Phoronix

GTK 4.0 isn't expected until autumn 2020 but a lot of work remains for that to happen as the next big update to GNOME's toolkit...

CERN, The European Organization for Nuclear Research that is home to the Large Hadron Collider and much more, has been working on alternatives to Microsoft software and recently some of their recommended options for various tasks / application replacements was published...

While Mesa 19.3 was just released last week, Mesa 19.3.1 is now available rather than on its bi-weekly release cadence in order to avoid the Christmas and New Year's holidays...

Coinciding with the release of Linux Mint 19.3 is the debut of the MintBox3 Linux Mint pre-loaded small form factor desktop computer that is fan-less...

It was just last week that Canonical released Multipass 0.9 as their means of easily spinning up Ubuntu virtual machines across Linux / Windows / macOS. Today Multipass 1.0.0 made the surprisingly fast debut and marks their first stable release...

After recently taking some time off of work, Canonical's Daniel van Vugt has been back on the GNOME bug hunt in the continuing quest of optimizing its performance. This GNOME 3.36 cycle is particularly important considering the upcoming Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release...

New AMD Family 17h (Zen) CPU family microcode was merged today into linux-firmware.git...

In meeting their plans for shipping Linux Mint 19.3 "Tricia" before Christmas, the Xfce / MATE / Cinnamon editions of this updated Linux distribution shipped this morning...

A few weeks back having done Threadripper 3970X Windows vs. Linux benchmarks for seeing how the competing operating systems are performing, following the recent i9-10980XE 11-way Linux distributions tests I loaded up Microsoft Windows 10 Pro November 2019 Update... Here are those benchmarks for those wondering how the Cascadelake-X platform is running in Windows vs. Linux performance.

Excluding the Linux hardware reviews, here is a look back at the most-viewed Radeon Linux/open-source graphics driver news of the 2010s...

NVIDIA announced the new DRIVE AGX Orin last night as their software-defined platform for robots and vehicles. Besides the DRIVE AGX itself, making it very notable is the use of their new Tegra "Orin" SoC...

While it's normally recommended switching to the P-State/CPUFreq "performance" governor for the optimal Linux gaming experience and the preferred default of Feral's GameMode Linux gaming daemon, in the case of Intel integrated graphics you may find better results in using the "powersave" governor...

With the new GNOME GLib 2.63.3 library release is a new "GMemoryMonitor" API for allowing notifications of when an application should attempt to free any non-critical system memory in an effort to help the system cope with memory pressure...

There's still nothing on Solaris past the v11.4 series, but Oracle is ending out 2019 with a last stable release update for the year...

A Kubuntu laptop is launching soon that is aiming for a high-end Linux laptop experience atop the KDE flavor of Ubuntu...

It looks like the FLANG Fortran compiler (also previously referred to as f18) could soon be landing in the LLVM source tree and in time for the LLVM 10.0 branching...

One year and one week since announcing the Deep Learning Reference Stack built atop Intel's open-source technologies like Clear Linux and Kata, the Deep Learning Reference Stack 5.0 was released today...

Canonical is soliciting desktop and server users to participate in a brief survey for helping to focus their work on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and moving forward...

If Purism didn't already have their hands full enough in working on the Librem 5 to make a fully functional Linux smartphone, the company announced today a forthcoming price hike for the device while also announcing their expansion into the server space.....

The latest in our series looking at various Linux performance metrics for end of year 2019 as well as for larger comparisons in ending out the 2010s, the latest is an always fun benchmarking topic... Looking at the course of Intel's Clear Linux performance over the course of the year. Here is a look at the performance of Clear Linux over the span of 2019 for 80 different tests.

Feral Interactive has announced they are releasing the complete season of Life Is Strange 2 for Linux (and macOS) this Thursday...

NetworkManager 1.22 is out today as the last update of this widely-used Linux network manager software for 2019...

More Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) material is queuing ahead of the Linux 5.6 kernel cycle in early 2020...

One of many features not yet in place for Purism's Librem 5 smartphone is working convergence where one can plug-in a display and keyboard/mouse to the phone and have a working system, along the lines of what was originally envisioned by Canonical with Ubuntu Touch. But some progress is being made with at least getting their phone-focused "Phosh" Wayland compositor working on the desktop form factor...

With most all-in-one water cooling setups I am used to seeing no Linux support at all either from the vendor themselves or any third-party/community reverse-engineered support, but in the case of the NZXT Kraken X series with the independent GKraken open-source software is easily the best experience I've had to date in managing water cooling setups from the Linux desktop...

MoltenVK has now caught up against the latest Vulkan upstream specification for the time being in supporting Vulkan translated to Apple's Metal API on macOS and iOS...

While the Raspberry Pi folks have been making thermal/power improvements to the Raspberry Pi 4 firmware, running this budget-friendly ARM single board computer with a heatsink or some form of cooling is certainly recommended if you want to sure it operates at the optimal clock frequencies. A Phoronix reader devised the CooliPi 4B and it's wound up being one of the best Raspberry Pi 4 cooler we have tested to date.

Under the planned time-line for transitioning to a Git workflow for the GNU Compiler Collection that was established back at the GNU Tools cauldron conference, 16 December was to be the cut-off for deciding which Git conversion program to use for translating their massive SVN repository into Git. That puts today as the deadline in order to meet their goal of switching over to Git at the start of 2020, but it looks like it could take several more days to decide their SVN-to-Git approach...

NVIDIA's "VideoProcessingFramework" is an open-source set of C++ libraries that are wrapped around by Python bindings for interacting with their closed-source Video Codec SDK. The function of this framework is to make it easy to exploit GPU-accelerated video encode/decode from Python...

Making Mir's XWayland support much more usable now is initial server-side decoration support in order to handle window resizing and window movements...

Last week AMD launched the Radeon RX 5500 XT graphics card as the sub-$200 Navi 14 graphics card in versions with either 4GB or 8GB of GDDR6 video memory. In our launch-day Radeon RX 5500 XT Linux testing the benchmarks of this budget 7nm graphics card was done using the 4GB review sample, but with Phoronix readers being curious about the 8GB version, I bought the GIGABYTE Radeon RX 5500 XT GV-R55XTOC-8GD for some additional Linux testing. Here are those results.

Well, here is some interesting M+A activity a week ahead of Christmas... Intel just announced they are acquiring AI chipmaker start-up Habana Labs...

Philip Rebohle has released DXVK 1.5 as the newest version of this Direct3D-over-Vulkan implementation and is a big release considering last night's merging of D9VK / Direct3D 9 support...

As part of Fedora 32's bleeding-edge compiler toolchain with the likes of GCC 10 and LLVM 10, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has approved making use of GNU C Library 2.31. Glibc 2.31 will be out early next year with more features in tow...

The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X/3970X are incredibly fast and trounce the competition, but as noted on launch-day most (all?) Linux distributions have a boot issue with them over a machine check exception. There is an easy workaround to let these core-happy CPUs boot and run Linux while the proper fix was queued last week in ras/core in what looks like it will wait until Linux 5.6 for merging...

The Broadcom V3D Gallium3D driver within Mesa 20.0 now has initial support for geometry shaders as needed by OpenGL ES 3.2...

D9VK, the frog-themed Direct3D 9 over Vulkan translation layer originally based on DXVK, has now been merged into the upstream DXVK Direct3D 10/11 over Vulkan layer. In other words, a single project is now providing support from Direct3D 9 through Direct3D 11 for Vulkan acceleration in speeding up the Windows gaming on Linux experience...

Oracle's had quite the file-system history and looking ahead to 2020 they appear committed to the XFS boat on the Linux front. Oracle retains control over the upstream ZFS file-system and could push for better Linux integration of that file-system plus they formerly employed Btrfs creator Chris Mason during its infancy. But they also employ lead XFS maintainer Darrick Wong and in keeping in-line with Red Hat Enterprise Linux defaults embrace that as their primary file-system for Oracle Linux...

On schedule with one week since the closure of the Linux 5.5 kernel merge window and subsequent release candidate, Linux 5.5-rc2 is out this evening for testing...

On Christmas it will mark three years since the release of FreeDOS 1.2 while it appears FreeDOS 1.3 is right around the corner and could potentially be released around that same time. FreeDOS continues going strong as a complete DOS-compatible open-source environment and with this next release can even function as a DOS Live CD...

If opting for a high-end desktop/workstation like the Intel Core i9 10980XE and even for smaller systems, your choice of Linux distribution can be a big factor in the performance potential out of the system. In benchmarking eleven modern Linux distributions across dozens of benchmarks, the performance difference can be more than 30% for the out-of-the-box Linux performance. Benchmarked this round on the i9-10980XE were multiple versions of CentOS, Clear Linux, Debian, Fedora Workstation, Manjaro, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Solus, and Ubuntu.

On Friday I published two years worth of Mozilla Firefox benchmarks in re-testing every browser release from Firefox 57 through Firefox 71 stable as well as the latest beta/alpha releases. One of the questions that came out of that was seeing the current Chrome performance on Linux against Firefox, so here are some fresh numbers there...

The Raspberry Pi 4 continues seeing better mainline kernel/software support as we approach 2020...

Rav1e's weekly-ish pre-releases for this Rust-written AV1 encoder have been focusing a lot on better performance via hand-written x86 Assembly, making use of SIMD extensions, and other fine tuning of their encoder. With this newest pre-release, another ~20% speed-up was obtained...

In their journey towards the Intel Xe GPUs expected to launch initially next year in the form of Ponte Vecchio, just about one month ago Intel posted patches implementing Shared Virtual Memory support for their Linux graphics driver. Those SVM patches have now been revised for further review in potentially making it for Linux 5.6 should everything look good...

Released on Friday was a new version of AMD's GPU Performance API "GPUPerfAPI" project under the GPUOpen umbrella. This is the AMD library used by CodeXL, Radeon Compute Profiler, and others for tapping GPU performance counters and to help in analyzing performance/execution characteristics for Radeon hardware. But this new GPUPerfAPI 3.5 release comes with a rather surprising change...

KDE developers are working on "something big" but this week in pre-holiday mode still managed to land a lot of improvements to the wide spectrum of KDE software...

D9VK 0.40 is out today as the latest feature update to this Direct3D 9 over Vulkan translation layer based on DXVK...

While the Mesa 20.0 cycle is quite young and still over one month to go until the feature freeze for this next quarterly installment of these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan Linux drivers, it's quite exciting already with the changes building up. In particular, on the Intel side they are still positioning for the Intel Gallium3D driver to become the new default on hardware of generations Broadwell and newer. Here is a quick look at how the Intel Gallium3D performance is looking compared to their legacy "i965" classic OpenGL driver that is the current default...

When it comes to PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs, the drives we have been using are the Corsair Force MP600 that have been working out great for pairing with the newest AMD Ryzen systems. But a Black Friday deal had the Sabrent 1TB Rocket NVMe 4.0 Gen4 PCIe M.2 SSD on sale, so I decided to pick one up to see how it was performing on Ubuntu Linux. Here are benchmarks of the Sabrent Gen4 NVMe SSD, which in the 1TB capacity can be found for $150~170 USD.