Phoronix

Veteran Linux engineer Nitin Gupta of NVIDIA has unveiled his latest patches on the work he got started on last year: proactive memory compaction for Linux motivated by the latency issues brought on by he current on-demand compaction when an application requests a lot of hugepages...

GNOME 3.36 will begin shipping a new application as part of the GNOME Shell to manage desktop extensions...

Following recent discussions about Openwall's Linux Kernel Runtime Guard (LKRG) and the Whonix spin on LKRG for Debian systems and more, here are some benchmarks showing the performance overhead to this run-time integrity checking of the Linux kernel that aims to fend off security vulnerability exploits.

The latest setback from Coronavirus / COVID-19 concerns is NVIDIA's flagship GTC conference no longer happening in San Jose later this month...

Google's latest work on the code fuzzing front for improving code security is FuzzBench, a benchmark for fuzzers...

Given the explosive growth of the Blender 3D modeling software in recent times and with receiving more sponsors/supporters and more organizations beginning to make use of this cross-platform, open-source software, the Blender release team has put out their plans for the next few years...

Intel's lead developer of the ANV Vulkan Linux driver started a discussion last week about adding an API to DMA-BUF for importing/exporting of sync files as part of allowing for explicit synchronization capabilities in better handling of modern APIs from user-space...

Marvell today announced the new OCTEON Fusion processors and a new line in the OCTEON TX2 family...

Intel's open-source team working on their media driver for VA-API Linux video acceleration on HD/UHD/Iris Graphics is preparing for its first release of 2020...

Last week we saw the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver add SQ Thread Trace support for this hardware block found on AMD GPUs. The SQTT block is used for performance profiling and now the RADV support has been extended to handle GFX10/Navi...

OpenBLAS 0.3.8 was released shy of a month ago for this popular Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms implementation while now has been succeeded by OpenBLAS 0.3.9...

SDL 2.0.12 is on the way as the next version of this library commonly used by Linux games to provide a hardware abstraction layer across platforms...

The fourth weekly release candidate of Linux 5.6 is now available for testing...

KDE developers wrapped up February 2020 with many fixes and improvements throughout their desktop landscape...

During last month on Phoronix were 276 original news articles and another 18 featured Linux hardware reviews / benchmark articles. Here is a look back at the most popular content and news stories for the month...

For those looking to experiment with a BSD-based desktop open-source platform, GhostBSD has been competing well as one of the few in this field. GhostBSD 20.02 is out and continues being based on TrueOS/FreeBSD stable packages while shipping the GTK-based MATE desktop environment as its out-of-the-box desktop solution...

With how ubiquitous the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is, one may have assumed that for years the software stack was already extensively optimized to insane levels, especially as it concerns the boot time for being able to quickly respond to changes in load... But it turns out there still is some low hanging fruit such as with Amazon's "ENA" network driver and a new patch allowing it to initialize 90 times quicker...

Addressing a two year old bug report over screen rotation not working when running KDE Plasma on Wayland, that support is finally on the way...

On top of the last minute GNOME 3.36 work on scaled/transformed hardware cursors handling, there is some other interesting last-minute Wayland work on the Mutter side...

Coming a month after Weston 8.0 and a few weeks after Wayland 1.18 is Wayland-Protocols 1.19 (and subsequently Wayland-Protocols 1.20 over a snafu) as the collection of Wayland protocol specifications...

On top of all the Godot happenings for its Vulkan rendering support, the code-base for Godot 4.0 is also being cleaned up and among the other improvements being worked on are Wayland and EGL support...

DXVK 1.5.5 is out this weekend as a big update to this Direct3D-over-Vulkan translation layer widely used by Linux gamers in running Windows games with decent speed...

Following yesterday's Wine 5.3 release, Wine-Staging 5.3 was issued as the latest testing/experimental flavor of Wine. Wine-Staging 5.3 is still carrying 800+ extra patches compared to upstream Wine while it has updated its Event FD synchronization code and also added one important addition this cycle...

In 2020 we certainly didn't expect the Linux Gaming Publishing website to appear back online, years after their single server failed and ultimately faded away as one of the promising Linux game porters built up following the collapse of Loki Software...

The Genode operating system framework is out with a new release along with its general purpose Sculpt OS operating system...

While the Qt5 tool-kit on Wayland is in fairly good shape in recent times, the Qt Wayland module that provides the Wayland platform abstraction and helpers for assembly Qt-based Wayland compositors could run the risk of regressing...

For those that have managed to get their hands on the Pinebook Pro as the $199 ARM 64-bit laptop powered by a Rockchip RK3399 SoC and with 4GB of RAM, 1080p panel, 64GB eMMC, and other decent features for the price, mainline Linux kernel support could be in order possibly even for Linux 5.7...

Wine 5.3 is out as the latest bi-weekly development snapshot on the road to Wine 6.0 next year...

Prolific open-source developer Richard Hughes of Red Hat who has been responsible for the creation of PackageKit, the ColorHug colorimeter hardware, GNOME Software, and for the past number of years focused on the Fwupd firmware updating utility and Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) has a new open-source project...

NVIDIA has issued another stable Linux driver release in their long-term 440 series...

The Unity 8 desktop environment that continues to be developed by the UBports open-source community for use on UBports' Ubuntu Touch and ultimately back on the Linux desktop as well have renamed the project...

A new version of the Radeon Open Compute "ROCm" stack is available today but it still doesn't deliver on Navi support...

On top of the Mesa "RADV" Vulkan driver's recent support for using the Radeon GPU Profiler with this open-source driver, RADV is now adding support for the SQTT hardware block on Radeon GPUs for expanding the profiling metrics it is able to expose...

The LLVMpipe CPU-based software rasterizer OpenGL driver within Mesa's Gallium3D now has working tessellation shader support (ARB_tessellation_shader) and can even run Unigine Heaven demo properly, just don't expect good performance...

Landing just in time for GNOME 3.36 is a merge request that has been open for nearly one year on improving Mutter's hardware cursor handling...

The Qt Company has released their first beta of the forthcoming Qt 5.15 tool-kit...

The cost of cloud hosting -- or in particular hosting their own GitLab instance and running continuous integration (CI) support for FreeDesktop.org projects -- is putting financial strain on the X.Org Foundation...

A few days back we reported on a security vulnerability within Intel's KVM virtualization code for the Linux kernel. That vulnerability stems from unfinished kernel code and was fixed for Linux 5.6 Git and is now being back-ported to the 4.4 / 4.9 / 4.14 / 5.5 supported kernels...

The latest benchmarks for your viewing pleasure are looking at the dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 performance up against the dual AMD EPYC 7742 CPUs while using the in-development Linux 5.6 kernel as the first time trying out these highest-end server processors on this new kernel debuting as stable in about one month's time...

The SPICE remote display system developed by Red Hat is up to version 0.14.3 with a few prominent additions...

Mesa's Panfrost Gallium3D driver for providing open-source support for Arm Mali Midgard and Bifrost GPUs now has experimental OpenGL ES 3.0 support...

While test builds have been available for months, out today is Android-x86 9.0-r1 as the first stable release of the Android 9.0 "Pie" series brought to Intel/AMD x86/x86_64 hardware...

AMD Linux kernel graphics driver maintainer Alex Deucher has submitted the company's first batch of graphics driver updates to DRM-Next that in turn is for inclusion with the upcoming Linux 5.7 cycle...

Stemming from incorrect rendering with VA-API and UYVY422 content with AMD Radeon graphics on Linux, a number of fixes were merged today for improving the Gallium3D video code...

Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller recently talked about his vision for the Fedora Project over the next decade and it to become an "operating system factory", among other advancements he hopes to see out of the project in the 2020s. A one-sentence vision for Fedora is now drafted as their vision statement...

The Subversion version control system is celebrating its 20th anniversary...

GCC 8.4 will hopefully be released next week but for now a release candidate is available for testing the latest bug fixes in the mature GCC8 series...

Debuginfod is the Red Hat led debug information HTTP web server distributed as part of elfutils and able to supply on-demand source code and ELF/DWARF debug files to debuggers / IDEs / other compiler tooling. The GDB debugger can now tap debuginfod for on-demand source files and debug information that isn't present on the local system...

Announced last November was the Bytecode Alliance with a goal of running WebAssembly everywhere. This effort by Intel, Red Hat, Mozilla, and others has resulted in a new release today of wasmtime, their JIT-style runtime for WebAssembly on the desktop...

With it being a while now since the PHP 7.4 release and the PHP developers continuing to be busy at work on PHP 8.0 as the next major installment of the popular web programming language, here is a fresh look at the performance of PHP 8.0 in its current state -- including when its JIT compiler is enabled -- compared to releases going back to PHP 5.6...