Phoronix

With the first quarter wrapping up, here is a look back at the most popular content of our 903+ original news articles in Q1 as well as 70 featured Linux hardware reviews / featured benchmark articles...

While we have been quite looking forward to ZFS On Linux 0.8 with its many additions, this next release will be even better as it now supports SSD TRIM...

With the Linux 5.1 kernel there is Arm's new "Komeda" direct rendering manager driver while patched in as new material for Linux 5.2 is support for the Mali D71 display processor with this new driver...

It's been a while since last hearing anything about the GNOME/GTK Broadway back-end that provides HTML5-based user-interfaces for rendering within web browsers. The HTML5 Broadway work has been revived ahead of the GTK 4.0 tool-kit release...

While Valve has long been collaborating with HTC and others on VR headsets and other ecosystem work to enhance virtual reality gaming as well as bringing VR support to Linux, the company is finally preparing to release its own high-end VR headset: the Valve Index...

Wine 4.5 is out today as the latest bi-weekly development release of this program for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other non-native platforms...

With now having WebDriver/Seleneium integration in PTS for carrying out browser benchmarks, we've been having fun running a variety of web browser benchmarks in different configurations. The latest is looking at the Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web browser performance across eight Linux distribution releases (or nine if counting Fedora Workstation on both X.Org and Wayland) for looking at how the web browsing performance compares.

GCC 9 release manager Richard Biener of SUSE has provided a status report concerning the state of getting the GNU Compiler Collection 9.1 shipped...

Ampere Computing and Packet announced on Thursday that eMAG servers will now be available through this public cloud/server provider. The initial configuration allows for 32 Arm cores at 3.3GHz and 128GB of RAM and 480GB of SSD storage for just $1 USD per hour on-demand access. I have run some initial benchmarks from this new compute instance for those interested...

The AMD developers working on their official Vulkan driver today pushed out updated sources for their "AMDVLK" open-source Linux driver. For this week's worth of activity, there aren't many notable changes but a few...

It's been on the project's TODO list for more than one decade but finally support for the "REINDEX CONCURRENTLY" command was added today to the PostgreSQL database server...

Longtime Linux input expert Peter Hutterer has released version 1.13 of libinput, the input library used both by Wayland and X.Org Linux desktops for unified input handling...

While X.Org and FreeDesktop.org are already closely related, administered by many of the same people, and FreeDesktop.org provides the hosting for much of the infrastructure, there isn't many formalities around FreeDesktop.org and the X.Org Foundation formally doesn't have control of FreeDesktop.org. But there's now a vote on whether the X.Org Foundation will formally accept FreeDesktop.org...

With BUS1 not to be found (or rather, very infrequently seeing any code commits let alone any clear trajectory yet for getting into the mainline kernel), Dbus-Broker that's worked on by most of the same developers continues maturing as a high-performance D-Bus compliant user-space implementation...

Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco Dingo" beta images have begun surfacing this evening as the first official test release (sans the generally great daily ISOs) for those wanting to begin testing this next six-month installment of Ubuntu Linux ahead of its official mid-April debut...

Joining the DRM-Next party with the Intel driver feature work is now the initial batch of the AMDGPU Radeon driver changes for Linux 5.2...

Just days after Intel sent in their first feature pull request to DRM-Next destined for the Linux 5.2 cycle, another round of feature work is ready for queuing...

Following the release this week of Sailfish OS 3.0.2, Jolla has released Sailfish SDK 2.0 as a big update to the mobile Linux platform's software development kit...

We knew it was coming and now it's been made official: the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) has formally become a Linux Foundation project...

With the Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco Dingo" release less than one month away, we are getting ready for rolling out more tests of this next six-month installment to Ubuntu Linux. For those curious about the direction of Ubuntu 19.04's performance, here are some very preliminary data points using the latest daily state of Ubuntu 19.04 right ahead of the beta period. Tests were done on a high-end Intel Core i9 9900K desktop as well as a Dell XPS Developer Edition notebook when comparing Ubuntu 19.04 to Ubuntu 18.10 and also tossing in Clear Linux as a performance reference point.

As expected, Feral Interactive has officially released the DiRT 4 racing game for macOS and Linux this morning...

Add CloudFlare to the list of companies interested in WireGuard as an open-source, next-gen secure network tunnel solution. CloudFlare even ended up writing their own user-space implementation of WireGuard in the Rust programming language, meet BoringTun...

Last week marked the release of Wayland 1.17 but at the time the Weston compositor update wasn't ready to ship, but overnight it has now set sail. Weston 6.0 is the latest Wayland reference compositor release with many improvements over its predecessor...

POCL, the "Portable CL" implementation for allowing OpenCL kernels to be executed on CPUs among other use-cases, is closing in on its version 1.3 release...

The second development release of Phoronix Test Suite 8.8-Hvaler is now available for your Linux / Windows / macOS / BSD benchmarking needs...

For those trying to keep to a systemd-free system, Gentoo developers have GNOME once again working without being dependent on systemd. The developers have managed with GNOME 3.30 the ability to use any init system desired, well, primarily OpenRC as is popular with Gentoo users...

Earlier this month the Intel open-source developers sent out their initial Linux kernel patches for "Elkhart Lake" graphics support. Elkhart Lake is a SoC successor to Geminilake based on Icelake and will feature Gen11 graphics...

For being the first point release of a new series, today's Mesa 19.0.1 is abnormally quiet as a pleasant update...

The Rust-written gfx-rs portability initiative that has similar goals to MoltenVK for allowing the Vulkan API to be supported/translated on non-native platforms can now run the Vulkan-ized Quake game...

Yesterday Valve released Proton 4.2 as a big step forward for this Wine-based software that is integral to their "Steam Play" for running Windows games on Linux. CodeWeavers, which is working on Proton/Wine improvements under contract for Valve, provided a look today at the massive amount of patches that have been upstreamed already from Proton to Wine...

While Purism is engaging with several different open-source communities for supporting different operating systems and interfaces with their in-development Librem 5 smartphone, by default they are planning to use assets from GNOME for their default user experience to jive with their GNOME-based Pure OS desktop Linux distribution. Here are some new mock-ups on the GNOME side for this privacy-minded Linux smartphone...

Mesa 18.3.6 is expected to be officially released this week as the last point release in the Mesa 18.3 series...

One month after the beta of the Qt Creator 4.9 integrated development environment, The Qt Company has rolled out the release candidate for this updated Qt/C++-focused development environment...

Flatpak 1.2.4 was issued today as an emergency release to address a new CVE vulnerability...

Earlier this month we wrote about the quandary Ubuntu Studio was in, the flavor of Ubuntu shipping with multimedia production and content creation software: none of their active developers had upload rights for updating packages. Fortunately, that situation has now been resolved...

Logic Supply, a manufacturer of several industrial-grade Linux-supported PCs in the past, has introduced the Karbon 300 has their latest compact and rugged PC intended for IoT/edge computing use-cases...

QEMU 4.0-RC1 was released today as the second test release for this forthcoming feature update to this important component of the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

Valve today released Proton 4.2 as their latest update to this Wine-based software for further empowering Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 was released earlier this month while the UBports community developers continue working to further along this Ubuntu-based mobile Linux OS...

The X.Org Foundation is once again participating in the Google Summer of Code where student developers engage with various open-source efforts on a range of projects. If there are interested and capable participants, GSoC 2019 could bring a Vulkan settings/preferences user-interface for the Mesa drivers, new OpenMAX acceleration bits, and other possible initiatives...

It turns out Fedora 29's Mesa 19.0 packages have recently been shipping in a "debug" mode since they switched to using the Meson build system and that has been leading to slower performance...

SUSE developer Thomas Zimmermann has posted his work on "FBDEVDRM" as a new Direct Rendering Manager driver for exposing the DRM interfaces on top of legacy "FBDEV" frame-buffer drivers. For old frame-buffer drivers not ported to modern DRM/KMS interfaces, this could open up some interesting possibilities and at least allow these vintage display drivers to work with the likes of Plymouth and other programs only supporting the DRM interfaces...

For nearly six years there has been a bug report about high CPU load when using the NVIDIA proprietary driver causing high CPU load when running the KDE desktop and making use of double buffering. This issue has been finally resolved...

AMD's Vulkan driver team this morning issued their AMDVLK 2019.Q1.9 Linux driver update as the latest tagged release for this official open-source Radeon Vulkan driver that does include a binary driver build for Ubuntu systems...

The Gallium Nine state tracker providing Direct3D 9 API support for Windows games/applications running on Linux under Wine will now be a little bit faster when using Intel's new Iris Gallium3D driver...

Another change being sought for Fedora 31 is including some newer GRUB2 modules as part of the distribution's GRUB EFI boot-loader build to provide some additional security functionality...

Google developer Matthew Garrett recently took over work on the long-standing "LOCKDOWN" kernel patches with a goal of preventing the running kernel image from being modified and strengthen the boundary between UID 0 and the kernel. These patches, which have been around for years and shipped by some Linux distributions, didn't make it into the recent Linux 5.1 merge window but now a pull request has been issued in trying to ship it with Linux 5.2...

Earlier this month was the feature proposal for Fedora 31 to finally upgrade to Mono 5, which has been out for nearly two years for this open-source .NET environment. This feature request has been approved for Fedora 31 while it's also been decided to allow it into Fedora 30 if it can land within the next week...

In the past few months a number of M.2 NVMe SSD to USB adapters have been appearing on the market. Curious about the performance potential on Linux of an NVMe SSD drive attached to a USB 3.1 connection, I recently picked up a QNINE NVMe solid-state drive enclosure for benchmarking.

Feral Interactive just announced they will be releasing their DiRT 4 racing game port this week for macOS and Linux...