Phoronix

For those that wait until the first point release before switching over to a new stable series, Linux 5.1.1 is out this morning...

Not only does Intel's Clear Linux distribution offer stellar out of the box performance, but they seem to be making it increasingly user/desktop friendly at this stage. There's been new GUI installer work as well as the launching of their own support forums...

AFS, the Andrew File-System that serves as a distributed file-system and used by the likes of Carnegie Mellon University and has seen ports to different operating systems, can now handle more programs running on top of the file-system like Firefox and GNOME...

Hot off the release of Wine 4.8, Wine-Staging 4.8 has already been released with its hundreds of patches re-based atop this latest upstream Wine code for handling Windows games/applications on Linux and other operating systems...

For those making use of the Lightweight Java Game Library (LWJGL) for cross-platform libraries common to games/multimedia software, version 3.2.2 is now available with nearly a half year worth of updates...

The -Wimplicit-fallthrough compiler flag has been around since GCC 7 for warning over switch fall-through cases where it could lead to potential bugs / unexpected behavior if the programmer inadvertently forgot to add a "break" statement to a case. The Linux kernel is looking to soon enable this warning by default...

Kaidan is the newest program in the KDE family, which is a Jabber/XMPP client that ultimately hopes to compete with the likes of Telegram...

Last month Intel developers began working on adding BFloat16 support to the open-source/Linux compilers for this new instruction debuting with next-generation Xeon "Cooper Lake" server processors. That support is now squared away for GCC 10, due out next year, and LLVM Clang 9, which will be released this autumn...

Wine 4.8 is now available as the latest bi-weekly snapshot for running Windows programs/games on Linux and other platforms...

With the recent release of Ubuntu 19.04, the new Intel OpenCL NEO compute stack is available in the archive as "intel-opencl-icd" for easy installation. The former Intel open-source OpenCL "Beignet" driver remains available too, for which we took it for a fun round of benchmarking comparison for seeing how these Intel OpenCL Linux drivers currently compete to just running on the CPU via POCL.

After being talked about for years, next month's release of KDE Plasma 5.16 will introduce a completely rewritten notification system for the KDE desktop...

As it stands now the upcoming release of Debian 10 "Buster" will provide a default desktop of the GNOME Shell running atop Wayland, but that still could change with a Debian developer suggesting the experience might not be good enough for this next release that they would be better off still using the X.Org Server...

It's not too often these days that new kernel updates bring changes to the pre-GCN Radeon Linux driver, but overnight a fix has been queued for helping out at least some users still running with ATI R5xx series hardware...

While it missed the main DRM pull request for Linux 5.2, the Nouveau DRM driver now has initial support for NVIDIA's Turing TU117, the GPU powering the new GeForce GTX 1650 series...

Phoronix Test Suite 8.8-Hvaler will be released in approximately one week while out now is the third and final development milestone release.Earlier development releases of Phoronix Test Suite 8.8 already brought many changes including Windows support improvements, PDF result improvements, various hardware/software detection improvements, statistics / analytic improvements, and other changes...

Mauro Carvalho Chehab sent in the media subsystem updates on Wednesday for the Linux 5.2 kernel and that new work has already been merged to mainline...

The much anticipated ZFS On Linux 0.8 release with its many new features isn't yet officially available but a fifth release candidate materialized today for testing...

While Mesa 19.1 will be released in a few short weeks, Mesa 19.0.4 is now available as the latest stable version of this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers...

With Scientific Linux bowing out, CentOS 8 will be the primary community/non-commercial re-spin of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. That is, once CentOS 8.0 is ready to be released...

Earlier this week Microsoft announced Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) as a more performant implementation of this Linux binary compatibility layer for Windows. Following that news, during their annual Build Conference, was a more detailed presentation on the WSL2 architecture...

Unity Tech today released their public beta of the forthcoming Unity 2019.2 game engine update...

Back at the Embedded Linux Conference in March 2018, Sound Open Firmware (SOF) was announced by Intel Open-Source Technology GM, Imad Sousou. The kernel-side patches to this open-source sound firmware were published shortly thereafter while now finally after going through several rounds of public code review, the kernel changes have been merged for Linux 5.2...

With Mesa 19.1 now under its feature freeze, here is a look at how the new Intel "Iris" Gallium3D OpenGL driver is performing for its debut in this next quarterly Mesa feature release. Benchmarks from a Skylake NUC with Intel Iris Pro 580 graphics just wrapped up for looking at the performance of the Intel Gallium3D driver against its existing open-source "i965" Mesa OpenGL driver.

While "just a point release", libinput 1.13.2 was released today as the newest update to this widely-used X11/Wayland Linux input handling library. With libinput 1.13.2 are two notable fixes...

Shipping today is the "Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 19.Q2 for Linux" driver package as the newest hybrid driver update for Linux systems with AMD Radeon Pro (and consumer) graphics, aiming to increase performance against NVIDIA Quadro hardware...

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem and driver updates have now been submitted and merged for the in-development Linux 5.2 kernel...

The Linux kernel's legacy IDE driver has been officially deprecated as of Linux 5.2 and is expected to be removed entirely in 2021...

Intel released version 19.17.12918 of their OpenCL "NEO" open-source compute runtime stack this week...

Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in the USB updates on Wednesday for the Linux 5.2 kernel...

As for WireGuard not making it into the Linux 5.2 kernel, the lead developer of this secure network tunnel explained in an email into Phoronix that it was due to his focus on getting the WireGuard Windows support in order. But as of today that initial Windows port is now available and he'll be returning to focusing on the Linux code...

While EXT4 in Linux 5.2 sees (optional) case insensitive file-name/directory support, the XFS file-system is seeing "a big pile of new stuff" introduced albeit it's made up of a lot of fixes and some new functionality...

Krita 4.2 is slated to be released later in May while today an alpha release is available for helping to test this release, which should be in largely good shape considering there were more than 200 bugs closed in the past month...

The notable change with the "EDAC" changes for Linux 5.2 comes down to the "Zen 2" support for the new AMD EPYC processors launching later this year...

The UBports community has released Ubuntu Touch OTA-9 as the newest release of Ubuntu for tablets/smartphones...

D9VK, the project based on DXVK and providing a Direct3D 9 to Vulkan translation layer, has tagged its first release for this promising project to assist those wanting to enjoy older D3D9 Windows games via Wine/Proton...

David Miller sent in the networking subsystem changes on Tuesday night for the in-development Linux 5.2 kernel...

GNOME 3.32.2 is now available as the latest (and final) stable release update for March's big GNOME 3.32 desktop...

Endless Computers, the startup that has been heavy contributors to GNOME among other open-source projects as part of their endeavor for selling low-cost computers in developing countries powered by their own Linux distribution and recently began offering a $299 laptop to teach kids to code is now hoping to motivate more kids to get involved with programming through Linux games...

Since yesterday's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 we have been busy firing up benchmarks of RHEL8 on multiple workstations and servers. Over the next week or two will be some interesting benchmark results on multiple systems compared to multiple operating systems while for some preliminary RHEL8 performance data are benchmarks of the new Red Hat Linux distribution from the dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 "Cascade Lake" Gigabyte server compared to CentOS 7.6 (RHEL 7.6), Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS, Ubuntu 19.04, Fedora Server 29, Fedora Server 30, openSUSE Leap 15, and Clear Linux 29250.

The EXT4 case-insensitive directories / file-name lookups were sent in yesterday for the mainline Linux 5.2 kernel...

It's been quite a while since last hearing anything major about the overdue GTK4 tool-kit release but now available is GTK 3.96 as a test version that positions GNOME's tool-kit closer to where they want it for GTK 4.0...

AMD on Tuesday released a new version of the Radeon Open Compute "ROCm" OpenCL/compute GPU stack with two primary new features...

While the x86 IRQ changes to the Linux kernel during the merge window periods don't tend to be too interesting for end-users, there is a pleasant change introduced with the Linux 5.2 kernel...

The kwin-lowlatency project is an independent fork of the KWin window manager / compositor aiming to deliver less stutter and a more responsive KDE desktop experience...

Longtime Linux kernel developer Will Deacon sent in the 64-bit ARM (ARM64 / AArch64) architecture changes on Monday for the in-development Linux 5.2 kernel...

Linus Torvalds happily pulled in the staging subsystem updates today for the Linux 5.2 kernel. While new functionality was added to staging including two new "subsystems", the overall net change for the lines of code is being 111,641 lines of code less...

With the Google I/O conference happening this week, Android Q Beta 3 was released and it continues furthering along the company's Vulkan adoption...

Last month for the GeForce GTX 1650 launch, NVIDIA shipped the 430.09 beta Linux driver, which is the current beta series at the moment. For those looking for GTX 1650 Turing support on a "stable" series, the NVIDIA 418.74 driver is available...

Following a Phoronix reader pointing out a NVIDIA driver setup guide for Clear Linux, I decided to have a go at it to see how well NVIDIA's proprietary graphics driver stack can work with Intel's high-performance Linux distribution.

The Mesa 19.1 release candidate is running a few days behind schedule but the code branching has indeed occurred while Mesa 19.2 is now under development on Git master...