Phoronix

KDE developers spent the first week of October working on improvements to their Dolphin file manager, seemingly never-ending work on HiDPI support, and a variety of other enhancements for this leading open-source desktop...

This week the GTK 4.0 development code picked up support for making use of the VK_KHR_incremental_present extension with its Vulkan renderer in order to allow much more efficient behavior...

With the ACO shader compiler back-end merged for Mesa 19.3 as of mid-September and more improvements merged since then, it's now very easy to try out this alternative to AMD's longstanding AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end. ACO, which is developed by Valve and their contractors outside of AMD, is looking quite good not only for quicker shader compilation (more punctual game load times) but also helping the performance of some Vulkan-powered games. Here are our latest ACO benchmarks.

With the surprise code drop of Google developing a new open-source AV1 video decoder as "libgav1", I set out this Saturday to run benchmarks on various systems for seeing how the performance is looking for this CPU-based decoder in relation to the more well known DAV1D decoder...

Coming out of informal discussions from this week's X.Org Developers Conference in Montreal, a "liboutput" library has been proposed as a theoretical new library for helping to bring up Wayland compositors, X11 window managers, and anything else wanting to interface with DRM/KMS kernel interfaces...

We were alerted this morning to a CPU bug resulting in crashes for Intel Geminilake processors. At least Chrome and Firefox are affected but sounds like other software may be affected too, just that Google has enough engineering resources for investigating the issue...

Just one week after the release of Radeon Open Compute 2.8, AMD has now released ROCm 2.9 as the newest feature release for this open-source GPU Linux compute stack for Radeon hardware...

Just one week after the release of Radeon Open Compute 2.8, AMD has now released ROCm 2.9 as the newest feature release for this open-source GPU Linux compute stack for Radeon hardware...

With less than two weeks to go until the Ubuntu 19.10 release, on Friday the experimental ZFS root file-system install support was merged into the Ubuntu desktop "Ubiquity" installer...

With less than two weeks to go until the Ubuntu 19.10 release, on Friday the experimental ZFS root file-system install support was merged into the Ubuntu desktop "Ubiquity" installer...

Intel's open-source crew on Friday released version 19.39.14278 of their compute/OpenCL runtime...

Intel's open-source crew on Friday released version 19.39.14278 of their compute/OpenCL runtime...

While there exists DAV1D as one of the most promising AV1 decoders to date, Google has been developing libgav1 as its own AV1 decoder and focused on Arm-powered Android devices but also x86_64 desktop CPUs as well...

While there exists DAV1D as one of the most promising AV1 decoders to date, Google has been developing libgav1 as its own AV1 decoder and focused on Arm-powered Android devices but also x86_64 desktop CPUs as well...

For the past year "Zink" has been in development as the OpenGL API implemented over Vulkan and done as a Gallium3D driver. That code by Collabora's Erik Faye-Lund will likely be merged to Mesa 19.3 in the coming weeks...

For the past year "Zink" has been in development as the OpenGL API implemented over Vulkan and done as a Gallium3D driver. That code by Collabora's Erik Faye-Lund will likely be merged to Mesa 19.3 in the coming weeks...

Linux 5.4 is already exciting with its many new features and changes but was made even more so on Friday night with the honoring of the latest DRM fixes pull request that includes the "fix" of enabling LRU bulk moves for the AMDGPU DRM driver!..

Linux 5.4 is already exciting with its many new features and changes but was made even more so on Friday night with the honoring of the latest DRM fixes pull request that includes the "fix" of enabling LRU bulk moves for the AMDGPU DRM driver!..

DXVK 1.4.2 is out as another weekly update to this Direct3D 11 over Vulkan translation library used by Wine / Proton for accelerating Windows games on Linux...

DXVK 1.4.2 is out as another weekly update to this Direct3D 11 over Vulkan translation library used by Wine / Proton for accelerating Windows games on Linux...

AMD provided an update on their Linux FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync support at this week's X.Org Developers Conference event in Montreal. There's good news both for HDMI and Wayland Linux users with Radeon graphics...

AMD provided an update on their Linux FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync support at this week's X.Org Developers Conference event in Montreal. There's good news both for HDMI and Wayland Linux users with Radeon graphics...

Complementing the 18-way NVIDIA GPU compute comparison from earlier this week with now having our hands on the RTX 2060/2070/2080 SUPER graphics cards, this round of NVIDIA Linux testing is looking at the Blender 2.80 and LuxCoreRender 2.1/2.2 performance for these popular rendering programs that offer CUDA acceleration.

Complementing the 18-way NVIDIA GPU compute comparison from earlier this week with now having our hands on the RTX 2060/2070/2080 SUPER graphics cards, this round of NVIDIA Linux testing is looking at the Blender 2.80 and LuxCoreRender 2.1/2.2 performance for these popular rendering programs that offer CUDA acceleration.

In addition to Intel announcing their work on the new "IBC" compiler back-end for their OpenGL/Vulkan drivers, the developers working on the Radeon "ACO" in cooperation with Valve were presenting the latest work on their compiler back-end at this week's XDC 2019 event in Canada...

In addition to Intel announcing their work on the new "IBC" compiler back-end for their OpenGL/Vulkan drivers, the developers working on the Radeon "ACO" in cooperation with Valve were presenting the latest work on their compiler back-end at this week's XDC 2019 event in Canada...

The Logitech G15 keyboards and related gaming keyboards from the company are seeing a new open-source driver queued ahead of the Linux 5.5 kernel cycle...

The Logitech G15 keyboards and related gaming keyboards from the company are seeing a new open-source driver queued ahead of the Linux 5.5 kernel cycle...

Following the Spectre mitigations coming to light last year, the late microcode update process for CPUs was serialized. However, this has led to complaints from cloud vendors and other customers with large core count servers where downtime/disruptions need to be minimal. So now the CPU microcode update process is being parallelized again...

Following the Spectre mitigations coming to light last year, the late microcode update process for CPUs was serialized. However, this has led to complaints from cloud vendors and other customers with large core count servers where downtime/disruptions need to be minimal. So now the CPU microcode update process is being parallelized again...

Systemd has begun harvesting the automatic suspend rules from ChromeOS for determining which USB devices support automatic suspend well out-of-the-box on Linux...

Systemd has begun harvesting the automatic suspend rules from ChromeOS for determining which USB devices support automatic suspend well out-of-the-box on Linux...

Neil Trevett, the president of the Khronos Group, presented at the X.Org Developers' Conference for the first time. During his presentation on Wednesday he covered their usual initiatives, how Khronos engages in open-source and open standards, and related bits -- plus a few interesting ones...

Not particularly surprising considering Fedora tends to always ship with a bleeding-edge toolchain, but for their Fedora 32 release to kick off 2020 they are planning for GNU Binutils 2.33...

One of the interesting reveals so far from this week's X.Org Developers' Conference in Montreal is that Intel has been developing a new back-end compiler for their OpenGL/Vulkan Linux drivers based upon their experiences so far with their NIR support and the lessons learned over the past number of years...

Intel's open-source crew has had a busy week with their first public OpenVKL release, OSPray 2 hitting alpha, and now the release of MKL-DNN where they are also re-branding it as the Deep Neural Network Library (DNNL)...

For those wondering about the current performance of desktop Linux distributions against Microsoft Windows 10 with the latest updates as we embark upon fall update season, here is a look at the performance of eight different Linux distributions compared to Windows 10. While a larger set of cross-platform tests are currently being worked on, for this article we are focusing on different "creator" workloads from video/audio encoding, render workloads, and related software prior to the larger comparison in the next week or two.

The Blender 2.81 release cycle has entered its "bcon2" development phase of development with the focus shifting to bug fixing and stabilizing new features with now being past the initial window of merging in the big ticket items...

As was anticipated, PostgreSQL 12.0 is now officially available...

If you are a user of AMD Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" graphics and don't mind riding Mesa Git, the latest 19.3-devel code as of yesterday has several more GFX10 fixes/improvements...

Flatpak 1.5 is the newest pre-release for this Linux app sandboxing and distribution tech...

The lossy ASTC texture compression algorithm has been widely adopted in recent years with it being official extensions to both OpenGL and OpenGL ES. While it may not be as messy as the S3TC patent situation of the past, it turns out Arm's license on Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression actually is quite restrictive outside of the context of Khronos' APIs...

While initially queued as a work-in-progress feature for Linux 5.5, AMD has now submitted a batch of "fixes" to the current Linux 5.4 cycle that include enabling of the LRU bulk moves performance-boosting functionality...

Igalia is working on supporting OpenGL ES' GLSL marking of variables as "mediump" when the precision involving those variables can be lowered to half-float 16-bit registers. That in turn can help with performance when honoring that precision marking, which to date Mesa has ignored...

One of the contributions Google is working on for the upstream Linux kernel is a new "sanitizer". Over the years Google has worked on AddressSanitizer for finding memory corruption bugs, UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer for undefined behavior within code, and other sanitizers. The Linux kernel has been exposed to this as well as other open-source projects while their newest sanitizer is KCSAN and focused as a Kernel Concurrency Sanitizer...

Here is our recap of the most popular content on Phoronix for Q3. This is also the first time any one vendor has nearly dominated the charts thanks to multiple successful product launches and growing embrace for Linux/open-source...

The Linux kernel will begin doing a basic sanity check of x86_64 CPUs with the RdRand instruction to see if it's at least returning "random looking" data otherwise warn the user at boot time. This stems from a recent issue where AMD's RdRand behavior with some hardware (particularly, buggy motherboards) could have borked RdRand issues...

Samba 4.11 was just released a few weeks back with big scalability improvements, but looking ahead to Samba 4.12 will be some big performance improvements for those leveraging encryption...

Given the recent AMD "ABBA" Ryzen 3000 boost fix, the upcoming release of Ubuntu 19.10 powered by Linux 5.3, here is a fresh round of AMD Ryzen 9 3900X vs. Intel Core i9 9900K benchmarks in a side-by-side matchup . It's just not any comparison but our largest i9-9900K vs. 3900X comparison ever: 112 gaming benchmarks and 321 system/CPU benchmarks carried out for our most extensive look yet at how these ~$500 CPUs are competing in this fierce race.

Tomorrow is when PostgreSQL 12.0 should meet the world for this popular open-source SQL database server...