Phoronix

Over two years since the unveiling of the Awesome 4.0 window manager and one and a half years since the Awesome 4.2 release, out today is Awesome 4.3 for this X11 window manager...

As is standard practice for the DRM-Next development workflow, the Intel open-source graphics driver developers have already been staging their new feature work ahead of the Linux 5.1 kernel cycle, as have other parties involved in DRM/KMS drivers and elsewhere in the kernel. Today another big feature update was submitted to DRM-Next of new material that will come with Linux 5.1 this spring...

While I have benchmarked the F2FS file-system a lot since it was mainlined back in 2013, it's all been on solid-state drives or even other forms of flash storage like USB drives. After all, F2FS is short for the Flash-Friendly File-System. But a Phoronix reader recently suggested that F2FS also works out well for traditional, rotating hard drives so I decided to run some benchmarks.

As a follow-up to the story from earlier this month about Intel wanting to add SYCL programming support to LLVM/Clang, the company's initial open-source compiler is now public...

Yum was supposed to be removed from Fedora 29 in favor of the modern DNF package manager that is largely compatible with Yum commands of the past. But its retirement was delayed due to the request being late in the cycle and some infrastructure like Koji and Pungi having not finished the migration to DNF interfaces. Yum's retirement might come for Fedora 30 but it could be too late...

Red Hat developer and lead Flatpak (formerly XDG-App) developer Alexander Larsson has announced the stable Flatpak 1.2.0 release...

Over the past year alone there have been multiple attempts at delivering a content protection protocol for Wayland to handle the likes of HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection). From Intel there is the latest protocol proposal out today...

While the next Raspberry Pi will be a major redesign, the Raspberry Pi Foundation today released the Compute Module 3+ as their newest module intended for embedded/industrial applications...

If all goes well, Mesa 19.0 will see its feature freeze this week and kick off the release process by the issuing of the first release candidate. Here's a look at some of what can be expected out of this Mesa3D quarterly feature update...

It has yet to appear in a Vulkan specification update, but the MoltenVK implementation that supports the Vulkan API on iOS/macOS by mapping it to Apple's Metal drivers now supports the VK_EXTX_portability_subset functionality...

It's been nearly one year since Feral Interactive introduced GameMode for optimizing the Linux gaming experience/performance. With not hearing anything out of the project in a while, I decided to poke around its development code this weekend...

The third development release of Phoronix Test Suite 8.6-Spydeberg is now available for testing across Linux, BSD, Windows, Solaris, and macOS systems. This latest milestone has more benchmark analytics exposed via the command-line interface, a few BSD and Windows enhancements, and other improvements...

Linus Torvalds has returned from his trek to LCA 2019 and released the Linux 5.0-rc4 kernel...

With carrying out the ZFS/HAMMER2 vs. Linux ZoL and other file-system benchmarks this weekend, while having those clean installs of each operating system under test, I also took the opportunity to run some other non-storage benchmarks...

There is a new version of the Catfish search utility, which is GTK3 based and part of the Xfce project, but works on other desktop systems as a Linux/Unix system search tool as well...

The Intel WiFi Linux driver "IWLWIFI" will see support for various new WiFi adapters with the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel cycle...

With many current ARM/embedded devices having their GPU render and display hardware split into different blocks, Mesa is seeing infrastructure improvements for making it easier to support new platforms in this split configuration...

It's been another busy week in the KDE space for seeing that 2019 will be another successful year for the KDE project...

Given the increasing rise of hardware accelerators for compute offloading of particular tasks especially now around deep/machine learning with more chips coming to market, the Linux kernel will likely soon see the introduction of a formal subsystem for these different accelerator drivers...

The release plans for the next version of the Weston reference compositor have been firmed up as well as joining that release by a new version of Wayland itself...

While running the Windows vs. BSD vs. Linux 10GbE network benchmarks among other recent 10GbE Linux network performance figures, the test request came in from a premium patron to look at the current 10GbE network performance hit as a result of the default Spectre+Meltdown mitigations...

DXVK 0.96 has been released as the newest version of this library for mapping Direct3D 10/11 to Vulkan for faster Wine/Proton gaming performance on Linux...

With TrueOS offering daily snapshots built against the "ZFS on FreeBSD" code derived from OpenZFS / ZFS on Linux, I decided to run some benchmarks to see how the performance compares to that of FreeBSD 12.0 with its ZFS file-system support, DragonFlyBSD 5.2.1 with its HAMMER2 file-system alternative, and then Linux with ZFS/ZoL and other file-system options.

Systemd doesn't tend to have tagged release candidates or any development releases aside from Git prior to issuing new stable releases, but that's different today with the systemd 241 RC1 debut...

As a follow-up to the story earlier this week about a Mesa EGL extension needed for a universal driver configuration GUI, that extension (MESA_query_driver) was re-merged into Mesa 19.0 now that the build issue was addressed. The developer behind ADriConf is also looking for ideas on further improving this open-source 3D driver configuration utility...

The LXQt team has announced version 0.14.0 of their lightweight Qt5-powered Linux desktop environment...

In making it easier to manage and access the Linux kernel headers for a particular kernel build, Google engineers working on Android are proposing an in-kernel solution for mainline where a compressed archive of a given kernel's headers could be accessible via /proc...

The Virtual I/O Device standard, VIRTIO, is moving closer to seeing its big 1.1 release. The VIRTIO standard as a reminder devices/drivers around networking, storage, and other areas akin to Xen paravirtualized drivers and VMware Guest Tools but designed with cross-hypervisor and cross-OS support in mind...

Taking place this week in Christchurch, New Zealand was the annual Linux.Conf.Au conference, one of the best Linux/open-source events. For those that weren't down under for the event, the videos of the various technical sessions have begun to be uploaded to YouTube...

The initial batch of new AMDGPU feature changes slated for the Linux 5.1 were sent out on Friday evening for staging in DRM-Next until the 5.1 kernel merge window opens at the end of February or early March...

It's been a while since last having anything major to report on MythTV, the once very common HTPC software for open-source DVR/PVR needs albeit less so these days given all the Internet streaming and on-demand video platforms. This month the project released MythTV 30.0 as their newest feature release...

For the past two and a half years there has been a non-default Firefox package with Wayland support available to Fedora users running Fedora Workstation with the GNOME Shell. For the Fedora 30 release due out this spring, they are planning to ship the Firefox Wayland back-end by default...

The Qt5 tool-kit continues picking up new features outside of the traditional scope of a graphical tool-kit. The latest feature announced, which is currently a Qt Labs project and developed by The Qt Company, is an HTTP server...

Yesterday we shared that Wine developers at CodeWeavers have begun exploring a Vulkan back-end for WineD3D for their Direct3D 11 support and lower, separate from their work on VKD3D that is targeting Direct3D 12 atop Vulkan. More details on that effort have now been shared...

FreeBSD 12.0, Windows Server 2019, and five Linux distributions were tested for comparing the Gigabit and 10GbE networking performance as part of our latest benchmarks. Additionally, the performance was looked at for the Mellanox 10GbE adapter when also using the company's Linux tuning script compared to the out-of-the-box performance on the enterprise Linux distribution releases.

AMD Linux graphics driver developers this morning posted a set of 138 patches introducing a new software SMU driver that is geared for "future ASICs."..

Going back seven years has been the Intel Linux graphics driver's "Fastboot" support for allowing a more polished initial boot experience by allowing unnecessary mode sets to be avoided by the hardware. There have been multiple attempts over the years to enable this cleaner boot experience by default, but each time it ended up being rejected or later reverted due to running into issues with problematic hardware. This year looks like we might finally see it enabled by default for Skylake HD/Iris Graphics and newer...

One of the exciting user additions to the forthcoming Linux 5.0 kernel is high resolution scroll wheel support for various Logitech and Microsoft mice. While the kernel support has landed, the user-space support is still pending...

If your new year's resolution was to try out a Linux rolling-release distribution, openSUSE Tumbleweed has shipped a number of updates ahead of the weekend for those wanting to give it a try. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is now making use of the Linux 4.20 stable kernel, KDE desktop package updates, and much more...

AMD developers have done their latest weekly code push comprising the open-source AMDVLK driver stack for the official open-source Vulkan API support...

If Wine 4.0 is having issues with some of your Windows applications or games, Wine-Staging 4.0 is now available and worth a glass...

Last week Purism announced the PureOS Store as their planned software / app store for their current Librem laptops and upcoming Librem 5 smartphone. The actual app store isn't available yet, but today they announced a few more details...

In addition to Canonical's Daniel van Vugt having been tackling various performance issues with the GNOME desktop, the Ubuntu developer has also been working on addressing various usability issues and other glaring problems...

WireGuard lead developer Jason Donenfeld has announced the release of WireGuard 0.0.20190123 as the latest snapshot for this secure VPN tunnel implementation for Linux systems and other platforms...

While Wine developers have already been working on VKD3D as Direct3D 12 implemented on top of Vulkan for Windows programs, it turns out Wine developers are exploring getting WineD3D on top of Vulkan for older versions of Direct3D using Vulkan rather than OpenGL...

With the AMD Radeon VII graphics card shipping in two weeks as the second-generation Vega GPU at 7nm, I figured it would be an interesting time to see how far the original Radeon RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64 graphics card performance has evolved since their launch back in August 2017. Here is a fresh look at the current Radeon RX Vega 56/64 GPU performance today using the bleeding-edge Linux graphics drivers compared to the driver state back in 2017 for OpenGL and Vulkan gaming performance.

ModemManager is the FreeDesktop.org project for controlling mobile broadband devices/connections that is akin to NetworkManager for networking. Last week ModemManager 1.10 was quietly outed as the latest feature release...

There still is two months to go until the annual Game Developers Conference kicks off in San Francisco while on Wednesday, The Khronos Group published their initial sessions for their developer day during the highly anticipated event...

The MESA_query_driver extension for EGL is of fundamental importance if there is to be a "universal" graphics driver control panel / configuration GUI for Mesa 3D drivers. The extension briefly landed today in Mesa but ended up being reverted due to build problems...

Now included in the Debian 10.0 Buster release and pending as part of the upstream MATE desktop environment is support for making it remote desktop aware...