Phoronix

KDE developers haven't let up ahead of the holidays in their relentless work for improving the KDE desktop and contained applications...

For those looking for some family-friendly Linux gaming this holiday season, a release candidate of the Mario Kart inspired SuperTuxKart 1.1 is now available for your enjoyment... err testing...

Disclosed back in November was the Intel Jump Conditional Code (JCC) erratum affecting Skylake and newer CPUs that could lead to "unpredictable behavior" when jump instructions cross cache lines. Intel issued a CPU microcode update to address the problem at a performance cost, but with some compiler toolchain magic, it's possible to mitigate a good portion of that impact...

Adding to the interesting list of proposed features for Fedora 32 would be update-alternatives handling of /usr/bin/cc and /usr/bin/c++ to more easily and seamlessly allowing pointing them at alternative compilers...

Intel contributions to Wayland/Weston aren't as frequent as years ago, but they continue volleying interesting work to keep pace with their graphics driver and Direct Rendering Manager subsystem advancements. Their latest work is on adding scaling filter support to libweston in order to supporting filters like nearest-neighbor for yielding less blurry outputs when upscaling...

Soft-announced earlier this week was the Kubuntu Focus as a high-end Linux laptop pre-loaded with the KDE flavor of Ubuntu. The Kubuntu Focus produced in cooperation with Mindshare Management, Kubuntu itself, and German manufacturer Tuxedo Computers will officially launch in January and begin shipping shortly thereafter while a review sample arrived in our lab today...

While the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X is delivering better raw Linux performance in a far majority of workloads compared to the Intel Core i9 10980XE, one of the areas where the Cascadelake-X platform and Intel CPUs still have an advantage is when it comes to the BSD support. Intel actively supports the BSDs more than AMD and in turn leads to the latest hardware generally working out fine on the latest BSDs. Here are some DragonFlyBSD and FreeBSD tests against Linux with the i9-10980XE.

The AMD machine check exception (MCE) code fix for Linux has landed ahead of this weekend's anticipated 5.5-rc3 release. This AMD MCE fix allows for the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3900 series processors introduced last month to boot the Linux kernel without hangs or other workarounds...

Announced last month at SuperComputing 19 in Denver was Radeon Open Compute 3.0 (ROCm 3.0) but it didn't end up shipping until last night. ROCm 3.0 is a big update to AMD's open-source Linux compute stack for ending out 2019...

Joining the NIR driver bandwagon recently was LLVMpipe adding support for this new intermediate representation. Now with that support having matured, Mesa 20.0-devel's LLVMpipe software OpenGL driver is switching to NIR by default in place of TGSI...

Jolla has announced Sailfish OS 3.2.1 "Nuuksio" as their mobile operating system update to end out 2019...

Rebased off yesterday's Wine 5.0-RC2 source tree is now Wine Staging 5.0-RC2 as this testing/experimental variation of Wine with some 830+ patches on top...

Sadly there still is no release plan for getting the long overdue X.Org Server 1.21 out the door and at this point is looking increasingly unlikely that it would land for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. But at least this extra time for X.Org Server 1.21 has allowed more XWayland changes to flow in...

LunarG on Friday released the Vulkan SDK 1.1.130 version with an updated license, better validation layer coverage, and support for newer extensions...

Following the Weston 8.0 Alpha release from earlier this month, the Weston 8.0 Beta is now available for this reference Wayland compositor...

In addition to finally enabling FSTRIM for flash-based storage devices, another arguably long overdue change slated for Fedora 32 to benefit performance is compiling packages by default with link-time optimizations (LTO) by the GCC compiler...

Intel's Scalable Video Technology SVT-AV1 video encoder/decoder for AV1 content has already been the speediest of the various solutions we have tried, but now a new release is available and it looks to be even faster for CPU-based AV1 video encode/decode...

Following last week's code freeze and subsequent Wine 5.0-rc1, the second weekly release candidate is now available for testing of the forthcoming Wine 5.0...

As part of our end-of-year benchmark comparisons, the latest results are looking at how the GNU Compiler Collection has evolved with the past five years of performance in testing GCC 5 through GCC 9 stable and the latest GCC 10 development compiler from the same system.

While Ubuntu, openSUSE, and numerous other Linux distributions make use of FSTRIM by default for helping with performance and wear-leveling on NVMe/SSD/SD-card storage, Fedora notably has not enabled the support by default but that could change next year in F32...

While Alpine Linux has traditionally been a lightweight Linux distribution focused on use within containerized environments, with yesterday's release of Alpine Linux 3.11 brought GNOME and KDE support for those wanting to use this distribution as a desktop/workstation OS. Curious, I had to give it a try and of course run some general Alpine Linux 3.11 benchmarks up against Clear Linux and Ubuntu 19.10 for seeing how its performance is on bare-metal hardware.

Flatpak 1.6 was released today as the culmination of the Flatpak 1.5 development series...

Systemd got its start in 2010 in providing a better init system and expanded its scope from there. As part of our year-end and end-of-2010s articles, here is a look at the top systemd stories from the past distribution controversies to new features and other highlights...

A Phoronix Premium reader recently inquired about the performance impact of LUKS LVM-based disk encryption that continues to be offered by Ubuntu's Ubiquity installer on new installations and if it's worthwhile. As I've said for many years, it's certainly recommended for production systems -- particularly laptops where there are greater chances of theft -- and the performance impact isn't generally all that bad with modern CPUs and the likes of AES-NI...

Back in October 2018 came the initial patches for providing per-process GPU usage reporting to be exposed to user-space for interesting metrics akin to the top command or other system monitoring utilities but for detailed GPU statistics. In October that interesting work finally saw a revision but went dark after that and didn't make it into the recent Linux 5.5 merge window. Now a new spin of that code has been sent out for review...

Huawei isn't known as much of an upstream contributor to the GNU toolchain and as far as GNU C Library (glibc) commits go prior to Thursday had just authored three patches from a Huawei emailing address. But that count more than doubled thanks to some optimizations they have successfully landed upstream...

Under the continued guidance of Satya Nadella, Microsoft made more interesting open-source / Linux moves in 2019 most notably with allowing exFAT support to be introduced into the mainline Linux kernel and also introducing Windows Subsystem for Linux 2...

While much of the lure to Gentoo Linux is on being a source-based distribution and assembling your system packages from source, some Gentoo developers are toying with the idea of providing some new kernel binary options similar to that of the more conventional binary Linux distributions...

Following last week's release of Chrome 79, the Chrome 80 web browser has been promoted to beta,..

Just in time for those taking advantage of Valve's annual Steam Winter Sale, a new release of the Wine-based Proton software is now available that powers Steam Play for running Windows games generally very well on Linux...

Alpine Linux is a distribution that prides itself on being "small, simple and secure" with being a lightweight distribution built off Musl libc and Busybox and popular for use within containers. But with today's Alpine Linux 3.11 release they are seemingly pursuing desktop Linux support...

The Mesa RADV Vulkan driver paired with the Valve-funded ACO compiler back-end is yielding an incredibly power competitor to AMD's own AMDVLK Vulkan driver that is derived from the source-code of their shared Windows Vulkan driver code-base. Here are some year-end benchmarks looking at the RADV vs. RADV ACO vs. AMDVLK Vulkan driver Linux gaming performance on Ubuntu with several generations of Radeon graphics hardware.

NVIDIA's PhysX SDK physics implementation, which NVIDIA has been providing open-source code drops on, will soon see a 5.0 release...

As expected, Feral Interactive this morning released the complete season of Life Is Strange 2 for Linux and macoS...

Compared to the inaugural Rav1e 0.1 release just over one month ago, Rav1e 0.2 was released on Wednesday with 40~70% better performance depending upon the encode settings...

With 2019 quickly drawing to a close, similar to yesterday's look at the most viewed Radeon Linux/open-source stories from 2010 through 2019, here is a similar look at NVIDIA's open-source/Linux news highlights...

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...