Phoronix

Given yesterday's release of Ubuntu Touch OTA-7, you might be curious how this UBports project is moving along with their adoption of the modern Mir 1.x that provides Wayland support... Unfortunately, it will still be a while before that is being shipped in production on Ubuntu Touch...

With Mesa 19.0 entering its feature freeze in three weeks, the race is on for finishing up OpenGL/Vulkan driver changes to make it in this next quarterly installment of these 3D open-source Linux graphics drivers...

The upcoming Chrome 72 release enables the "Mojo Video Decoders" by default on Windows while that milestone is set to be realized for Linux systems with the following Chrome 73 web-browser update...

One of the major open-source GPU compute driver initiatives going the past year has been the Red Hat folks working on adding Nouveau SPIR-V support as part of allowing GPU compute to work for this open-source NVIDIA driver. By longtime Nouveau contributor Pierre Moreau has also been work on adding SPIR-V support to Clover, the Gallium3D OpenCL state tracker...

After being in testing over the holidays, Ubuntu Touch OTA-7 via the UBports community is now officially out today...

The AMD Radeon "GCN" compiler back-end to the GCC open-source code compiler might still be merged ahead of the GCC 9 stable release due out in April...

Yesterday NVIDIA kicked off their week at CES by announcing the GeForce RTX 2060, the lowest-cost Turing GPU to date at just $349 USD but aims to deliver around the performance of the previous-generation GeForce GTX 1080. I only received my RTX 2060 yesterday for testing but have been putting it through its paces since and have the initial benchmark results to deliver ranging from the OpenGL/Vulkan Linux gaming performance through various interesting GPU compute workloads. Also, with this testing there are graphics cards tested going back to the GeForce GTX 960 Maxwell for an interesting look at how the NVIDIA Linux GPU performance has evolved.

AMD developers have now offered up an AMDVLK Vulkan driver build for Ubuntu as a Debian package based upon yesterday's source drop...

Last month Fedora developers were planning on building their Firefox package with Clang rather than GCC to follow the move by upstream Mozilla in transitioning their production builds from being built under GCC to LLVM Clang. But now Fedora has reversed course and will continue building with GCC though now benefiting also from PGO and LTO optimizations...

The developers behind the open-source, cross-platform 2D/3D Godot game engine have placed a release freeze on the upcoming Godot 3.1 with today's beta reveal...

A new conversion process has wrapped up for the LLVM Git repositories in their migration from Subversion. Unless there are any new, last-minute objections, the conversion is considered final and ready to be made official...

While the Linux 5.0 kernel merge window (nee Linux 4.21) just closed this past Sunday, already there are Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver updates queuing for DRM-Next to then premiere with the Linux 5.1 kernel cycle in about two months...

New Fedora releases go hand-in-hand with the latest and greatest GNOME releases. But as a formality, the change proposal has been submitted to officially approve shipping Fedora Workstation 30 with the GNOME 3.32 desktop...

With Mesa3D having a nice release rhythm going on now for their quarterly, time-based release cycles, all of their planned major release dates for the year are now published...

Intel's CES 2019 press conference is now wrapping up with some interesting announcements and other new information to relay, some of which was also covered at last month's Intel Architecture Day event in California but under NDA until now...

The release of the upcoming GNU Bash 5.0 shell release is now available. Bash 5.0 is packing various fixes over Bash 4.4 but also a number of new features and improvements to better conform to POSIX specifications...

GNUstep, the long-standing implementation of Apple's Cocoa/Objective-C frameworks as open-source and supported on Linux, BSDs, and other platforms, started off 2019 with some new releases. GNUstep GUI 0.27, GNUstep Base 1.26, and GNUstep GUI Backend 0.27 are the new releases out today...

With all of the major file-systems seeing clean-up work during the Linux 4.21 merge window (now known as Linux 5.0 and particularly with F2FS seeing fixes as a result of it being picked up by Google for support on Pixel devices, I was curious to see how the current popular mainline file-system choices compare for performance. Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS were tested on a SATA 3.0 solid-state drive, USB SSD, and an NVMe SSD.

While most major Linux distributions have been supporting UEFI SecureBoot for years already in order to work nicely on modern locked-down (generally Windows pre-loaded) PCs, Debian stable releases have yet to properly support SecureBoot but that should be changing with this year's release of 10.0 Buster...

Fedora developers are looking at implementing a per-system UUID identifier leveraged by the DNF package manager in order to more accurately count their user-base...

2019 is looking to be the year where we will finally see Multi-Gig Ethernet controllers appearing on desktop/enthusiast motherboards rather than Gigabit Ethernet controllers. Aquantia is using CES to show off its new Multi-Gig controllers and has already courted ASUS to use their chips on forthcoming motherboards...

AMD developers maintaining the open-source AMDVLK Vulkan driver that is derived from the same cross-platform code-base of their proprietary Vulkan Windows/Linux driver has seen its first code push of the new year...

SUSE's Richard Biener announced this morning that "stage three" development on GCC 9 is now over, which means all that's left before releasing it as GCC 9.1 is to carry out more regression and documentation fixes...

Huawei announced today the Kunpeng 920, which they are saying is the highest performance ARM-based processor to date...

Open-source driver developer Tomeu Vizoso of Collabora has taken to some Panfrost driver work for greatly enhancing the viability of this open-source, reverse-engineered ARM Mali Linux graphics driver...

Phoronix Test Suite 8.6-Spydeberg Milestone 1 is now available as the first development snapshot towards this next open-source, cross-platform benchmarking software release due out later in Q1...

Longtime GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) developer Jan Hubicka of SUSE is looking at enabling vectorization as part of the -O2 optimization level for Intel Core, AMD Zen, and generic x86_64 CPU targets...

At least until D3D9-over-Vulkan is in better shape, the means by which you can achieve the greatest Direct3D 9 performance right now under Wine/Linux is by using Gallium3D's "Nine" state tracker. Unfortunately though upstream Wine developers have been reluctant to support it upstream since its limited to just Linux and of that just Gallium3D drivers, but Gallium-Nine-Standalone makes this support easier to deploy across Wine versions...

NVIDIA used their CES keynote on Sunday night to announce the GeForce RTX 2060, their newest Turing graphics card priced at $349 USD...

Back in November is when ARM Holdings posted their GCC compiler support for "Ares", their forthcoming new ARMv8 core design intended for HPC/server SoCs. Ares continues inching closer to launch while now the GNU Assembler has picked up support for recognizing Ares...

Linus Torvalds ended the Linux 4.21 merge window on Sunday evening and decided to go ahead and rename it to Linux 5.0. Linux 5.0-rc1 is now available to begin the testing process for this next kernel release that will officially debut around the end of February or early March...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.0-rc1, what was formerly known as Linux 4.21 over the past two weeks. While the bumping was rather arbitrary as opposed to a major change necessitating the big version bump, this next version of the Linux kernel does come with some exciting changes and new features (of course, our Twitter followers already have known Linux was thinking of the 5.0 re-brand from 4.21). Here is our original feature overview of the new material to find in this kernel.

While Linus Torvalds tends to be very strict about accepting kernel changes that have the potential of breaking user-space, he himself authored a patch today to change the mincore() system call to enhance the security...

Rolled out recently was Bitsum's Coreprio third-party freeware utility designed to offer better Threadripper 2970WX/2990WX performance by its own implementation of AMD Dynamic Local Mode compared to the default Windows scheduler behavior. Here are some benchmarks of Windows 10 against Linux while trying out CorePrio's NUMA Dissociater mode to see how much it helps the performance compared to Ubuntu Linux. Additionally, tests are included of Windows Server 2019 to see if that server edition of Windows is able to offer better performance on this AMD HEDT NUMA platform.

Since November the developers behind Fedora Linux had been discussing whether to significantly delay or even cancel Fedora 31 so they could spend around one year working on re-tooling how the distribution is crafted and work on other fundamental changes. But it turns out now they have decided against this big shake-up delay...

As another optimization for Intel's Clear Linux distribution, a "libSuperX11" library is being considered that fundamentally changes how the X.Org libraries are handled...

Ahead of the big AMD keynote on Tuesday, AMD kicked off CES week today by announcing the Ryzen 3000 Series Mobile Processors...

Waiting until the last day of the Linux 4.21 kernel merge window, Ted Ts'o sent in the fscrypt changes today adding Adiantum crypto support to this file-system encryption framework currently used by F2FS and EXT4...

The initial batch of fixes as well as new device IDs were merged to mainline Linux Git overnight, just in time for today's Linux 4.21-rc1 kernel release (well, looking like it may be 5.0-rc1)...

Just ahead of NVIDIA's expected reveal of new hardware at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), their driver teams have done a Sunday morning drop of new Vulkan beta drivers that match the new functionality offered up by Vulkan 1.1.97...

KDE developers were busy in the first days of 2019 working on Breeze icon improvements and other work so KDE Frameworks 5.54, Plasma 5.15, and KDE Applications 19.04 will be in even better shape...

As the first Vulkan specification update in nearly one month and just ahead of CES where we'll see new graphics hardware, Vulkan 1.1.97 has been released with a handful of new extensions...

Besides the Intel engine-reset graphics driver work, some other interesting activity to report on this weekend in the Intel open-source Linux graphics driver space is the FP16 visual and frame-buffer configuration support that recently debuted...

With the ever increasing usage of RGB LEDs on modern computer systems, Linux kernel developers have begun discussing a formal RGB LED user-space interface...

There is an experimental Rockchip open-source video codec driver for accelerated video encode/decode posted for the Linux kernel but in its current form isn't suited for mainline inclusion...

Google developers working on the Chrome/Chromium web-browser have decided to blacklist the Nouveau driver from having GPU acceleration by default within their web-browser...

At the end of 2018, Canonical's Alan Pope shared the most popular Snap packages for 2018. Now there's a similar list out of the folks maintaining Flathub for Flatpak packages. The list of popular applications is quite different between these app sandboxing/distribution means...

With having a EVGA GeForce RTX 2070 XC GAMING retail graphics card fail on me, I ended up buying an ASUS TURBO-RTX2070-8G. The benefit of this ASUS GeForce RTX 2070 graphics card is that at times can be found for as low as $499 USD, in line with the cheapest RTX 2070 options and lower than many of the other RTX 2070 AIB models and certainly the RTX 2070 Founder's Edition at $599 USD. Should you be considering the ASUS TURBO-RTX2070-8G, here are some benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux.

A few days back there was the main ARM pull request for Linux 4.21 with new SoC and board support. A second ARM pull request has been submitted now during the final moments of the 4.21 kernel merge window and it offers up some new features, most notably the initial i.MX8 SoC support...

Fedora 29 wanted to have the use of LUKS2 by default when going for full-disk encryption compared to the LUKS1 meta-data format, but that didn't turn out in time so now the hope is to have it ready for Fedora 30...