Phoronix

A new release of MoltenVK is now available that is updated against Vulkan 1.1.121 for allowing much of this graphics/compute API to function under Apple's macOS and iOS platforms by remapping the Vulkan calls to Metal...

Just a few weeks after Intel's i965 OpenGL driver in Mesa added GL 4.6 support, the "Iris" Gallium3D driver is now exposing OpenGL 4.6 support too...

While Fedora 31 isn't even out yet, looking ahead to the Fedora 32 release next spring is a plan to switch firewalld as Fedora's default network firewall from its existing iptables back-end to the more modern nftables back-end...

Intel's open-source crew has released version 0.2 of its primarily Rust-developed Cloud Hypervisor and associated firmware also in Rust...

Sadly too late for the upcoming Linux 5.4 merge window, but for Linux 5.5 it looks like there will be a FreeSync improvement around low-frame-rate compensation...

As a follow-up from this weekend's article about Intel's SVT-VP9 video encoder running much faster on AVX2 CPUs from both Intel and AMD, here are the results now before/after for ten different systems with this open-source CPU-based VP9 video encoder...

The LLVM 9.0 release is running a few weeks behind schedule but should be out in the days ahead along with other LLVM sub-project releases like Clang 9.0. Here's a look at what's on tap for this half-year update to the LLVM compiler infrastructure...

Ubuntu's kernel team has decided to switch to LZ4 kernel image compression beginning with Ubuntu 19.10 in order to speed-up the boot times...

Yesterday we reported on two Navi 14 device IDs being added for "workstation SKUs" while today a third has appeared...

In our recent Mesa 19.2 benchmarks of Intel's old and new (Gallium3D) OpenGL Linux drivers one of the rare areas where the new "Iris" driver performed behind the classic driver was with "j2dbench" that stresses the Java OpenGL pipeline. At the time it was unknown why the new driver was performing subpar for this Java graphics test, but now at least there's one optimization so far in addressing that shortcoming...

During this week's KDE Akademy 2019 conference there was some planning discussions around improving the Kate text editor...

Back in April we wrote about MLIR as Google's new IR designed for machine learning. This intermediate representation was designed for use by any machine learning framework and now this common format is being contributed to LLVM...

The past month and a half we have been putting CompuLab's Airtop 3 computer through some demanding benchmarks and a variety of endurance workloads. With the Airtop 3 under test loaded with an 8-core / 16-thread Xeon processor, NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 graphics, and 64GB of RAM with NVMe SSD storage there were some concerns over thermal throttling and if this fan-less industrial PC design could really deal with the generated heat. But after all of this testing, the Airtop 3 continues running strong and another shining example of CompuLab's engineering strength.

Microsoft Teams, the communication platform for chat / video messaging / collaborative file storage and other features, is in the process of being brought to Linux...

In addition to AMD's open-source Linux driver developers being busy in recent weeks bringing up the Renoir APU support, today we've seen the first baby steps towards bringing up "Dali" as another upcoming AMD APU...

Linux/open-source fans don't at least have to hear "Imagination Technologies" or PowerVR as often as in the past, but today's Vulkan 1.1.122 specification update does publicly document Imagination's VK_IMG_format_pvrtc extension that remains "Imagination Technologies Proprietary" licensed...

The next-generation AMD "Renoir" APU is turning into being an interesting successor over the existing Picasso APUs. While at first it was a letdown finding out that the APU is based on Vega and not their newer Navi architecture, follow-on open-source Linux patches have continued to show that it's more than a facsimile and in some areas like display and multimedia has blocks in common with Navi...

Longtime Intel open-source graphics driver developer Chris Wilson today sent out a set of patches attempting to enable IOMMU coverage for graphics by default...

When it comes to Navi graphics processors in workstation cards, there's now confirmation of at least one coming with the "Navi 14" GPU...

Outreachy's summer round recently wrapped up while their winter round for participants in the southern hemisphere is now open...

Up to now the LLVM compiler stack has been used when wanting to target the Linux's eBPF in-kernel virtual machine while now the port for the GNU Compiler Collection has been deemed in good enough shape and merged...

For fans of the Mumble open-source VoIP communication program that is popular with gamers, Mumble 1.3 was released as their first major release in years...

Intel's open-source team continues showing the power of optimizations... Or rather in this case, a three fold performance improvement due to previously limiting an AVX-512 routine that also works on AVX-2 CPUs. SVT-VP9 is now a lot faster on AVX2 CPUs from both Intel and AMD...

As expected, Linus Torvalds today released the Linux 5.3-rc8 kernel rather than opting for the stable Linux 5.3...

The past eight years Arch-based Manjaro Linux has largely been a hobby effort for this easy to use Linux distribution but moving forward there is a commercial entity being setup and ultimately they will be looking to employ full-time developers/maintainers...

Just over one week past the release of DXVK 1.3.3, the DXVK 1.3.4 is out with more fixes and workarounds...

PHP 7.4-RC1 was released this week as this next annual update to the PHP programming implementation nears. Here is a look at how the PHP 7.4-RC1 performance looks like compared to the major releases going back to PHP 5.6...

The Linux 5.3 kernel is fit enough to be released today after another quiet week following 5.3-RC7. But due to the Linux Kernel Summit happening this week and Linus Torvalds traveling for that, he's expected to delay the stable kernel release until next weekend so as to not open the Linux 5.4 merge window until he returns from the event...

This week marked the release of Qt 5.13.1 as the first point release to this tool-kit series along with Qt Creator 4.10 as the newest version of this Qt/C++ focused integrated development environment...

There was recently a debate on the Coreboot mailing list about the mission statement / description of this open-source BIOS/firmware replacement for systems that traditionally has liberated boards from proprietary BIOS but still on modern platforms is often pulling in a number of binary blobs...

Mesa 19.3 now supports the GL_MESA_EGL_sync extension, a feature proposed by Mesa developers themselves months ago for OpenGL...

Open-source gaming manager/platform Lutris is up to version 0.5.3 this weekend. While the version bump may not be significant, this update brings with it several new features and fixes...

While KDE's new goals will include focusing on Wayland support, a big TODO item was just crossed off the list this week... KDE Plasma finally supports fractional scaling under Wayland...

A few days ago I provided some benchmarks showing how running Intel's open-source Clear Linux on AMD EPYC Rome can provide some significant speed-ups over Ubuntu Linux, but how do other Linux distributions compare on AMD's new Zen 2 server processors? Here is an eight-way benchmark comparison on the AMD EPYC 7742 2P Daytona server with its 128 cores / 256 threads.

This summer KDE was looking for ideas on new goals to pursue along the likes of their successful Usability + Productivity initiative. In marking the start of their annual Akademy developer conference in Milan, the KDE developers announced their new set of goals to focus on for the next two years...

Debian 10.1 was released today as the first collection of security and bug fixes to this summer's release of Debian 10 "Buster" GNU/Linux...

POCL, the "Portable Open Computing Language" project known for implementing OpenCL support on top of the CPU, is closing in on its version 1.4 release...

GNOME 3.34 RC2 made it out on Friday night as the final step before next week's official GNOME 3.34 release...

SGI systems going back to the SGI Origin servers starting some two decades ago will see better mainline kernel support with the upcoming Linux 5.4...

Intel's "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver has now hooked into the DriConf infrastructure for handling driver tunables and workarounds...

NVIDIA on Friday released their 435.19.03 Vulkan beta driver as their newest Linux driver update. This Vulkan beta doesn't come with any new extensions this go around but does have some DXVK fixes for helping Linux gamers...

We are approaching the one year anniversary since the Haiku R1 Beta and the developers working on this open-source BeOS-inspired operating system are as busy as ever with improvements...

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver crew has been on an exciting spree lately of not only punctually enabling new hardware support but also pushing some big performance improvements for new and existing generations of graphics hardware. Today another performance achievement was unlocked...

WireGuard 0.0.20190905 was released on Thursday by lead developer Jason Donenfeld...

With Firefox 69 released and Firefox 70 entering beta, here are some fresh web browser benchmarks between Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome from Ubuntu Linux. On the Firefox size, Firefox 68, 69, and 70 Beta were tested with and without WebRender being enabled and compared to Google's current Chrome 76 stable release.

GNU Wget2 is a from scratch rewrite of the popular wget downloading utility. GNU Wget2 wraps around the libwget library while now being multi-threaded and supporting other features to provide better performance over the current wget releases...

Since June Intel's open-source developers have begun volleying the initial open-source graphics driver code for Tigerlake "Gen12" hardware. To date the Gen12 changes haven't been too invasive even with this being the first generation with the "Xe Graphics" engine branding. But that's now changed with a new patch series showing major changes to the graphics instruction set...

The Turbostat utility that lives within the Linux kernel source tree for reporting various power/frequency metrics on x86_64 processors saw some late updates merged last weekend for the upcoming Linux 5.3 kernel...

For those excited by the prospects of running Linux on Arm-based laptops, with the upcoming Linux 5.4 kernel will be better mainline support for the Lenovo Yoga C630 laptop...

Landing Thursday within Mesa 19.3 Git but marked for back-porting to the stable 19.1 and 19.2 series is an Intel driver fix to address an issue with KDE's KWin sometimes crashing...