Phoronix

With the Linux 5.7 kernel cycle in two months there is some "spring cleaning" within the staging area that is leading to almost twenty-nine thousand lines of code being removed thanks to removing a deprecated feature...

It's been a while since last having any news to report on Mesa's Lima Gallium3D driver for old Mali 400/450 series hardware, but an important optimization was merged today...

The second weekly release candidate of Linux 5.6 is now available and overall it's quite a calm test release...

Wine 5.2 is out as the second bi-weekly development release of Wine following the recent Wine 5.0 stable debut. This post-5.0 unstable series is ultimately leading up to Wine 6.0's release early next year...

With Blender 2.82 having released on Friday, this weekend we've begun our benchmarking of this new Blender release as the leading open-source 3D modeling solution currently available. Here are some preliminary v2.81 vs. v2.82 figures on different higher-end Intel and AMD processors...

It's been nearly one month since the release of Vulkan 1.2.132 and that came shortly after the big Vulkan 1.2 milestone, but out today is now Vulkan 1.2.133...

If the likes of GIMP and Krita aren't satisfying your digital drawing/painting needs, MyPaint 2.0 has finally been released as a big update to this simplicity-minded, cross-platform and open-source program...

Not scheduled to go live until Monday but up this weekend is the NVIDIA 440.58.01 Linux beta driver that offers a few Vulkan updates...

While this week marked the release of KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS, KDE developers haven't let up on their bug fixing activities and other improvements to this open-source desktop environment...

With C++20 now effectively complete, GCC developers have made a rather late change for GCC 10 that is also long overdue and that is introducing the -std=c++20 switch for targeting C++20...

Linux has supported the Apple Magic Keyboards since 2018 handling the Bluetooth connectivity and also needing some special handling for the numeric keypad. While that normally would be the end of the story, recent firmware updates to the Apple Magic Keyboard have caused problems...

Following last week's release of Chrome 80, Google this week promoted Chrome 81 into their beta channel...

The Linux 5.7 kernel that will be out in the late spring / early summer is poised to see support for USB fast charging support for Apple iOS devices...

Not only did NetBSD 9.0 make its debut today but DragonFlyBSD 5.8 was branched and its first release candidate made while DragonFlyBSD 5.9 is the version now open on Git master...

The out-of-tree Reiser4 and Reiser5 (Reiser4 v5) patches have been updated against the recently stabilized Linux 5.5 kernel...

An ISO C++ Committee meeting just wrapped up in Prague and it was voted to send the draft international standard for C++ out for final approval and publication...

NetBSD 9.0 is out today as for what the project is hoping as the "best NetBSD release ever" at least until NetBSD 10 down the road...

Red Hat's Richard Hughes has released Fwupd 1.3.8 as the latest version of this Linux utility for performing firmware updates of various system components...

Last summer it was announced that IBM's POWER ISA would be open-source and the OpenPOWER Foundation joining the Linux Foundation. Finally we're getting a look at how the end-user license agreement (EULA) is looking for those wishing to make use of the POWER CPU instruction set architecture...

Version 20.06.15619 of the open-source Intel Compute Runtime was released on Friday as powering the company's modern Linux graphics hardware compute stack...

For those tantilized by the prospects of gaming on RISC OS, SDL2 has been seeing early mainline work on supporting this long-standing operating system...

Following Netflix's AV1 adoption with collaborating with Intel on the SVT-AV1 encoder, now using AV1 streaming for Android users, and others around this advanced royalty-free video codec, Netflix is now exploring AVIF as their next-gen image format...

New stable and development releases of Mesa3D are available for providing the latest open-source Linux graphics driver experience for OpenGL and Vulkan...

For those that enjoy our daily open-source/Linux news each and every day of the year along with all of our original Linux benchmarking / hardware review content, you can show your support this Valentine's Day with a special offer...

Blender 2.82 is out as the second update over last year's big Blender 2.80 release...

As has been known for a while now, AMD Ryzen Threadripper processors really show their true potential on Linux with often significant increases to the performance thanks to the kernel's better scalability compared to Microsoft Windows. While Microsoft has made some improvements in this area over the past year, with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X 64-core / 128-thread HEDT processor it really shines on Linux. In this article are benchmarks of Windows 10 Professional and Windows 10 Enterprise against Linux on the Threadripper 3990X when going from 16 cores to 128 threads for seeing how the three operating systems are scaling.

While many in the Linux community still cringe when hearing Imagination Tech's PowerVR given the troubling state of their graphics drivers over the years, in 2020 it looks like they are pursuing a new open-source graphics driver project...

After recently ending feature development on Qt 5.15, the alpha release of this forthcoming tool-kit is now available...

OpenSSH 8.2 is out this Valentine's Day as the leading SSH suite. Besides working to disable the SSH-RSA public key signature algorithm due to SHA1 collision attacks, OpenSSH 8.2 also comes with new features...

PHP 7.4 should be landing in the Ubuntu 20.04 archive in the next week or so...

A new driver already queued in the power management code for the Linux 5.7 cycle not opening up until April is a "tiny power button" driver...

Clear Linux looks poised to join the ranks of the few Linux distributions allowing it to run off an F2FS root file-system...

While the open-source Intel "ANV" and Radeon "RADV" Vulkan drivers get talked about a lot, one of the lesser known Vulkan drivers within Mesa is Turnip but it's been gaining steam recently...

It's been years since last hearing anything about sisched as the SI machine instruction scheduler that started out for the RadeonSI OpenGL driver and was ultimately supported by the RADV Vulkan driver too...

Proton 5.0-2 is out with fixes over last week's big Proton 5.0-1 release that brought many features to this Wine 5.0 downstream focused on powering Valve's Steam Play for running Windows games nicely on Linux...

Intel Blackhole Render support was finally merged today for the new Intel "Iris" Gallium3D OpenGL driver default, the older i965 driver for pre-Broadwell hardware, and also the Mesa state tracker for Gallium3D drivers...

Here are some fresh numbers looking at the current performance of various AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors up against Intel Xeon Cascade Lake processors when using an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS development snapshot and also upgrading to Linux 5.5 as the latest stable kernel. Beyond raw performance, power efficiency and performance-per-dollar for these different server CPUs are being compared as well for these sub-$5000 processors.

Flatpak 1.6.2 is out and users are encouraged to upgrade due to a recent Flatpak + OSTree regression that leads to slow install times...

Beyond the Linux kernel patches presented earlier this week for AMD SEV-ES "Encrypted State" support, another Linux patch series out overnight provides another improvement to Secure Encrypted Virtualization with AMD EPYC server processors...

The release of the long sought after GTK 4.0 is one step closer to finally becoming reality with the slightly delayed GTK 3.98 now being available for testing...

Making use of Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) and Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) is currently being talked about by Mesa developers for their release builds in potentially squeezing out better performance...

Quibble is a new open-source bootloader that supports booting Windows XP through Windows 10 and opens up new possibilities like booting a Windows installation off Btrfs...

It's been a while since last having any new magical optimizations to talk about by DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon, but on Wednesday he landed some significant temporary file-system "TMPFS" optimizations for better throughput including with swap...

It looks like the Cavium/Marvell OCTEON MIPS-based processor support is being restored for Linux systems after some of its drivers were briefly removed...

Collabora under contract with SK Telecom has been working on Hwangsaeul as a new open-source platform for relaying security system surveillance video feeds from multiple sources, recording them on the centralized server, and supports connected clients for watching the feeds...

Given this week's release of Firefox 73 stable that also puts Firefox 74 into beta state, here are fresh Firefox browser benchmarks of Firefox 72/73/74 on Ubuntu Linux with and without WebRender as well as how it compares to the current state of Google Chrome.

After a one week delay, Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS is available today as the newest long-term support point release...

Since the release of Linux 5.6-rc1 that is coming in as a very feature-packed kernel, here are benchmarks of Linux 5.5 stable up against Linux 5.6-rc1 on a few of the systems tested so far while more results are in-progress...

While Linux 5.5 is out in the wild now as the latest stable version of the Linux kernel, it turns out some Intel kernel graphics driver patches were overlooked and this can spell trouble for some users...

One of the letdowns of the forthcoming Linux 5.6 kernel is that AMD's long-awaited Sensor Fusion Hub "SFH" open-source driver wasn't ready in time for merging this cycle, but it continues moving forward with hopes of seeing it in Linux 5.7...