Phoronix

Monday's weekly Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee approved of a means for the DNF package manager to integrate some user counting capabilities as long as it's a "sane" approach and not the UUID-driven proposal originally laid out...

Last week System76 announced the new Darter Pro laptop with Intel 8th Gen CPUs while today the ordering process has opened up on this latest 15-inch laptop from the Linux-focused vendor. They hadn't revealed pricing information last week but we now know that information...

Following last week's code branching / feature freeze for Mesa 19.0, the second release candidate is now available for testing of this latest quarterly feature release...

After nearly two weeks of benchmarking, here is a look at our most extensive Linux x86_64 compiler comparison yet between the latest stable and development releases of the GCC and LLVM Clang C/C++ compilers. Tested with GCC 8, GCC 9.0.1 development, LLVM Clang 7.0.1, and LLVM Clang 8.0 SVN were tests on 12 distinct 64-bit systems and a total of 62 benchmarks run on each system with each of the four compilers... Here's a look at this massive data set for seeing the current GCC vs. Clang performance.

RustPython is a new Python 3.x implementation written within the Rust programming language...

The big Sway 1.0 Wayland compositor release is upon us with now having weekly release candidates until the code-base is deemed stable enough to officially ship...

For those still trying to find a suitable non-linear open-source Linux video editing solution that fits your needs, Flowblade 2.0 is now available for this decade old video editor that is arguably not as well known as the likes of Kdenlive and OpenShot. Flowblade 2.0 comes with the largest workflow and user experience improvements since the early days of the project...

Phoronix Test Suite 8.6.0 is now available as our latest quarterly feature release to this open-source, fully-automated Windows / Linux / BSD / macOS benchmarking software...

Intel has been developing a new Media Driver for the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) geared for Icelake "Gen 11" graphics hardware and future generations. For Icelake video encode there is new functionality that needs to be exposed in the kernel to user-space for use by the Intel media-driver and it looks like that user-space interface will be christened by the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel...

While in some areas it's still an extremely cold winter, many open-source projects are already preparing for their participation in Google's annual Summer of Code initiative. The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) crew that always tends to see at least a few slots for interested student developers has begun formulating some potential project ideas...

A few things in Ubuntu's latest weekly development summary caught our attention... As has been going on for months, a new Ubuntu installer "Ubiquity-NG" continues to be worked on, but seemingly tying into that they are looking at ZFS support on the desktop...

It was nearly one year ago to the day that there was the huge VLC 3.0 feature release and while that was a great update to this open-source, cross-platform media player there is a lot more out on the horizon...

Tim-Philipp Müller once again presented at FOSDEM in Brussels about the current GStreamer release and a bit of what they have planned for moving forward. This multimedia framework continues to evolve and is quite exciting with everything they have in store...

The in-development Mesa 19.1 graphics stack release due out next quarter will feature a new Gallium3D driver... The initial Panfrost driver for open-source, reverse-engineered ARM Mali graphics hardware support of newer generations...

It's been just over a year since the debut of libvpx 1.7 while today a major new release is available for this library providing VP8/VP9 video encode/decode capabilities...

Interest in building the mainline Linux kernel with LLVM Clang as an alternative to GCC seemed like it waned for several years, but in recent months that effort has been moving forward thanks to Google's involvement...

With Wine 4.0 out the door, feature development is back on for Wine with what will be known as Wine 5.0 with their next stable timed feature release next year. Wine 4.1 is out today to mark the kick-off of this new bi-weekly series...

MidnightBSD, the downstream of FreeBSD focused on desktop support and offers the Lumina desktop as well as GNOME 3 and other options, is out with its minor v1.1 update...

Yesterday I posted some initial benchmarks looking at the performance improvements with Glibc 2.29, the newest feature release of the GNU C Library. Here are more benchmarks on eight different systems using Glibc 2.29 on Clear linux...

AMD's Radeon VII as their Vega 7nm consumer graphics card will be launching on 7 February at $700 USD ($699), but today marks the embargo expiry for the "unboxing" content... Yep, the Radeon VII is in the process of being tested under Linux.

While Canonical often takes heat for their various project "forks", their work on LXD for further innovating atop LXC for Linux containers has really paid off. Over the past few years LXD has really evolved into quite a capable system container manager beast...

Waffle is the seven year old project that started out as an Intel side-project to allow run-time selection of X11/Wayland support as well as OpenGL or OpenGL ES. It's been a while since hearing much about Waffle, but it is still being consumed and improved upon...

Vulkan 1.1.99 is now available to kick off February and features two new extensions plus a number of documentation fixes/clarifications...

For those running Ivybridge/Haswell era Intel graphics and older, better support for ETC2 texture compression is on the way...

The recently releases of FreeBSD 12.0 and DragonFlyBSD 5.4 have been exciting in the BSD space while moving forward there is the NetBSD 9.0 release a ways out on the horizon...

Glibc 2.29 was released a few days back and like most GNU C Library releases -- particularly in recent times -- does offer up more CPU performance optimizations... Some early benchmarks done this weekend do show some nice performance improvements in select workloads at least out of our initial benchmarking.

Linus Torvalds just issued the fifth weekly release candidate for the upcoming Linux 5.0 kernel...

For those that have been wanting to see case-insensitive filename support or even encoding of filenames in UTF-8 or other character encoding, the work is still on going...

Two years ago we covered Greenfield as an in-browser HTML5-based Wayland compositor. While at first it may seem like just a short-lived toy, it turns out the project is still around and advancing with its functionality for running Wayland apps inside modern web browsers without any browser plug-ins...

A patch series queued into Linux's driver core infrastructure ahead of the 5.1 kernel cycle is set to enhance the boot performance particularly for larger NUMA servers/systems. This latest round of kernel work was another contribution to the core kernel code thanks to Intel...

One of the sessions we look forward to each year at FOSDEM is in regards to the GNU Hurd status update... It's one of the few times per year where we hear anything new presented on the Hurd. GNU Hurd is nearly three decades old and has yet to see its v1.0 milestone reached, but Samuel Thibault and a small group of other free software developers continue working on this GNU micro-kernel...

Yet another open-source project out of Intel is SVT-AV1, which is a new AV1 video encoder implementation for Windows and Linux Systems...

Last month I shared the work going into Gallium-Nine-Standalone that aims to make it easier to utilize the Gallium3D Direct3D 9 "Nine" state tracker on Wine. There is now a new release of that code, including easy-to-use binaries, for those pursuing faster D3D9 Windows gaming performance on Linux...

WireHub is a new open-source project aiming to provide decentralized, peer-to-peer and secure overlay networks that is tooled around the WireGuard secure VPN software...

One of the Linux desktop technologies that is quite exciting and will hopefully see more widespread adoption this year is the Red Hat backed PipeWire initiative...

It's been a love affair going on for years, but should you not already know, Netflix has long been leveraging FreeBSD as part of its in-house content delivery network (CDN) for serving its millions of users with on-demand video. This weekend at FOSDEM, Jonathan Looney of the company talked about their usage of FreeBSD...

After seeing a new GNU C Library release this week, the GNU toolchain has another update with the availability now of Binutils 2.32...

VkRunner is a tool inspired by Mesa's Piglit shader runner and developed by consulting firm Igalia initially as part of their work on the Intel Linux graphics driver stack. VkRunner allows for running a variety of Vulkan shaders for testing a driver's compiler back-end...

While current-generation Intel/AMD CPUs are still supporting the MMX SIMD instruction set from two decades ago, a set of GCC compiler patches are pending to begin implementing MMX intrinsics using SSE instructions...

Dell recently announced the XPS 9380 Developer Edition laptop as a minor refinement over the 9370: there's now Intel Whiskey Lake processors with minor performance boosts and the web camera is better positioned, while for the "Developer Edition" Sputnik models it means Ubuntu 18.04 LTS rather than Ubuntu 16.04 on the former model or Microsoft Windows 10. The testing so far of the Dell XPS 9380 Developer Edition has been going well and I will have my full benchmark review out soon, but for this weekend are some preliminary data points...

With Kodi 18.0 having been released earlier this week, the LibreELEC project is out with their 9.0 release as a lightweight Linux distribution built around this HTPC/multimedia software...

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver team has sent out another feature batch of changes for queuing in DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel cycle...

The fifth alpha of the Debian Installer for the upcoming Debian 10.0 "Buster" release is now available for testing. What makes this new release particularly important to test is that it features the initial UEFI Secure Boot support...

Since the notorious S3TC patent expired at the end of 2017, this common texture compression implementation for OpenGL has been supported by mainline Mesa. It's now been extended to also support sRGB non-linear color components...

The Haiku open-source operating system project inspired by BeOS is out with their newest monthly report on the happenings...

AMD's Linux graphics driver developers are preparing a set of Mesa patches that allow for compute shaders to be used for the video compositor render process within Gallium3D's video layer code...

In making it easier to persistently enable Weston's Pixman rendering code, the next Weston release offers up a configuration file option for flipping it on...

Valve has just published their monthly "Steam Survey" results that are always interesting for seeing the Linux usage metrics...

After hinting another major OEM was to join the LVFS, Richard Hughes of Red Hat announced today that HP is the latest company backing the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for distributing system firmware updates via this platform that is then applied on systems via Fwupd and conveniently exposed through the likes of GNOME Software...

For those using the Lutris open-source gaming platform that aims to enhance the experience of managing games and better integration from Wine to Steam games, the huge 0.5 release is now available for upgrades...