Phoronix

Announced last October by a Google engineer was KUnit as a Linux kernel unit testing framework and a proper solution unlike some of the current in-tree kernel testing facilities. The latest KUnit patches have been volleyed for review while waiting to see if it will be accepted soon into the mainline kernel...

Purism announced today they are partnering up with Private Internet Access (PIA) for offering out-of-the-box VPN services to Librem 5 smartphone users as well as offering the VPN integration inside their Debian-based PureOS for Librem 13/15 laptop users...

Back in November marked the Linux release of Warhammer II, powered by Vulkan for this high profile Linux game port by Feral Interactive. Feral announced today they are aiming for a timely release of the Linux/macOS port of the game's newest DLC...

Marek Olšák of AMD has merged his latest performance-enhancing feature into RadeonSI Gallium3D: the enabling of displayable DCC on Raven Ridge / Raven 2 APUs...

While the crowd-funding campaign has long been used up for working on the Allwinner VPU support via reverse-engineering for the mainline Linux kernel, Bootlin continues advancing the "Cedrus" driver particularly in getting the H.264 decoding to work...

The Linux "Lockdown" patches to restrict the running kernel image from being modified and to strengthen the boundary between UID 0 and the kernel continues to be revised. Matthew Garrett at Google who is now leading this Linux security effort is hoping to get the code into Linux 5.2 but that remains to be seen -- on Wednesday the thirty-second revision to these patches were posted...

Adding to the list of features to get excited about with PostgreSQL 12 is support for GSSAPI encryption...

The-Forge, a rendering framework that has supported Vulkan on Linux for the past year, is now a lot more interesting as it's newest release now opens up Vulkan ray-tracing support for both Windows and Linux...

The Portable Computing Language implementation of OpenCL for execution on CPUs and other use-cases is buttoning up its next release as POCL 1.3...

Mer, the fork of MeeGo that aimed to provide a free alternative to Maemo for Nokia devices, is now finally merging with Sailfish OS...

The high resolution scrolling support in Linux 5.0 has been a headache to say the least. After being ejected from Linux 4.20 following early fall-out, the support was merged for Linux 5.0 but the user-space support has yet to stabilize...

Last week were tests looking at the Firefox/Chrome web browser performance on eight Linux distributions but how does the situation look if adding Microsoft Windows 10 to the equation? Well, this article addresses that question as we looking at how well Chrome and Firefox compare Windows 10 vs. Linux on the same system and using the latest releases of these web browsers.

With it approaching two months since the release of systemd 241, Lennart Poettering and his gang of systemd developers are putting the finishing touches on systemd 242 with a release candidate now being available...

Released a few weeks ago was NetworkManager 1.16 with WireGuard integration, WiFi Direct/P2P connection handling, and other new Linux networking features. NetworkManager 1.17.2 has now been kicked off as the first development release towards the next version...

Alongside many other data-centric announcements yesterday, Intel quietly released the Wi-Fi 6 AX200 802.11ax wireless adapters formerly known by the Cyclone Peak codename...

It's been busy recently testing Intel's new Xeon Platinum 8280 Cascade Lake processors as well as the in-development Linux 5.1 kernel following the recent closure of its merge window. Interestingly, at least for this combination, Linux 5.1 is running even faster for these new Cascade Lake processors in some workloads...

A few weeks back Intel's next-gen OpenGL Linux driver, the Iris Gallium3D initiative, picked up support for fast color clears in order to boost performance. That initial support was for Skylake "Gen 9" and newer while now Broadwell "Gen 8" graphics have this functionality in place...

Intel's 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable Cascade Lake processors are officially launching today! Last month we were briefed out at one of Intel's campuses in Oregon and have been testing the new Xeon Platinum 8280 processors in recent days. In this article is a look at what's new with Cascade Lake as well as our preliminary Ubuntu Linux performance figures for the Xeon Platinum 8280 processors.

In this morning's Intel Xeon "Cascade Lake" launch article joined by initial benchmarks of the high-end 2 x Xeon Platinum 8280 processors there are dozens of benchmarks compared to various AMD EPYC and IBM POWER9 processors. If you are wanting to compare your own system's article to a smaller set of focused results, this article is for you with some additional reference figures under a variety of different workloads...

Epic Games today released Unreal Engine 4.22 and while they continue to support Vulkan and offer native Linux support, this engine update is more exciting this time around on the Windows side...

GCC 9 is just weeks away from being officially released while today IBM engineers added support for new "arch13" processors to this next compiler update...

The public beta of Fedora 30 is now available for testing as the latest installment to this Red Hat developed Linux distribution now riding with the very latest packages like the GNOME 3.32 desktop...

Jean Hertel who has spent the past year developing ADriConf as as the Advanced DRI Configurator is now looking for this project to officially live within Mesa...

Blend2D is a cross-platform C++ vector graphics library aiming to compete with the likes of Cairo...

In the one year that the Panfrost Gallium3D driver has been coming together for open-source, reverse-engineered support for Arm Mali Midgard/Bifrost hardware, it's been making a lot of progress in what it's capable of running atop this Mesa driver...

With Intel Comet Lake support queued for Linux 5.2, Intel's open-source developers have queued the support into their Mesa code for their OpenGL/Vulkan user-space drivers...

SPURV is a new open-source initiative out of Collabora for "running Android next to Wayland" with the Android app windows being rendered alongside Wayland Linux applications and having full 3D acceleration support...

With the start of a new month, Valve has just published their updated monthly Steam figures showing the Linux gaming market-share and more...

As the first step towards the plans to have a Vulkan back-end to WineD3D itself for Wine mapping older versions of Direct3D to Vulkan, an initial Vulkan adapter implementation was merged today...

Marek Olšák of AMD kicked off the new month by finally landing support for the ARB/KHR extensions around parallel shader compile support...

Philip Rebohle, the lead developer of DXVK for accelerating Direct3D 10/11 on Linux systems by mapping the API to Vulkan, has released the newest point release for this library used by Steam Play (Proton) / Wine gamers...

Last year Amazon began offering AMD EPYC options for their EC2 public cloud and last week extended the line-up of EPYC cloud options with the new "M5ad" and "R5ad" instance types with greater performance potential while being built on the AWS Nitro System.

The Qt Company today announced the release of Qt 3D Studio 2.3, the latest feature release for this development environment for creating 3D user interfaces that started out from code open-sourced by NVIDIA albeit since then it has evolved in its own right...

Last week I wrote about NVIDIA contributing a fix to KDE/KWin for avoiding high CPU usage when using the proprietary GeForce graphics driver. That fix ended up being due to the KWin compositor making incorrect assumptions about GLX swap buffers behavior. It turns out GNOME also needs a similar fix...

Edge computing solutions vendor SolidRun is working on "ClearFog" as an ITX-based ARM64 workstation platform. They hope for an early bird launch price later this year of around $500~500 USD for this board that has 16 ARMv8 cores, multiple 10 GbE SFP+ connections, Gigabit Ethernet, multiple USB 3.0 and 2.0 ports, 2 x mPCIe, four SATA ports, and can handle up to 64GB of laptop DDR4 memory...

The latest bit of Icelake "Gen 11" graphics enablement for the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver is supporting the performance counters/queries for exposing them through the OpenGL driver for the debugging/analyzing of performance bottlenecks...

A student is proposing parallelization improvements to the GCC code compiler this year as part of Google's Summer of Code initiative...

During March on Phoronix was 299 original news articles and 22 featured Linux hardware reviews / benchmark specials in quite an exciting month, though looking ahead to April and Q2'2019 should be quite exciting as well...

It's been a while since last having any major news to report on Sabayon Linux, the once quite popular Gentoo-based Linux distribution, but they ended out March with a big update as version 19.03...

This weekend the Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org crossed its latest milestone... Serving more than 39 million test profile / test suite downloads to those using our open-source, cross-platform benchmarking software!..

Linus Torvalds has just announced the third weekly release candidate of the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel...

Tomohiro Kusumi has contributed an initial FUSE implementation to DragonFlyBSD for implementing file-systems in user-space support...

Back in February the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) was celebrating having served more than five million firmware files over the duration of this service for providing BIOS/firmware files to Linux users for different hardware components from different vendors ranging from mice/peripheral firmware to new system/motherboard BIOS from major hardware vendors. That count is quickly shooting up these days and they are now serving 500k files per month...

LLVM has merged a very useful feature for the Clang 9.0 release this autumn: the -ftime-trace feature allows producing time trace profiling data in a friendly format that is useful for developers to better understand where the compiler is spending most of its time and other areas for improvement...

While spring has arrived, KDE developers remain as busy as ever on improving their open-source desktop environment and related components...

While Wine-Staging 4.4 was at 770 patches compared to upstream Wine for running Windows programs/games on Linux and elsewhere, this weekend's Wine-Staging 4.5 is down to 759 patches thanks to more of these improvements being deemed ready for upstream...

OpenMandriva has been toying with some performance optimizations in recent times like preferring the LLVM Clang compiler over GCC, spinning an AMD Zen "znver1" optimized version of the OS/packages, and apparently now exploring possible Profile Guided Optimizations...

As we've been expecting for the past month, Trinity Desktop R14.0.6 as a fork of KDE 3.5 was just released and its first for 2019...

It was widely expected that PHP 8 would introduce JIT (Just In Time) compiler functionality while now that experimental work has been approved...

One of the exciting product launches for this month has been the introduction of the NVIDIA Jetson Nano as a $99 Arm developer board offering four Cortex-A57 cores that isn't too special itself but packing in a 128-core Maxwell NVIDIA GPU makes this board interesting for the price. Out-of-the-box the Jetson Nano is just passively cooled by a small aluminum heatsink, but does it work any better if actively cooled to avoid any potential thermal throttling? Here are some thermal benchmarks.