Phoronix

While Intel's SVT-VP9 video encode has been public since February and receiving frequent Git commits for advancing this very fast open-source VP9 video encoder, finally today it saw its first tagged release, being called the SVT-VP9 0.1 pre-release...

While not exactly a big surprise with System76 having done an "OSFC Edition" Coreboot laptop at small scale at the end of the summer, but System76 is now formally announcing two Linux laptops shipping with Coreboot as an alternative to their proprietary BIOS...

Earlier this week I provided some fresh Windows vs. Linux web browser benchmarks for both Firefox and Chrome. For those curious how the current Windows 10 vs. Linux performance is for other workloads, here is a fresh look across a variety of software applications and while testing the near-final Ubuntu 19.10, Intel's rolling-release Clear Linux, and Debian 10.1 while running off an Intel Core i9 HEDT platform.

The promising ACO compiler back-end for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver now has support for GFX10/Navi graphics!..

In addition to Intel this week sending out their first big batch of graphics driver changes for the Linux 5.5 kernel cycle kicking off at year's end, today AMD developers sent in their first batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver changes targeting this next version of the Linux kernel...

There hasn't been a major release of the X.Org Server now in 17 months... Not because there haven't been any changes (in fact, a lot of GLAMOR and XWayland work among other fixing) but because no one has stepped up as release manager to get the next version out the door. But to workaround that, developers are looking at moving the X.Org Server to purely time-based releases and letting their continuous integration testing be the deciding factor on if a release is ready to ship...

While Ubuntu developers are busy adding experimental ZFS support to their installer, the SUSE developers working on their YaST installer are working on offering better security options for their platform by beefing up the encryption capabilities at install-time...

RenderDoc has already been the leading open-source graphics debugging tool for OpenGL / Vulkan / Direct3D across multiple platforms and it continues only getting more useful with each new feature release...

Google's newest open-source contribution for benefiting the Linux kernel is SchedViz...

Valve has released Proton 4.11-7 as the newest version of their Wine downstream that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

We are hitting the autumn Linux distribution update season and out today is NixOS 19.09 as the latest installment for this operating system built around the functional Nix package manager...

With Stallman sticking around as head of the GNU and with that the Free Software Foundation re-evaluating their GNU relationship, Richard Stallman is already saying there will be no major changes to the project he founded...

Last week I shared benchmark results of the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X vs. Intel Core i9 9900K in 400+ benchmarks in the largest comparison ever for these two competing ~$500 USD processors. If that wasn't enough, I repeated the hundreds of CPU/system benchmarks again but without any of the recent CPU security mitigations in place to see how the situation would have played out pre-2018.

The Qt Company has shipped Qt 5.14 beta as the newest version of the Qt5 tool-kit and their last real feature update as Qt 5.15 will focus more on bug fixes as development is shifting towards Qt 6.0 due out in one year's time...

Currently when resuming from systemd suspend or switching back to the KDE desktop from an alternate VT, it's possible with the NVIDIA proprietary driver to see screen corruption or leakage of previous screen contents to areas of the lock screen / desktop. This annoying issue is now being better addressed with Qt 5.14...

As we reported this weekend, the Ubuntu desktop installer "Ubiquity" has landed the much anticipated ZFS install support. That's now propagated through to the Ubuntu 19.10 daily ISOs and does indeed make for a quick and easy setup of Ubuntu Eoan running off a root ZFS file-system...

Intel engineers have contributed GPU-accelerated memory copy support to FFmpeg when making use of their preferred video decode implementation...

There still is another month until the feature freeze for Mesa 19.3 to end out 2019 and it will be a big one...

There weren't out in time for yesterday's formal GNOME 3.34.1 point release, but GNOME Shell and Mutter have out their prominent point releases today that are exciting on the correction front...

Besides RADV ACO compiler testing and AMDGPU bulk moves restored another common test request recently on the Radeon Linux graphics side has been looking at the NIR support...

The in-kernel staging Amlogic Meson video decode driver could soon handle H.264 support as soon as Linux 5.5...

For those annoyed by random textures appearing when launching the popular Rocket League game with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, a workaround has landed in Mesa 19.3-devel Git while also marked for back-porting to currently supported stable series...

RDPRU is one of the new instruction set extensions of AMD "Zen 2" CPUs that is for reading a processor register that is typically limited to privilege level zero. RDPRU allows for reading select registers at any privilege level. With Linux 5.5, the RDPRU presence will be advertised by the CPU features...

With running some fresh cross-OS benchmarks now that Ubuntu 19.10 is imminent followed by Ubuntu 19.10, a new Windows 10 update coming in the days ahead, and also the release of macOS 10.15, a lot of fun benchmarks are ahead. In today's article is a quick look at the Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 19.10 vs. Clear Linux web browser performance for both Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.

Just one day after announcing the Radeon RX 5500 series as the first Navi 14 GPUs, AMD has submitted the firmware binaries to the linux-firmware.git tree that are required for usage with the open-source Linux graphics driver...

KDE developer Roman Gilg attended the X.Org Developer's Conference last week in Montreal. At XDC2019 he provided the X11/Wayland developers with an overview of KWin's architecture as both an X11 window manager and Wayland compositor along with talking of some of the future plans...

GNOME 3.34.1 is out as the first point release to last month's big GNOME 3.34 desktop debut...

Just last week marked the one year anniversary since shipping the Haiku R1 beta release for this BeOS-inspired open-source operating system. The developers remain though as busy as ever with advancing this interesting open-source project...

Firefox 71 is bringing another important Wayland improvement!..

While Fedora recently began spinning workstation/live images for POWER (PPC64LE) at least as a work-in-progress, it won't be made a formal feature of the upcoming Fedora 31...

NVIDIA is the latest high profile company now contributing significant funds for advancing the open-source Blender 3D modeling software...

After an incredible 25 year journey at Intel and having founded the Open-Source Technology Center, Imad Sousou announced today he is stepping away from Intel...

While just one week past the Linux 5.4 merge window cut-off and now with XDC 2019 out of the day, Intel's open-source graphics driver team sent in their first batch of new material they will be targeting for the Linux 5.5 cycle...

One of the areas of performance I had been meaning to look more at following the recent AMD EPYC 7002 series launch was for database servers. With the original EPYC 7000 series performance, the performance came up short in competing with Intel Xeon CPUs, but for the EPYC Rome processors it ends up being a very different story. Given the launch last week of PostgreSQL 12, I've been trying out this new database server release on both EPYC and Xeon processors.

In addition to The Cascadelake X-Series CPUs launching at a much lower price, Intel announced the Xeon W-2200 series today also at lower pricing while cutting prices on their existing Core 9000 F-series desktop CPUs too...

AMD today lifted the lid on the Radeon RX 5500 series as their first Navi 14 based graphics card. This is the soft launch with no units shipping yet but expected to starting in November...

For those wondering, NVIDIA is still pursuing a generic allocator / Unix device memory allocator that has been talked about for years and a potential successor to the likes of the Generic Buffer Manager (GBM). They now have an implementation of their proposed allocator working for the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver though there still is a lot of work ahead...

With RMS resigning as head of the FSF but ultimately is remaining as head of the GNU, the Free Software Foundation is now publicly re-evaluating its relationship with the GNU...

The GNU Debugger (GDB) now has support for the Compact C Type Format following support for this debugging information format having been added to the GCC compiler and Binutils...

While popularity in Solaris-based operating systems may be on the decline, for Meson to ultimately replace other build systems it will need good support for said operating systems where Automake, CMake, and others are well supported. As such, with this weekend's Meson 0.52 release comes with better support for Solaris and the OpenSolaris-derived Illumos platforms...

While Red Hat is pursuing Pipewire with plans to fill the use-cases provided by the JACK(2) low-latency audio server, JACK2 isn't letting up and Sunday marked version 1.9.13 for the project and their first release since December 2017...

Vulkan 1.1.124 is out this Sunday evening with two new extensions...

Linus Torvalds is back on his Sunday release regiment with having just declared the Linux 5.4-rc2 test release and also took the opportunity to have some fun by shifting the kernel's codename to be the Nesting Opossum, replacing the Bobtail Squid...

With the bit of a surprise this past week of AMD flipping LRU bulk moves back on as a "fix" for Linux 5.4 and this now having landed in Linux 5.4 Git, here are some preliminary benchmarks of this feature being enabled on the newest 5.4 kernel builds since Friday.

While we are eager to see Godot 4.0 with its new Vulkan renderer and other improvements, Godot 3.2 is coming out first and this weekend marks the alpha release for this latest update to this leading open-source, cross-platform game engine...

WFX is a new WiFi driver being added to the staging area with the Linux 5.5 cycle coming up in a few months...

While the GNAT Ada front-end for GCC is in quite good shape, AdaCore has been experimenting with bringing their GNAT front-end to LLVM for allowing Ada code compilation with the LLVM compiler stack...

In addition to the Tigerlake support being plumbed within the Linux kernel and other areas of the open-source Linux software stack, this week they pushed out their initial Gen12 Tiger Lake support into the NEO compute run-time that is for providing OpenCL support as well as the ongoing SYCL enablement and other work around their forthcoming oneAPI model...

The Qt Company this week released the public beta of the forthcoming Qt 3D Studio for this development tool focused on creating rich 3D user interfaces with the Qt tool-kit...

This week Intel released MKL-DNN 1.1 as their open-source deep learning library. They also rebranded the software project as the "Deep Neural Network Library" (DNNL) though its focus remains the same. I ran some initial benchmarks on MKL-DNN/DNNL 1.1 on AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon hardware for reference...