Phoronix

The third and likely final development milestone release ahead of this month's Phoronix Test Suite 9.0-Asker release is now available for cross-platform, fully-automated benchmarking...

Systemd 243 finally shipped this morning as the latest major update to this widely used Linux init system...

Even as we approach 2020, many Linux distributions and various desktop programs still isn't fully optimized for today's modern HiDPI screens. Fortunately for users of Ubuntu-based Linux Mint, their next update will further improve its HiDPI support...

UPower is the abstraction layer around batteries and other power devices on Linux. Even with it being years since it was known as DeviceKit-power and seeing many 0.99 updates, the UPower 1.0 release isn't there yet but at least UPower 0.99.11 is now available as their first release since February...

An interesting new addition to FFmpeg's avformat library is ZeroMQ protocol support for enhancing its streaming abilities...

In addition to Mutter seeing today an important last minute performance fix for the NVIDIA proprietary driver, Mutter also saw a long-standing performance optimization finally land for GNOME 3.34 that benefits all hardware/drivers...

It appears Linus Torvalds is spending some time away from his computers this US Labor Day weekend with the Linux 5.3-rc7 kernel test release coming one day late...

Firefox 69.0 is set to be officially released tomorrow but for those eager to upgrade the release binaries have now hit their FTP server...

The increasingly used Godot open-source game engine has been working on porting to Vulkan as part of Godot 4.0. With much of the lower-level and 2D bits in good standing, work on their 3D rendering support with Vulkan has begun...

There isn't any AV1 video decode/encode built into the video engines of today's GPUs, but the DAV1D project CPU-based AV1 decoder is experimenting with offloading some aspects of the process to current generation hardware with OpenGL ES and Vulkan...

For those with extra time on their hands this US Labor Day, the Kodi team behind this open-source HTPC software issued their 18.4 Leia release...

GNOME 3.34 is expected for release next Tuesday while squeezing into Mutter this morning is an important performance fix for those running GNOME on X11 with the NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver...

Based off Friday's Wine 4.15, Wine-Staging 4.15 is now available that has its 800+ existing patches while adding a number of new patches and updating functionality for some of the existing feature patches...

LLVM 9.0 is past due for release but it looks like this compiler stack along with sub-projects like Clang 9.0 could be released in the coming weeks...

Linux 5.4 will be a big kernel on the file-system front as in addition to introducing the new VirtIO-FS and exFAT file-system support, Huawei's EROFS file-system will be graduating from staging...

When looking back over the 270 original news articles on Phoronix during August and our 17 featured Linux hardware reviews / benchmark articles, the majority of the most popular content came down to our continued testing of the AMD Ryzen 3000 series processors and the newly-launched AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors...

Ghidra is the open-source reverse engineering tool published by the US National Security Agency as an alternative to existing decompilers/disassemblers and other reverse engineering utilities. As noted earlier this summer, a Google Summer of Code project has been creating Ghidra plug-ins for helping with firmware reverse engineering...

It's been a number of months since last seeing a new release of GreenWithEnvy or hearing anything out of the project, but this weekend is finally a new version of this open-source overclocking panel for NVIDIA graphics cards on Linux...

KDE had a busy final week to August...

In addition to the new hardware support and other features queued already in DRM-Next for the upcoming Linux 5.4 merge window, on Friday AMD sent in a final pull request to DRM-Next of new material ahead of this upcoming kernel cycle...

In addition to NetBSD seeing better DRM ioctl support for its Linux compatibility layer (as part of an effort towards possible Steam support) thanks to Google Summer of Code 2019, there were also Wine improvements as a result of this Google programming initiative...

The Intel Icelake Linux support has largely been squared away for months but one lingering important feature for many is the Thunderbolt support and that's now set to be introduced with the upcoming Linux 5.4 version...

The EOMA68 computer card design was novel when first talked about for interchangeable Arm-based computer cards that could also be installed within laptops and other devices. But even after being worked on for years and raising more than $234k USD, it's still not ready yet to see the light of day...

This past week was GNOME's annual developer conference, GUADEC. Video recordings from all the presentations at this event in Thessaloniki, Greece are now online...

In addition to the initial exFAT driver landing for Linux 5.4, also slated to land for this next kernel cycle is the VirtIO-FS file-system driver...

Wine 4.15 is out for testing this US holiday weekend. With Wine 4.15 it brings an initial implementation of Windows' HTTP.sys as the HTTP protocol stack that is a kernel-mode driver that lists for HTTP requests and passes it onto Microsoft's IIS...

Back on the AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" launch day I wrote about how AMD is working to return to open-source BIOS / Coreboot support and now there's further confirmation of their work in that direction...

The Linux 5.4 kernel merge window will kick off in September and with this next kernel cycle the initial open-source exFAT file-system driver is set to be mainlined for supporting this Microsoft file-system, but it will premiere within the kernel's "staging" area for code of lesser, yet-to-be-proven quality...

The ACRN hypervisor that was open-sourced by Intel last year as a small footprint virtualization hypervisor focused on real-time computing and safety-critical applications for IoT and related embedded use-cases is up to version 1.2...

While we are often testing Intel's Clear Linux on high-end desktop and server hardware, it turns out even on the opposite end of the spectrum that their performance-optimized distribution can offer meaningful performance advantages on low-end SoCs for IoT-type devices. When testing Clear Linux with an Apollolake platform, it came out to being about 20% faster than the likes of Fedora and Ubuntu Linux.

Frequently brought up following our various Ryzen 3000 "Zen 2" benchmarks like the Ryzen 9 3900X vs. Core i9 9900K gaming benchmarks is how the Ryzen 9 3900X is pulling considerably more power than the similarly equipped Intel Core i9 system and those numbers are higher than what is often cited by Windows reviewers as the difference. I've begun investigating that power difference and indeed quite quickly could see Linux power usage being higher than Windows 10...

Waypipe is off to the races as the newest network transparency effort in the Wayland space. Waypipe provides a network transparent Wayland proxy for running native Wayland programs/games over a network similar to X11's capabilities and forwarding X over an SSH connection...

Nearly three years to the day since the release of CUPS 2.2, the release of CUPS 2.3 that had been delayed more than one year is now available...

The Fairphone 3 made its formal announcement this week with pre-orders beginning and plans to begin shipping in mid-October. The Fairphone 3 is the latest iteration for this phone design that is focused on social values / ethical manufacturing, the longevity of the phone, and modular replacement parts...

AMD developers have sent out their latest open-source Linux patches doing their kernel driver share for enabling High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) support for version 1.4 and newer...

While we've known Arm would be adding BFloat16 (BF16) support to their future processor designs, on Thursday they publicly provided more details on their plans for this new floating-point format to help AI / machine learning workloads with training and inference...

Intel has previously indicated they plan for their new "Iris" Gallium3D driver to become their default OpenGL driver for Linux by EOY 2019 as far as Broadwell graphics and newer are concerned. Working in that direction and acknowledging their "Gen 12" Tiger Lake graphics will only be supported under Gallium3D OpenGL, they have begun establishing the driver mappings to handle the change-over...

While it feels like DXVK 1.3.2 was just released, it's approaching one month old already and has been succeeded today by DXVK 1.3.3...

NVIDIA has promoted their 435.17 Linux driver as their newest short-lived driver release while also issuing a new Vulkan beta driver...

GTK 4.0 won't be out this year, nor is it expected next spring as part of the GNOME 3.36 cycle, but now the developers believe this next major tool-kit update will be ready to ship in just over one year's time with the autumn release of GNOME 3.38...

Here is our most extensive look yet at the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X Linux gaming performance up against the Intel Core i9 9900K while testing the latest Linux drivers with the Radeon RX 5700 XT as well as the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 and RTX 2080 graphics cards. Beyond testing all the benchmark-friendly Linux-native and Steam Play OpenGL/Vulkan games, the performance-per-Watt and performance-per-dollar of the tested systems are also being covered.

Two weeks have passed since AMDVLK 2019.Q3.4 while out this morning is the next iteration of this open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver derived from the company's official cross-platform driver code-base...

Following Microsoft's approval of seeing exFAT support on Linux and at long last releasing public specifications to the file-system, the existing out-of-tree Linux driver code was quickly volleyed on the mailing list for review and hopeful inclusion into the kernel...

Since June there has been the Intel open-source development team volleying Linux patches for bringing up Tiger Lake "Gen 12" graphics. There have been several rounds of patches working on the new Gen 12 graphics and that experimental open-source support is coming with Linux 5.4. A new patch series sheds more light on one of the new Gen 12 hardware features: the Display State Buffer engine...

As a follow-up to the recent story on AMD looking to land Navi 14 support in the imminent Mesa 19.2, that code for the smaller Navi GPU did successfully land into Mesa 19.3-devel and was back-ported to the 19.2 series for the upcoming 19.2.0 stable release...

While NVIDIA is focused upon their CUDA-based video encode/decode solution moving forward, they do continue supporting and maintaining their existing VDPAU-based video decode stack. Of the driver-neutral VDPAU library (libvdpau) on Wednesday they issued the newest update...

Genode OS as the operating system framework with a micro-kernel abstraction layer and other components is out today with their newest update. Genode OS Framework 19.08 is the new version that will ultimately power their Sculpt OS general purpose operating system...

Raven Ridge APUs brought the DCN 1.0 "Display Core Next" engine, Navi GPUs upped that to a DCN 2.0 implementation for the display engine, and now the Renoir APUs are ushering in DCN 2.1. This is a bit interesting particularly with Renoir being a Vega-based GPU and not Navi as one would have hoped prior to the Vega confirmation in the earlier patches...

Virglrenderer 0.8 was released last week as one of the components to the "Virgl" graphics stack for getting OpenGL acceleration working within KVM+QEMU guests that is in good enough shape for handling relatively recent GL/GLES Linux games and other workloads...

The Librem 5 smartphone is still advertised as shipping in Q3'2019 though it looks next to impossible with just one month left in the quarter. Purism CTO Nicole Faerber presented at CCC's Camp 2019 and the phone wasn't demoed but pictures of the Librem 5 PCB were on display...