Phoronix

It's been another busy week for KDE developers even with everything happening globally around the coronavirus there are a lot of open-source desktop innovations continuing...

The FreeType library that is used by many open-source projects for font rendering and other font operations, is out with their first release of the year...

Last month Crucial introduced their P2 NVMe SSD series as their new low-cost successor to their prior P1 series. The Crucial P2 500GB NVMe solid-state drive retails for $60~65 USD which offers good value and yields better performance than their prior low-cost P1 SSDs.

Wine 5.8 has been uncorked for the weekend as the newest bi-weekly development release for running Windows programs and games on Linux and other platforms...

Xrdesktop, the Valve-funded Linux desktop support for VR headsets and making the likes of GNOME and KDE window managers VR-aware, is out with a new release...

Last month we reported on LibreOffice now preferring its new rendering code be built with LLVM Clang over alternative compilers. When falling back to CPU-based software rasterization, the Clang-generated code performs much better than alternative compilers given Google's own emphasis with Skia on being Clang-focused. LibreOffice 7.0 is now beginning a hard requirement on Clang when building for Windows...

Con Kolivas known for his longtime work on improving Linux desktop responsiveness with largely working on the kernel and the likes of MuQSS has now seen his first Mesa patch merged for fixing unexpected GUI-related stalls...

Last month marked the release of FreeRDP 2.0 for implementing the Microsoft Remote Assistant Protocol v2. FreeRDP 2.0 also brought RDP proxy support, font smoothing by default, Flatpak packaging support, better scaling for Wayland, and other improvements. Today now marks the release of FreeRDP 2.1...

A new set of kernel patches out this morning are for implementing software boost support within the ACPI CPPC CPUFreq driver...

Oracle's Anthony Yznaga has sent out a proposal for "PKRAM" as a new means of being able to preserve memory pages of the currently running kernel so that they can be restored after launching a new kernel via kexec...

The Lima kernel driver providing reverse-engineered, open-source driver support for aging Arm Mali 4xx graphics processors is finally seeing run-time power management capabilities come Linux 5.8...

IBM engineers have been working on improvements to the Linux kernel's power savings while running latency-sensitive tasks but still delivering comparable performance. Their own numbers for a patched kernel are showing significant power saving benefits as much as ~20%...

PipeWire, the Red Hat backed solution for providing modern management of audio and video streams that supports a Wayland-minded environment and also sandboxed applications with Flatpak while fulfilling use-cases set by JACK and PulseAudio, has a new session manager option...

At the end of April AMD announced the Ryzen 3 3100 + Ryzen 3 3300X and these Zen 2 budget processors are now shipping. Here are our initial benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 3 3100 and Ryzen 3 3300X processors running on Ubuntu Linux compared to an assortment of old and new Intel/AMD CPUs with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

The GNU Compiler Collection 10 has seen its first stable release this morning in the form of GCC 10.1...

Google this week announced accepted projects for Summer of Code 2020 as their virtual engagement for getting students involved in open-source development. As usual, there are a lot of interesting GSoC projects...

Years ago long before GNOME had great Wayland support and was used by default on the likes of Fedora Workstation and long before other Wayland compositors had mature support along with other areas of the stack, there was a Linux distribution offering up an experimental Linux "Live DVD/USB" OS for showcasing Wayland. That distribution is now out with a new release...

DragonFlyBSD 5.8 debuted in March while now shipping is v5.8.1 as the latest update for this BSD operating system...

On Wednesday marked the second weekly release candidate for the forthcoming Mesa 20.1...

Following the recent release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2, Oracle has now released Oracle Linux 8 Update 2 as their RHEL8-based distribution with various extra features on top and even an alternative kernel option...

Recently we noted the latest revision to AMD's Programmer Reference Manual points to PCID and MPK/PKEY support coming on future CPUs. New Linux patches now confirm that the MPK support is on the way with next-gen EPYC processors...

Android 11 Developer Previews have been available since February in bringing new 5G APIs, updated Neural Network APIs, privacy and security improvements, HDMI low-latency mode support, and many other additions. Google is now preparing the transition to Android 11 betas and ultimately to have this next mobile operating system release ready to roar by Q3...

It's been a while since hearing much out of the Google-backed Dart programming language for designing UI-focused cross-platform applications and its ability to compile to JavaScript or native code. But out today is Dart 2.8 as the latest step forward for this language...

Given the recent releases of Fedora 32, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Manjaro 20.0, and others, here is a fresh eight-way Linux distribution benchmark comparison.

Qt 5.15 is aiming to ship in approximately two weeks time while the first release candidate was issued today as one of the last opportunities for testing this forthcoming release...

David Airlie's "multi-sample support extravaganza" for the LLVMpipe software driver has been merged into Mesa 20.2-devel...

Last month the GNU MediaGoblin project announced they were still alive and have now managed to deliver a new release in the form of version 0.10...

While Ubuntu 20.04 LTS was released less than two weeks ago, attention by Canonical and the Ubuntu development community has already turned to Ubuntu 20.10 as the Groovy Gorilla. With it being the first release past an LTS debut, they tend to be a more liberal in the changes in allowing plenty of time to stabilize before the next Long Term Support cycle. On the ZFS front it looks like we could be in for some more exciting changes...

The Linux DM-Writecache target that allows for writeback caching to cache newly written data to an SSD or persistent memory will with Linux 5.8 see better performance out of Intel Optane like storage on newer platforms...

Firefox 76.0 is out today as the newest feature release to Mozilla's web browser...

David Howells of Red Hat has been working to "massively overhaul" the code surrounding the kernel's local caching for network filesystems...

NVIDIA Carmel CPU cores that succeeded Denver 2 and found for a while already within Tegra Xavier hardware now has mainline LLVM/Clang compiler support...

Intel developers are working on a new Linux feature and technology called "Intel Platform Monitoring Technology" as amounting to a hardware telemetry framework that can also be used by other hardware vendors. This appears to be a new feature Intel will be supporting on the hardware side starting with Tiger Lake...

For those wanting to learn more about the inner-workings of Wayland and its architecture, The Wayland Book is now freely available for all to learn from for moving past the X11 world on the Linux desktop...

OpenIndiana, the open-source operating system built off Illumos and the former open-source Solaris code, is out with version 2020.04 as its newest feature release...

Yesterday marked fifteen years since the very first release of the Unigine Engine, the longtime Linux-friendly game engine that over the past decade has seemingly increased focus towards industrial simulations and AR but remaining well known among PC enthusiasts for the company's very demanding tech demos...

The Linux-friendly folks at CompuLab are preparing to ship the Tensor-PC as their newest creation following their big successes with the likes of the Airtop 3 fan-less PC and incredibly small yet featureful Fitlet...

Back in March we reported how AMD developers were looking at GNU C Library platform optimizations for Zen and in part could be leveraging some of the capabilities currently employed by Intel for Haswell and newer. It's looking like some solid progress is being made in that direction...

When it comes to Intel's high performance Scalable Video Technology (SVT) video encoders, SVT-AV1 is the most well known for its great speed and usage by Netflix and others. But Intel SVT also consists of VP9 and HEVC/H.265 encoders too and today brought the debut of SVT-VP9 0.2...

GNOME 3.36.2 is now available as the latest stable GNOME desktop environment update...

Inkscape 1.0 is finally here! This open-source vector graphics editor that has been around for nearly two decades has finally reached 1.0 status...

The first beta of Krita 4.3 is now available for this advanced open-source digital painting software package. Krita 4.3 has been baking for about one year so there is a lot in store...

The GNOME Shell has long provided the ability for easily launching applications on alternative GPUs namely for multi-GPU/Optimus-type setups especially with the increasing number of laptops having both integrated and discrete graphics. GNOME is now introducing an addition to .desktop files so applications can specify if they should run on the dedicated GPU if available...

OpenRazer, one of the leading open-source/Linux solutions for configuring Razer peripherals on Linux, is out with a big update...

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...