Phoronix

Going back to last September has been work within Linux's AMDGPU kernel driver on enabling encrypted vRAM support with "Trusted Memory Zone" functionality. Now it's looking like a kernel release in the not too distant future could be enabled this support by default...

Continuing on with our Blender 2.82 benchmarking for this open-source 3D modeling software update that debuted last month with numerous improvements, here are some fresh benchmarks of the CUDA and OptiX back-ends for NVIDIA GPU acceleration...

Given the continuously evolving state of the open-source Radeon Linux graphics drivers in particular, here are fresh AMD Radeon vs. NVIDIA GeForce Linux gaming benchmarks with the latest Linux graphics drivers as we begin March 2020. Besides the latest NVIDIA 440.64 Linux driver, on the Radeon side was Mesa 20.1-devel paired with the Linux 5.5.5 kernel and also having the RADV ACO back-end enabled.

Multipass is the software developed by Ubuntu-maker Canonical that is advertised as "a mini-cloud on your workstation" that provides an Ubuntu command-line in "just a click" with native hypervisor support...

The i3-inspired Sway Wayland compositor is seeing work carried out for it to support Adaptive-Sync / Variable Rate Refresh...

For those making use of the GCC 8 compiler series, GCC 8.4 is out with all of the bug fixes collected since GCC 8.3's release in February of last year...

Linspire is still kicking in 2020 as the Linux distribution formerly known as "Lindows" more than a decade ago. Linspire 8.7 is out today with a renewed emphasis on trying to get legacy Windows PCs migrated to Linux...

Following last week's release of the big Phoronix Test Suite 9.4 update that brought result viewer enhancements, continued Windows improvements, and a lot of other new functionality, Phoronix Test Suite 9.4.1 is out as the first and likely only point release of the 9.4 series...

One of the developers involved with the GCC efforts around more parallelization / multi-threading within the compiler itself has offered his skills to the LLVM team. Though as part of LLVM's growing embrace of the MLIR intermediate representation will also be better multi-threading within compilers like Clang...

Valve has finally fixed an annoying bit about logging into the Steam client from the Linux desktop in recent months...

Released last month was the big OpenShot 2.5 release that brought hardware acceleration for video encode/decode via VA-API and NVENC/NVDEC, SVG vector graphics support, Blender 2.8+ integration support, import/export to Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro, and much more. Out now is OpenShot 2.5.1 with a few more improvements sprinkled on top...

In our many benchmarks of the System76 Thelio Major over the past month (and more on the way!) with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X, besides the sheer power of that 64-core / 128-thread processor, many are quick to comment on the pictures of the System76 chassis that they manufacturer in-house. This week the company is expanding their line-up of System76 Thelio cases...

Khronos announced last year they would be looking to pursue an analytic rendering API and following the evaluation they have decided to move it forward...

Ampere Computing, the ARM server start-up founded by former Intel president Renee James and staffed by many former Intel folks, is today announcing Altra as their next-generation server processor. Ampere started off with the assets of AppliedMicro's X-Gene ARMv8 IP and that turned into the Ampere's eMAG as a decent entrant into the field two years ago. But now with more resources and engineering talent under their belt, they are now preparing to ship the Ampere Altra as up to 80 cores per socket and based on Arm's latest Neoverse N1.

Firefox 75 due to be released next month should finally have its native Wayland support in good order...

Released one month ago was systemd 245 RC1 while now a second release candidate is available. Systemd 245 stable should be shipping in the near future as well in order to make some of the spring Linux distribution releases like Fedora 32...

GNOME co-founder Miguel de Icaza, who also started the Mono project and now working at Microsoft following their 2016 acquisition of Xamarin, has penned his first blog post in nearly one year -- and it's about WebAssembly...

The first release candidate of OBS Studio 25.0 is now available for this cross-platform open-source software popular with game streamers...

DragonFlyBSD 5.8.0 release images began propagating tonight as the latest installment of this long ago forked FreeBSD operating system...

IBM last week made the bold announce that they will be transitioning to LLVM/Clang-based compilers across their hardware portfolio for C, C++, and Fortran compilation...

After hitting 0.9% in January for the Steam on Linux marketshare that was a high for at least the past year, the Linux gaming percentage dropped slightly for February...

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...