Phoronix

Linux Mint recently began developing a new open-source Linux IPTV player. That project "Hypnotix" is moving ahead and will be integrated with Linux Mint 20.1 while is also available as a standalone Debian package...

The momentum of WireGuard continues with FreeBSD now having mainlined their port of this open-source secure VPN tunnel...

Another month of the tumultuous year that is 2020 is now in the books... At least in November were several exciting hardware announcements to help pass the time along with the exciting evolution of open-source software...

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) already supports LZO, LZ4, and Zstd compression while a proposal would also add support for LZ4HC...

For years there have been calls to deprecate Linux's FBDEV and work around replacing FBDEV drivers with modern Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers. While hardware vendors are now trending in the direction of DRM drivers (and the FBDEV emulation support if needed) after the embedded space was somewhat of a holdout, FBDEV drivers and the subsystem still exist as we roll into 2021. But at least one more FBDEV driver is now looking likely for removal in favor of its modern and maintained DRM counterpart...

OpenZFS 2.0 has been officially released! OpenZFS 2.0 marks a major step forward for open-source ZFS file-system support for what started out as ZFSOnLinux but is now OpenZFS with unified FreeBSD and Linux support (macOS support is still being pursued as well) and this release also bringing many new features...

With the X.Org Server being "abandonware" but at the same time the upstream XWayland portion of the codebase continuing to be worked on, Fedora developers at Red Hat are looking at splitting XWayland into its own standalone package to make it easier to ship it without having to use the rest of the xorg-server code-base...

The weekly release candidates of Mesa 20.3 fell off the wagon last week due to the US Thanksgiving holiday but now is updated today for Mesa 20.3-RC3...

Version 1.10 of Intel's IWD "iNet Wireless Daemon" has been released as the increasingly useful alternative to the likes of WPA_Supplicant for Linux systems...

This month Western Digital introduced the WD_BLACK SN850 as the latest PCI Express 4.0 solid-state drive hitting the market. The WD_BLACK SN850 is a surprisingly strong performer if looking to upgrade to PCIe 4.0 solid-state storage, competing with the fastest of the consumer drives currently available.

CUPS printing system founder Michael Sweet who left Apple last year and that left CUPS in a stagnate position (as of writing, still no commits to their Git repository since April) while Sweet continues pushing ahead with his new and modern "PAPPL" effort...

With Qt 6.0 due to be released in December, Qt-minded consulting firm KDAB has published a blog post outlining the extensive 3D renderer improvements made for this big toolkit update. While Qt6's 3D rendering abilities are much improved, there still is further work ahead...

Up to now the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has only enabled Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) support by default for discrete graphics cards. But now that requirement is lifted for supporting NGG on forthcoming GFX10.3 (RDNA 2) APUs...

GhostBSD 20.11.28 is out as the latest version of this desktop-focused BSD operating system based on FreeBSD...

GNOME Circle was talked about earlier this month at the Linux App Summit 2020 while now it's been officially announced...

While in recent weeks Linus Torvalds was becoming increasingly concerned over the size of the changes in Linux 5.10, 5.10-rc6 is out this evening and fortunately it has calmed down. At this point Linus is appearing relieved that Linux 5.10 will be in good shape for shipping on time and without any major concerns...

With this month's release of Chrome 87 having more performance improvements while Firefox 83 debuted with its "Warp" JavaScript improvements, it's a good time for some fresh Linux web browser benchmarks of these two main options. Plus with Firefox 84 to begin enabling WebRender by default in some Linux configurations, there is also a fresh run of Firefox with WebRender enabled.

Over the past year we have seen various Vulkan features landing in the FFmpeg repository and this past week brought more fixes and improvements around using the Vulkan API for accelerated filters and more...

Earlier this month we covered the news of Xilinx is looking to upstream their open-source "AI Engine" driver to the Linux kernel. This comes as Xilinx and AMD are working on Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) support for their FPGAs with AMD being in the process of acquiring the FPGA giant. Now more open-source code is looking to be included in the Linux kernel tree...

While consumer GPUs are reaching market with AV1 decode acceleration, there still is the matter of the various media APIs and multimedia software making use of it. In cases where that is missing or the user doesn't yet have a supported Tiger Lake / Ampere / RDNA2 GPU, the dav1d decoder remains the fastest open-source CPU-based AV1 decoder. Similarly, SVT-AV1 remains the fastest CPU-based AV1 encoder available...

The latest bit of obscure hardware support set to arrive with Linux 5.11 are the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii U dongles for the Guitar Hero Live...

The Mediatek MT8167 SoC was announced four years ago already while for the Linux 5.11 kernel in early 2021 will finally be display support via the open-source Mediatek DRM driver...

For aspiring DJs wanting to mix beats under Linux, the Pioneer DJ DDJ-RR controller should be working come Linux 5.11 early next year...

Mike Blumenkrantz who has spent most of the year working on the "Zink" Gallium3D code for allowing universal OpenGL over Vulkan translation and took this Mesa code to OpenGL 4.6 compatibility and in some cases 90%+ the performance of a native OpenGL driver is now working on Zink development from a Radeon Navi graphics card with the RADV driver, which may in turn help uncover bugs and areas of optimizations for the open-source Radeon driver stack...

An exciting addition for GNOME 40 is that the Mutter compositor will be punting the input work off to a separate CPU thread...

KDE developers remain as busy as ever even with pandemic and Christmas season upon us...

Genode as an original operating system framework that has been in development for more than a decade is out with a new release. The Genode OS based Sculpt OS as their "general purpose OS" push is also updated...

RenderDoc 1.11 is out as the newest feature release for this leading open-source graphics debugger supporting platforms from Linux to Windows to the Nintendo Switch to even Google's Stadia and supporting all major graphics APIs...

One area not talked about much for Intel's latest Tiger Lake processors are hardened CPU security mitigations against the various speculative execution vulnerabilities to date. What's peculiar about Tiger Lake though is now if disabling the configurable mitigations it can actually result in worse performance than the default mitigated state. At least that's what we are seeing so far with the Core i7 1165G7 on Ubuntu 20.10 Linux is the opposite of what we have been seeing on prior generations of hardware.

Intel's Linux graphics driver developers have submitted their final batch of feature changes targeting the Linux 5.11 kernel...

Qt 6.0 is releasing in December and The Qt Company is already drafting plans for the release cycles of Qt 6.1 and Qt 6.2 LTS next year...

In September Arm began adding Neoverse N2 support to the open-source compilers initially with GCC and now the support has been merged into LLVM Clang 12 as well...

FUSE is well known to longtime Linux users for allowing file-systems to be implemented in user-space for where a Linux kernel port isn't feasible for portability or licensing restrictions, among other factors. There is also CUSE for character devices in user-space. Now being based on FUSE, there is "MUSE" being worked on for MTD in user-space...

Just some quick, friendly holiday reminders...

As part of Lenovo offering Linux pre-loaded on more laptops and desktops, they have been working on upstream improvements themselves along with their partners at Red Hat and others. One of the latest Lenovo-contributed improvements to the kernel is palm sensor support for newer ThinkPad notebooks...

Systemd 247 is out today as the latest major version of this Linux init system. Like most systemd releases, systemd 247 is very heavy on new features...

PHP 8.0 is out today as expected as a major update to this widely-used programming language for server-side programming and other purposes...

Unigine 2 remains one of the most visually stunning game and simulation engines out there. That's even with still using OpenGL (or Direct3D 11 also on Windows) while their Vulkan renderer remains in the works. Unigine 2.13 is out this week as their latest iteration of this visually incredible engine with first-rate Linux support...

OpenZFS 2.0 is getting quite close to release but isn't over the finish line yet and this week brings the seventh release candidate...

While the Radeon RX 6800 series is now shipping that was developed under the Sienna Cichlid codename, there are other fishy codenames remaining and are seeing more work for the Linux 5.11 kernel that will officially open development in December and then likely reaching stable in February...

For those with some extra time around the US Thanksgiving holiday, the Arcan display server/environment is out with a new release. This is the interesting project that's powered in part by a game engine, offers X11 and Wayland compatibility, ported to BSDs, and more recently has been exploring VR and other desktop innovations...

The Godot Game Engine has been funding work on a GPU-based texture compressor to deal with the issue that importing textures to this leading open-source game engine can often be painfully slow...

Blender has been gaining a lot of ground this year with numerous prominent organizations now backing its development (just most recently, Facebook) and just at the end of summer they delivered Blender 2.90 while out today is Blender 2.91...

PHP 8.0 is scheduled for release tomorrow on the US Thanksgiving day. PHP 8.0 brings with it many new language features on top of the opt-in JIT compiler support. Here is a look at some of the PHP 8.0 changes along with a quick look at the near final performance of PHP 8.0 on an AMD EPYC Linux server...

Last week a new vulnerability was made public for IBM POWER9 processors resulting in a mitigation of the processor's L1 data cache needing to be flushed between privilege boundaries. Due to the possibility of local users being able to obtain data from the L1 cache improperly when this CVE is paired with other side channels, the Linux kernel for POWER9 hardware is flushing the L1d on entering the kernel and on user accesses. Here are some preliminary benchmarks looking at how this security change impacts the overall system performance.

Thanks to work by AMD and SUSE engineers, the Linux kernel could soon be seeing frequency invariance support for EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors for yielding greater performance and power efficiency...

While Metro Exodus can run on Linux right now via Steam Play, 4A Games is still working on a port of this popular game to Linux and Mac systems...

The Qt Company has just announced Qt 6.0 Release Candidate 1 as what should be the second to the last test build ahead of the big Qt 6.0 toolkit release next month...

Just yesterday Raspberry Pi fans were celebrating that the V3DV driver is now officially Vulkan 1.0 conformant for supporting this modern high performance graphics/compute API atop the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer. Today another milestone was reached with V3DV...

This week marked the release of Vulkan 1.2.162 with the ray-tracing extensions now finalized. As such Intel's stellar open-source team has begun landing their work around Vulkan ray-tracing ahead of the Xe HPG hardware availability that will support this functionality...