Phoronix

While Godot 3.1 isn't even out yet, our eyes are already looking forward to Godot 4.0 for 2D and 3D rendering improvements, but most notably Vulkan API support...

The ET: Legacy open-source project derived from the id Tech 3 sources and letting Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory live on almost two decades later is out with their biggest release yet: version 2.76. ET: Legacy 2.76 itself is a big release but the developers involved still have more plans moving forward...

Linus Torvalds has just released the second weekly release candidate for the upcoming Linux 5.0 kernel...

Kodi 18 Leia RC5 is available this weekend as what should be the last release candidate before this major release is out of this widely-used, cross-platform HTPC software...

Last weekend there was the Vulkan 1.1.97 specification update with five new extensions including some notable ones like memory priority and buffer device address while out today is the much more mundane Vulkan 1.1.98...

Since receiving the powerful NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier with its ARMv8 Carmel cores on this Tegra194 SoC a while back, it's been quite a fun developer board for benchmarking and various Linux tests. One of the areas I was curious about was whether GCC or Clang would generate faster code for this high performance ARM SoC, so here are some benchmarks.

While systemd 240 was released right before Christmas, it looks like systemd 241 will soon be released in order to address the recent "System Down" security vulnerabilities...

The work around better GPU/infrastructure handling for GNOME 3.32 continues with the most recent work merged this weekend being for better handling by Mutter over deciding the primary GPU of the system in multi-GPU systems whether it be multiple graphics cards, notebooks with dual GPUs, or systems with a USB-based external display adapter...

KDE developers continue being very productive this winter working on various improvements to their desktop stack...

The DragonFlyBSD operating system dropped its i386 install support back in 2014 with DragonFlyBSD 4.0 and since then has been focused on x86_64-only. Over the past two years or so they have gutted much of their i386-specific code from their kernel that is no longer needed for today's modern processors while over the weekend they got back to doing some more of that cleansing...

If you are able to make it to Brussels, Belgium in three weeks, the wonderful FOSDEM event is taking place as easily one of the best open-source/Linux events in the world and it's free to attend...

Helping to make the SDL cross-platform library more attractive for mobile/Android developers, the latest SDL2 code has an initial OpenSL ES implementation...

The KDE project has released KDE Frameworks 5.54 as their monthly update to these complementary components to Qt5...

The DXVK project for mapping Direct3D 10/11 atop Vulkan for Wine/Proton (Steam Play) users continues inching closer to its eventual 1.0 milestone...

As a follow-up to the story a few days ago about interest in getting the Radeon GCC compiler back-end merged for this year's GNU Compiler Collection 9 (GCC9) release, it's been approved!..

With the mention earlier this week of GCC potentially enabling the vectorize options at the -O2 optimization level, I carried out some fresh GCC 9 development benchmarks at various optimization levels for reference.

With GCC 9 being released in just a short time and being now onto the final stage of development, besides fixing regressions the developers are also getting the documentation in order...

The resurrected Linspire Linux distribution formerly known as Lindows is planning to enter the Linux server market as well as an upcoming "Office 365" edition...

X-Plane 11.30 is now available as the latest feature update to this realistic, cross-platform, mature flight simulator system that has long provided native support for Linux...

Beginning with February's KDE Frameworks 5.55 release, there will be an Android notifications back-end introduced...

SYCL, the single-source programming model developed by the Khronos Group and based upon standard C++, might soon be supported by the LLVM Clang compiler thanks to Intel...

While last week's Wine 4.0-RC5 release was quite a small release due to the holidays, Wine 4.0-RC6 is now available and it's back on track with more bug-fixing...

Canonical's Mir display server is off to a good start for 2019 with a lot of work and pet projects being worked on over the holidays by the developers involved...

Complementing the benchmarks done earlier this week in the our NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Linux review, here are more benchmarks of the GeForce RTX 2060 $349 USD graphics card that is beginning to ship next week. This article offers up a plethora of 1920 x 1080 and 2560 x 1440 Linux gaming benchmarks while providing the very latest driver performance results on the AMD Radeon RX 590, RX Vega 56, and RX Vega 64 while on the NVIDIA side was the GeForce GTX 1060/1070/1080 and RTX 2060/2070 graphics cards.

The Tux-themed MarioKart-inspired SuperTuxKart animated racing game is out with its v0.10 Beta 1 release that delivers on initial LAN/Internet-based multiplayer support...

From the end of the year to already this year there are several new test profiles available via OpenBenchmarking.org and the Phoronix Test Suite...

With just days to go until the Mesa 19.0 branching and feature freeze, it's a busy time on Mesa Git with developers working to land their latest changes into this next quarterly feature release...

The LLVM project has long been transitioning from Subversion-centered development to using Git around GitHub. The new "LLVM monorepo" Git setup is now considered finalized...

VLC 3.0.6 was released on Thursday while VideoLAN developers were at CES in Las Vegas celebrating the milestone of their cross-platform multimedia software surpassing three billion total downloads...

While the Linux 5.0 kernel has a lot of enticing features and improvements, if you rely upon ZFS On Linux (ZOL) you will probably want to hold off on trying the Linux 5.0 release candidates at this time...

While released too late for making it into GNOME 3.31.4 proper as the newest GNOME 3.32 development release, out today are GNOME Shell 3.31.4 and Mutter 3.31.4 and both of these components offer up performance fixes/improvements...

While the Linux desktop's display stack has largely reached parity with Windows and macOS in recent years (most recently, the DRM core properties hitting Linux 5.0 around Adaptive-Sync / VRR), but one of the areas that has remained elusive has been for full HDR display support. We've seen NVIDIA working on nursing the X.Org-based display stack for HDR while now Intel appears to be working on the necessary Wayland changes...

Last month when running FreeBSD 12.0 benchmarks on a 2P EPYC server I wasn't able to run any side-by-side benchmarks with the new DragonFlyBSD 5.4 as this BSD was crashing during the boot process on that board. But fortunately on another AMD EPYC server available, the EPYC 1P TYAN Transport SX TN70A-B8026, DragonFlyBSD 5.4.1 runs fine. So for this first round of BSD benchmarking in 2019 are tests of FreeBSD 11.2, FreeBSD 12.0, DragonFlyBSD 5.4.1, the new TrueOS 18.12, and a few Linux distributions (CentOS 7, Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS, and Clear Linux) on this EPYC 7601 server in a variety of workloads.

For those that wait for a point release or two before upgrading to a new PHP release on your development box or web server, PHP 7.3.1 is out today as the first bug-fix release since last month's big PHP 7.3 release...

With yesterday's surprise announcement of the Radeon VII "Radeon 7" as a new $699 7nm second-generation Vega consumer graphics card launching in early February, you may be wondering about the open-source Linux driver support state. While nothing official has come down the wire yet, here is what appears to be the state for this new Vega graphics card on Linux...

For those with older graphics processors, rejoice as with the upcoming Mesa 19.0 driver release it might now be possible to have OpenGL 4.0 thanks to software-based implementations of ARB_gpu_shader_int64 and ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 finally being merged to mainline. The FP64 one is most notable with that being a requirement for OpenGL 4.0 but some older GPUs lacking that capability for bumping past OpenGL 3.3...

A late addition to the GCC 9 code compiler are new additions around ARMv8.5 as the latest revision to the AArch64 specification...

EditShare, which continues developing the professional-grade Lightworks video editor, does continue maintaining their Linux support and this year they are planning for more improvements. But not shared as part of their 2019 plans is any word on making good about the "open-source" version of the software they originally announced back in 2010...

Longtime Red Hat / Fedora designer Máirín Duffy has shared some proposals for a new Fedora logo and the lengths they are going to in coming up with this new logo/marks...

It's been over a decade since VIA x86 hardware has been relevant and with that their Unichrome/Chrome integrated graphics chipsets, but the effort still isn't over for trying to get the OpenChrome DRM/KMS driver into the mainline Linux kernel for these vintage systems...

GNOME 3.31.4 is out today as their latest development snapshot towards this March's GNOME 3.32 desktop release. GNOME 3.31.4 comes with several exciting additions ranging from enhancing its default web browser to the GNOME Boxes virtualization component enabling 3D/OpenGL support with VirtIO-GPU...

The first point release to the two-week-old Linux 4.20 kernel is now available...

While Monday was the Intel keynote at CES 2019, this morning AMD took the spotlight with Lisa Su's keynote in Las Vegas...

The folks at Purism have shared their latest status update on the Librem 5 Linux-powered, security-minded smartphone they plan to begin shipping in the months ahead...

While the ROCm "Radeon Open Compute" stack has been fully open-source for a while and in recent months even able to work fine off a mainline Linux kernel, a barrier to its adoption has been officially just have binaries produced by AMD for RHEL/CentOS/Ubuntu and not seeing these components including its OpenCL driver available through Linux distribution repositories. Fortunately, in 2019, that may finally be changing...

Last month firmware vendor AMI joined the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) while today the other big firmware vendor, Phoenix Technologies, is also backing LVFS for their OEM/ODM partners that want to distribute firmware update capsules on this RedHat-based service...

Not making it for the Linux 5.0 kernel but continuing to be revised is atomic replace functionality for the livepatching code. The Linux livepatch atomic replace feature allows for cumulative patches and the ability to remove a patch lower in the stack / patch series...

There is just one week to go until LLVM 8.0 and sub-projects like the Clang 8.0 C/C++ compiler will enter its feature freeze ahead of next month's official 8.0.0 milestone...

While the Btrfs file-system supports many next-gen features from SSD optimizations to transparent file-system compression to snapshots, it hasn't natively offered any encryption support. There have been Btrfs encryption attempts in the past, but nothing that has panned out in mainline short of running Btrfs atop dm-crypt. A new patch series was published overnight having another go at adding AES encryption to Btrfs...

After releasing Qt 5.12 a month ago, The Qt Company is using CES week to announce Qt Automotive Suite 5.12. This is the company's effort for getting their UI toolkit within more vehicles/automobiles for forming next-generation digital cockpits...