaping up to be a darn fine release especially with the performance improvements slated to be part of this six-month desktop environment update due out in March...

For the Linux kernel's Speculative Store Bypass Disable (SSBD) handling for Spectre Variant 4 protection is support for processes opting into force disabling of speculation via a prctl() interface. Currently when speculation is disabled, that is carried through to new processes started via the execve() system call. But a new bit will allow clearing that state when a new program is started by a process otherwise relying upon PR_SPEC_DISABLE, in what will help the performance in such cases...

Last month the Ubuntu/Debian-based Linux Mint distribution crew collected more than twenty-two thousand dollars in donations during the holiday period. With that record high in monthly donations for the project, they are as motivated as ever for delivering more improvements to their desktop-focused distro this year...

While Intel's Clear Linux is known to the most of you for its speed, it's also a distribution that is very easy to build off of for specific use-cases should you want your own pre-configured Linux OS...

Fresh on the Mesa 19.1 development cycle, the Virgl Gallium3D driver that is used as part of OpenGL acceleration for KVM guests with VirtIO-GPU is seeing some improvements...

Just in time for the Sway 1.0 release, support for the Wayland pointer constraints and relative pointer protocols has been merged, which is important for handling various games primarily first person shooters...

After its feature freeze and code branching yesterday, the first release candidate of Mesa 19.0 is now available...

As some other exciting Linux graphics news today alongside NVIDIA rolling out G-SYNC Compatible support for Linux, the Intel Mesa OpenGL driver could soon finally achieve OpenGL 4.6 compliance with the mainline code...

Taking many by surprise less than one month after NVIDIA announced "G-SYNC Compatible" in supporting FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync displays as an alternative to the more expensive dedicated G-SYNC monitors, the newest Linux beta graphics driver has support for this gamer-oriented feature. This comes just a matter of days after NVIDIA began shipping their Windows driver with this dynamic refresh rate feature that aims to eliminate or at least reduce tearing and stuttering.

Just a few days ago marked the systemd 241 release candidate while today Lennart Poettering opted for a second release candidate...

Richard Hughes of Red Hat continues on his conquest for improving the Linux firmware updating experience: his latest accomplishment is getting support for microcode updates on ATA/ATAPI drives into Fwupd...

While the initial "G-SYNC Compatible" (FreeSync) support is the big headlining feature of today's NVIDIA 418.30 Linux beta driver drop, there are also other changes to get excited about too...

Earlier this month at CES was the surprise announcement that NVIDIA would be effectively rolling out FreeSync display support for Pascal GPUs and newer with forthcoming driver updates. There's been that support on Windows while beginning today that tear-free, gaming-focused display tech will also be working on Linux...

With yesterday having posted fresh OpenGL/Vulkan Linux gaming benchmarks for the current NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards, in this article is the freshest OpenCL GPU compute data for that set of 14 graphics cards on the very latest Linux graphics driver stack. In the case of AMD Radeon open-source compute, it was tested using the new ROCm 2.0 atop the mainline Linux 5.0 kernel and Ubuntu 18.10.

Back in November is when NVIDIA announced they were developing an EGLStreams-based back-end for KDE's KWin so the KDE Wayland session could run with their proprietary graphics driver similar to GNOME's EGLStreams support. That latest code is now under review...

The open-source, reverse-engineered Panfrost Gallium3D driver is now under review in an early form for potentially merging into mainline Mesa in the near future. Panfrost is the current open-source driver community effort around Arm's Midgard and Bifrost graphics units...

Jerome Glisse of Red Hat has spent the past few years devoted to Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) that continues stepping towards taking on bigger roles within the Linux kernel. With the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel cycle there are slated to be more additions to this code, which is the backbone of allowing the mirroring of process address spaces, system memory to be transparently used by any device process, and other functionality for GPU computing and other modern PCIe devices...

This week's AMDVLK open-source Radeon Vulkan driver code drop brings support for the Vega 20 (Vega 7nm) graphics cards and Raven 2 APUs...

With the upcoming Linux 5.1 cycle we'll likely see Intel "Fastboot" enabled by default at least for Skylake hardware and newer, but Cherry Trail and Valleyview might also get this special treatment...

In addition to Alpine 3.9.0 seeing the light of day on Tuesday, another lightweight Linux distribution out with a new release is Slax 9.7.0...

A set of 28 patches posted today by Intel Linux developer Mika Westerberg would improve the kernel's Thunderbolt software connection manager and particularly help older Apple hardware...

The Alpine Linux distribution that is lightweight and security focused and based on Busybox and musl libc is out with their version 3.9.0 feature release. The latest improvements to this operating system continue with a focus of Alpine being used within containers and other lightweight use-cases...

As is always the case at Phoronix ahead of any major graphics card launch, it means re-testing the collection of past graphics cards for comparison in order to have the newest data on the entire line-up with the very latest GPU drivers, operating system updates, and any game updates. For those curious what the very latest Linux gaming performance is looking like at the end of January, here are benchmarks of the NVIDIA Pascal and Turing graphics cards on their 415.27 latest driver release up against the Linux 5.0 Git kernel paired with the near-feature-frozen Mesa 19.0 built with the AMDGPU LLVM 9.0 back-end. These 14 graphics cards on the latest software stack was put through more than three dozen gaming tests.

In addition to Mozilla releasing Firefox 65, the release calendars also aligned today with Google introducing the Chrome 72 web browser...

Should you not be into the new Dell XPS 13 9380 with Ubuntu pre-loaded nor the new Librem laptops that rely on older Intel CPUs, another option is coming with System76 that is releasing a new version of their Darter Pro laptop. The new System76 Darter Pro is built around Intel's 8th Gen mobile processors...

Kodi 18.0 "Leia" is now available as one of the biggest releases ever for this open-source, cross-platform multimedia/HTPC software...

Mesa 19.0 is due to enter its feature freeze today, but the "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver is seeing some last minute enhancements for this next quarterly feature release...

Firefox 65.0 is out today as the latest stable release to Mozilla's open-source, cross-platform web browser...

Earlier this month there was a change proposal announced that would give Fedora system's a new unique UUID tracking identifier to count systems. The intention isn't to track users but rather to provide more statistics about the Fedora install base compared to the current system that is just tracking unique IP addresses, but a revised proposal would improve the privacy while still offering up much of the same statistics potential...

Among the recent projects by Intel's open-source graphics driver crew for Linux has been supporting FP16 visuals for handling wide color gamut with a focus on Android support in particular. A big set of Mesa patches for this effort have now been posted...

Longtime open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" developer Ilia Mirkin has released xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.16 as the latest version of this X.Org DDX driver...

Patches were posted on Monday wiring up support for the Allwinner H6 SoC within the Cedrus VPU driver for open-source video decode support...

Since the Linux 4.14 kernel Btrfs has supported Zstd for transparent file-system compression while a revived patch-set would allow that Zstd compression level to become configurable by the end-user...

Just before Christmas, Purism began shipping the Librem 5 developer kits and with that increasing questions about the Librem 5 Linux smartphone, the company has published some new FAQs about the security-minded smartphone as well as publishing a concise list of the currently planned specifications...

Over two years since the unveiling of the Awesome 4.0 window manager and one and a half years since the Awesome 4.2 release, out today is Awesome 4.3 for this X11 window manager...

As is standard practice for the DRM-Next development workflow, the Intel open-source graphics driver developers have already been staging their new feature work ahead of the Linux 5.1 kernel cycle, as have other parties involved in DRM/KMS drivers and elsewhere in the kernel. Today another big feature update was submitted to DRM-Next of new material that will come with Linux 5.1 this spring...

While I have benchmarked the F2FS file-system a lot since it was mainlined back in 2013, it's all been on solid-state drives or even other forms of flash storage like USB drives. After all, F2FS is short for the Flash-Friendly File-System. But a Phoronix reader recently suggested that F2FS also works out well for traditional, rotating hard drives so I decided to run some benchmarks.

As a follow-up to the story from earlier this month about Intel wanting to add SYCL programming support to LLVM/Clang, the company's initial open-source compiler is now public...

Yum was supposed to be removed from Fedora 29 in favor of the modern DNF package manager that is largely compatible with Yum commands of the past. But its retirement was delayed due to the request being late in the cycle and some infrastructure like Koji and Pungi having not finished the migration to DNF interfaces. Yum's retirement might come for Fedora 30 but it could be too late...

Red Hat developer and lead Flatpak (formerly XDG-App) developer Alexander Larsson has announced the stable Flatpak 1.2.0 release...

Over the past year alone there have been multiple attempts at delivering a content protection protocol for Wayland to handle the likes of HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection). From Intel there is the latest protocol proposal out today...

While the next Raspberry Pi will be a major redesign, the Raspberry Pi Foundation today released the Compute Module 3+ as their newest module intended for embedded/industrial applications...

If all goes well, Mesa 19.0 will see its feature freeze this week and kick off the release process by the issuing of the first release candidate. Here's a look at some of what can be expected out of this Mesa3D quarterly feature update...

It has yet to appear in a Vulkan specification update, but the MoltenVK implementation that supports the Vulkan API on iOS/macOS by mapping it to Apple's Metal drivers now supports the VK_EXTX_portability_subset functionality...

It's been nearly one year since Feral Interactive introduced GameMode for optimizing the Linux gaming experience/performance. With not hearing anything out of the project in a while, I decided to poke around its development code this weekend...

The third development release of Phoronix Test Suite 8.6-Spydeberg is now available for testing across Linux, BSD, Windows, Solaris, and macOS systems. This latest milestone has more benchmark analytics exposed via the command-line interface, a few BSD and Windows enhancements, and other improvements...

Linus Torvalds has returned from his trek to LCA 2019 and released the Linux 5.0-rc4 kernel...

With carrying out the ZFS/HAMMER2 vs. Linux ZoL and other file-system benchmarks this weekend, while having those clean installs of each operating system under test, I also took the opportunity to run some other non-storage benchmarks...