Phoronix

For those hoping that the Disney+ streaming service would work on Linux in conjunction with a modern web browser, sadly that is not set to be the case. While the likes of Netflix and Hulu can play from Linux desktop web browsers, Disney's tightened Digital Rights Management around their new service doesn't allow for Linux support with current browsers...

Well, here is a surprise... The Libre RISC-V project that is trying to build an "open-source GPU" more along the lines as a Vulkan accelerator is looking at other options besides RISC-V. While RISC-V is royalty-free and open-source in nature, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton is not content with the RISC-V Foundation and is evaluating the likes of POWER and MIPS...

AMD's Radeon Image Sharpening feature is designed to improve image quality with minimal performance costs. However, it is only supported by Radeon Polaris / Vega / Navi graphics cards and only under Microsoft Windows 10. An independent open-source project has implemented contrast adaptive sharpening support for Vulkan that is similar to Radeon Image Sharpening but will work for any Vulkan-enabled GPU -- including NVIDIA GPUs...

Prominent Xfce developer Simon Steinbeiß has shared more of the group's plans for the planned 2020 release of Xfce 4.16...

With the early Librem 5 smartphones now shipping from their "Aspen" batch and recent Reddit discussions about the Librem 5 roping him in, former Purism CTO Zlatan Todoric has agreed to a brief interview on Phoronix...

GNOME 3.35.1 was released this morning as the first development release towards GNOME 3.36 next March...

KDE developers remain busy this autumn on addressing bugs in the recent KDE Plasma 5.17 release and tackling early feature work for Plasma 5.18. Plus work on KDE Frameworks 5 and KDE Applications is as busy as ever...

Landing this week in Mesa 19.3-devel were more functions being implemented around the big OpenGL EXT_direct_state_access extension...

While SYCL has been around for five years as a Khronos standard providing a single-source C++ programming model for exploiting OpenCL, it has yet to reach its prime but demand for it is picking up with Intel working to upstream their SYCL back-end in LLVM, SYCL becoming part of their programming model with oneAPI and Xe Graphics, and other vendors also jumping on the SYCL bandwagon. Codeplay has now provided an open-source SYCL learning code for those interested in this higher-level alternative to straight OpenCL programming...

While the MSM+Freedreno open-source graphics driver stack already supports the Adreno 500 and 600 series, one of the GPUs not seeing support until now was the basic Adreno 510. Kernel patches are pending for A510 enablement while the Mesa support was already merged...

System76 has released their newest operating system update of their Pop!_OS distribution based upon Ubuntu. Pop!_OS 19.10 is based upon this week's release of Ubuntu 19.10 "Eoan Ermine" but adding various extra changes and enhancements...

Intel developers have been working on the Cloud Hypervisor that is written in Rust and built atop KVM as an open-source VMM designed for running modern cloud workloads while being focused on just supporting modern software/interfaces and relying upon para-virtualized (VirtIO) devices without legacy support. This week marked a new release of this forward-looking KVM-based hypervisor solution...

Back in February for LLVM Clang 9.0 was the initial AMD Zen 2 "znver2" enablement, but like the GCC support at the time it was the very basics. With time GCC picked up Zen 2 scheduler improvements and other work while sadly in the case of LLVM the improvements are still pending...

With the upcoming Linux 5.4 kernel release there is now an exFAT file-system driver based on an old Samsung code drop of their exFAT driver support for mobile devices. This comes after Microsoft made the exFAT specification public recently and gave their blessing for a native Linux driver for the file-system. The Linux developers acknowledge though the current exFAT code is "horrible" and a "pile of crap" but is within the staging area...

Fresh off yesterday's Wine 4.18 release, Wine-Staging 4.18 is now available for those preferring the more experimental blend of Wine that incorporates various testing patches atop Wine...

Following this week's release of KDE Plasma 5.17, a new release of the independent kwin-lowlatency code has been re-based against version 5.17...

We are getting mighty close to the release of FreeBSD 12.1 as the next installment of FreeBSD 12 for 2019. It's looking like FreeBSD 12.1 will indeed be ready to set sail in early November...

While mid-way through the Linux 5.4 development cycle with RC4 due out on Sunday, a number of memory management fixes just hit the mainline kernel...

While three weeks have passed since the previous Wine development release compared to the usual two week cadence, Wine 4.18 is out today and isn't too busy on the feature front but there are more than three dozen bug fixes...

While we normally hear of rewriting code from Python and other scripting languages into C/C++ when its a matter of performance, in the case of Oracle Solaris it was taking old C code and modernizing it in Python 3 to yield a ~17x performance improvement...

As another release in time for weekend gamers, DXVK 1.4.3 was released today as the newest update for this library mapping Direct3D 10/11 to Vulkan for accelerating the Wine/Proton-based Linux gaming experience...

For those wondering if -- or how much -- of a performance impact mitigations still make regarding Spectre for Intel's long-awaited 10nm+ Ice Lake processors, here is the rundown on the mitigation state and the performance impact.

After Google dropped the open-source WireGuard app from their Play Store since it contained a donation link, the app has now been restored within Google's software store for Android users but without the donation option...

While swapping around CPUs for the AMD EPYC vs. Intel Xeon Cascade Lake testing of Facebook's RocksDB enterprise workload testing, I also took the opportunity for running some other recently updated test profiles on these EPYC/Xeon parts under test...

As a change for next year's Xfce 4.16, the xfce4-panel now exposes a preferences option for those preferring "dark modes" of GTK themes...

It looks like as soon as Linux 5.5 is where the AMDGPU kernel driver could be ready with Panel Self Refresh (PSR) support for enabling this power-savings feature on newer AMD laptops...

While normally we don't cover hardware start-ups on Phoronix, Pensando Systems has just exited stealth and given their focus will be heavily involved with Linux and in fact already have their first kernel driver mainlined...

AMD developer Marek Olšák has landed a "mega cleanup" to the Gallium3D Mesa state tracker code around its NIR intermediate representation handling...

Fedora developers had been trying to ship Fedora 31 for their original release target of next Tuesday, 22 October, but that isn't going to happen due to remaining blocker bugs...

If you are planning to run the newly-released Ubuntu 19.10, among the initial round of stable release updates is an important kernel fix...

Ubuntu 19.10 "Eoan Ermine" has hit mirrors today for an on-time release of this six-month non-LTS installment to Ubuntu Linux...

NVIDIA today introduced their first beta driver in the 440 Linux branch and it's quite an exciting release!..

Following the benchmarks earlier this month looking at PostgreSQL 12.0 on AMD EPYC Rome versus Intel Xeon Cascade Lake there was interest from Phoronix readers in wondering how well Rome is doing for other modern enterprise database workloads. One of those workloads that was recently added to the Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org is Facebook's RocksDB, the company's embedded database that is forked from Google LevelDB. With RocksDB being designed to exploit many CPU cores and modern SSD storage, here are some benchmarks looking at how the Xeon Platinum 8280 stacks up against various new AMD EPYC 7002 series processors.

Theo de Raadt released OpenBSD 6.6 today as the newest feature update to this popular BSD operating system known for its security focus...

Google open-sourced their Bazel build system four years ago while today it reached version 1.0 for this multi-language, multi-platform build solution...

The first development snapshot of Phoronix Test Suite 9.2-Hurdal is now available ahead of the stable release later this quarter...

With Project Trident moving away from a TrueOS/FreeBSD base to instead Void Linux, if you are looking for a good BSD-based desktop operating system it largely comes down to the likes of MidnightBSD and GhostBSD providing good out-of-the-box setups. As for GhostBSD, they are reaffirming their commitment to using TrueOS/FreeBSD and MATE as their official desktop...

AMD open-source developer Marek Olšák on Wednesday released libdrm 2.4.100 as the newest feature update to this Mesa DRM library...

RADV Vulkan driver developer Bas Nieuwenhuizen of Google has ventured into kernel space in working on format modifiers support for Vega/GFX9 and newer...

In addition to this week being exciting for the Ubuntu 19.10 release due out on Thursday followed by the kicking off of the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS "Focal Fossa" cycle, Ubuntu maker Canonical coincidentally made their financial statement filings in the UK this week where they are headquartered that gives a fresh look at their financial performance ahead of a possible IPO in the next few years...

With Ubuntu 19.10 "Eoan Ermine" releasing tomorrow (17 October), development is about to kick-off for the next Ubuntu development cycle under the codename Focal Fossa...

While we had been eager for Intel's goal of defaulting to their new Gallium3D OpenGL Linux driver by EOY2019, it looks like that is going to swing by one quarter with the plan now for Mesa 20.0 at the end of Q1...

Now with more Librem 5 smartphones from their first batch now shipping, Purism has begun sharing more photos of the current hardware as well as the state of their Linux-based PureOS software stack...

For those thinking of playing with Ubuntu 19.10's new experimental ZFS desktop install option in opting for using ZFS On Linux in place of EXT4 as the root file-system, here are some quick benchmarks looking at the out-of-the-box performance of ZFS/ZoL vs. EXT4 on Ubuntu 19.10 using a common NVMe solid-state drive.

The upcoming release of Arch's Pacman 5.2 is bringing support for compressing packages with Zstd which ultimately will provide faster package installs on Arch Linux...

In the newest development code of GNOME Shell and Mutter for GNOME 3.36, Graphene integration has begun to replace some elements of Clutter...

While there is an ever increasing number of open-source developers focusing on the Linux graphics stack with the GPU drivers and related infrastructure, it's quite a different story when it comes to the Linux input side. It's basically one developer that has been working on the Linux input improvements for the past number of years...

Apparently Google doesn't appreciate donation links/buttons within programs found on the Google Play Store even when it's one of the main sources of revenue for open-source programs. WireGuard has been reportedly dropped over this according to WireGuard lead developer Jason Donenfeld...

With the recent release of LLVM 9.0 the RISC-V back-end was promoted from an experimental CPU back-end to being made "official" for this royalty-free CPU ISA. Work though isn't over on the LLVM RISC-V support with new features continuing to land, like link-time optimizations (LTO) most recently being enabled within the Clang 10 code...

Khronos president Neil Trevett was at this month's XDC2019 conference in Montreal and he clarified their position on accepting conformance submissions by the open-source drivers...