Phoronix

For a few years GNOME has supported a "launch on discrete GPU" option for applications within the Shell's menu while for GNOME 3.36 that support is being cleaned up and extended to also handle NVIDIA GPU configurations...

With 2019 quickly drawing to an end, I figured it would be interesting to see how the performance of Mozilla Firefox has been trending over the longer term. So for this article today is a look at the Firefox 57 through Firefox 71 stable performance plus tests of Firefox 72 beta and Firefox 73 alpha all from the same system and using a variety of browser benchmarks.

Last year one of Feral's top Linux developers left the company and now another top developer has sadly left the game porting firm...

Introduced last month was the Flatpak 1.5.1 development build that provided initial support for protected/authenticated downloads of Flatpaks as the fundamental infrastructure work towards allowing paid or donation-based applications within Flathub or other Flatpak-based "app stores" on Linux...

As anticipated, AMD has now formally released a new version of their AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver following this week's Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Windows driver release...

QEMU 4.2 is out this morning as a key piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

While LibreOffice 6.4 isn't even coming out until the end of January, we are already stoked about the follow-on release to this open-source office suite... Currently the development builds are towards LibreOffice 6.5 (though given the big impact we wouldn't be surprised if it morphed into LibreOffice 7.0) and one of the features that landed at the end of November is the Cairo drawing being replaced by Skia and with that Vulkan-based rendering support for this free office suite...

Fedora Linux is on track to deliver another bleeding-edge compiler toolchain stack with Fedora 32 due out this spring...

Released earlier this month was Phoronix Test Suite 9.2 while now available is a point release with a couple of fixes...

Earlier this week AMD unveiled the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition driver and we await a Radeon Software for Linux / AMDGPU-PRO driver update for Linux users on supported distributions. But AMD has begun pushing some updated AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver code ahead of a possible tagged release in the next few days...

After a few weeks worth of delays due to blocker bugs the release of Mesa 19.3 is out today as a big end-of-year upgrade to the open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux systems. Intel and AMD Radeon driver changes largely dominate the work as always but there is a growing number of embedded driver changes and other enhancements for this crucial piece to the open-source 3D ecosystem...

For those preferring the Vim text editor, Vim 8.2 is out today and its primary new feature is support for "popup windows" and for demonstrating those new capabilities is even a new Vim-based game called Killer Sheep...

Oracle has released VM VirtualBox 6.1 with better integration around the public Oracle Cloud, continued work on their new 3D support brought forward in VirtualBox 6.0, user-interface improvements, and much more...

AMD today is shipping the Radeon RX 5500 XT as the new sub-$200 Navi graphics card. This 7nm graphics card offers 22 compute units, 1408 stream processors, up to 5.6 TFLOPS of compute power, 4GB or 8GB GDDR6 video memory options, and built atop their modern RDNA architecture and supporting features in common with the RX 5700 series like PCIe 4.0 support. Here is a look at the initial Linux gaming performance of the AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT with various gaming benchmarks and Steam Play tests as well.

KDE Applications 19.12 is out today as the collection of 120+ KDE applications tailored around the Plasma desktop and largely built using Qt and KDE Frameworks...

After being delayed from last month, Qt 5.14 is shipping today as the newest Qt5 tool-kit release while developers become increasingly focused on next year's Qt 6.0 end-of-year release and Qt 5.15 in the spring that will serve as an LTS release and the last hurrah for Qt5...

Beyond AMD's open-source graphics driver stack of the past decade, part of their original open-source plans have also involved providing public (NDA-free) GPU hardware documentation. That has come with time though the documentation drops are not coordinated in-step with code drops. Out today, for example, is the ISA documentation on Vega 7nm...

There are early discussions going on over the possibility of shipping WireGuard support in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS that could be done either using the existing DKMS kernel module or patching their Linux 5.5-based kernel with WireGuard now that the necessary crypto API changes made it into that release...

With the current Mesa 19.3 there is the Intel Gallium3D driver generally performing much better than their "classic" i965 driver and for Mesa 20.0 it looks to only make more ground as it switches over to this driver by default...

Yesterday was a look at the most popular open-source/Linux news of the decade with 2019 quickly drawing to an end. That was an interesting look at more than 27,840 original news items published on Phoronix since the start of 2010. Today meanwhile is a look at the most popular Phoronix featured articles / Linux hardware reviews / extensive benchmark pieces for the decade of which there were more than 2,820 this decade...

Intel's MKL-DNN Deep Neural Network Library (DNNL) that is open-source and catering to deep learning applications like Tensorflow, PyTorch, DeepLearning4J, and others is nearing its version 2.0 release. With DNNL 2.0 is now support for Data Parallel C++ as Intel's new language as part of their oneAPI initiative...

While the Linux 5.5 merge window has just been over for less than one week, AMD has already submitted their first batch of feature updates to DRM-Next of new graphics driver material aiming for Linux 5.6 early next year...

Out today is a new development release of GNOME Shell on the road to GNOME 3.36 in March...

Intel's OpenSWR software rasterizer for OpenGL as an alternative to the likes of LLVMpipe could soon have OpenGL 4.0 and is a step closer to that code thanks to... Microsoft code...

Out today is NVIDIA 440.44 as the latest stable Linux driver update in their new long-lived driver series...

Recently I wrapped up some benchmarks looking at the performance of Ubuntu on Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux comparing WSL on Windows 10 Build 18362 (May 2019 Update) and then both WSL and WSL2 performance using the Windows 10 Build 19008 Insider's Preview (what will come as Windows 10 20H1 update) for looking at where the WSL performance is heading. Additionally, looking at the bare metal performance of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS for which the WSL instances were based plus Ubuntu 19.10. As well, for the Windows-compatible tests also looking at how the Windows performance itself was outside of WSL/WSL2.

While DXVK tends to be much-loved by Linux gamers for allowing more Direct3D 10/11 Windows games to run nicely on Linux with Wine or Proton (Steam Play) thanks to its fairly complete translation of D3D10/D3D11 API calls to Vulkan, it looks like Philip Rebohle is at least contemplating shifting it just into maintenance-mode...

With 2019 and in turn this decade quickly drawing to a close, here is a look back at the most popular open-source/Linux news on Phoronix from 2010 to present. So far this decade on Phoronix has been 27,840 original news articles pertaining to Linux/open-source/hardware...

Along similar aims to GhostBSD and MidnightBSD, GhostBSD is another one of the BSD distributions focused on providing a nice out-of-the-box experience. NomadBSD 1.3 is now available that is in turn based on the recent FreeBSD 12.1...

Introduced back in Ubuntu Server 17.10 and improved upon since has been "Subiquity" as a new Ubuntu Server install option rather than their classic installer derived from Debian. But with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, they will be dropping that Debian Installer based option and focusing solely on their modern "Subiquity" server installer option...

The currently-experimental Qt Shader Tools allows for graphics/compute shader conditioning and used by the in-development Qt graphics abstraction layer for supporting Vulkan / Metal / Direct3D / OpenGL APIs...

Mesa 20.0 due out in Q1'2020 is now the magical release that is set to switch on RadeonSI NIR usage by default in place of the TGSI intermediate representation. What makes this IR switch-over prominent is that OpenGL 4.6 is then enabled by default on this open-source Gallium3D driver supporting Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs and newer...

Chrome 79 is out as Google's last feature update to their web browser for 2019...

GraphicsFuzz is the project born out of academia a few years ago for fuzzing GPU drivers to find OpenGL / OpenGL ES (WebGL) driver issues. This work was ultimately acquired by Google and then open-sourced just over one year ago. Today marks the release of GraphicsFuzz 1.3...

Ubuntu 19.10.1 has been released as an unscheduled re-spin of Ubuntu 19.10 Eoan Ermine for Raspberry Pi 2 / 3 / 4 ARM single-board computers...

CodeWeavers has announced the availability of CrossOver 19 for their Wine-based software for running Windows programs/applications/games on macOS and Linux...

Back in September we learned that Microsoft was bringing their Microsoft Teams software to Linux and today it has entered a public preview state...

Mesa 19.3 could be released as soon as this week after being challenged by several delays over blocker bugs. This release should be making it out in the days ahead and is a fantastic Christmas gift to Linux desktop users and a big step-up for these OpenGL / Vulkan driver implementations as we end out 2019.

An issue affecting some Linux users with Radeon graphics for at least the last four months around graphics corruption problems when switching to newer versions of the Linux kernel have been resolved...

Unisoc, the Chinese SoC provider for smartphones that is part of the Tsinghua Unigroup, has published a new open-source DRM display driver that ultimately they are looking to get into the mainline kernel...

While we are approaching 2020 and the four year anniversary since the Vulkan 1.0 launch, one aspect that has been a bit disappointing has been the lack of not seeing quicker uptake by various Linux window managers / compositors in at least offering a Vulkan code path. One of the best examples of a Vulkan-powered compositor with that has been the independent ChamferWM...

The TURNIP Mesa Vulkan driver providing support for recent Qualcomm Adreno graphics processors and akin to the Freedreno Gallium3D driver has added an important performance-boosting feature...

Google's Hans Wennborg is once again stepping up to manager the next feature release of LLVM and sub-projects like Clang. If all goes well, LLVM 10.0 will be out with Clang 10.0 and friends before the end of February...

With Intel Jasper Lake graphics support making it as one of the prominent hardware support additions for Linux 5.5, the user-space OpenGL/Vulkan driver support is now found within Mesa 20.0-devel...

Last month was a proposal for Fedora 32 to disallow empty passwords for local users by default but at today's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) they completely shot down that proposal...

Multipass, the Canonical-led open-source project that aims to make it easy to spin up Ubuntu VM instances on Linux and Windows and macOS, is up to version 0.9 ahead of a possible 1.0 release for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS...

Last month we reviewed the OnLogic Karbon 700 as a passively-cooled, industrial-grade PC powered by an eight-core / sixteen-thread Intel Xeon, 16GB of RAM, 512GB NVMe storage, and a plethora of connectivity options in suiting to industrial use-cases. The performance was great and even the thermal performance was very good for being a fan-less PC. In seeing how well other Linux distributions were panning out on the Karbon 700, I tested five popular Linux distributions on the Xeon Coffee Lake system and once again Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux squeezed out much more performance potential.

Intel Labs announced "Horse Ridge" as a cryogenic control chip to enable more development and testing around full-stack quantum computing systems...

Vulkan 1.1.130 is out today as the newest update to this graphics API that fixes a wide variety of documentation issues and areas in need of clarifications while also introducing a new extension...

The WireGuard secure VPN tunnel kernel code has landed in net-next! This means that -- barring any major issues coming to light that would lead to a revert -- WireGuard will finally reach the mainline kernel with the Linux 5.6 cycle kicking off in late January or early February!..