Phoronix

With picking up the Dell XPS 7390 with Intel Core i7-1065G7 for being able to deliver timely benchmarks from Intel's long-awaited 10nm+ Icelake generation, one of the first areas we have been testing is the Iris Plus "Gen 11" graphics performance. In this article are our initial Windows 10 vs. Linux graphics performance numbers for Ice Lake.

Feral Interactive revealed today that Shadow of the Tomb Raider will be released for Linux on 5 November...

Plasma 5.17.0 is out as the newest desktop feature release from the KDE project...

While it is already exciting to have the Ubuntu 19.10 desktop easily support installations to a root ZFS file-system, moving ahead with their original Zsys effort it should be even more exciting for Ubuntu storage possibilities on both the desktop and server...

Several Red Hat developers are looking at improving the CPU thermal management capabilities for Fedora Workstation 32 and in turn possibly helping Intel CPUs reach better performance...

User-space API additions and changes (granted, no ABI breakage permitted for the mainline Linux kernel) to Linux Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers is done fairly easily by their developers and possibly without enough thought. Linux DRM subsystem co-maintainer David Airlie has issued a proposal that would make user-space API alterations more strictly reviewed...

LLVM developers had been planning to transition to the Git revision control system in place of SVN by the time of their developer meeting in October. It looks like that goal will be realized on the same-day as kicking off that annual developer meeting...

Project Trident has been one of the lesser known BSD distributions derived from TrueOS (formerly PC-BSD) and making use of the FreeBSD package set. But moving forward the distribution is looking to reinvent itself as a derivative of Void Linux...

Python 3.8.0 is out today as the latest major release for this popular programming language...

Details are still light on Jasper Lake, but volleyed onto the public mailing list today was the initial support for the Jasper Lake PCH within the open-source Linux graphics driver side...

PyPy 7.2 is out today as a big update for this alternative Python implementation that currently provides interpreters for compatibility with Python 2.7 and Python 3.6...

Debian 10 "Buster" already is making use of IPTables' Netfilter back-end by default in their path to deprecate IPTables while for Debian 11 the deprecation will continue further...

Sony engineers working on the PlayStation compiler toolchain continue upstreaming various improvements to the LLVM source tree for helping the AMD APUs powering their latest game console...

Google announced their new USB-C Titan Security Key will begin shipping tomorrow for offering two-factor authentication support with not only Android devices but all the major operating systems as well...

For those that have been interested in AMD's EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors for your own server build, more 7002 series supported motherboards have been hitting Internet stores in recent weeks. If you are looking for one of the lower-cost motherboards, ASRock Rack's EPYCD8 motherboards have been refined with 7001/7002 series processor support.

Two years after the "Stack Clash" vulnerability came to light, the LLVM compiler is working on adding protection against it similar to the GCC compiler mitigation...

SHADERed is the open-source, cross-platform project for creating and testing HLSL/GLSL shaders. While a version number of 1.2.3 may not seem like a big update, some notable additions can be found within this new SHADERed release...

Version 1.4 has been released of POCL, the "Portable Computing Language" implementation that allows for a portable OpenCL implementation to be executed on CPUs as well as optionally targeting other accelerators via HSA or even CUDA devices...

Succeeding Vulkan 1.1.124 one week later is now Vulkan 1.1.125 with a lone new extension...

With devices beginning to hit store shelves using the new Intel WiFi 6 AX200 series chipsets, the firmware binaries have landed in linux-firmware.git for rounding out support for these latest WiFi/Bluetooth adapters...

Linus Torvalds has just issued the third weekly release candidate of the forthcoming Linux 5.4 kernel that should debut as stable before the end of November...

For those not following on Twitter, recently I picked up one of the new Dell XPS 7390 laptops for finally being able to deliver Linux benchmarks from Intel Ice Lake! Yes, it's real and running under Linux! For those eyeing the Dell XPS 7390 with this being the first prominent laptop with Ice Lake, here is a brief look at the initial experience with using Ubuntu 19.10.

WireGuard is still working on transitioning to the Linux kernel's existing crypto API as a faster approach to finally make it into the mainline kernel, but for those using the out-of-tree WireGuard secure VPN tunnel support, a new development release is available...

The openSUSE's Open Build Service (OBS) has been picking up the ability to build Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) images for those wishing to craft their own WSL distribution or just rebuild openSUSE from source as a reproducible/verifiable build...

While longtime X11 developer Keith Packard is now working for SiFive on RISC-V processors by day, he's still involved in the Linux graphics world through his contract work for Valve. At the XDC2019 conference earlier this month he presented on display timing, the current Linux plumbing for it, and also bringing up Vulkan will better support variable rate displays in the future...

With many of the prominent fixes that we've talked about for GNOME Shell and Mutter since last month's 3.34 release having been back-ported to 3.34.1, this weekend's release of GNOME Shell 3.35.1 and Mutter 3.35.1 as the first steps towards GNOME 3.36 aren't all that big. But at least in the case of this new Mutter development release are some worthwhile fixes...

Lead developer of the open-source Godot 2D/3D game engine Juan Linietsky has continued working daily on the engine's Vulkan renderer ahead of Godot 4.0...

With KDE Plasma 5.17 releasing soon, it's been seeing a lot of last minute fixes while feature activity is also brewing around Plasma 5.18...

GNU Binutils 2.33 was tagged in Git two weeks ago but seemingly without any release announcement while now Binutils 2.33.1 has been released...

Red Hat had been looking to hire another experienced open-source graphics driver developer and for that their newest member on their growing open-source graphics team is a longtime AMD/ATI developer...

FreeBSD 12.1 is near with the first release candidate shipping this weekend. While a point release over the nearly one year old FreeBSD 12.0, it does come with some notable changes in tow...

Friday marked the release of dav1d 0.5 as the newest version of this speedy open-source AV1 video decoder. With dav1d 0.5 are optimizations to help out SSSE3 most prominently but also AVX2 and ARM64 processors. Here are some initial benchmarks so far of this new dav1d video decoder on Linux...

There is yet another significant improvement found for XWayland in the latest X.Org Server code that will hopefully see a long overdue release soon...

With The Qt Company working hard now on development around Qt 6, the KDE developers are beginning their early discussions over their path forward to adopting this next evolutionary tool-kit update...

AMD has released a new version of their X.Org display driver...

For years we have been looking forward to the realistic X-Plane flight simulator rendered by Vulkan as an alternative to their long-standing OpenGL render and with X-Plane 11.50 that is finally being made a reality...

Rspamd 2.0 has been released as the newest version of this leading open-source spam filtering software and it's coming with plenty of changes...

A lot of the Tiger Lake "Gen 12" graphics compiler infrastructure changes to Mesa for Intel's open-source OpenGL and Vulkan Linux drivers were just merged into the Mesa 19.3 code-base...

The KDE Plasma Mobile team has begun publishing weekly reports on their development efforts for making KDE software more suitable for mobile devices as well as convergence and other efforts in common with KDE on the desktop...

Back during the summer Eric Anholt who had been the lead developer of Broadcom's VC4/V3D graphics driver stack most notably used by Raspberry Pi boards left the company to join Google. In his place, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is working with consulting firm Igalia to continue work on the DRM/KMS kernel driver and Gallium3D drivers for this open-source graphics driver support...

As written about a few days ago, Intel engineers added Gen12/Xe Tiger Lake support to their compute stack "NEO" for Linux users. That support has now made it into their latest weekly release of the Intel Compute Runtime...

Canonical's developers continuing to advance the Mir display server that continues to be focused on providing an abstraction for Wayland support have issued a new feature release...

It's fairly rare these days seeing big patch sets out of AMD focused on improving the open-source Linux driver support for the likes of aging GPUs such as the Sea Islands and Volcanic Islands generations, but this Friday there is some notable development activity...

Intel's open-source IWD wireless daemon that continues work on replacing WPA Supplicant is up to version 0.22...

Recently on Phoronix you have likely heard a lot about the LRU "bulk moves" functionality for the AMDGPU driver after it was talked up by a Valve Linux developer for the performance help to Linux games and then the change landing in Linux 5.4 as a "fix"...

The "VIRTME" project was started years ago as a set of simple tools for running a virtualized Linux kernel that uses the host distribution or basic root file-system rather than a complete Linux distribution image. There hasn't been a new release of VIRTME in years but that changed on Thursday...

Mesa's DRM library could soon be shifting to a date-based versioning scheme similar to what is already employed by Mesa itself (year.release) and the X.Org Server is also looking at similar versioning...

While Intel's SVT-VP9 video encode has been public since February and receiving frequent Git commits for advancing this very fast open-source VP9 video encoder, finally today it saw its first tagged release, being called the SVT-VP9 0.1 pre-release...

While not exactly a big surprise with System76 having done an "OSFC Edition" Coreboot laptop at small scale at the end of the summer, but System76 is now formally announcing two Linux laptops shipping with Coreboot as an alternative to their proprietary BIOS...

Earlier this week I provided some fresh Windows vs. Linux web browser benchmarks for both Firefox and Chrome. For those curious how the current Windows 10 vs. Linux performance is for other workloads, here is a fresh look across a variety of software applications and while testing the near-final Ubuntu 19.10, Intel's rolling-release Clear Linux, and Debian 10.1 while running off an Intel Core i9 HEDT platform.