Phoronix

Now being into Q3, we're waiting to see if Purism will be able to deliver the Librem 5 GNU/Linux smartphone this quarter after being pushed back twice from their original January ship date. They haven't released any finished design yet or the finalized specifications (they still haven't finalized on the RAM, battery, cameras, and speaker(s)), but their latest series of blog posts are showing that GNOME/Linux applications can run on their Librem 5 developer kit...

A big set of patches landed this morning in RADV Git for Mesa 19.2...

It looks like CentOS 8 as the "community" version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 is still a few weeks away, but good progress is being made...

While there is the open-source OpenGL driver support in RadeonSI now part of Mesa 19.2 for the Radeon RX 5700 series launching on Sunday, for the open-source Vulkan driver support due to timing you might be needing to wait a little bit...

Last week I wrote about Navi (10) support pending for the RadeonSI OpenGL driver to complement the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver support for the Radeon RX 5700 series currently queued into DRM-Next for Linux 5.3. That OpenGL driver support has been now been merged into Mesa 19.2 for debuting as stable around the end of August for providing open-source OpenGL on these next-gen AMD GPUs...

Valve has been funding work on "ACO", a new shader compiler alternative to the de facto AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler currently used by both the RADV and RadeonSI Mesa graphics drivers for AMD Radeon hardware...

While Apple computers once ran well with Linux, that's not been the case in recent years particularly for MacBook Pros but now really all newer Apple computers have become a mess on Linux. There's been really messy issues in trying to run Macs on Linux. With MacBook Pros from recent revisions, it's now only finally possible for Linux to read/write to the solid-state drive if using an out-of-tree patch...

WireGuard 0.0.20190702 has been released as the newest snapshot for this increasingly popular open-source network VPN tunnel that has showed much potential and has now been ported to all major platforms...

While Debian 10.0 "Buster" is due to be released this weekend, a seemingly last release candidate of the Debian Installer is now available...

Intel's open-source developers working on their Scalable Video Technology video encoders (and decoders) on Tuesday released SVT-AV1 0.6 as their latest work on high-performance AV1 support using CPU-based encoding/decoding...

It looks like in July we could finally see an "experimental ZFS" option within Ubuntu 19.10 and its daily images for those wanting an easy-to-use ZFS On Linux based installation of Ubuntu...

AMD's Marek Olšák released a new version of the Mesa DRM library (libdrm) on Tuesday...

While the Radeon RX 5700 "Navi 10" series is launching on 7 July and there was the recently presented open-source Linux patches (so far for the AMDGPU kernel driver and RadeonSI OpenGL; Vulkan support still pending), today was the surprise move of posting the kernel patches for an unannounced "Navi 14" graphics processor...

A few years back we looked at the ASUS ZenScreen USB-C Portable Monitor that took until recently when it began playing working nicely on Linux due to its DisplayLink hardware and also the state of Type-C DP AlternateMode support at the time. What we've been trying out over the past week has been the Odake BladeX as a much more interesting portable monitor: it's a 15.6-inch display in 1080p and 4K options that also supports native HDMI input and other functionality unmatched by the ZenScreen.

NVIDIA announced via their newsletter today that they've open-sourced their TensorRT library and associated plug-ins...

AMDVLK 2019.Q3.1 is out as the latest update to AMD's official open-source Vulkan Linux driver...

For those looking for a small form factor workstation-oriented graphics card or just a budget workstation GPU in general, AMD today announced the Radeon Pro WX 3200...

Following weeks of leaks and other rumors, NVIDIA today finally lifted the lid on their new "SUPER" line-up with the revised RTX 2060 / RTX 2070 / RTX 2080 graphics cards with more competitive value especially in light of AMD's Radeon RX 5700 series offerings coming to market next week...

The latest work by Valve open-source Linux graphics driver contributor Samuel Pitoiset is on offering Delta Color Compression (DCC) support for layers with the Vulkan RADV driver...

Mir 1.3 was released today as the newest version of Canonical's project making it easier to write desktop shells with Wayland support...

NVIDIA released update Vulkan beta drivers on Monday for both Windows and Linux...

While Linux usage of Steam as a percentage has generally been flat or ticking up slightly each month since last year when Valve introduced Steam Play for allowing many Windows games to run gracefully on Linux, during June was the first time in a while seeing a decline...

Godot lead developer Juan Linietsky has been spending much of his time working on porting their open-source game engine to Vulkan for the Godot 4.0 release to follow Godot 3.2. Good progress is being made in getting this increasingly popular game engine rendering with Vulkan...

The 2019 X.Org Developers Conference for "all-things open-source graphics" is coming up at the start of October. But if you've been wanting to talk about something related to the Linux kernel, Mesa, Wayland, or related components, this week is your last chance to apply...

The second preview release of the long-awaited Xfce 4.14 is now available for testing ahead of its official debut later this summer...

Keith Packard has joined RISC-V company SiFive. Yes, the same Keith Packard that is the longest still active (though somewhat more dormant these days) X Window System developer who for many years had led much of the X11/X.Org efforts and worked for nearly a decade at Intel on their open-source Linux graphics driver stack before working for HP Labs and also a side-gig for Valve improving the Linux stack for VR...

A few weeks ago we received a POWER9 Raptor Blackbird for testing that features an IBM POWER9 4-core (16 thread) processor clocked at 3.80GHz. For those curious about the performance potential for low-end POWER9 parts compared to the more common high-core/thread count POWER processors we have benchmarked before like in the Talos II server, here are some initial tests of that petite POWER9 processor.

GNU Rush 2.0 is out today as the latest major update to this restricted user shell that allows administrators greater control over the command line support exposed to users as well as system resource control and running remote programs within a chroot...

Packit-as-a-Service has been announced as a GitHub integration app and leveraging the Packit project to provide for upstream CI testing to ensure different software projects continue to build and function fine on Fedora Linux...

With Debian 10.0 aiming to release next weekend, the near-final release images have been uploaded with enthusiasts encouraged to test out these builds for spotting any lingering bugs...

The KaOS Linux distribution remains one of the best options for those wanting to check out a polished and bleeding-edge KDE desktop experience. Out today is KaOS 2019.07 as the newest stable ISO succeeding their earlier 2019.04 build...

Prolific GNOME contributor Daniel Van Vugt of Canonical working to optimize the desktop stack for Ubuntu continues his great upstream-focused work on enhancing the performance of various key components. This past week he posted a new merge request that seeks to lower the input latency further for the Mutter compositor / window manager...

June was a very interesting month with the varying statements out of Canonical about the future of Ubuntu 32-bit support, AMD's Zen 2 processors and Navi product announcements (benchmarks next week!), Microsoft pushing out the new Windows Terminal and WSL2, Clear Linux continuing to further enhance their offering, and more Linux performance happenings in general...

The Mageia Linux distribution of Mandriva/Mandrake descent is kicking off July by shipping Mageia 7, two years after the debut of Mageia 6...

There have been Linux reports of problems pertaining to "8254 Clock Gating" going back a while but more so recently. This problem is some newer Intel Skylake~Apollolake derived systems particularly with Intel SoCs where certain systems ship with the 8254 PIT to be gated via a special register and up until now that has caused Linux to fail to boot...

One of the interesting Google Summer of Code projects on the BSD front this year is porting Wine to run on AMD64 (x86_64) under NetBSD...

Linus Torvalds is off in "the middle of nowhere" on one of his well known scuba diving adventures but that didn't stop him from being able to release Linux 5.2-rc7 today like clock-work thanks to tethering of a smartphone...

It's been just one week since the release of Vulkan 1.1.112 but it's now been succeeded by Vulkan 1.1.113 and two new extensions are in tow...

KDE developer Nate Graham has posted another one of his usability/productivity summaries of the KDE improvements over the past week. There's been another busy week of work on KDE Plasma 5.17, KDE Applications 19.08, and KDE Frameworks 5.60...

With the Linux 5.2 kernel due to be released in a few weeks and that marking the opening of the Linux 5.3 merge window, here is a look at some of the likely features coming to this next version of the Linux kernel...

Systemd now allows loading of custom BPF programs for network traffic filtering that are applied to all sockets created by processes of a given systemd unit...

Waypipe is a transparent Wayland proxy and the latest of several different projects aiming to make it easy running Wayland clients over a network similar to X11's capabilities...

In addition to the latest Wacom Intuos Pro Small drawing tablet to be supported by the Linux 5.3 kernel, the high-end (circa $1,500 USD) Wacom MobileStudio Pro tablet is also set to now be supported by this next kernel cycle...

The Mir 1.2 release was aiming to make it easier to develop Mir servers with custom Wayland extensions easier, but in dog feeding the work, Canonical's long-time Mir developer Alan Griffiths realized some shortcomings in the experience...

Alongside this week's announcement of the Raspberry Pi 4, the Raspberry Pi Foundation also released a new Raspbian operating system release that is re-based from Debian 9 Stretch to the soon-to-be-released Debian 10 Buster. In benchmarking of these new and old Raspbian releases on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Plus, there are performance gains to find even if not jumping to the Raspberry Pi 4.

Intel's tradition of delivering punctual open-source graphics driver support for their hardware continues. While Icelake hardware isn't even hitting the masses yet, Intel developers this week began sending out their initial driver patches for bringing up the graphics on Tiger Lake...

The Linux 5.2 kernel brings optional per-directory case-insensitive filenames/folders while with the Linux 5.3 kernel that new EXT4 feature will see better performance...

Huawei's EROFS Linux read-only file-system continues to be improved upon and with the upcoming Linux 5.3 kernel cycle will see yet more improvements...

With the Fedora Workstation 31 feature outlook covered earlier this week, there was an interesting comment in that article by Red Hat's Christian Schaller that deserves special coverage...

Newer AMD GPUs are capable of offering hardware accelerated decoding for 10-bit VP9 content, but that wasn't the case with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. Fortunately, a simple patch is pending to expose this support...