Phoronix

While yesterday Linus Torvalds was still undecided on whether to pull in the long-revised "LOCKDOWN" kernel patches and wanted to review them patch-by-patch, following that lengthy examination he has decided to indeed land this opt-in restricted functionality for Linux 5.4...

For those running the GNOME Wayland session and having issues with windows not grabbing keyboard input after a child window is closed with Java applications like IntelliJ, Mutter has landed a fix...

Wine 4.17 was released yesterday that merged the DXTn support and other improvements from Wine-Staging. Meanwhile Wine-Staging 4.17 is out today to re-up their game with now more than 850 patches in total against upstream Wine...

Added back during the Linux 5.1 cycle was IO_uring for fast and efficient I/O. This new interface allows for queue rings to be shared between the application and kernel to avoid excess copies and other efficiency improvements over the existing Linux AIO code. With Linux 5.4, IO_uring is in even better shape...

AMD released Radeon Open Compute 2.8 (ROCm 2.8) for ending out September. But to some surprise and sadness, this open-source Radeon GPU compute stack still isn't supporting the Navi GPUs...

RPM 4.15 is officially out this week as the newest version of the RPM Package Manager most often associated with Red Hat / Fedora systems...

Oracle has reaffirmed their "long term commitment to deliver innovation on Oracle Solaris" though it still doesn't look like anything past Solaris 11 will materialize...

Just a friendly reminder in case you wanted to help support our open-source/Linux news coverage, Linux hardware reviews, and benchmarking work...

DXVK lead developer Philip Rebohle has done another weekly update to DXVK for helping weekend gamers have the best Steam Play / Proton experience...

Wine 4.17 has been uncorked for weekend testing as the newest bi-weekly feature development release of this open-source project for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms...

The Linux 5.4 kernel merge window is set to close this weekend and as of writing it's still yet to be decided by Linus Torvalds whether to accept the kernel "lockdown" functionality feature for this release...

In addition to adding Intel Icelake support to the kernel's processor thermal / int340x code, there is an interesting change with the thermal management updates for Linux 5.4 to potentially boost the performance on Intel platforms...

With this week's release of the much anticipated CentOS 8.0 as the community/free rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 as well as the surprise announcement of the bleeding-edge, rolling-release CentOS Stream, we have begun benchmarking these enterprise Linux distribution releases. Up today are our first tests of CentOS 7.7 against CentOS 8.0 and the early CentOS Stream state on Intel Xeon Cascadelake and AMD EPYC Rome servers.

For owners of recent Lenovo laptops that find frequent thermal throttling and ultimately lower performance compared to Windows, the company has formally acknowledged the issue and is working towards addressing the issue...

It has surprisingly taken until the Linux 5.4 kernel in 2019 to potentially have a single unified way for calculating the size of a member of a struct within the kernel: Linux 5.4 is looking at adding a new sizeof_member macro for handling this purpose...

One of the lesser known Vulkan drivers within Mesa is TURNIP but at least this week it's been seeing new activity after a recent lull of activity...

The Ubuntu 19.10 "Eoan Ermine" is now available in beta form with the official release being less than one month away...

ZFS On Linux 0.8.2 is out with fixes in order to provide compatibility with the brand new Linux 5.3 stable kernel while retaining support still going back to the Linux 2.6.32 days...

The engineers maintaining Intel's open-source Scalable Video Technology (SVT) encoders today released SVT-AV1 0.7 as the newest feature update to their speedy AV1 video encoder...

While Richard Stallman resigned as president of the Free Software Foundation last week, he just announced he'll be continuing as head of the GNU Project...

While Windows itself has begun offering Tar and OpenSSH support among other integration improvements for traditional Linux administrators, it's possible to seamlessly integrate Linux commands within the PowerShell thanks to some features of PowerShell intermixed with Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux...

We finally have our hands on NVIDIA's current RTX 20 SUPER graphics card line-up and have been putting the RTX 2060/2070/2080 SUPER cards through their paces under Linux. For the first of our long awaited NVIDIA RTX SUPER Linux benchmarks, first up is a look at the Linux gaming performance under a variety of native OpenGL/Vulkan games as well as Steam Play (DXVK+Proton) titles while testing a total of 26 graphics cards this round on the very latest AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce drivers.

A Steam beta update out today is notable for Linux gamers to avoid possible GPU crashes and corruption of the Steam overlay...

Today marks the release of Rust 1.38 as the latest stable update for this increasingly popular, memory-safe programming language...

VirtIO-FS as a better approach for sharing folders/files with guest VMs is set to debut in Linux 5.4...

Now that the first (beta-ish) batch of Librem 5 smartphones is shipping, Purism has published the first video showing the phone in its current state in action...

One of the most interesting Google Summer of Code projects this year was the student effort to work on better parallelizing GCC's internals to deal with better performance particularly when dealing with very large source files. Fortunately -- given today's desktop CPUs even ramping up their core counts -- this parallel GCC effort is being continued...

If looking for a new WiFi router to go with the RYF-pending, 802.11n-based Purism Librem 5 or just want a wireless network as libre as possible, the Free Software Foundation has announced an 802.11n WiFi router now available that respects the user's freedoms...

There were already 18 new PCI IDs for Intel's open-source OpenGL/Vulkan Linux graphics drivers for forthcoming Comet Lake processors with UHD Graphics, but now it appears there are even more models en route...

It was back in July 2018 that GCC's conversion to Git was becoming a massive headache and now more than a year later it's looking like that switch from Subversion to Git is still weeks if not months from becoming official...

With CompuLab's incredibly well engineered Airtop 3 fan-less computer that is built to meet rugged industrial requirements while being loaded with an 8-core/16-thread Xeon CPU, NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 graphics, 64GB of RAM, and NVMe solid-state storage, here is an interesting benchmark comparison of Ubuntu 19.04, Clear Linux, and openSUSE Tumbleweed. Given the interesting system under test, not only is the raw performance being looked at but also the performance-per-Watt / AC power consumption and CPU thermal differences between these Linux operating systems.

After a month worth of delays, Mesa 19.2 is now officially available as the latest quarterly feature update to this collection of open-source graphics driver components...

Fwupd is gaining the ability to update firmware on Synaptics/Conexant CX audio devices commonly used by laptops...

While the Linux 5.4 merge window doesn't even end until this weekend, as is usual traditional with the DRM-Next cutoff having been weeks ago, the open-source DRM driver developers are already working on their changes for what will ultimately go into Linux 5.5. On the AMD side, the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver already has some interesting work accumulating...

While the Linux 5.4 cycle just officially began last week and its feature merge window not even over until this weekend, given there are AMD EPYC load balancing improvements and many other kernel improvements in general, I was eager to fire up the in-development kernel on the EPYC 7002 "Rome" series to see how the performance is looking...

Arm has outlined their architecture enhancements being introduced in ARMv8.6-A as their 2019 ARMv8 architecture update...

On top of many other changes for Fedora Workstation 31, this next release of Fedora Linux continues to improve the experience for proprietary multimedia codecs where the patents have lapsed...

The WireGuard open-source secure network tunnel won't be mainlined for Linux 5.4 but there finally is an action plan for getting this promising network security tech into the kernel...

The Qt Company has announced the availability of the Qt 5.14 Alpha release ahead of this half-year tool-kit update due out before year's end. Qt 5.14 is also the second to the last in the Qt5 series with an increasing amount of work shifting to Qt6 that is expected to debut towards the end of 2020...

The SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface) pull requests to the Linux kernel normally don't get us excited, but they do when it comes with word of big performance enhancements. There are several SPI performance improvements this round but exciting us the most is the work done on the Broadcom SPI driver for Raspberry Pi hardware...

Moving towards their oneAPI beta release next quarter, the Intel developers are as busy as ever advancing their LLVM-based SYCL compiler and run-times for Windows and Linux...

Epic Games' Brandon Schaefer (and in fact former Canonical developer working on Ubuntu's Mir display server) has contributed a new SDL2 video driver back-end for offscreen rendering...

In squeezing to shipping in Q3, Purism announced today their first batch of Librem 5 Linux smartphones are beginning to ship. In the process, we see the first actual photos of the Librem 5...

The Nim programming language now has a stability guarantee with this statically-typed, general purpose programming language hitting its 1.0 release...

D9VK 0.21 is out today as the newest feature release for this project implementing the Direct3D 9 API over Vulkan...

It's looking like RSEQ support might be added to the GNU C Library with the Glibc 2.31 release in a few months time. The "restartable sequences" support was added last year to the Linux kernel and the numbers have been quite promising for the performance benefits...

CentOS 8.0 is now available as the long awaited community rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0...

CentOS Stream is a new forward-looking distribution running in parallel with CentOS 8 and in cooperation with Red Hat and the CentOS Project...

AMD's AMDVLK open-source Vulkan Linux driver recently fell off its weekly release wagon with the last release being nearly one month ago. But today they finally tagged their next milestone and given the time that's lapsed there are a number of new features and improvements...

The Apache Software Foundation today announced that Rya has been promoted as the organization's newest top-level project...