Phoronix

Along with Linux 5.9 set to add NVMe ZNS support for the spec surrounding placement of data within zones, more broadly this next kernel is positioned to bring dm-crypt support for zoned block devices...

Merged just over one week ago to the mainline kernel were inclusive terminology guidelines following the recent discussion among upstream developers. The Linux sound subsystem has begun preparing patches for Linux 5.9 to overhaul their naming conventions as a result...

While Fedora 33 desktop variants are aiming to use Btrfs by default, non-desktop environments are not and Red Hat remains committed to XFS and their Stratis Storage technology for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Coming to Fedora 33 will also likely be Stratis 2.1 for offering the latest on that front...

Surprising many in the open-source community in recent weeks was the LibreOffice 7.0 release candidate branded as a "Personal Edition". While still being free/open-source software and no licensing change, the traditional LibreOffice build was going to be marketed as "Personal Edition" to differentiate from other stakeholders that may market their professional/enterprise services around this cross-platform, open-source office suite. Those Personal Edition plans are now officially being reverted from next month's LibreOffice 7.0 release...

For those looking at an NVMe PCIe M.2 solid-state drive enclosure for connecting to USB 3.1/3.2 systems, Sabrent offers a nice option with their EC-TFNB enclosure that is constructed out of aluminum, 100% tool-free, and runs well. I recently bought this Sabrent USB 3.2 enclosure along with the Sabrent Rocket Q 2TB NVMe solid-state drive, which offers nice performance for a PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD and the 2TB capacity can be found for just about $250 USD.

Over the past several months there has been work on Intel's Linux kernel graphics driver for async page-flipping to yield better performance. That work was revised against today for hopefully making it into a kernel release in the near future albeit too late for Linux 5.9 but regardless nice to see this work moving forward...

A few months back we wrote of experimental work for creating "secret" memory areas with memfd and now that work has turned into the secretmemfd system call that is under review...

Vulkan 1.2.148 was released on Sunday with two new extensions...

While the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver allows pre-GCN AMD graphics card owners continue making use of their graphics cards, there are diminishing returns with newer games requiring Vulkan that is not supported by pre-HD7000 series hardware as well as far greater performance and efficiency improvements in the more recent generations. In any case, if you are still using a Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 series graphics card, some new life is being pushed into the open-source driver via the in-development NIR back-end...

The latest FFmpeg multimedia library code can see faster H.265 video encoding with the Video Acceleration API when running on Icelake and newer Intel graphics...

While Linus Torvalds has been concerned by the size of Linux 5.8 at times, he just released Linux 5.8-rc6 and so far things are looking good...

In addition to this week bringing an AMDGPU pull request with new GPU support and initial Intel DG1 graphics card support as material for DRM-Next to in turn land with Linux 5.9 in the weeks ahead, there was also another DRM-Misc-Next pull with further material to these smaller drivers...

When it comes to open-source audio software, the Ardour digital audio workstation and Audacity audio editor are the two flagship offerings. But Zrythm continues advancing as another promising open-source digital audio workstation project. Zrythm is currently in a late alpha stage with its newest release this weekend but a beta appears to be on the horizon...

Riding off Friday's Wine 5.13 release, an updated Wine-Staging is now available coming with 669 patches atop the code-base...

Intel's IWD wireless daemon for Linux systems has been seeing work in recent days on integration around WiFi Display support, a.k.a. WFD / Miracast...

The Lutris open-source gaming platform manager that also makes it easier installing Windows games via Steam is now employing the Valve-backed VKD3D-Proton fork for Direct3D 12 over Vulkan...

While DragonFlyBSD has its own, original HAMMER2 file-system, for those needing to access data from EXT2/EXT3/EXT4 file-systems, there is a brand new "ext2fs" driver implementation for this BSD operating system...

For those looking for another rolling-release Linux distribution to try and one whose roots trace back to the legendary Mandrake Linux, OpenMandriva has been working to establish its own rolling-release spin for those preferring the latest software packages as opposed to their conventional releases. Additionally, OpenMandriva is nearing the end of its i686 repository offering while continuing to work with Wine and 32-bit games...

Debian 9.13 is now available as the last planned update for the Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" series...

Way back in 2010 it was announced that Lightworks would be going open-source as this high-end, non-linear and cross-platform video editor solution. This video editing system has been used by many films over the years from The Wolf of Wall Street to Bruce Almighty to Moulin Rouge to Pulp Fiction as well as many other movies and television shows while also being approachable enough that it's used by less advanced video editing enthusiasts. Lightworks going open-source would be a big win, but ten years after their failed plans were announced they finally have shed some light on why such move away from being a proprietary application never materialized...

At the end of June was the first batch of AMDGPU changes queued for DRM-Next to in turn go into the Linux 5.9 kernel when that cycle opens up in August. On Friday a second batch of feature changes for this open-source AMD Radeon kernel graphics driver was submitted...

This week KDE developers have seen a lot of bug and regression fixes materialize for Plasma and other components...

Git 2.28-rc1 was released on Friday in stepping towards the next feature release for this widely-used, distributed revision control system...

Ahead of the official release expected in early August, the second release candidate of LibreOffice 7.0 is now available for testing...

The Panfrost Gallium3D driver providing open-source OpenGL driver support for Arm Mali Midgard and Bifrost hardware has another feature tacked on as of Friday night...

Wine is out with its latest bi-weekly development summer blend for running Windows applications and games on Linux and other platforms...

The Monado open-source OpenXR runtime for AR/VR headsets is making progress on integrating open-source positional tracking capabilities...

For about one and a half months now I have been using the AMD Ryzen 7 4700U as my main laptop paired with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. It's been working out very well for not even being the top-of-the-line AMD Renoir SKU. Here is some additional commentary for those thinking about one of the new AMD laptops with Linux use...

Microsoft's newest open-source Linux software is ProcMon for Linux, a rewritten and re-imagined version of its Processor Monitor found on Windows within their Sysinternals suite...

It looks like the syscall user redirection support could soon be mainlined to the kernel for this new Linux feature that was originally motivated by helping Windows games running on Wine...

Well this is a huge Friday morning bummer: the GNU C Library (glibc) is dropping support for the very interesting Restartable Sequences (RSEQ) as some design changes need to be made, thus restarting work on restartable sequences...

There is finally a new release of the Thunderbird mail/RSS client available as the annual update to this longtime Mozilla mail client. Thunderbird 78 is the new version out and serves as an Extended-Support Release with many improvements in tow...

Longtime FreeBSD/Linux network stack developer and former Qualcomm Atheros engineer Adrian Chadd is back to working on FreeBSD wireless networking improvements...

Joining Sway 1.5 for an exciting week in the Wayland space is an update to Cage, the Wayland compositor designed for kiosk-like experiences...

Fedora 33 is easily shaping up to be one of the biggest releases ever for this long-time Linux distribution formerly known as Fedora Core. It's just not a few big features like Fedora desktop variants defaulting to Btrfs but even just on feature count alone it's looking by far to be one of the biggest at least in a number of years if not ever...

On top of the recent UVD video decode for AMD Radeon "GCN 1.0" GPUs with the AMDGPU kernel driver to complement the existing Radeon kernel driver support, these aging "Southern Islands" graphics cards also continue to see patchwork on enabling "Display Core" (DC) display support with the AMDGPU driver option...

With the Intel 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable (Cascade Lake) processors having turned a year old in April and next month marking one year since the launch of the AMD EPYC 7002 (Rome) series, here are fresh benchmarks of the dual Xeon Platinum 8280 versus the AMD EPYC 7742 when testing the Linux software stack from early 2019 and then again using a bleeding-edge Linux software stack as of this month. This shows how the Linux software performance has evolved over the past year for both Intel and AMD on the server front as well as how the current top-end SKUs are competing right now.

In recent months KDE's Konsole terminal emulator has been seeing a lot of new features while even more are in the works...

Announced earlier this year was WirePlumber as a new session manager for PipeWire with its role in managing of audio/video streams to/from hardware/software components as well as handling security/permissions, device monitoring, and other session management functionality...

QEMU 5.1-rc0 is available as the first step towards this next feature release of this important component to the Linux virtualization stack...

While we remain eager to find out more about (and benchmark) Intel Gen12 graphics in Tiger Lake and Xe discrete graphics with this generation bringing the biggest changes to the ISA since i965, Linux patches and bug reports do continue offering new tid-bits of information on Gen12...

In addition to the "Sienna Cichlid" support recently published for the open-source AMD Radeon Linux kernel graphics driver, there is another new graphics processor being added to their driver: Navy Flounder...

As we have been anticipating for weeks, initial (but still early) enablement of the Intel DG1 graphics card on their open-source driver stack will indeed be sent in for the upcoming Linux 5.9 cycle and is currently being queued in the DRM-Next repository...

Sway 1.5 is out as a big feature update to this Wayland compositor inspired by the i3 window manager. A big user-facing feature with Sway 1.5 is support for Adaptive Synchronization / Variable Refresh Rate, such as AMD FreeSync...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee formally signed off today on allowing Fedora 33 desktop variants to default to using the Btrfs file-system rather than the existing EXT4 default or other alternatives...

Valve and CodeWeavers have rolled out a release candidate of Proton 5.0-10 as the newest update to their Wine-based software powering Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

The FreeBSD project has published their Q2'2020 status report that outlines their nearly-complete work on migrating from Subversion to Git plus many hardware support improvements for this BSD operating system and more...

The Matrox G200 series desktop graphics cards released in the late 90's are now seeing open-source DRM kernel driver support emerge in 2020...

Longtime open-source Intel Linux kernel graphics driver developer Chris Wilson has out a big new set of patches...

The GCC crew is preparing to issue their first stable point release to the GCC 10 series next week...