Phoronix

Olof Johansson has sent in his usual batch of multiple pull requests updating the ARM hardware support, this time for the nearly-over Linux 4.19 kernel merge window...

Just over two years since digiKam 5.0 shipped, this Qt/KDE-aligned open-source photo management software has debuted its 6.0 beta release...

AKiTiO is the latest hardware vendor beginning to allow for firmware upgrades in an easy and reliable manner under Linux...

While it was just days ago that DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon got his hands on a Threadripper 2990WX 32-core / 64-thread "beast", got it working under this long ago forked operating system from FreeBSD, and proceeded to exclaim with joy how powerful this system is, he's now made it even better. Dillon has landed some additional kernel work to benefit the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX...

For the Linux 4.19 kernel there's been a lot of F2FS performance enhancements and more, the new EROFS file-system, low-level Btrfs improvements, and more. Some of the file-system work less in the spotlight are the OverlayFS and UBIFS updates sent in this week...

The x86 platform driver work was merged today for the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window...

On Monday NVIDIA introduced the GeForce RTX 20 series while today they have begun making some more performance details of these Turing-powered GPUs succeeding the GeForce GTX 1000 "Pascal" series...

While Linux 4.19 is slated to have a lot of new features as we have been covering now the past week and a half, Linus Torvalds is upset with these big pull requests and some of them being far from perfect -- to the extent of being rejected...

AMD developers have open-sourced rocprofiler for profiling the AMD GPU hardware performance counters under compute/OpenCL workloads...

The fourth release candidate of Mesa 18.2 is out today rather than the final release due to open blocker bugs still persisting...

While we are still waiting on Red Hat to roll out the overdue Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 public beta, today they have announced the beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6...

For those of you that have missed the ability to have desktop icons on the GNOME Shell desktop since the support was dropped from Nautilus, it's now sort of back thanks to GNOME developer Carlos Soriano...

Jaegeuk Kim, the creator and lead developer of the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS), has finally submitted the big feature updates slated for the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window...

Yesterday NVIDIA released the 396.54 Linux driver update and while from being another point release might feel like a mundane update hot on the heels of the GeForce RTX 2070/2080 series debut, it's actually a significant driver update for Linux gamers. Here are some benchmarks showcasing the performance fix that warranted this new driver release.

KDE developers have ported their Ubuntu-based KDE Neon distribution to the 64-bit ARM Pinebook as well as optimized the Plasma desktop experience for this device...

Daniel Vetter of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center team has written his first blog post in a while on Linux graphics. In this latest post he is answering why there isn't a 2D user-space API in the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) code...

Given Monday's press conference by NVIDIA where they launched the RTX 20 series and much of the two-hour-long event was focused on ray-tracing for games, you may be wondering about the state of Linux affairs.....

In addition to approving the Fedora 30 release schedule proposal, the members of the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee have approved this week a number of Fedora 29 features...

The SDL2 library that offers a cross-platform hardware abstraction layer primarily and primarily used by Linux/Windows/macOS/iOS/Android games now has a sensor API...

Valve has today announced a new version of Steam Play that allows Linux gamers to enjoy Windows games on Linux via their new Wine-based Proton project...

The support we talked about earlier this month for offering VKD3D-based Direct3D 12 support on macOS for Windows games/applications running under Wine is now merged...

While Fedora 29 isn't shipping until the end of October, the release schedule for Fedora 30 was firmed up this week at the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee meeting...

Last week I carried out some tests of BSD vs. Linux on the new 32-core / 64-thread Threadripper 2990WX. I tested FreeBSD 11, FreeBSD 12, and TrueOS -- those benchmarks will be published in the next few days. I tried DragonFlyBSD, but at the time it wouldn't boot with this AMD HEDT processor. But now the latest DragonFlyBSD development kernel can handle the 2990WX and the lead DragonFly developer calls this new processor "a real beast" and is stunned by its performance potential...

As covered earlier this month, Emil Velikov at Collabora has been working on EGLDevice support for Mesa. These EGL extensions originally developed by NVIDIA are being pursued by Mesa developers for better dealing with the enumeration and querying of multiple GPUs on a system...

One day after announcing the GeForce RTX 2070/2080 series, NVIDIA has released a new Linux driver. But it's not a major new driver branch at this time (that's presumably coming closer to the 20 September launch date) with the Turing GPU support, but is a point release delivering a practical bug fix...

It's been a while since last having any big security bulletins for the X.Org Server even though some of the code-base dates back decades and security researchers have said the security is even worse than it looks and numerous advisories have come up in recent years. But it's not because X11 is bug-free as today three more security bulletins were made public affecting libX11...

While Debian has tens of thousands of packages in its archive and users often tend to cite the size of a package archive as one of the useful metrics for evaluating a OS/distribution or package manager's potential, not all packages are maintained the same. In acknowledging that not all packages are maintained to the same standard and some ultimately slip through the cracks, Debian developers are discussing a salvaging process...

While Roccat previously backed their devices on Linux that is the case no more and what is left for the time being are various community/third-party applications for supporting gaming mice/keyboard configuration under Linux from Logitech to Razer and various other lesser known brands of gaming peripherals (Razer will hopefully change this, at least). One of the most promising efforts right now for unifying mouse configuration on Linux is libratbag and its GTK3 Piper interface. Ratbag and Piper have evolved into a very competent open-source project for configuring Logitech mice on the Linux desktop.

Now that Flatpak 1.0 was released yesterday, what's next for this leading Linux app sandboxing and distribution framework?..

Mesa 18.2.0 is expected to be released in the days ahead as the latest quarterly feature release to this collection of open-source user-space graphics driver components. As has been the case each quarter for particularly the past few years, these timed quarterly releases are quite feature-packed...

Earlier this year development on Linspire/Freespire was restarted for this Linux distribution that dates back to 2001 when it launched as "Lindows" before having to be renamed due to a trademark dispute with Microsoft. Back in January, PC/OpenSystems who is now developing the distribution, the Freespire 3.0 release debuted while today Freespire 4.0 is available...

Junio Hamano issued the first release candidate on Monday of the upcoming Git 2.19 distributed revision control system update...

One of many test requests we have received concerning the AMD Threadripper 2 Linux performance was to look at the impact of the different CPU frequency scaling governors, particularly for the 32-core / 64-thread Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX. Here are those CPUFreq governor benchmarks for those interested in squeezing slightly better performance out of your HEDT system by changing how aggressively or not the system is shifting power states to higher frequencies.

Officially the Linux kernel listed GCC 3.2 as the minimum version of the GNU compiler needed. However, with Linux 4.19 that is being raised to GCC 4.6...

Building off Friday's big Wine 3.14 release is now the adjoining update to Wine-Staging that includes various testing/experimental patches, about 880 in total compared to upstream Wine...

Going back to 2011 there's been a Nintendo Wii remote "Wiimote" driver in the Linux kernel but this unofficial hardware driver hasn't worked with some of the devices that can interface with the Wiimote like devices for Rock Band and Guitar Hero. In 2018, that's now changed with the in-development Linux 4.19 kernel...

With UEFI BIOS updating now working well with the Fwupd firmware updating utility and Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for distributing these UEFI update capsules, Richard Hughes at Red Hat is next focusing on NVMe solid-state drives for being able to ship firmware updates under Linux...

A big update is available today of the Debian-based Deepin Linux distribution...

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has just announced the GeForce RTX 2080 series from his keynote ahead of Gamescom 2018 this week in Cologne, Germany...

With NVIDIA expected to announce the Turing-based GeForce RTX 2080 series today as part of their Gamescom press conference, here is a fresh look at the current NVIDIA Linux OpenGL/Vulkan performance with several Pascal graphics cards compared to AMD Polaris and Vega offerings. Additionally, with these latest Linux drivers, the current look at the performance-per-Watt.

They didn't make it out in time for last week's GNOME 3.29.91 release but updates to Mutter and GNOME Shell are now available in their near-final state ahead of the upcoming GNOME 3.30 desktop update...

Last week L1 Terminal Fault (a.k.a. L1TF and Foreshadow) was made public as the latest set of speculative execution vulnerabilities affecting Intel processors. This Meltdown-like issue was met by same-day Linux kernel patches for mitigating the problem and does introduce another performance penalty but in this case is at least only limited to virtual machines. Last week I posted some initial L1TF-mitigated KVM-based VM benchmark results using a Core i7 CPU but the results for sharing today are using a much more powerful dual Xeon server.

Flatpak 1.0.0 has been released this morning as their new stable release series for this Linux app sandboxing and distribution tech that previously was known as XDG-App...

Intel stopped developing their Beignet open-source Linux OpenCL driver in February to concentrate all efforts now around their new Intel OpenCL NEO platform. But commits landed today with a few improvements for those still using Beignet...

The Linux "multi-function device" code updates were sent in overnight for the 4.19 kernel merge window with a few interesting additions...

It's been five years since the last Haiku OS alpha release for their inaugural "R1" release but next month it looks like this first beta will be released, sixteen years after this BeOS-inspired open-source operating system started development...

The GIMP team has released a new point release today to GIMP 2.10 stable. While the version may not be indicative of significant changes, there are some prominent user-facing improvements with this release...

The Linux 4.19 kernel merge window opened one week ago and there's been a lot of new features and improvements to be merged during this front-half of the merge period. If you are behind on your Phoronix reading, here's a look at the highlights for week one...

This past week we looked at the Windows 10 vs. Linux performance for AMD's just-launched Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX and given the interest from that then ran some Windows Server benchmarks to see if the performance of this 64-thread CPU would be more competitive to Linux. From those Windows vs. Linux tests there has been much speculation that the performance disparity is due to Windows scheduler being less optimized for high core/thread count processors and its NUMA awareness being less vetted than the Linux kernel. For getting a better idea, here are benchmarks of Windows Server 2019 preview versus Ubuntu Linux when testing varying thread/core counts for the AMD Threadripper 2990WX.

Even with KDE's annual Akademy conference happening this past week in Vienna, KDE development has been going strong especially on the usability front. The Kate text editor and the KTextEditor component within KDE Frameworks 5 have been the largest benefactors of recent improvements...