Phoronix

Red Hat this morning announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1, the first update to RHEL8 since its general availability in May...

The Linux 5.5 kernel due out as stable in early 2020 will finally have mainline support for the MIPS-powered SGI Octane and Octane II workstations that originally ran with SGI's IRIX operating system about two decades ago...

Several weeks ago we wrote about a kernel fix for Linux 5.4 to address performance issues for highly-threaded Linux software running under CFS quotas. The fix can yield up to a 30x improvement in performance and one company estimated the impact of the bug cost them at least $1.5 million USD in extra resources/hardware. But now it looks like it will soon appear in a Linux 5.3 point release and possible back-ports to earlier kernels...

With more cameras moving their image processing operations from micro-controllers to the CPU to save on manufacturing, libcamera was started last year to serve as an open-source camera support library across Linux / Android / ChromeOS for supporting these modern cameras...

While Ubuntu 19.10 just shipped two weeks ago with its initial desktop install support to a root ZFS file-system option, feature work is already happening of ZFS changes destined for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Ubuntu's Zsys daemon being built around ZFS' advanced feature set...

Drew Gallatin of Netflix presented at the recent EuroBSDcon 2019 conference in Norway on the company's network stack optimizations to FreeBSD. Netflix was working on being able to deliver 200Gb/s network performance for video streaming out of Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC servers, to which they are now at 190Gb/s+ and in the process that doubled the potential of EPYC Naples/Rome servers and also very hefty upgrades too for Intel...

With DXVK in remarkably good standing for translating Direct3D 10/11 to Vulkan for use by Steam Play (Proton) and Wine, Philip Rebohle who started that project is now contributing more to Wine's VKD3D initiative for mapping Direct3D 12 on Vulkan...

Beyond GCC 9 having deprecated Solaris 10 support and that code now removed ahead of the GCC 10 release in a few months, the GNU Debugger (GDB) is also moving forward with its plan to obsolete Solaris 10...

FreeBSD 12.1 has released on-time as the first incremental update to last year's FreeBSD 12...

Last week NVIDIA announced the GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER as their newest Turing "SUPER" graphics card coming in at $229+ USD and delivering around 1.5x faster performance than the GeForce GTX 1060. For those wondering about the Linux gaming performance potential for this graphics card, here are our initial tests of this new graphics card using the EVGA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER.

NVIDIA has rolled out the 440.31 Linux driver today as their first stable update in this new driver branch...

For looking at any difference in thermal throttling and peak frequencies, I ran the Dell XPS with Intel Core i7-1065G7 "Ice Lake" processor out in a cold garage overnight compared to normal operating temperatures inside across dozens of benchmarks...

With the Linux 5.3 kernel release this summer Intel enabled Speed Select Technology under Linux for this feature found on new Cascade Lake processors. The SST Linux tool has now seen some updated patches ahead of the forthcoming Linux 5.5 cycle...

Landing in GNOME's Mutter tree today is a change for GNOME 3.36 improving the effectiveness of running the GNOME Shell desktop with a software renderer like LLVMpipe...

Vulkan 1.1.127 is out this morning as the latest routine update to the specification for this high-performance graphics API...

The popular Darktable open-source RAW photography workflow software is closing in on its v3.0 release with the first release candidate having been issued on Sunday...

With the recently released Ubuntu 19.10 there is initial support for the Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computers sans the highest-tier 4GB version that embarrassingly suffers from USB ports not working with the current Ubuntu 19.10 build. Fortunately, Canonical is working to address that issue with the RPi4 4GB version as well as making other Raspberry Pi support improvements...

Linus Torvalds has released Linux 5.4-rc6 back on schedule after his travels this past week around the Linux Foundation events in Lyon, France...

In addition to a talk at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe on trimming the Linux boot time with systemd changes, Michael Opdenacker of embedded Linux engineering firm Bootlin presented on their techniques for not only speeding up the Linux boot time but also reductions in the kernel image size...

NetworkManager 1.21.3 is the network management project's latest development release in the path towards the upcoming NetworkManager 1.22...

This past week at the Open Source Summit Europe in France there were several past Outreachy interns that shared their work on contributing to the Linux kernel and related open-source projects. Several of these projects have resulted in useful additions to the Linux kernel...

It's been a while since last having any new features to report on in regards to the Linux kernel's livepatching infrastructure for applying kernel updates without system reboots. With the Linux 5.5 there is a big addition to livepatching and that is support for tracking the system state changes...

Godot 4.0 continues to be worked on with much excitement by lead developer Juan Linietsky and others. While continuing to advance the Vulkan code in general for its introduction in Godot 4.0, over the past month most of the development efforts were focused on global illumination...

For those wondering what KDE developers are up to at the start of November, KDE's Nate Graham has published his latest weekly blog post highlighting the new developments in the KDE space...

IBM developers and others continue exploring the potential for address space isolation in the Linux kernel to reduce the risk of leaking sensitive data in attacks like L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF), MDS, and other vulnerabilities. Though this does increase the complexity of the kernel code and the performance hit is still to be evaluated...

Intel's Mika Westerberg who continues overseeing the Linux kernel's Thunderbolt code has prepped more changes ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.5 cycle...

In recent years we have seen prominent automobile manufacturer BMW engaging more with open-source and Linux. At this week's Open-Source Summit Europe / Embedded Linux Conference Europe they talked more about their increasing usage of Linux from their assembly line to within automobiles...

With the C++17 support in the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) already being quite mature for about two releases/years, when the GCC 11 development cycle opens they are looking at enabling their GNU dialect of C++17 to be the default standard when compiling C++ code...

Along with Intel sending in their last feature pull to DRM-Next for Linux 5.5, AMD has done the same in sending their lingering AMDGPU feature work for queuing ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.5 merge window...

The Rust-written "rav1e" AV1 video encoder continues working on better performance potential with recent Intel/AMD CPUs...

Fresh off last night's Wine 4.19 uncorking, Wine-Staging 4.19 is out as the experimental blend of Wine with more than 800 patches for experimental/testing patches atop the upstream code-base for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms...

With the start of a new month we are always eager to see what Valve reports via their "Steam Survey" for Linux usage (among other stats) for the month prior. The October 2019 numbers are now published but they don't indicate any Linux change in marketshare but with some odd indications...

Wine 4.19 is out today as the project's first development release for November and as we get quite close to the feature freeze / RC period for Wine 5.0 that will be out in early 2020...

With Qt 6.0 planned for release in late 2020, KDE developers are thinking about the eventual KDE Frameworks 6.0 for when they plan to transition to the evolutionary Qt 6 tool-kit. The first of likely several developer sprints around KDE Frameworks 6 will be happening already in late November...

Thanks to Red Hat's Hans de Goede there is another optimization to GNOME's Mutter around XWayland full-screen gaming...

The open-source vkBasalt project is the independent effort implementing AMD Radeon Image Sharpening / Contrast Adaptive Sharpening technique as a Vulkan post-processing layer that can be used regardless of the (Vulkan-powered) game. With vkBasalt 0.1 also now comes the ability to apply FXAA...

During October on Phoronix there were 287 original news articles and 27 featured-length Linux hardware reviews / benchmark articles, all written by your's truly. Here is a look back at the most popular Linux hardware happenings and other open-source/Linux news for the past month...

Intel's open-source crew has submitted the last of their feature updates to their "i915" Direct Rendering Manager graphics driver for staging in DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.5 kernel cycle...

NVIDIA's Nitin Gupta continues working on proactive compaction for the Linux kernel's memory management code...

MidnightBSD is one of the easy-to-use, desktop-focused BSDs that makes it easy to run GNOME and other desktops like Lumina atop its FreeBSD base. MidnightBSD 1.2 was released on Halloween as an update providing updates to its base system and various fixes...

Dell has been offering the Dell XPS 7390 in "Developer Edition" form with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS for this newest XPS generation using 10th Gen Comet Lake CPUs while now they have added more hardware configuration options...

Following last week's release of Chrome 78, Google today promoted Chrome 79 to their beta channel...

While we long to finally see GIMP 3.0, GIMP 2.10.14 is out as the newest stable update for this leading open-source image manipulation program...

With Mesa 19.3 having been branched yesterday, hitting Git master today as an early change for Mesa 20.0 is an overhaul to the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver's buffer object (BO) allocation code...

The Khronos Group has launched the Vulkan Unified Samples Repository, a Git repository on GitHub for Khronos-reviewed, high-quality Vulkan code samples...

The performance of Fedora 30 on multiple systems has generally been coming up short compared to the likes of Ubuntu, Clear Linux, and openSUSE Tumbleweed. With this week's release of Fedora 31 I was hopeful that the performance would be more competitive to other prominent Linux distributions, but sadly that doesn't appear to be the case. Here are some initial benchmarks of Fedora Workstation 31 compared to Fedora Workstation 30, Clear Linux 31450, and Ubuntu 19.10.

Linux Mint 19.3 "Tricia" will be out before Christmas and continuing to further refine this desktop focused Linux distribution...

Gaming on ARM-based boards like the Raspberry Pi will soon have the potential for running much better thanks to a series of ARM Assembly optimizations that were just merged into SDL2...

The mainline Linux kernel continues to see better support for Oracle VM VirtualBox with more of the guest drivers reaching the mainline kernel to provide a vastly better out-of-the-box experience...

The Qt Company has released version Qt 3D Studio 2.5 of their 3D UI creation software originally derived from code that NVIDIA volleyed as open-source...