Phoronix

The saga about EXT4 file-system corruption on Linux 4.19 kernels that has increased in recent weeks might soon be drawing a close... This data corruption bug though is looking like it doesn't originate from within the EXT4 code at all...

With the time for new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver feature material to enter DRM-Next for the Linux 4.21 kernel cycle quickly coming to a close, the Intel Open-Source Technology Center crew has sent in a final feature pull of material for this next kernel development cycle...

NVIDIA has quietly outed the key features they will be introducing with their upcoming Video Codec SDK 9.0 release...

Complementing the recent Linux 4.19 I/O scheduler benchmarks using SATA 3.0 SSD storage, here are some benchmarks when using the current Linux 4.20 development kernel and also using faster NVMe solid-state storage for benchmarking. Most Linux distributions default to no I/O scheduler in the case of NVMe SSDs, but for your viewing pleasure today is a look at the performance against MQ Deadline, Kyber, and BFQ.

As an early Christmas surprise, Microsoft has today open-sourced Windows Forms, WinUI (Windows UI Library), and WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation)...

A new feature release of CodeWeavers' Wine-based CrossOver software for Linux and macOS is now available...

After weeks of rumors, Epic Games today officially announced the Epic Games Store as their own electronic game store alternative to Steam...

AMD's Vulkan driver developers have done their first fresh code drop of the AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver code in two weeks and it's a big push...

Greg Kroah-Hartman today published the initial patch series of work he intends to use as forming the Linux 4.19.7 point release in the coming days. With Linux 4.19.7 there are some important fixes...

Yesterday saw the release of Vulkan 1.1.95 that introduced the new VK_KHR_shader_float18_int8 extension for supporting 16-bit floating-point types and 8-bit integer types within shader code for arithmetic operations, compared to earlier extensions limiting these data types to load/store operations. NVIDIA released a same-day driver update for the new 1.1.95 extensions while now Intel's "ANV" open-source Vulkan code is the second Linux driver seeing this support (or first if just looking at the open-source drivers)...

Mesa developers have been discussing on and off in recent months about dropping their Autotools build system support considering there is also the SCons build support, Android build system support, and most notably is the increasingly mature Meson build system coverage...

Ongoing LLVM release manager Hans Wennborg has laid out plans for releasing LLVM 8.0 and related sub-projects like Clang 8.0 in early March...

Eric Anholt of Broadcom's graphics driver team has provided another status update about their open-source Linux driver work in recent weeks on the VC4 driver stack mostly known for being the open-source 3D driver for the Raspberry Pi as well as the V3D driver for next-gen Broadcom VideoCore hardware...

Besides the mysterious EXT4 issue on Linux 4.19 that is still being sorted out, another known issue but with a fix pending that is hopefully not far out pertains to running newer Radeon graphics cards with older motherboards...

The past several years Red Hat developer Jerome Glisse has been working on Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) for the Linux kernel to handle the mirroring of process address spaces, system memory that can be transparently used by any device process, and similar functionality around today's GPU computing needs and other devices. Jerome today published the next step as part of his low-level memory device management work and that is the Heterogeneous Memory System for exposing complex memory topologies of today's systems...

Complementing our many recent bare-metal Linux distribution comparison benchmarks, here is a fresh look at how the various high profile Linux distributions are running on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). For this round of testing on their current-generation M5 instance type, Amazon Linux 2, Clear Linux 26600, Debian 9.6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15, and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS were benchmarked.

Last month when the AMD Radeon RX 590 launched, it wasn't working on Linux to much surprise considering it's another Polaris refresh. Today there are new AMDGPU DRM kernel patches and firmware/microcode files that do allow the RX 590 now to work properly under Linux...

Adding to NVIDIA's busy Monday morning of announcing the TITAN RTX and open-sourcing PhysX, they also shipped their latest Vulkan beta driver support for Windows and Linux...

Days ahead of the FreeBSD 12.0 release, the long-ago-forked DragonFlyBSD is out with its very exciting 5.4 six-month feature update...

Developers are beginning to firm up the Darktable 2.6 release as the next feature update to this amazing, cross-platform open-source RAW photography software...

As a very big surprise bundled alongside the announcement today of the $2,499 USD TITAN RTX graphics card is word that NVIDIA's PhysX software is going open-source!..

After teasing the TITAN RTX over the weekend on social media, NVIDIA this morning officially announced this new $2,499 USD graphics card...

While the long-term prospects of the project have yet to be determined, longtime Linux input expert Peter Hutterer of Red Hat has hacked together "GGKBDD" as the generic gaming keyboard daemon for Linux systems...

The Khronos Group's Vulkan working group is kicking off the start of a new week with a new specification update. The Vulkan 1.1.95 release brings with it two new floating point extensions...

The ARM Linux developers continue working on Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) for the mainline Linux kernel to better handle systems with asymmetric CPU topologies, namely SoCs like those with ARM big.LITTLE cores...

For those utilizing OpenBLAS as the linear algebra library for your application(s), OpenBLAS 0.3.4 was released on Sunday with the latest features and CPU optimizations for multiple architectures...

Last month at the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC 2018) was a presentation by Red Hat's open-source graphics driver developer David Airlie on creating a vendor-neutral compute stack that theoretically could take on NVIDIA's CUDA dominance...

Linus Torvalds has outed the fifth weekly release candidate of the in-development Linux 4.20...

Given the AMDGPU changes building up for DRM-Next to premiere in Linux 4.21 that is on top of the AMDGPU performance boost with Linux 4.20, here are some benchmarks of Linux 4.19 vs. 4.20 Git vs. DRM-Next (Linux 4.21 material) with the Radeon RX Vega 64 compared to the relevant NVIDIA GeForce competition.

Ubuntu 17.10 stopped producing 32-bit x86 ISOs and many other *buntu derivatives followed suit earlier this year. One of them still producing i386 images was Xubuntu, but now they have decided to abandon them as well...

There is still four weeks or so until the Linux 4.20 kernel will be officially christened, but there are already some changes we are excited for that should be on the table with Linux 4.21...

SQLite developers started off December by releasing a new feature update to their widely-used, embed-friendly SQL database library...

Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet provided an update to the kernel developers on his file-system over the weekend, following his Patreon post that updated followers on the latest for this "next-gen" Linux file-system born out of the block cache code...

FreeBSD 12.0-RC3 is out as likely the last test release before the official FreeBSD 12.0 debut in the next week...

The KDE developers haven't slowed down at all due to the winter holidays approaching but rather there is a ton of great improvements and new features with their next round of software releases...

Valve has published their latest monthly Steam survey data, which shows an increase in the Linux gaming population...

The big Linux 4.20 performance slowdown is now corrected by tonight's Linux 4.20 Git code while still providing reasonable security for cross-hyperthread Spectre V2 mitigation...

In the works now for over three years has been BCachefs that doesn't receive nearly as much attention as Btrfs, Stratis, ZFS On Linux, or other next-gen Linux storage options, but it does continue making progress and still possesses a lot of potential...

RenderDoc 1.2 is now available as the latest feature update to this leading graphics debugging tool for Vulkan, OpenGL, and Direct3D across all major platforms...

On Friday AMD's Alex Deucher sent in the latest batch of feature to work DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 4.21 cycle. This mostly included AMDGPU/AMDKFD driver updates but also a lone Radeon DRM driver fix to avoid a possible 32-bit overflow and also DRM scheduler and TTM memory management fixes...

It's been over five months already since the release of systemd 239 and a lot of feature work has been amassing for what will end up releasing as systemd 240...

While Qt 5.12 isn't even out until next week, The Qt Company has already begun formulating their early plans around Qt 5.13...

Oracle's VirtualBox 6.0 multi-platform virtualization software continues inching closer to release...

Genode, the open-source operating system framework focused on a micro-kernel layer and various innovative user-space components, is out with its latest feature update. The developers at Genode Labs also continue bringing up their Sculpt OS effort for Genode as a general purpose operating system...

Another month is in the books as we approach the 15th birthday of Phoronix in June. This month on Phoronix there was a lot of interest in the major Linux kernel slowdown that ended up being attributed to "STIBP" but fortunately improvements are on the way, a lot of interest in Raptor Computing Systems' Talos II libre system and their lower-cost Blackbird board, excitement starting to heat up around Linux 4.21 changes, and the Mesa 18.3 release being on approach while Mesa 19.0 feature development is in full swing...

In seeking to comply with the Linux kernel's new Code of Conduct enacted by the recent 4.19 release, a patch series has been sent out today replacing profane kernel code comments with "hugs"...

Ubuntu's Mir team will soon be releasing their Mir 1.1 display server release in the days ahead with this first post-1.0 stable update of this re-shifted project that has morphed into offering Wayland client support...

It should come as virtually no surprise to any regular Phoronix reader given the significant investment Intel makes to Linux via their Open-Source Technology Center with working on Mesa for their Vulkan/OpenGL drivers and related components, but their discrete GPU undertaking will support Linux gaming alongside Windows...

The release of Sway 1.0 as the popular i3-compatible Wayland compositor is one step closer with the latest beta update...

Ahead of the official release next month, KDE Applications 18.12 is now available in release candidate form for those wanting to test out this latest slew of KDE app updates...