Phoronix

Building off Phoronix Test Suite 9.8 M1 from the start of June, the second development "milestone" release is now available for our cross-platform, open-source automated benchmarking software...

AMDVLK 2020.Q2.5 is out today as the newest snapshot of this open-source official AMD Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems...

It should hardly come as a surprise if you regularly follow the Mesa quarterly release cadence for these open-source Vulkan/OpenGL drivers, but a release schedule has now been committed for next quarter's Mesa 20.2...

Intel's P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for Linux systems has been seeing a number of refinements lately including some major changes like shifting towards the "Schedutil" scheduler utilization governor by default. Further tuning with new/changed knobs is also on the way for giving users more control over their CPU power / performance preferences...

Microsoft has posted their initial patch implementing a Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver for the synthetic video device exposed by their Hyper-V virtualization stack...

One of many high profile features that didn't make it in time for Linux 5.8 is FGKASLR, Function Granular Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization...

At the start of 2020 well known KDE developer Nate Graham who publishes the weekly status reports on their desktop environment posted a 2020 KDE roadmap of sorts. Now being half-way through the year, here is a look at how that roadmap is looking with what items have been completed, what is still being tackled, and what is looking less likely to be accomplished...

NVIDIA today released a new Vulkan beta driver for Linux systems at version 440.66.17...

Back in March Ampere Computing detailed their next-gen Altra ARM-based server CPU with up to 80 cores per socket. Today the company is revealing more roadmap details including the forthcoming Altra Max that offers 128 cores per socket.

Dell is announcing this morning that their latest XPS Developer Edition laptops are beginning to ship with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS as the latest version of the popular desktop Linux distribution...

Mesa's TURNIP Vulkan driver for open-source Qualcomm Adreno support took another big step forward this week with the mainlining of tessellation shader support...

A new tunable for the RADV driver is to disable bounds checking for dynamic buffer descriptors. The initial beneficiary of this driver workaround is for satisfying the Path of Exile role playing game running under Wine / Proton (Steam Play)...

It wasn't even twenty four hours ago that Apple disclosed their plans for transitioning to in-house chips for future laptops and desktops and with that macOS 11. Already we are seeing the first of the LLVM compiler patches being upstreamed in preparing for the wild new Apple future...

Intel has landed their Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan driver support for their "DG1" discrete graphics card!..

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has renewed their attacks against the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and software patents in general, this time in relation to the COVID-19 / coronavirus crisis...

Apple finally confirmed the log-running rumor that their future laptops and desktop computers will be using in-house silicon with their custom designed Arm-based chips...

The newest TOP500 supercomputer list was published today. The newest TOP500 list includes more positions for AMD EPYC supercomputers but to some surprise the Arm-based Fujitsu A64FX-powered supercomputer has topped the list...

Going back to the end of 2018 was initial open-source "Nouveau" driver work on RTX 2000 / Turing GPUs as of Linux 5.0. But due to the lack of signed firmware images at the time, there was no actual hardware acceleration but just display/modesetting. The accelerated Turing support has come together recent so now here are benchmarks showing the open-source GeForce RTX 2060 and RTX 2080 performance of this open-source driver compared to the proprietary official driver.

LibreOffice 7.0 is aiming for release in early August but for that release to be a success they need help in testing...

While GNOME 3.0 didn't debut until early 2011, GNOME 3.0 and GNOME Shell have now been in development for a decade. While GNOME Shell has come a long way over the past ten years, the UI/UX folks are still eyeing further enhancements to this widely used Linux desktop...

It turns out for the GNOME 3.34 and 3.36 series, Mutter's window rendering culling code was broken and that led to extra rendering of windows not even visible... A fix is in the works and can lead to the performance doubling or more...

New OmniOS Community Edition releases for this open-source Solaris/Illumos-based operating system are now available that principally bring updated Intel CPU microcode for mitigating the CrossTalk / SRBDS vulnerability...

After announcing the NVIDIA Ampere architecture at last month's virtual keynote, beginning today the NVIDIA A100 PCI Express accelerator is now shipping in GPU compute servers...

Linus Torvalds as the father of the Linux kernel marked Father's Day 2020 with the release of Linux 5.8-rc2, right on schedule following last week's big 5.8-rc1 kernel with this cycle being one of the largest ever for this open-source kernel...

Following WireGuard being merged into Linux 5.6, the attention turned in recent months by WireGuard developers onto seeing their kernel port upstreamed in OpenBSD. As of this weekend, the WireGuard upstreaming in OpenBSD is their latest accomplishment...

Perl is out this weekend with Perl 5.32 as the latest version of this interpreted programming language...

For those trying to carry out AV1 video decoding on a 32-bit Arm environment, the new dav1d 0.7.1 decoder should be a heck of a lot faster...

More than one month ago we reported on AMDGPU patches proposed for better hot unplug handling, mainly for the use-case of external GPU solutions if disconnecting them while the system is still running to avoid a range of show-stopping problems. It's been a quiet few weeks but that work has now seen a new revision...

There have been a few Vulkan spec updates without any new extensions introduced but this weekend's Vulkan 1.2.145 revision does bring new functionality...

In addition to changing the acceptable language within the LLVM project, another topic this week sure to be interesting is on the establishing of an "incubator" process similar to that of Apache Incubator projects...

A few days ago I mentioned that it looked like the FSGSBASE patches could finally land for Linux 5.9 and indeed this performance-sensitive x86_64 feature is on track for premiering the next kernel cycle. But additional testing is encouraged...

Two weeks after ROCm 3.5, the AMD Radeon team has now issued a patch update to this Radeon Open Compute stack...

The Raspberry Pi 1 through Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ and even the Raspberry Pi Zero can now see Vulkan support via a new unofficial "RPi-VK-Driver" that is offering even better performance than the Broadcom OpenGL driver...

The Pascal programming language is 50 years old this year. The Free Pascal Compiler for Pascal / Object Pascal is out with version 3.2 to celebrate, five years since FPC's previous 3.0 stable series. Somewhat amusing. this FPC 3.2 compiler update adds a Windows 16-bit target support for building Pascal code for Windows 3.0+...

KDE developers continue making much progress on enhancing their desktop through this pandemic and the nice summer weather...

Wine-Staging has traditionally been around 800~850 patches over upstream while with Wine-Staging 5.11 this experimental/testing flavor of Wine has ticked down to just a 702 patch delta...

The first batch of "drm-misc-next" changes have been sent in for DRM-Next that is targeting the Linux 5.9 merge window later this summer...

Xfce's "xfdesktop" desktop manager rolled out version 4.15 this week as the newest albeit unstable update...

LLVM is the latest open-source project working to shift their Git development terminology away from the "master" branch naming and to something more inclusive. Nearly everyone who voiced their opinion so far were in favor of this change, but there still are open matters such as what to call their new main development branch, the involved technical costs, and how quickly such a transition should happen...

Wine 5.11 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development snapshot for this open-source project that allows Windows games and applications to run on Linux and other platforms...

One of the areas where Intel has the leg up over AMD when it comes to open-source software support is on the BSD side where generally the likes of FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD often exhibit better out-of-the-box support at launch. Here is a look at how DragonFlyBSD and FreeBSD are running on the Core i9 10900K "Comet Lake" processor with Z490 motherboard.

A Cogl driver API clean-up within GNOME's Mutter code-base was merged this week after being open for two months. This cleanup could ultimately help if/when Mutter decides to add a Vulkan back-end...

Following AMD publishing the open-source Linux driver patches for "Sienna Cichlid" (Navi 2) that included the RadeonSI OpenGL driver changes, the RADV Vulkan driver has now tacked on support for this next-generation Navi GPU...

The past number of months Facebook engineering has been working on a new slab memory controller for Linux that can offer less memory fragmentation and lower memory use and slab utilization. The sixth version of these patches were published earlier this month...

It's looking like the Linux kernel support for the FSGSBASE instruction that has been present since Intel "Ivy Bridge" CPUs might finally see mainlining with Linux 5.9...

Building off the existing Gen12 graphics driver support that has accumulated in the Linux kernel and Mesa over the past year, last month Intel sent out the open-source patches for supporting the DG1 graphics card on Linux...

If the VideoLAN project wasn't already busy enough developing the VLC media player, dav1d AV1 decoder, libbluray, x264 and numerous other open-source multimedia projects, libndi is a new library being developed for dealing with NDI (Network Device Interface) video streams...

Following a beta period since last year as the Firefox Private Network, Mozilla's virtual private network offering is now going official and under the Mozilla VPN branding...

Red Hat continues to invest in the modularity concept for packaging and will be embracing it "where it most makes sense" for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9...

The latest open-source/Linux bring-up for AMD's "Sienna Cichlid", a.k.a. Navi 2, is enabling VCN 3.0 video encode support...