Phoronix

While LLVM 9.0 was branched nearly two weeks ago and it was anticipated that the release candidate would immediately follow, only yesterday did 9.0-RC1 materialize...

Earlier this month AMD's Linux driver team sent out their initial open-source patches bringing up the "Arcturus" GPU as a new Vega family product. Today a second batch of patches adding in two thousand more lines of Linux kernel driver code were sent out...

NVIDIA's Unix/Linux graphics driver team has kicked off a new week by introducing the 430.40 long-lived driver release...

Now that the flow of initial Navi fixes and optimizations has settled down for both the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver and the Mesa RADV/RadeonSI user-space driver components, here is a look at AMD Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT graphics card performance on Ubuntu Linux at the end of July, now three weeks after these 7nm graphics cards first shipped.

It still remains to be seen if Purism will be able to ship the Librem 5 Linux smartphone this quarter as is their current revised target, but at least today they are publishing the finalized specifications for the phone's hardware...

In addition to the release of OpenXR 1.0 for kicking off SIGGRAPH 2019 week, The Khronos Group has released Vulkan 1.1.117 as a fairly notable update to this high-performance graphics API...

Back during the Game Developers Conference was the release of the OpenXR provisional specification by The Khronos Group while today for SIGGRAPH they have formally announced OpenXR 1.0...

Two weeks after AMDVLK received initial Navi 10 support, another release of this official open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan Linux driver is now available. With this 2019.Q3.3 release there is performance optimizations for Navi as well as some new extensions...

TurboSched is a new Linux kernel scheduler that's been in development by IBM for maximizing use of turbo frequencies for the longest possible periods of time. Rather than this scheduler trying to balance the load across all available CPU cores, it tries to keep the priority tasks on a select group of cores while aiming to keep the other cores idle in order to allow for the power allowance to be used by those few turbo-capable cores with the high priority work...

Thanks to funding from Arm Holdings and Crossbar, the PyPy folks working on their speedy Python JIT implementation have extended it to support 64-bit ARM (AArch64) with compelling performance results...

AMD's GPUOpen development team has kicked off the new week by releasing Radeon GPU Profiler 1.6, their open-source and cross-platform GPU profiling and analysis utility. With Radeon GPU Profiler 1.6 comes support for gathering insights on AMD Radeon RX 5000 "Navi" graphics processors...

After being in development the past year and in beta the past few weeks, Latte Dock 0.9 is now officially out as this KDE-aligned desktop dock...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.3-rc2 and sums it up as a "reasonably large rc2 to go with a fairly large merge window."..

GNOME's Pango text layout and rendering library is now in much better shape with the brand new 1.44 release following receiving some attention by Red Hat's developer team...

Coming for the Linux 5.4 cycle later this year will be support for the buttons on newer Microsoft Surface devices...

While initially the user-space utility for Huawei's EROFS file-system was not publicly available, it came last November and this past April they began rewriting these EROFS user-space bits. Fortunately, since then they have done a better job of keeping EROFS-utils up-to-date against their latest kernel module changes for this read-only file-system...

Whether you like it or not, the Linux kernel's x86 32-bit support has already begun suffering some minor forms of bit rot. Most kernel developers are no longer actively testing x86-32 and distribution vendors are beginning to drop 32-bit support. The latest example of x86 32-bit's effectively demoted state is some buggy undefined behavior functionality living within the mainline kernel for the past year since the Meltdown mitigations landed...

Patches are now queued into the Linux kernel's hwmon subsystem staging area that allow the AMD "k10temp" driver to support the Ryzen 3000 "Zen 2" processors...

KDE developer Nate Graham has posted his latest weekly summary of KDE's development happenings as the team wraps up work for July...

With yesterday's Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Linux benchmarks for the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, some suggested that the Linux performance could have been better if using a Linux 5.x kernel. Well, here are some benchmarks comparing the performance of Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS with its Linux 4.18 kernel compared to Linux 5.2 stable as well as the brand new Linux 5.3 development kernel...

KernelShark 1.0 has been released as the tool for visualizing Trace-cmd Linux kernel traces...

It's vintage X.Org driver week... Not only was there an S3 display driver update for that vintage hardware, but a SiS X.Org display driver update has also been released...

To date there haven't been any really compelling RISC-V processors from a performance perspective but it's looking like we could soon be crossing that threshold...

Microsoft released a new Windows 10 Insiders Preview Build on Friday that offers up more Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) enhancements...

With SIGGRAPH 2019 happening next week in LA, The Khronos Group has already kicked off the news cycle by making several announcements from forming a 3D Commerce Initiative Working Group to releasing new WebGL extensions to making use of Binomical's Basis Universal tech for better compression...

For those wondering how the performance compares of AMD's new Zen 2 processors between Windows 10 and Linux, here are our initial benchmarks across dozens of benchmarks for the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X on Windows 10 Pro 1903 against Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS.

Two months from today marks the beta and kernel freezes for the Ubuntu 19.10 release while in less than one month is already the feature freeze. Canonical developers and others within the Ubuntu community remain quite busy this summer working on this "Eoan Ermine" release and is of particular importance with next cycle being the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS swing...

While a bit quiet over the summer months and their Data Parallel C++ announcement was recently made, Intel's LLVM-based SYCL compiler continues maturing and picking up new features as the beta roll-out of oneAPI is expected in Q4...

OpenGL is still evolving and days ahead of SIGGRAPH 2019, NVIDIA has published a set of new GL extensions for improving multi-GPU rendering...

Zink is the year-old project implementing OpenGL over Vulkan using Mesa/Gallium3D infrastructure. While Zink had been making some good progress by developer Erik Faye-Lund of Collabora, he went back to rewriting some core pieces of Zink to address some design defects. In the process of this rewrite, Zink is currently back to OpenGL 2.1 era support over Vulkan...

S3 Graphics drivers are still alive and well on Linux, well, sort of. On Thursday was the first new open-source xf86-video-s3 driver update in seven years...

As the first Simple DirectMedia Layer release of 2019, SDL 2.0.10 has debuted today for this library that's widely used by cross-platform games including as part of the Steam run-time...

Jolla has released Sailfish OS 3.1 "Seitseminen" as their Linux-based mobile operating system update and their biggest since shipping Sailfish OS 3 back in 2018...

XCP-ng, the enterprise-focused hypervisor based on Xen Server that offers a web UI for management, scalability optimizations, live migration support, and other community features, is up to version 8.0...

After already having gone through three alpha releases, PHP 7.4 has reached its feature freeze and branching. As a result, the first PHP 7.4 beta is now available that will follow by multiple betas and release candidates while hopefully being released by the end of November...

Remember back in 2017 when Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan talked about plans for better Linux support for their high-end gaming laptops on Linux? More than two years later, they have yet to ship a Linux laptop nor make any other measurable improvements to their Linux support...

Two months have already passed since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 8.8 while today marks the first development snapshot/milestone of the next quarterly feature update, Phoronix Test Suite 9.0-Asker...

Another late change proposal being talked about for this autumn's Fedora 31 release is introducing a 64-bit ARM (AArch64) Xfce desktop spin...

In recent months we've heard of Intel engineers working on better supporting third-party packages on Clear Linux that would be akin to Arch's AUR, Ubuntu's PPA, or Fedora's Copr systems for allowing unofficial/third-party packages to be more easily made available particularly in cases of closed-source software. It looks like that internally that system is now in beta as they work towards having more software available on Clear Linux...

DragonFlyBSD is replacing their 48-core Opteron server named "Monster" with two of the new AMD Ryzen 9 3900X "Zen 2" processors as well as a spare Xeon server. DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon continues to be mighty impressed by AMD's latest processor offerings...

The open-source MoltenVK continues advancing for supporting a healthy subset of the Vulkan API on Apple's macOS and iOS platforms. MoltenVK 1.0.36 was released today with support for more Vulkan extensions, many bug fixes, and a variety of other improvements...

The gNewSense that is based on Debian GNU/Linux but comprised entirely of free software without any non-free software support is now without a maintainer...

Following the Antergos Linux distribution being discontinued one of the new projects stemming from that decision is Endeavour OS as a new convenient to use Arch Linux distribution. Here are some early benchmarks of Endeavour OS compared to Ubuntu, Clear Linux, and other distributions on an Intel Core i9 system.

Ahead of the first point release to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 due out around October, the first beta of RHEL 8.1 is now available for early evaluation...

Released last week was Deepin 15.11 with various desktop improvements for this popular third-party desktop option. This desktop option could be on its way to Fedora 31's package repository to replace the existing Deepin 5.9 packaging...

With OpenSUSE now LTO'ing their Tumbleweed packages by default, SUSE's compiler team is looking at improving the compilation experience and one of those steps is via a proposed "-flto=auto" option...

It's arriving one week late, but GNOME 3.33.4 is now available as the latest snapshot in the trek towards GNOME 3.34 this September...

It was a year and a half ago that Red Hat acquired CoreOS while today they are announcing their first preview release of Fedora CoreOS...

The excitement over the open-source AMD Radeon Navi graphics driver support for Linux gamers/users continues. On Tuesday the RADV driver saw support land for binning to boost performance but while Bas was doing that, Samuel Pitoiset of Valve posted patches allowing GFX10/Navi to support Vulkan transform feedback...

Another late change proposal coming in for Fedora 31 is to allow update-alternatives to optionally point /usr/bin/ld as the default linker to /usr/bin/lld for the LLVM linker...