Phoronix

GentooLTO is a configuration overlay for Gentoo's overlay to make it easy to enable Link Time Optimizations (LTO) and other compiler optimizations for enabling better performance out of the Gentoo packages. GentooLTO appears to be inspired in part by the likes of Clear Linux who employ LTO and other compiler optimization techniques like AutoFDO for yielding better performance than what is conventionally shipped by Linux distributions. The GentooLTO developers and users have wrapped up their survey looking at how practical this overlay configuration is on the massive Portage collection...

For those wondering how the Linux smartphone stack is shaping up for Purism's long-awaited Librem 5 smartphone that is currently aiming to ship in Q3, the company has released several video recordings of different operations running on their Librem 5 software on their developer kits...

The newest project being hosted by the Linux Foundation is Laminas, what was the PHP Zend Framework...

While Ubuntu 19.04 isn't even coming out until tomorrow, the indications around Ubuntu desktop ZFS support and functionality likely debuting the next cycle has us already quite eager for the Ubuntu 19.10 release coming out in October...

It's approaching two years since the release of Mageia 6 but at least the wait for Mageia 7 shouldn't be too much longer...

The engineers at Facebook maintaining Zstandard "Zstd" as a speedy real-time compression algorithm debuted version 1.4.0 on Tuesday with some notable improvements...

Mesa 19.1 is now even more exciting as RADV's co-lead, Bas Nieuwenhuizen has requested the Radeon Vulkan's FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync support be a blocker bug for this quarterly Mesa update...

We've seen many efforts like DXVK that are mapping Direct3D atop Vulkan, efforts like Zink in getting OpenGL over Vulkan, and less popular but still progressing is getting OpenCL -- at least a reasonable subset of it -- working under Vulkan. That's what the CLVK project is about and it's been making more progress since we last looked at it on Phoronix...

It's been nearly one year already since the previous patch series working on speculative page faults for the Linux kernel were sent out for review. Fortunately, IBM's Laurent Dufour has once again updated these patches against the latest code and sent them out for the newest round of discussions...

The effort to provide a more convenient / easy to remember kernel option for toggling Spectre/Meltdown mitigations is out with a second revision and they have also shortened the option to remember...

GLFW is the traditionally OpenGL library (now also encompassing the Vulkan graphics API) that offers a basic API for the creation of windows/contexts/surfaces across software platforms. GLFW works for both desktop and mobile, various devices, and works across all major operating systems while being under the liberal Zlib license. GLFW 3.3 is now available with some exciting enhancements...

AMD today announced the Ryzen Embedded R1000 series with the inaugural R1505G and R1606G SoCs...

Following yesterday's Intel Iris vs. i965 OpenGL benchmarks against Windows 10, there is already an optimization out of our latest testing as a result...

Vulkan 1.1.107 is out today as the newest version of the Vulkan graphics/compute API...

Nearly one month after the release of the Qt 5.13 Beta 1, the second beta of this forthcoming tool-kit upgrade is now available...

Unity Tech has just released Unity 2019.1 as a big update for this cross-platform game engine...

Yesterday marked the final freeze for the upcoming Fedora 30 distribution release. The problem with Red Hat / Fedora developers being on the forefront of contributing innovations upstream to GNOME and other key components is that often exposes them to new bugs and this cycle is no different...

Juan A. Suarez Romero of Igalia is serving as the release manager for Mesa 19.1 and sent out a reminder on Monday of the planned release schedule for this quarterly driver update...

Mozilla presented at the NAB Streaming Summit last week over the state of the royalty-free AV1 video format aiming to compete with H.265/HEVC and succeeding VP9 for open-source use-cases...

It's been quite fascinating to watch the development of the Intel Iris Gallium3D driver that has now been in development by their open-source team for more than one year while back in February is where this currently experimental driver was merged into Mesa. It's been over one month since last looking at the Intel Iris Gallium3D performance relative to Intel's default "i965" Mesa OpenGL driver. Here are fresh benchmarks looking not only at their current and next-gen OpenGL Linux driver options but also how that performance compares to their current Windows 10 OpenGL driver.

While there are around 150 release critical bugs to be addressed before Debian 10.0 "Buster" can make its debut, the Debian Installer continues getting in great shape and is out today with its release candidate...

Quite a surprise this Monday morning is finding that KDE's EGLStreams back-end for the KWin Wayland compositor has been merged! The KDE Plasma 5.16 release this summer will thus introduce support for running the KDE Plasma Wayland session with the proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver stack...

While DXVK 1.1 was released earlier this month, it ultimately was recalled due to game crashes and GPU hangs that are still being investigated. For now, DXVK 1.0.3 has been released as the latest and greatest version of this library for translating Direct3D 10/11 calls to make use of the Vulkan graphics API for Windows gaming on Linux with Wine/Proton...

CentOS, the community enterprise operating system built from the sources of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, is marking its 15th birthday...

The GStreamer 1.16 cycle is slowly coming to an end and today marks the availability of the release candidate for this widely-used, open-source multimedia framework...

The Qt Company today released Qt Creator 4.9, the latest feature update to their integrated development environment focused on Qt/C++ support that has expanded now to support more programming languages via the Language Server Protocol (LSP) support...

With modules being an accepted feature for C++20, LLVM's Clang compiler has now enabled the functionality when tapping the compiler's experimental support via the -std=c++2a compiler switch...

It's already been two years since Unigine Corp introduced their very fascinating Superposition graphics benchmark. Today they have rolled out Unigine Superposition 1.1 as the next installment of this demanding GPU benchmark to showcase the Unigine 2 engine's abilities...

Longtime open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver developer Ilia Mirkin is drafting a new OpenGL extension proposal for helping out in driver reverse-engineering efforts...

The latest Wayland protocol in the works is a color manager calibration protocol...

Debian developer Jonathan Wiltshire who is part of the project's release team issued a Buster freeze status update on Sunday concerning the readiness of Debian 10...

We are less than one month away from the official Linux 5.1 kernel release while today Linus Torvalds announced the availability as expected of Linux 5.1-rc5...

OpenSUSE defaults to IBRS for its Spectre Variant Two mitigations rather than the Retpolines approach and that is one of the reasons for the distribution's slower out-of-the-box performance compared to other Linux distributions...

Friday's release of Wine 4.6 was exciting in that it started merging the code for WineD3D Vulkan support, now supports a shared Wine-Mono, and other big ticket work. Wine-Staging 4.6 is now available as the latest experimental patches re-based atop the latest upstream Wine. This Wine-Staging update is quite exciting in its own right...

With KDE Frameworks 5.58, the Dolphin file manager and other KDE applications will finally begin displaying file creation dates/times as a long sought after feature on Linux systems...

Last year introduced in the Linux 4.19 kernel was a new EROFS file-system developed by Huawei that they designed to be used as a modern, read-only Linux file-system. After originally publishing the user-space bits last year, they are now re-working their utilities...

Following this week's release of systemd 242, one of the newly-merged features for what will become systemd 243 is support for MACsec within the networkd code...

Google's Summer of Code is embarking on its 14th year of encouraging student developers to get involved with open-source development. Complementary to code contributions, Google is preparing its inaugural "Season of Docs" to help technical writers get involved in better preparing open-source program documentation...

With TrueOS (formerly PC-BSD) shifting away from its desktop FreeBSD focus, the GhostBSD project remains one of the nice "desktop BSD" operating system offerings. GhostBSD 19.04 is now available in MATE and Xfce desktop spins...

The crew working on the open-source MoltenVK layer that allows for Vulkan to run on macOS/iOS by remapping the calls to use Apple's Metal drivers just picked up a lot more capabilities...

We've been looking forward to seeing Blender 2.80 in 2019 while now we finally have a better idea for when it will actually see the light of day...

For those still using the out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system, it may be about time to consider alternatives like Btrfs, XFS, ZFS On Linux, F2FS, or even the likes of Stratis and Bcachefs. But should you still be using this once promising file-system, the out-of-tree patches have been revised to now work with the Linux 5.0 kernel...

Broadcom's next-gen "V3D" driver (formerly known as VC5) being used by some newer Broadcom hardware but more coming down the pipeline in the future has nearly working compute shader support...

Intel developers continue prepping the Linux support for next-generation Intel Xeon "Cooper Lake" processors, particularly around its addition of the new BFloat16 instruction...

Following this week's testing of the Radeon Linux gaming performance between Ubuntu 18.10 and 19.04, I also ran some benchmarks on the Ubuntu 19.04 when manually switching over to the bleeding-edge Mesa 19.1 RADV/RadeonSI drivers paired with the Linux 5.1 Git kernel. Is that worthwhile for "Disco Dingo" users to gain better AMD Linux gaming performance?..

AMD today unexpectedly released Radeon Open Compute "ROCm" 2.3 as the newest feature release for this open-source Radeon GPU compute stack...

Wine 4.6 is now available as the latest bi-weekly development release and is actually quite exciting on the feature front with the developers -- especially those at CodeWeavers -- being quite active this spring...

If GNU Emacs is your text editor of choice, you can end out the week by upgrading to Emacs 26.2...

Last week I passed along some initial benchmark results after finding Intel Cascade Lake offering up some performance improvements when using the in-development Linux 5.1 kernel. The exciting news is this doesn't appear to be Cascadelake-specific or even Intel specific as with the Dell PowerEdge EPYC 2P server I am also seeing some nice performance improvements in the same benchmarks...

Red Hat's Alexander Larsson released Flatpak 1.3.2 as the newest development release for this widely-used Linux application sandboxing/distribution tech. Flatpak 1.3.2 builds upon last month's Flatpak 1.3 unstable release with more low-level changes to enhance the security and reliability of Flatpaks...