Phoronix

Red Hat's lead X.Org developer Adam Jackson is looking at reworking the VESA display code path for Fedora moving forward. The plan would entail removing some old "sketchy code" from the X.Org Server and moving to UVESAFB as the VESA-based FBDEV driver but would mean dropping support for the OpenChrome driver among other changes...

Developers at IBM are working on a new concept for the Linux kernel of "system call isolation" in order to isolate parts of the kernel when impacted by vulnerabilities...

It's been just one month since GNOME 3.32 shipped as the latest and greatest work going into the GNOME desktop environment. Premiering today is GNOME 3.33.1 as the first development snapshot in the road to the release of GNOME 3.34 this September...

While the Mesa-based Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver has been exposing Vulkan 1.1 since last year, the upcoming Mesa 19.1 will bring support for Vulkan 1.1 when this driver is active on Android systems...

While Fedora 30 isn't even out the door yet and Fedora 32 not coming out until roughly one year from now, we already know one big change on the table: dropping Python 2 and packages depending upon it...

Today was a Go/No-Go meeting for the final release of Fedora 30 but the Linux distribution in its current state isn't ready to be released. Fortunately, a week delay hasn't been set in stone yet but will be convening tomorrow to see if the latest release candidate is ready in the next 24 hours to be promoted as final...

Radeon Software for Linux 19.10 was quietly released at the end of last week and seemed to go unnoticed until a Phoronix reader pointed out the existence of this updated hybrid driver featuring the AMDGPU All-Open and AMDGPU-PRO components...

GCC 9 has reached zero "P1" regressions that mark issues of the highest priority. With that list cleared, GCC 9.1 is moving towards release as the first stable version of GCC 9. GCC 9.1-RC1 will be out soon while GCC 10.0 is open on master...

Hardkernel's newest single board computer is the ODROID-N2 that they sent over a few weeks ago for benchmarking. The ODROID-N2 is built around the Amlogic S922X SoC and features four Cortex-A73 cores and two Cortex-A53 cores, options for 2GB or 4GB of DDR4 system memory, eMMC connectivity, Gigabit Ethernet, and four USB 3.0 ports for starting out just above $60 USD.

Following questions from our forum goers, there's now an overview of the current state of Intel's new "Iris" Gallium3D driver and its road-map for the remainder of the year in being the company's next-gen OpenGL driver that should be in especially good shape by the time Icelake "Gen 11" hardware arrives...

After being in development pretty much this entire decade, KernelShark 1.0 will soon be released as the visualizer around the trace-cmd that wraps Ftrace for internal Linux kernel tracing...

Feral Interactive has just announced the release of Total War: WARHAMMER II - The Prophet and The Warlock for Linux and macOS gamers...

For ironing out the OpenGL 4.4+ support within their VMWGFX virtual graphics driver stack and/or for starting out work on bringing up Vulkan support to guest VMs running VMware virtualization products, their longtime graphics driver team is working on emulated coherent graphics memory support...

While it's not looking like Mesa 19.1 will end up exposing OpenGL 4.6 capabilities, it is picking up various other extensions including some prominent several year old extensions like EXT_texture_buffer_object and the decade old EXT_gpu_shader4...

NVIDIA has been working on a new GLX extension to help the PRIME GPU offloading situation where multiple GPU vendors are involved and thus different OpenGL driver implementations. In particular, the proposed GLX_EXT_server_vendor_select is designed to better fit in to address PRIME GPU offloading obstacles introduced by their work on the now common GLVND OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch library...

With iX Systems having released new images of FreeBSD reworked with their ZFS On Linux code that is in development to ultimately replace their existing FreeBSD ZFS support derived from the code originally found in the Illumos source tree, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the FreeBSD 12 performance of ZFS vs. ZoL vs. UFS and compared to Ubuntu Linux on the same system with EXT4 and ZFS.

It looks like the AMD posting of the open-source Radeon driver enablement code for next-gen "Navi" GPUs is imminent. In fact, the first bits of it quietly were pushed out today...

With the last of the MPEG-2 patents having expired last February, the Fedora / Red Hat legal team is ready to okay the shipping of MPEG-2 video support out-of-the-box in Fedora Linux at long last... But they don't yet know what implementation to use...

Purism has shared their latest update on the efforts around their Librem 5 GNU/Linux smartphone they hope to begin shipping in Q3...

OpenBSD 6.5 was released today, about one week ahead of schedule for this security-minded BSD operating system. OpenBSD 6.5 is bringing several prominent new features including RETGUARD as its new stack protector and OpenRSYNC as its ISC-licensed in-progress replacement to rsync...

Nsight Systems, NVIDIA's proprietary cross-platform tool providing a timeline view of system resource analysis and other metrics while running GPU compute/graphics workloads, now can handle the Vulkan API...

Over the past decade there's been talks on a few occasions about either spinning NetBSD as a desktop platform or offering up various desktop usability improvements to make it easier to use this BSD as a desktop operating system. In 2019 there still isn't a great desktop experience to NetBSD but the new "OS108" is seeking to improve that with a NetBSD OS paired with the MATE desktop environment...

If you have been hit by a bug on Linux 5.1 where your X.Org Server would no longer start or separately where when using VirtIO DRM that XWayland and GNOME Shell would break, fixes have now landed in Linux 5.1 Git...

While Windows 10 users are gushing over Chrome finally introducing a "dark mode" for the web browser, on the Linux front there are no dramatic user-facing changes but just a lot of continued lower-level improvements for this cross-platform web browser...

On top of Intel's new open-source OpenGL driver seeing some hefty performance optimizations, the Iris Gallium3D driver has picked up another OpenGL extension ahead of the Mesa 19.1 branching...

Filament is Google's real-time physically based rendering engine that supports Android along with Linux and all other major platforms, including a target for WebAssembly+WebGL. Filament 1.2.0 was released on Tuesday as the latest step forward for this PBR rendering engine...

The Cage Wayland Compositor for kiosk / full-screen-one-app environments has managed to materialize...

While on the kernel-side there has been FreeSync support with the AMDGPU DRM driver since Linux 5.0 and for the OpenGL driver with RadeonSI there has been this functionality in Mesa 19.0 when paired with a supported kernel, the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver has missed out on this action until now. But landing just in time for the Mesa 19.1 feature freeze is now the FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync enablement for RADV...

The big QEMU 4.0 release is now available for this critical piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

Adding to the list of Mesa 19.1 changes is now AMD_compressed_ATC_texture being plumbed into Mesa/Gallium3D primarily with a focus on the Freedreno driver...

The Coreboot open-source firmware/BIOS project has finally seen initial AMD Zen CPU support as part of Google engineers bringing up Picasso APU support in order to handle an upcoming Chromebook launch...

The folks at CompuLab have achieved another engineering masterpiece with a passively-cooled PC with an Intel Core i9 9900K processor and up to NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 graphics. Coming out of CompuLab, the PC is also Linux-friendly...

For those trying to avoid systemd, the Guile-based GNU Shepherd init system / service manager is out with a new feature release...

With today's GeForce GTX 1650 launch, NVIDIA has posted the 430.09 Linux driver as their first in this new driver series...

Coming in now a step below last month's GeForce GTX 1660 as an RTX-less Turing graphics card is now the GeForce GTX 1650 at the $149 USD price point...

There is just one week to go until the Mesa 19.1 feature freeze and branching for this next quarterly feature update to these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan Linux drivers. Notable this round is the introduction of the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver for supporting Broadwell graphics and newer atop this next-gen OpenGL driver ahead of next year's Xe Graphics dGPU launch. With days to go until the Mesa 19.1 feature freeze, more performance optimizations have landed...

Earlier this month the developers behind Tensorflow open-sourced MLIR as the Multi-Level Intermediate Representation. They hope this IR can become a common format between machine learning models/frameworks and as part of that it might end up becoming an LLVM sub-project...

For fans of the Kodi HTPC software, version 18.2 of the "Leia" update is now available with several prominent fixes...

Intel continues working on its SPMD compiler as part of their SPIR-V translator running on the CPU and other efforts. ISPC is the Intel SPMD Program Compiler and at the end of last week reached its version 1.11 milestone for this C variant compiler designed for single program, multiple data programming...

The latest change merged for Mesa 19.1 is a workaround so the Epic Games' game launch correctly renders when using OpenGL...

Continuing on with our benchmarks this month of the new Intel Xeon Cascade Lake processors in the form of the Xeon Platinum 8280 processors, here are some preliminary figures showing not only how various Linux distributions are comparing to Microsoft Windows Server 2019 but also FreeBSD 12.

For those wanting a community-supported, free version in effect of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the two options have been CentOS with its close relation (and employment) by Red Hat or Scientific Linux that has been maintained Fermilab, CERN, and other research labs. Moving forward, however, these labs are going to be adopting CentOS 8 and they will not be developing a new version of Scientific Linux based on the upcoming RHEL8...

When drivers get dropped from the Linux kernel it's generally due to hardware being no one cares about anymore that hasn't been produced in many years and the code often falls into disrepair to the point that the only logical way forward is dropping the driver. That happened last year to the "FDOMAIN" driver but as does happen every so often (albeit rare) thanks to the code being still obtainable through Git and the nature of open-source, interested parties can step up and revive the code...

Canonical has shifted the default Java of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS from OpenJDK 10 to OpenJDK 11. Plus here are some fresh OpenJDK 8/11/12 benchmarks on this Ubuntu Long Term Support release...

AMD this morning released AMDVLK 2019.Q2.2 as the newest tagged update to their open-source Radeon Vulkan Linux graphics driver...

NetworkManager 1.16 was released in March with WireGuard support, WiFi P2P, Intel IWD improvements, and much more. Surprisingly being released already is NetworkManager 1.18...

While awaiting DragonFlyBSD 5.6 as the BSD operating system's next feature release, DragonFlyBSD 5.4.2 has been released as the newest stable point release...

The Freedreno MSM DRM driver changes have been submitted to DRM-Next ahead of Linux 5.2. MSM provides the Direct Rendering Manager support around Qualcomm Adreno hardware and with this next kernel cycle is continuing to see better Adreno 600 series support...

Adding to the excitement of the Linux 5.2 kernel changes are a lot of Thunderbolt improvements expected to be introduced in this next kernel cycle...

The Netrunner Rolling Linux distribution that is based on Arch Linux / Manjaro (unlike the non-rolling release using Debian Testing) is out with a new release for this KDE-focused desktop platform...