Phoronix

For fans of the Kodi HTPC software, version 18.2 of the "Leia" update is now available with several prominent fixes...

Intel continues working on its SPMD compiler as part of their SPIR-V translator running on the CPU and other efforts. ISPC is the Intel SPMD Program Compiler and at the end of last week reached its version 1.11 milestone for this C variant compiler designed for single program, multiple data programming...

The latest change merged for Mesa 19.1 is a workaround so the Epic Games' game launch correctly renders when using OpenGL...

Continuing on with our benchmarks this month of the new Intel Xeon Cascade Lake processors in the form of the Xeon Platinum 8280 processors, here are some preliminary figures showing not only how various Linux distributions are comparing to Microsoft Windows Server 2019 but also FreeBSD 12.

For those wanting a community-supported, free version in effect of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the two options have been CentOS with its close relation (and employment) by Red Hat or Scientific Linux that has been maintained Fermilab, CERN, and other research labs. Moving forward, however, these labs are going to be adopting CentOS 8 and they will not be developing a new version of Scientific Linux based on the upcoming RHEL8...

When drivers get dropped from the Linux kernel it's generally due to hardware being no one cares about anymore that hasn't been produced in many years and the code often falls into disrepair to the point that the only logical way forward is dropping the driver. That happened last year to the "FDOMAIN" driver but as does happen every so often (albeit rare) thanks to the code being still obtainable through Git and the nature of open-source, interested parties can step up and revive the code...

Canonical has shifted the default Java of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS from OpenJDK 10 to OpenJDK 11. Plus here are some fresh OpenJDK 8/11/12 benchmarks on this Ubuntu Long Term Support release...

AMD this morning released AMDVLK 2019.Q2.2 as the newest tagged update to their open-source Radeon Vulkan Linux graphics driver...

NetworkManager 1.16 was released in March with WireGuard support, WiFi P2P, Intel IWD improvements, and much more. Surprisingly being released already is NetworkManager 1.18...

While awaiting DragonFlyBSD 5.6 as the BSD operating system's next feature release, DragonFlyBSD 5.4.2 has been released as the newest stable point release...

The Freedreno MSM DRM driver changes have been submitted to DRM-Next ahead of Linux 5.2. MSM provides the Direct Rendering Manager support around Qualcomm Adreno hardware and with this next kernel cycle is continuing to see better Adreno 600 series support...

Adding to the excitement of the Linux 5.2 kernel changes are a lot of Thunderbolt improvements expected to be introduced in this next kernel cycle...

The Netrunner Rolling Linux distribution that is based on Arch Linux / Manjaro (unlike the non-rolling release using Debian Testing) is out with a new release for this KDE-focused desktop platform...

Linux 5.1-rc6 is larger than the previous release candidate, but he isn't too worried right now about the condition of the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel...

Most exciting this week in KDE space was seeing KWin pick up support for the NVIDIA EGLStreams implementation for Wayland with this proprietary graphics driver. Beyond the EGLStreams KWin support were also many fixes and other improvements to the desktop landing this Easter week...

Should you have any Daktronics scoreboards, video displays, or digital billboards, mainline Linux kernel support appears to be in the works...

While initially no qualified candidates stepped forward for the 2019 Debian Project Leader elections, following the extended nomination period and voting, Sam Hartman has been elected the newest leader of Debian...

Intel's i40e / XL710 Ethernet driver will begin supporting Dynamic Device Personalization (DDP) with the upcoming Linux 5.2 kernel...

One of the areas of Oracle Linux and its "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" that the company continues investing in and differentiating it from upstream RHEL and alternatives is around Ksplice as their means of live kernel patching while Red Hat continues with Kpatch and SUSE with kGraft...

While initially some questions were raised over the usefulness and practicality of this driver when it was first proposed on the kernel mailing list, the NULL TTY driver is set to make its maiden voyage to mainline with the upcoming Linux 5.2 kernel cycle...

SuperTuxKart, the open-source racing game inspired by Mario Kart and themed around Linux/Tux, has reached its 1.0 version after being in development the past 12+ years...

Being merged into the LLVM code-base this Saturday is JITLink, a just-in-time linker for parsing object files and letting their contents run in a target process...

Not only is the longtime Lima DRM driver for Arm Mali 400/450 graphics set to finally premiere with the Linux 5.2 kernel, but the Panfrost DRM driver is also being mainlined for the newer Mali graphics hardware...

A new subsystem queued for introduction in the upcoming Linux 5.2 cycle is the Fieldbus Subsystem, which is initially being added to the staging area of the kernel...

As we've been expecting from NVIDIA's recent DXR ray-tracing support back-ported to Pascal/Volta GPUs, there's now a NVIDIA Linux driver beta that offers VK_NV_ray_tracing for pre-Turing graphics processors...

Going back to the late Linux 2.6 kernel days has been the CONFIG_DMESG_RESTRICT (or for the past number of years, renamed to CONFIG_SECURITY_DMESG_RESTRICT) Kconfig option to restrict access to dmesg in the name of security and not allowing unprivileged users from accessing this system log. While it's been brought up from time to time, Linux distributions are still generally allowing any user access to dmesg even though it may contain information that could help bad actors exploit the system...

While on one side of the table is the Purism Librem 5 Linux smartphone on the high-price/high-end side, the Pine64 folks continue working on the PinePhone as a lower-end Linux smartphone. A new video now shows the PinePhone running on Linux 5.0 with Wayland's Weston...

Coming as a late addition to the Linux 5.1 kernel are some long overdue keyboard key mappings for different functionality...

While there were the recent X.Org Foundation board elections, a do-over was needed as their new custom-written voting software wasn't properly recording votes... So here's now your reminder to re-vote in these X.Org elections...

Feature work on DRM-Next for the Linux 5.2 kernel cycle is winding down while today AMD has sent in what could be their last round of AMDGPU feature updates for this next kernel release...

Mesa 19.1 is due to be released at the end of May and for that to be the feature freeze is in two weeks followed by the weekly release candidates. With the feature development ending soon for this next quarterly Mesa release, the Radeon "RADV" and Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver developers in particular have been quite busy on their remaining feature work...

While the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) is needed for targeting the Xbox One, Microsoft HoloLens, and IoT, The Qt Company is thinking about gutting out their UWP support in the big Qt 6 tool-kit update...

Last year FreeBSD developers decided to re-base their ZFS file-system code based on the "ZFS On Linux" port rather than the Illumos source tree where they originally had been acquiring the support for this BSD. There's now FreeBSD 12 and FreeBSD 13/Head images available for testing of this re-worked ZFS file-system support...

Back during the BeOS days of the 90's, NVM Express solid-state storage obviously wasn't a thing but the open-source Haiku OS inspired by it now has an NVMe driver...

The Virtual I/O Device standard has christened its VIRTIO 1.1 specification this month. This is the virtualization standard around network/storage/graphics/other-hardware in mind for cross-hypervisor compatibility...

Following last month's Proton 4.2 for Steam Play that is derived from Wine 4.2 with many patches applied, Proton 4.2-3 has been released for the latest Windows gaming on Linux experience ahead of any Easter weekend gaming time...

For those wondering about Intel's MKL-DNN "Math Kernel Library for Deep Neural Networks" performance on Cascade Lake, here are some reference benchmarks using the dual Xeon Platinum 8280 setup including when using the GCC 9 compiler for building this Intel open-source library and employing the "cascadelake" compiler tuning...

With Ubuntu 19.04 out the door, it's time to kick off Ubuntu 19.10 as the next six-month installment of Ubuntu Linux and the last before Ubuntu 20.04 as the next LTS release...

Mozilla WebThings is what was formerly known as "Project Things" while serving as an experiment around a platform for IoT devices on the web...

KDE Applications 19.04 is now officially out as the first update of 2019 for this collection of prominent KDE desktop programs...

The Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco Dingo" has been officially released as the latest non-LTS, six-month installment to Ubuntu Linux...

Leading up to the Ubuntu 19.04 release, several premium supporters requested fresh results for seeing the X.Org vs. Wayland performance overhead for gaming, how GNOME Shell vs. KDE Plasma is performing for current AMD Linux gaming, and related desktop comparison graphics/gaming metrics. Here are such benchmarks run from the Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco Dingo" while benchmarking GNOME Shell both with X.Org and Wayland, Xfce, MATE, Budgie, KDE Plasma, LXQt, and Openbox.

On Wednesday night Valve issued their latest stable Steam client update and carries much of the work we've seen out of their recent beta releases...

Intel's open-source developers sent in another pull request this morning to DRM-Next of additional feature material they are planning on having in the upcoming Linux 5.2 kernel...

While it may not seem like a big release with Xfce 4.14 having yet to materialize, the Xubuntu developers have been doing a fine job providing a nice upgrade with Xubuntu 19.04 for those appreciating a lightweight, GTK-based desktop environment built around Ubuntu...

Theo de Raadt and the OpenBSD developers maintaining OpenSSH today unveiled OpenSSH 8.0...

SQLite 3.28 is now the latest version of this widely-used, embed-friendly cross-platform database library...

We haven't been seeing as much GLAMOR activity these days but then again the pace of X.Org Server development has certainly slowed up in recent years. GLAMOR as a reminder allows for X.Org Server 2D acceleration to happen in a generic manner via OpenGL / GLES and has been a common area for improvement...

While missing the GNOME 3.32.1 point release that shipped last week, GNOME Shell and Mutter today experienced their 3.32.1 updates with a variety of fixes...

Valgrind 3.15 has been released, the programming utility famous for catching memory leaks and helping with memory debugging/profiling...