Phoronix

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...

AMD has volleyed their latest AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver code, their first publish push in more than two weeks, making it their first push of the new quarter...

DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon who also created the HAMMER family of file-systems remains quite busy on filling out the remaining features for HAMMER2 and tuning its performance...

This week the LLVM Foundation formally accepted "f18" as part of the LLVM project. This is the initiative led by NVIDIA in developing a modern LLVM-based Fortran compiler...

Beyond the Lima Gallium3D driver being merged into Mesa 19.1, the Linux 5.2 kernel will be introducing the DRM/KMS kernel open-source driver developed via reverse-engineering for these Arm Mali 400/450 graphics processors...

While LLVM 8.0 was released last month, LLVM 7.1 is set to come soon as an unusual update for this open-source compiler...

Of the multiple choices for music/media players on KDE systems, Elisa has been one of the recent but promising contenders in this space. Thanks to recent improvements, Elisa is becoming quite a viable music player for the KDE desktop...

During this year's X.Org Foundation elections there was the key ballot initiative on whether the X.Org Foundation should formally accept FreeDesktop.org into its umbrella. That measure, which required a super majority of members to approve, passed. But the X.Org Foundation Board of Directors voting hit an oops...

Red Hat developer Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek has just tagged the systemd 242 release, which is coming in with yet more features for this init system...

Purism's Coreboot support for their laptops has evolved nicely over the past two years after initially not having support. While their devices have been shipping with Coreboot for some time now, Coreboot updates up until now have involved having to build them from source, but now they are offering pre-built binaries...

As has been expected the past several weeks, NVIDIA rolled out a driver update today providing DXR ray-tracing support going back to non-RTX Pascal GPUs. While NVIDIA has mostly been trumpeting the DirectX 12 ray-tracing abilities now with these older GPUs lacking RTX cores, their work does include enabling of Vulkan VK_NV_ray_tracing support on these graphics processors...

With the continuously evolving RADV Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver and near-weekly updates to the AMD's official "AMDVLK" open-source tree Vulkan driver, how are these competing AMD Vulkan Linux drivers comparing these days? As it's been a while since our last benchmarking comparison of the official AMDVLK driver against the open-source and more common/popular Mesa RADV driver, here are some fresh benchmarks of RADV from Mesa 19.0 on Ubuntu 19.04 as well as 19.1-devel compared to the latest AMDVLK driver code.

Proxmox VE 5.4 was released today as the server virtualization environment based on Debian and allows for easily deploying LXC containers and KVM-based virtual machines from a web-based interface...

Complementing the initial set of AMDGPU changes for Linux 5.2, Alex Deucher of AMD has sent in another pull request of new material for this next version of the Linux kernel...

Well known open-source developer Lennart Poettering has shined some light onto Fedora Workstation's packaging state that it could be beneficial reducing the set of packages installed by default...

While the U2F Zero has already been superseded by the "Solo" FIDO2 security key, this USB-based U2F token for two-factor authentication is finally seeing mainline support come Linux 5.2...

The belated Mesa 19.0.2 is now available as the newest stable release to these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers...

Seven years after Luc Verhaegen started the Lima driver project for open-source Mali graphics -- one of the first reverse-engineered, open-source Arm graphics driver attempts in general -- while he is no longer involved with the initiative, developer Qiang Yu picked it up and has successfully worked it into a functioning open-source OpenGL Gallium3D driver that has been merged into Mesa Git...

It's been a while since NVIDIA last issued a new Windows/Linux Vulkan beta driver update but that changed today with gamers and developers on Linux today having access to the 418.52.03 driver build...

Over the past week we've been delivering several benchmarks of the new Intel Xeon Scalable "Cascade Lake" processors under Linux with the Platinum 8280 processors. The Linux support and performance is hitting expectations, but what about on the BSDs? I spent some time this week trying out the dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 processors within the Gigabyte S451-3R0 Storage Server. The FreeBSD 12.0 support has been in great shape and in this article are some comparison benchmarks between various Linux distributions and FreeBSD for those curious.

For those intrigued by Dbus-Broker as a high-performance, user-space D-Bus compatible implementation, Dbus-Broker 20 has been released...

Following yesterday's Ubuntu 18.10 vs. 19.04 Radeon gaming/graphics benchmarks I decided to try out the Radeon VII on Ubuntu 19.04, which should be working out-of-the-box given its use of Linux 5.0 and Mesa 19.0. Unfortunately, earlier Radeon VII (Vega 20) issues I've been encountering are still plaguing the card...

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released a new version of Raspbian, its Debian-based operating system for Raspberry Pi devices...

Mesa's "RADV" Radeon Vulkan open-source driver has landed support for VK_AMD_gpu_shader_half_float...

While Linux users can today manually enable WebRender support for their Firefox installations, Mozilla is making the necessary adjustments to begin experimenting with enabling this Rust-written GPU-based rendering element for "qualified" Linux devices...

With Ubuntu 19.04 due for release next week, here is a look at how the AMD Radeon Linux gaming performance is looking out-of-the-box on the Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco Dingo" compared to the current Ubuntu 18.10 release.

Not to be confused with NVMe or any other memory/storage tech, NetBSD's NVMM is a new hypervisor that has been in-development the past half-year for Intel/AMD x86-64 processors and will premiere with the NetBSD 9.0 release...

In February of 2018 Intel open-sourced their new OpenCL Linux driver dubbed "NEO" that is the replacement to their long-standing "Beignet" OpenCL driver. This modern OpenCL stack is on its way now to the repositories of Ubuntu and Debian distributions...

For the past number of months we've seen Canonical developers working on ZFS support in the Ubuntu desktop and ZFS root partition support so that the Ubuntu desktop could (optionally) be installed to a ZFS On Linux partition. That work has been continuing and it's looking like we could see the fruits of that work for the Ubuntu 19.10 cycle...

The GCC 9 compiler is due to be released in the next few weeks and among the many new and improved features is an option designed to help generate binaries that are friendly for live-patching purposes. With the Linux 5.2 kernel, this option will be used by default when building a kernel with live-patching support and that has the potential for some slight slowdowns...

It's been 23 months since the release of GRUB 2.02 while the next release, GRUB 2.04, is finally around the corner. GRUB 2.04-rc1 was issued today as the first test release for this widely-used open-source bootloader...

Yesterday Intel finally announced their SVT-AV1 video encoder as a promising high-performance AV1 encoder but it turns out they also have open-source plans this year for developing a performant AV1 decoder, among other interesting items on their road-map...

Mesa developers have been off to a busy start this week with a lot of new code merged affecting multiple drivers...

At Monday's weekly Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) meeting, a number of changes pertaining to Fedora 31 were approved...

Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux distribution is preparing to be one of the first distributions relying upon LLVM 8 (and Clang 8) out-of-the-box as the latest major release for this widely-used compiler stack...

Released at the start of February was Lutris 0.5 with a much improved GTK3 user interface, GOG.com integration, and other improvements to this open-source Linux game manager that works from Wine-based games to Steam and various other offerings. Lutris 0.5.2 is now out with the latest set of improvements on top...

The OpenVPN 3 Linux client has been in the works for a number of months with some big features including a rewrite in C++11, exposing a D-Bus interface that yields a number of usability improvements, better DNS configuration, and various other enhancements...

Blackmagic Design has announced Davinci Resolve 16 beta as the newest feature update to the very feature-rich and cross-platform but proprietary video editor...

We've been pretty much exclusively reporting on - and benchmarking - the Intel SVT-AV1 open-source encoder since the start of February while finally today Intel has formally announced this initiative. It also turns out Netflix is cooperating with Intel on this Scalable Video Technology with their plan to make use of it...