Phoronix

GNOME's Sysprof profiler continues on a trajectory of becoming an incredibly versatile component for developers looking to maximize performance and efficiency under this desktop environment. Sysprof already picked up a number of new features for GNOME 3.34 but work is not yet finished...

Xfce 4.12 was released in February 2015 while finally getting ready to succeed that is the long talked about Xfce 4.14 that is expected to ship this month...

AMD dominated the Linux hardware conversations and benchmarking in July with their 7/7 launch of their 7nm Ryzen 3000 series "Zen 2" processors and Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" processors. Of the 273 original news articles on Phoronix during July and the 19 featured Linux hardware reviews / benchmark specials, AMD news and Linux benchmark results tended to dominate many of the top spots...

The newest initiative within the Fedora camp is a "Minimization Team" seeking to reduce the size of packaged applications, run-times, and other software available on Fedora Linux...

The latest upstream GNOME performance shortcomings being investigated by prolific contributor Daniel Van Vugt of Canonical are OpenGL pipeline stalls...

Thanks to Valve's open-source driver developer Samuel Pitoiset, there is now experimental support for using Wave32 support on Navi graphics cards for compute shaders...

A Phoronix reader has talked about the efficiency of using Raptor Computing Systems' open-source Blackbird POWER9 desktop system for Monero cryptocurrency mining in 2019...

Well known Panama-based VPN provider NordVPN has announced their NordLynx technology today that is based on the WireGuard protocol...

We've been eagerly watching Intel's open-source LLVM-based SYCL compiler support developed over the past number of months and today it finally premiered as an experimental feature in their modern OpenCL Linux driver package for its CPU run-time component...

The NetBSD 9.0 code has now been branched and preparations underway for releasing the next version of this BSD operating system known for its vast architecture support...

The UBports community developers continuing to advance Ubuntu Touch have shared their latest work items and plans. OTA-10 is being developed while they are also working on ports for the PinePhone and Librem 5 smart-phones, among other items on their radar...

Lennart Poettering has made available the first release candidate of the upcoming systemd 243 update. Systemd 243 is a big one in seeing more than 1,700 commits since the April release of systemd 242...

Linux laptop/PC vendor System76 has become a Thunderbolt licensee so that they can officially offer support for it in the Coreboot-based open-source system firmware initiative they are pursuing...

The recent proposal to drop Fedora's Modular and Everything repositories for the upcoming Fedora 31 release is yet to be decided after it was deferred at this week's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) meeting...

Intel's "CREATE" event is ongoing right now at SIGGRAPH 2019 where they are using it to repeat their goal of seeing a "1,000x advancement in performance" over the years ahead...

Valve's Linux developers today released Proton 4.11 as the newest release of their Wine-based software that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux under the Steam client...

Google today promoted their Chrome 76 web-browser to stable for all supported platforms, including Linux...

Blender has used SIGGRAPH 2019 week for announcing the major Blender 2.80 open-source 3D modeling software release...

Following the release of OpenXR 1.0, Collabora has announced the release of Xrdesktop, which was funded by Valve...

Complementary to yesterday's Radeon RX 5700 / RX 5700 XT Linux Gaming Performance With AMDGPU 5.3 + Mesa 19.2-devel, here are some benchmarks showing how the RadeonSI OpenGL performance has evolved for the Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT since they launched three weeks ago for this open-source OpenGL Linux stack...

Unity 2019.2 rolled out today as the latest quarterly feature update for this very popular cross-platform game engine...

Arch-based Linux distribution Manjaro has issued their newest testing update with some controversial changes...

The open-source MoltenVK project that offers Vulkan API support for Apple devices on iOS and macOS is out with a new release for mapping Vulkan atop Apple's Metal graphics/compute stack...

Last week I wrote about the GCC 10 compiler picking up a new scheduler model and cost tables for AMD Zen 2 CPUs to build off the initial "znver2" microarchitecture target from last year. Fortunately, those Znver2-specific improvements have now been back-ported to the GCC 9 compiler branch so it will see user systems with not as long of a wait until GCC 10 stable...

Valve's interesting ACO shader compiler alternative to AMDGPU LLVM currently for the RADV Vulkan driver as well as for RadeonSI OpenGL in the future now can handle vertex shaders...

In continuation of the article last week how the RISC-V Linux kernel support has been maturing and various missing gaps filled in, another feature just arrived in patch form: support for KVM virtualization...

In addition to new patches coming out on Monday for addressing power management with AMD's unreleased "Arcturus" GPU, a set of Mesa patches were merged for adding RadeonSI Gallium3D driver support...

While LLVM 9.0 was branched nearly two weeks ago and it was anticipated that the release candidate would immediately follow, only yesterday did 9.0-RC1 materialize...

Earlier this month AMD's Linux driver team sent out their initial open-source patches bringing up the "Arcturus" GPU as a new Vega family product. Today a second batch of patches adding in two thousand more lines of Linux kernel driver code were sent out...

NVIDIA's Unix/Linux graphics driver team has kicked off a new week by introducing the 430.40 long-lived driver release...

Now that the flow of initial Navi fixes and optimizations has settled down for both the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver and the Mesa RADV/RadeonSI user-space driver components, here is a look at AMD Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT graphics card performance on Ubuntu Linux at the end of July, now three weeks after these 7nm graphics cards first shipped.

It still remains to be seen if Purism will be able to ship the Librem 5 Linux smartphone this quarter as is their current revised target, but at least today they are publishing the finalized specifications for the phone's hardware...

In addition to the release of OpenXR 1.0 for kicking off SIGGRAPH 2019 week, The Khronos Group has released Vulkan 1.1.117 as a fairly notable update to this high-performance graphics API...

Back during the Game Developers Conference was the release of the OpenXR provisional specification by The Khronos Group while today for SIGGRAPH they have formally announced OpenXR 1.0...

Two weeks after AMDVLK received initial Navi 10 support, another release of this official open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan Linux driver is now available. With this 2019.Q3.3 release there is performance optimizations for Navi as well as some new extensions...

TurboSched is a new Linux kernel scheduler that's been in development by IBM for maximizing use of turbo frequencies for the longest possible periods of time. Rather than this scheduler trying to balance the load across all available CPU cores, it tries to keep the priority tasks on a select group of cores while aiming to keep the other cores idle in order to allow for the power allowance to be used by those few turbo-capable cores with the high priority work...

Thanks to funding from Arm Holdings and Crossbar, the PyPy folks working on their speedy Python JIT implementation have extended it to support 64-bit ARM (AArch64) with compelling performance results...

AMD's GPUOpen development team has kicked off the new week by releasing Radeon GPU Profiler 1.6, their open-source and cross-platform GPU profiling and analysis utility. With Radeon GPU Profiler 1.6 comes support for gathering insights on AMD Radeon RX 5000 "Navi" graphics processors...

After being in development the past year and in beta the past few weeks, Latte Dock 0.9 is now officially out as this KDE-aligned desktop dock...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.3-rc2 and sums it up as a "reasonably large rc2 to go with a fairly large merge window."..

GNOME's Pango text layout and rendering library is now in much better shape with the brand new 1.44 release following receiving some attention by Red Hat's developer team...

Coming for the Linux 5.4 cycle later this year will be support for the buttons on newer Microsoft Surface devices...

While initially the user-space utility for Huawei's EROFS file-system was not publicly available, it came last November and this past April they began rewriting these EROFS user-space bits. Fortunately, since then they have done a better job of keeping EROFS-utils up-to-date against their latest kernel module changes for this read-only file-system...

Whether you like it or not, the Linux kernel's x86 32-bit support has already begun suffering some minor forms of bit rot. Most kernel developers are no longer actively testing x86-32 and distribution vendors are beginning to drop 32-bit support. The latest example of x86 32-bit's effectively demoted state is some buggy undefined behavior functionality living within the mainline kernel for the past year since the Meltdown mitigations landed...

Patches are now queued into the Linux kernel's hwmon subsystem staging area that allow the AMD "k10temp" driver to support the Ryzen 3000 "Zen 2" processors...

KDE developer Nate Graham has posted his latest weekly summary of KDE's development happenings as the team wraps up work for July...

With yesterday's Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Linux benchmarks for the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, some suggested that the Linux performance could have been better if using a Linux 5.x kernel. Well, here are some benchmarks comparing the performance of Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS with its Linux 4.18 kernel compared to Linux 5.2 stable as well as the brand new Linux 5.3 development kernel...

KernelShark 1.0 has been released as the tool for visualizing Trace-cmd Linux kernel traces...

It's vintage X.Org driver week... Not only was there an S3 display driver update for that vintage hardware, but a SiS X.Org display driver update has also been released...

To date there haven't been any really compelling RISC-V processors from a performance perspective but it's looking like we could soon be crossing that threshold...