Phoronix

AMD engineers responsible for their official Vulkan driver code-base have issued their first updated open-source snapshot in two weeks for AMDVLK fans...

With Linux 5.9 comes the ability to compress the Linux kernel image / initrd with Zstd for yielding faster boot speeds but at a compression ratio between Gzip and XZ/LZMA. Being proposed next with the widespread adoption of Facebook's Zstd is compressing the kernel microcode/firmware files...

The UBports' Ubuntu Touch crew has been focusing a lot lately on improving their support for the popular, budget-friendly PineTab tablet and PinePhone smartphone. The next OTA release will bring more improvements for fans of these PINE Allwinner-powered devices...

For the past two summers student developer Giuliano Belinassi has been working under Google Summer of Code in working to address GCC parallelization bottlenecks and ultimately a goal of allowing single source files to be split up for compilation in parallel by GCC. In particular, being able to split the compilation of large source files across multiple CPU cores. The latest patches on this "-fparallel-jobs=" was sent out today as we approach the end of GSoC 2020...

The Chinese-developed C-SKY CPU architecture for 32-bit SoCs and embedded processors could soon see an LLVM back-end to complement the C-SKY support found since GCC 9...

Proposed last year for Fedora 32 was aiming to make it easier to swap out GCC for other alternate compilers (like Clang) by using the update-alternatives functionality on Fedora for handling the /usr/bin/cc and /usr/bin/c++ symbolic links. That work was deferred to Fedora 33 as it wasn't completed in time while now it's been deferred yet again to Fedora 34 next year...

The second and possibly final release candidate of LLVM 11.0 is now available for testing...

AMD's software team has released version 3.7 of ROCm, the Radeon Open Compute stack as their alternative to NVIDIA's closed-source CUDA compute environment...

Merged into Mesa 20.3 earlier this week was VALLIUM as a Vulkan front-end to Gallium3D with an explicit focus to serve as a CPU/software-based Vulkan implementation and relying upon the Gallium/LLVMpipe infrastructure. But with VALLIUM being a Gallium3D front-end, some have wondered whether this could allow Vulkan to magically work with existing Gallium3D hardware drivers or even to run Vulkan on GPUs not natively supported by Vulkan...

WSL2 as a HyperV-powered more VM-like Windows Subsystem for Linux rolled out officially in the Windows 10 May 2020 Update. Microsoft though has now back-ported WSL2 to their Windows 10 November 2019 and May 2019 updates...

NVIDIA is preparing to remove support for multi-GPU modes of AA (anti-aliasing), AFR (alternate frame rendering), and SFR (split frame rendering) from the Linux driver in the near future...

The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) today announced the formation of a Software Implementation Working Group (SIWG) to bring AV1 video support to more platforms by leveraging Intel's open-source SVT-AV1 implementation...

Xfce 4.16 continues to move along on new and improved features with hopes of shipping this calendar year. A batch of xfce4-panel improvements were merged today...

After System76 was teasing a new Bonobo WS in recent days as a high-end laptop with Core i9 10900K, up to 128GB of RAM, and Coreboot, they have now announced this $2399+ laptop...

As part of the upcoming oneAPI 1.0 "Gold" release, oneAPI Level Zero 1.0 was released this morning...

There is a common misconception that the official AMD Radeon open-source Vulkan driver "AMDVLK" doesn't support FreeSync / Variable Rate Refresh, but that is actually inaccurate as the support was merged earlier this year albeit never announced or made it into the release notes...

Longtime independent Linux kernel developer Con Kolivas known for his work previously on the BFS scheduler and now the MuQSS scheduler as well as his out-of-tree "-ck" patch set is becoming increasingly concerned over the growing size of the kernel code-base and that ultimately could put an end to his work with a focus on greater desktop interactivity/performance...

For the past few years there has been a Fedora spin for the "Internet of Things" while with Fedora 33 this autumn the Fedora IoT version is being promoted to an official edition...

The first development release of the forthcoming Phoronix Test Suite 10.0-Finnsnes is now available for evaluation for this open-source, cross-platform, fully-automated benchmarking software framework...

While the feature rich Mesa 20.2 should be christened as stable within the next couple of weeks, Mesa 20.1.6 is out today as for what is now the newest bi-weekly stable point release for this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers...

Along with Solaris 11.4 SRU24, another operating system update out this week from Oracle is the beta of their forthcoming RHEL7-based Oracle Linux 7 Update 9...

With Intel's Lakefield and the future Alder Lake with their hybrid x86 architecture mixing of "little" and "big" cores, operating system optimizations become all the more important and thus will be interesting to see how the battle is between Windows and Linux...

As alluded to previously, a major overhaul of OpenBenchmarking.org has been in the works for a number of months now including a completely brand new analytics engine as part of the Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 development with its release due out later this year. With the new OpenBenchmarking.org now in good enough shape at least for the internal infrastructure, this new version is being opened up to the public today while over the weeks ahead more features will continue to be flipped on.

Fedora's plans to make use of link-time optimizations (LTO) by default with the GCC compiler when building Fedora 33 packages is looking like it will successfully pan out...

Oracle engineers have released a new version of GraalVM, their Java virtual machine that supports JIT compilation, ahead-of-time compilation with GraalVM Native Image, an LLVM runtime, JavaScript runtime, and other language support like Python and R...

Red Hat confirmed today it is bringing Multipath TCP (MPTCP) to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3 as a "tech preview" feature...

Intel's open-source team responsible for their Compute Runtime on Tuesday released version 20.32.17625 for this HD/UHD/Iris/Xe Graphics compute stack providing OpenCL 2.x/3.0 and oneAPI Level Zero capabilities...

Solaris 11.4 continues chugging along per the Oracle/Solaris maintenance terms but still with no signs of life beyond the 11.4 series with any radical changes. The twenty-fourth stable release update was issued on Tuesday for Oracle Solaris 11.4...

There are just a handful of games like Battlefield 4, Thief, and others that can make use of AMD's long-deprecated Mantle graphics API as the predecessor to modern graphics APIs like Vulkan and Direct3D 12. Mantle never was brought to Linux given the emphasis quickly turned to Vulkan within The Khronos Group, but now with the open-source "GRVK" project it's being mapped on top of Vulkan...

Given the uncertainty created by Mozilla laying off roughly a quarter of their staff last week that did include some Rust developers and in looking to further along the Rust ecosystem in its own right, the Rust core developers in cooperation with Mozilla are working to form the Rust Foundation...

A few weeks back Alibaba announced the "XT910" as the fastest RISC-V processor featuring 16 cores and clock speeds up to 2.5GHz while being manufactured on a 12nm node. This by far beats most RISC-V hardware currently available and now at this week's Hot Chips conference the Chinese company is reporting that the XT910 is faster than an Arm Cortex-A73...

TensorFlow Lite for AI inference on mobile devices now has support for making use of OpenCL on Android devices. In doing so, the TFLite performance presents around a 2x speed-up over the existing OpenGL back-end...

Ahead of the big Qt 6.0 release expected before the end of the year, Debian's current Qt package maintainers have decided to step down...

NVIDIA today released 450.66 as their latest stable Linux graphics driver update...

More than a dozen patches were merged by a Microsoft engineer into Mesa yesterday...

As written about at the start of the month, well known GNOME contributor Daniel van Vugt of Canonical/Ubuntu has added tackling deep color support to his TODO list for being able to properly handle 30-bit color on the desktop...

Continuing on with all of the OpenCL Mesa work that's been going on by Red Hat developers in recent time, LLVM's libclc library now has support for targeting Mesa SPIR-V...

Edward Shishkin continues pushing ahead with not only maintaining the existing out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system code but also developing Reiser5 seemingly without any major corporate support. Reiser4 and the experimental Reiser5 file-system code were updated on Monday for Linux 5.8 kernel compatibility...

It landed sooner than anticipated but the LLVMpipe patches enabling OpenGL 4.5 support were merged to Mesa 20.3-devel today and are also marked for back-porting to the Mesa 20.2 series soon to be promoted to stable...

Complementing Amazon's recently launched EPYC 7002 "Rome" CPUs in the EC2 cloud, the "c5a" series has now been extended with the "c5ad" line-up of AMD EPYC Rome processors that now have local NVMe-based solid-state storage directly attached. Initial tests of the Amazon EC2 C5ad instances are promising and indeed offering better value than the comparable Intel Xeon instances.

While Raptor Computing Systems has been making fabulous 100% open-source/libre hardware systems based around POWER9 with the likes of their Talos II and Blackbird systems, don't hold your breath on quickly seeing fully-open POWER10 systems even with "OpenPOWER" being trumpeted in recent years and similar for being more open-source friendly than the likes of Intel and AMD...

SiFive today announced OpenFive as their custom silicon business now spun into its own self-contained, autonomous unit...

Red Hat's David Airlie has been on quite a spree lately with open-source graphics driver improvements from OpenGL 4 for LLVMpipe to now merging "VALLIUM" for a Vulkan software implementation...

Version 20.08 of Kdenlive has been released, the KDE-aligned open-source non-linear video editor platform that is among the best in the field for open-source, community-driven projects...

After covering the Linux/open-source POWER10 bring-up for a number of months already, IBM has finally announced firm information on their forthcoming POWER10 processors. POWER10 looks promising but these 7nm CPUs will not begin shipping until the second half of next year...

Going back many months have been work on making Wine work nicely on 64-bit POWER (POWER9) for ultimately being able to handle Windows programs on IBM POWER/OpenPOWER hardware. The latest Wine work has now been sent out for benefiting this CPU architecture popular with free software purists...

For years Mesa's LLVMpipe software rasterizer has been bound to OpenGL 3.3 support but finally in recent months Red Hat's David Airlie has been tackling OpenGL 4.x support... Right now in Mesa it's at OpenGL 4.3 but there are patches seemingly to be mainlined very soon that will take it up to OpenGL 4.5...

As expected Linus Torvalds has christened Linux 5.9-rc1 to mark the end of the merge window and new feature development of Linux 5.9 as another featureful update that will debut as stable this autumn...

Linux 5.9-rc1 is set to be released this evening in marking the end of the two-week long merge window where new features are introduced for the cycle.

Today marks twenty-seven years since the late Ian Murdock started Debian as one of the original Linux distributions. It was on 16 August 1993 when Ian Murdock started this distribution while it wasn't until September when he released the first version. Debian remains one of the oldest Linux-based distributions / operating systems. Over the years Debian has gone on to power numerous other Linux distributions like Ubuntu and SteamOS while continuing to experience much success in its own right as well...