Phoronix

GNOME 3.36 is slated to be released today so here is a look back at much of the prominent work being introduced in this six month update to the GNOME desktop...

SDL 2.0.12 is now available as the latest stable update to the Simple DirectMedia Layer that is the library commonly used by cross-platform games as a hardware/software abstraction layer...

Proton 5.0-4 is out as Valve's Wine-based layer for running Windows games on Linux via Steam Play...

Given this week's release of dav1d 0.6, here are some fresh benchmarks of this open-source AV1 video decoder on a few different Intel and AMD systems so far...

The newest open-source project out of Amazon Web Services is Bottlerocket, a Linux-based operating system designed for hosting containers and largely written in Rust code...

We've known that Intel's P-State Linux CPU frequency scaling driver in general can be a bit quirky and especially so when dealing with Intel integrated graphics where the iGPU and CPU share the same power envelope. This has been shown with examples like using the "powersave" governor to boost iGPU performance while discrete graphics owners are generally best off switching over to the "performance" governor. As the latest though on helping the iGPU front with P-State, there is a new patch series talking up big gains in performance and power efficiency...

Load Value Injection (LVI) is being disclosed today as a new class of transient-execution attacks and the researchers claim can defeat all existing mitigations around Meltdown, Foreshadow, Zombieload, RIDL and Fallout. The researchers say LVI can affect virtually any access to memory and compiler-based mitigations can be expensive...

With the Linux 5.7 kernel this spring there is going to be a new exFAT file-system drive developed by Samsung as outlined last week. While that is being added to the formal file-system area of the kernel rather than staging so both could co-exist for a transition period, already with Linux 5.7 will be the removal of the existing staging driver...

RenderDoc 1.7 is out today for this cross-platform graphics debugging/profiling tool that supports Vulkan, Direct3D, and OpenGL graphics APIs across all major platforms...

Git 2.26-rc1 is out this morning as the newest test version of this distributed version control system...

While we are very excited for Firefox 75 with Wayland and video acceleration improvements along with maturing Flatpak support, out today is Firefox 74.0 as the newest version of Mozilla's web browser...

Sculpt OS is the general purpose operating system built off the Genode operating system framework. Out now is their version 20.02 update that tries to make the OS more approachable...

Dav1d 0.6 is now available as a big update to this open-source AV1 video decoder developed by the VideoLAN crew...

The LibreOffice open-source office suite's Qt5 tool-kit integration so far has lacked HiDPI scaling support for dealing with modern high pixel density displays. But adding to the excitement for the LibreOffice 7.0 release later this year is now the Qt5 HiDPI scaling capability...

Should you be experienced in upstream Linux kernel development, AMD is hiring a lead Linux kernel developer...

Mesa 19.3.5 was released today for ending out the Mesa 19.3 series as the Q4'2019 OpenGL/Vulkan driver release stream...

Mozilla engineers have been making good progress on being able to ship a Flatpak'ed Firefox web browser for better security/sandboxing and easier distribution on Linux systems...

Last week Basemark launched their Basemark GPU 1.2 benchmark that now includes Linux support alongside all other major supported desktop and mobile operating systems. We've been testing out this Linux version with OpenGL and Vulkan support on both AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce hardware.

Compression experts Rich Geldreich and Stephanie Hurlburt with their Binomial consulting firm are about to release a high-quality open-source compression codec for GPUs...

Intel's open-source Compute Runtime for OpenCL and now oneAPI support on Linux has added oneAPI Level Zero support...

Fujitsu has contributed support for their high-performance A64FX ARMv8-based CPU cores to the LLVM Clang compiler...

Memcached 1.6 was released on Sunday as a big update for this popular open-source distributed memory caching system...

While the Debian archive continues to be built with the GCC compiler by default and will likely remain that way for the foreseeable future, Debian developers do continue experimenting with building the Debian archive under LLVM's Clang...

Linus Torvalds has unveiled the fifth weekly release candidate to the forthcoming Linux 5.6 kernel...

After running behind schedule from the planned release last month and an extra release candidate being warranted, LLVM 10.0 should be releasing this coming weeks along with its sub-projects -- most notably, the Clang 10.0 C/C++ compiler. Here is a look at the big ticket items of LLVM/Clang 10.0...

Not many AMD Radeon Linux gamers have been using the "sisched" SI machine instruction scheduler in recent times. This non-default scheduler hasn't been well maintained. Additionally, when on the RADV Vulkan driver, using the Valve-backed compiler back-end has been far superior. As such, SISCHED has now been gutted out of Mesa...

While the cross-distribution AppStream specification standardizes the software component metadata for use by Linux software centers/stores, it turns out many open-source developers aren't interested in or time limited by learning the spec and maintaining the metadata. As such, Matthias Klumpp has now developed the MetaInfo Creator for easily creating this important cross-distro metadata for packages...

Not only have GNOME developers been fixing many bugs this week ahead of the 3.36 stable desktop release next week, but coincidentally KDE developers were also going heavy on the bug fixes this week...

In preparing for the GNOME 3.36 stable release due out on 11 March, GNOME Shell and Mutter issued their final v3.36.0 releases on Saturday...

Over the past year Debian developers have been working towards APT 2.0 while now it is officially released for the advanced package tool on Debian, Ubuntu, and other DEB-based platforms...

Linux 5.4 brought a preliminary Microsoft exFAT file-system driver after Microsoft made the exFAT specification public and encouraged the support for Linux. But with the Linux 5.7 kernel this spring, a new exFAT file-system driver is going to land that is a much improved version of the earlier code...

Going back about two years has been work by Linaro on "thermal pressure" support for the scheduler so that it can make better task placement decisions among CPU cores when any of the core(s) are being restricted by running too hot. That work is now set to finally land this spring with the Linux 5.7 kernel...

Ubuntu 20.04 is coming out next month and will be the first LTS release with Ubuntu desktop ZFS support available for the root file-system after it was made easy-to-deploy the Ubuntu desktop on ZFS last cycle. One of the areas being expanded upon with the ZFS support has been Ubuntu's Zsys daemon for offering extra functionality for ZFS-based setups...

The Qt Company has put out the first public beta of the Qt Creator 4.12 integrated development environment focused on Qt/C++ development...

The Khronos Group has released Vulkan 1.2.134 as their newest revision to this high-performance graphics/compute API...

Intel's performance-oriented Clear Linux distribution recently added support for using F2FS as the root file-system so we were curious to run some benchmarks on it for how it stacks up against EXT4.

The second and final release candidate for the GNOME 3.36 milestone is now available for testing this weekend ahead of the official GNOME 3.36.0 debut next week...

Systemd 245 RC2 was released just earlier this week while now it has been succeeded by the stable release of systemd 245...

For those that have been looking out for an AMD Linux laptop powered by a Ryzen 4000 series processor, Acer is set to launch a new laptop at least in Germany that could be quite appealing to Linux users...

The latest Intel Linux graphics driver optimization being worked on is asynchronous page-flipping...

It turns out the Point-to-Point Protocol Daemon (PPPD) used for dial-up models, DSL, and other point-to-point network setups on Linux has been bugged for the past seventeen years with a buffer overflow vulnerability that could lead to remote code execution at the system level...

For those wondering how the Threadripper 3990X is performing with the upcoming Linux 5.6 kernel, here are benchmarks of a recent development snapshot of Linux 5.6 as well as benchmarking all of the major kernel releases going back to Linux 5.1...

Mesa's OpenGL threading "glthread" support has been around for a while but come Mesa 20.1 next quarter will be further improvements to this performance feature...

Following the release of Mesa 20.0 in mid-February, the first point release to this quarter's Mesa 3D feature series is now available...

GNOME Genius, one of the oldest GNOME programs and what served as the desktop's original calculator, has finally been ported to GTK3 and seen a new release in 2020...

Samba 4.12 is out this week as a big update to this prominent SMB/CIFS implementation for file exchange and printer sharing predominantly with Microsoft Windows systems...

D9VK (now part of DXVK) developer Joshua Ashton has proposed a set of patches to Wine's Vulkan library (Winevulkan) that should help with performance...

The Panfrost open-source, reverse-engineered Arm Mali Gallium3D driver is seeing work on a new driver-specific IR and compiler back-end...

BSD-focused vendor iXsystems has developed FreeNAS as their community-oriented NAS operating system while TrueNAS is what they ship on their storage solutions. FreeNAS and TrueNAS have been derived largely from the same code-base. Moving forward to TrueNAS 12.0 later this year, iXsystems is unifying FreeNAS and TrueNAS...

LLVM 10.0 was supposed to be released at the end of February but is running slightly behind schedule and now there is a third and unscheduled final release candidate...