Phoronix

While the Linux 5.0 kernel won't even debut as stable until around the end of February, as is standard practice, it's open season for new feature improvements of the changes developers want to end up queuing into the "-next" branches ahead of the Linux 5.1 cycle. The Intel open-source driver developers on Monday sent in their initial batch of graphics driver changes for this next kernel cycle...

Built atop LLVM's clangd server, Apple recently open-sourced SourceKit-LSP as a language server protocol for Swift and C-based languages. This allows for better integration with various IDEs and development tools...

One of the lesser known compiler backends/targets by the LLVM compiler is Nios II, which is for the 32-bit embedded FPGA processor designs...

ZFS On Linux (ZOL) 0.8 is going to be a big release... No, a huge release. But for ensuring it's going to be a successful release, a third release candidate was just issued for further vetting of all the new code...

Last month we mentioned that Fedora 30 was possibly picking up a Deepin Desktop Environment option for this Qt5-based desktop developed by the Deepin Linux distribution...

Pointed out by a Phoronix reader a few days ago and added to the Phoronix Test Suite is the PlaidML deep learning framework that can run on CPUs using BLAS or also on GPUs and other accelerators via OpenCL. Here are our initial benchmarks of this OpenCL-based deep learning framework that is now being developed as part of Intel's AI Group and tested across a variety of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

The Solus project has laid out some of their grand plans for the year from their GTK-based Budgie desktop environment to seeing the release of the highly anticipated Solus 4 Linux distribution to working on new software components further out in the year...

GNOME developers are currently testing some changes to the Adwaita theme as a minor refresh to GTK3 applications...

Now available via the official linux-firmware tree are the AMDGPU firmware binaries needed for initializing the forthcoming Raven 2 and Picasso AMD APUs...

Wine's VKD3D project for working towards Direct3D 12 support mapped atop the Vulkan graphics API now has patches for utilizing transform feedback in order to implement Direct3D Stream-Output functionality...

While Purism remains very busy with their Librem 5 smartphone efforts, today they have announced their fourth version of the Librem 13/15 laptops...

Debian 10 "Buster" continues moving along for its hopeful stable release later in 2019. The first freeze is now underway while the new artwork/theme for Debian 10.0 has been decided...

While there has already been a lot of exciting GNOME performance improvements so far during the GNOME 3.32 cycle, even more could be on the way with there still being a number of open merge requests for enhancing the performance of the GNOME desktop...

A Phoronix reader pointed out LCZero (Leela Chess Zero) a few days ago as an interesting chess engine powered by neural networks and supports BLAS, OpenCL, and NVIDIA CUDA+cuDNN back-ends. Particularly with the FP16 cuDNN support, this chess engine can be super fast on NVIDIA's latest Turing GPUs with tensor cores...

While Godot 3.1 isn't even out yet, our eyes are already looking forward to Godot 4.0 for 2D and 3D rendering improvements, but most notably Vulkan API support...

The ET: Legacy open-source project derived from the id Tech 3 sources and letting Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory live on almost two decades later is out with their biggest release yet: version 2.76. ET: Legacy 2.76 itself is a big release but the developers involved still have more plans moving forward...

Linus Torvalds has just released the second weekly release candidate for the upcoming Linux 5.0 kernel...

Kodi 18 Leia RC5 is available this weekend as what should be the last release candidate before this major release is out of this widely-used, cross-platform HTPC software...

Last weekend there was the Vulkan 1.1.97 specification update with five new extensions including some notable ones like memory priority and buffer device address while out today is the much more mundane Vulkan 1.1.98...

Since receiving the powerful NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier with its ARMv8 Carmel cores on this Tegra194 SoC a while back, it's been quite a fun developer board for benchmarking and various Linux tests. One of the areas I was curious about was whether GCC or Clang would generate faster code for this high performance ARM SoC, so here are some benchmarks.

While systemd 240 was released right before Christmas, it looks like systemd 241 will soon be released in order to address the recent "System Down" security vulnerabilities...

The work around better GPU/infrastructure handling for GNOME 3.32 continues with the most recent work merged this weekend being for better handling by Mutter over deciding the primary GPU of the system in multi-GPU systems whether it be multiple graphics cards, notebooks with dual GPUs, or systems with a USB-based external display adapter...

KDE developers continue being very productive this winter working on various improvements to their desktop stack...

The DragonFlyBSD operating system dropped its i386 install support back in 2014 with DragonFlyBSD 4.0 and since then has been focused on x86_64-only. Over the past two years or so they have gutted much of their i386-specific code from their kernel that is no longer needed for today's modern processors while over the weekend they got back to doing some more of that cleansing...

If you are able to make it to Brussels, Belgium in three weeks, the wonderful FOSDEM event is taking place as easily one of the best open-source/Linux events in the world and it's free to attend...

Helping to make the SDL cross-platform library more attractive for mobile/Android developers, the latest SDL2 code has an initial OpenSL ES implementation...

The KDE project has released KDE Frameworks 5.54 as their monthly update to these complementary components to Qt5...

The DXVK project for mapping Direct3D 10/11 atop Vulkan for Wine/Proton (Steam Play) users continues inching closer to its eventual 1.0 milestone...

As a follow-up to the story a few days ago about interest in getting the Radeon GCC compiler back-end merged for this year's GNU Compiler Collection 9 (GCC9) release, it's been approved!..

With the mention earlier this week of GCC potentially enabling the vectorize options at the -O2 optimization level, I carried out some fresh GCC 9 development benchmarks at various optimization levels for reference.

With GCC 9 being released in just a short time and being now onto the final stage of development, besides fixing regressions the developers are also getting the documentation in order...

The resurrected Linspire Linux distribution formerly known as Lindows is planning to enter the Linux server market as well as an upcoming "Office 365" edition...

X-Plane 11.30 is now available as the latest feature update to this realistic, cross-platform, mature flight simulator system that has long provided native support for Linux...

Beginning with February's KDE Frameworks 5.55 release, there will be an Android notifications back-end introduced...

SYCL, the single-source programming model developed by the Khronos Group and based upon standard C++, might soon be supported by the LLVM Clang compiler thanks to Intel...

While last week's Wine 4.0-RC5 release was quite a small release due to the holidays, Wine 4.0-RC6 is now available and it's back on track with more bug-fixing...

Canonical's Mir display server is off to a good start for 2019 with a lot of work and pet projects being worked on over the holidays by the developers involved...

Complementing the benchmarks done earlier this week in the our NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Linux review, here are more benchmarks of the GeForce RTX 2060 $349 USD graphics card that is beginning to ship next week. This article offers up a plethora of 1920 x 1080 and 2560 x 1440 Linux gaming benchmarks while providing the very latest driver performance results on the AMD Radeon RX 590, RX Vega 56, and RX Vega 64 while on the NVIDIA side was the GeForce GTX 1060/1070/1080 and RTX 2060/2070 graphics cards.

The Tux-themed MarioKart-inspired SuperTuxKart animated racing game is out with its v0.10 Beta 1 release that delivers on initial LAN/Internet-based multiplayer support...

From the end of the year to already this year there are several new test profiles available via OpenBenchmarking.org and the Phoronix Test Suite...

With just days to go until the Mesa 19.0 branching and feature freeze, it's a busy time on Mesa Git with developers working to land their latest changes into this next quarterly feature release...

The LLVM project has long been transitioning from Subversion-centered development to using Git around GitHub. The new "LLVM monorepo" Git setup is now considered finalized...

VLC 3.0.6 was released on Thursday while VideoLAN developers were at CES in Las Vegas celebrating the milestone of their cross-platform multimedia software surpassing three billion total downloads...

While the Linux 5.0 kernel has a lot of enticing features and improvements, if you rely upon ZFS On Linux (ZOL) you will probably want to hold off on trying the Linux 5.0 release candidates at this time...

While released too late for making it into GNOME 3.31.4 proper as the newest GNOME 3.32 development release, out today are GNOME Shell 3.31.4 and Mutter 3.31.4 and both of these components offer up performance fixes/improvements...

While the Linux desktop's display stack has largely reached parity with Windows and macOS in recent years (most recently, the DRM core properties hitting Linux 5.0 around Adaptive-Sync / VRR), but one of the areas that has remained elusive has been for full HDR display support. We've seen NVIDIA working on nursing the X.Org-based display stack for HDR while now Intel appears to be working on the necessary Wayland changes...

Last month when running FreeBSD 12.0 benchmarks on a 2P EPYC server I wasn't able to run any side-by-side benchmarks with the new DragonFlyBSD 5.4 as this BSD was crashing during the boot process on that board. But fortunately on another AMD EPYC server available, the EPYC 1P TYAN Transport SX TN70A-B8026, DragonFlyBSD 5.4.1 runs fine. So for this first round of BSD benchmarking in 2019 are tests of FreeBSD 11.2, FreeBSD 12.0, DragonFlyBSD 5.4.1, the new TrueOS 18.12, and a few Linux distributions (CentOS 7, Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS, and Clear Linux) on this EPYC 7601 server in a variety of workloads.

For those that wait for a point release or two before upgrading to a new PHP release on your development box or web server, PHP 7.3.1 is out today as the first bug-fix release since last month's big PHP 7.3 release...

With yesterday's surprise announcement of the Radeon VII "Radeon 7" as a new $699 7nm second-generation Vega consumer graphics card launching in early February, you may be wondering about the open-source Linux driver support state. While nothing official has come down the wire yet, here is what appears to be the state for this new Vega graphics card on Linux...

For those with older graphics processors, rejoice as with the upcoming Mesa 19.0 driver release it might now be possible to have OpenGL 4.0 thanks to software-based implementations of ARB_gpu_shader_int64 and ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 finally being merged to mainline. The FP64 one is most notable with that being a requirement for OpenGL 4.0 but some older GPUs lacking that capability for bumping past OpenGL 3.3...