Phoronix

DXVK lead developer Philip Rebohle has released version 1.0.1 of this popular project that enhances Wine-based Linux gaming by allowing Direct3D 10/11 to be re-routed atop Vulkan drivers...

I certainly recommend that everyone uses full-disk encryption for their production systems, especially for laptops you may be bringing with you. In over a decade of using Linux full-disk encryption on my main systems, the overhead cost to doing so has fortunately improved with time thanks to new CPU instruction set extensions, optimizations within the Linux kernel, and faster SSD storage making the performance penalty even less noticeable. As it's been a while since my last look at the Linux storage encryption overhead, here are some fresh results using a Dell XPS laptop running Ubuntu with/without LUKS full-disk encryption.

NVIDIA has introduced its latest RTX-less, lower-tier Turing GPU... The GeForce GTX 1660 is now available starting at $219 USD...

It's coming a bit late considering the X.Org Server bits were added back in 2015 along with the xf86-video-modesetting support, but within xf86-video-amdgpu Git and pending for xf86-video-ati is support for the TILE property in dealing with tiled displays...

Libinput is fairly mature at this stage for offering a unified input handling library for use on both X.Org and Wayland Linux desktops. Libinput has largely reached a feature plateau with new releases no longer coming out so often and no glaring gaps in support. With it already being a half-year since the last major release, libinput 1.13 is now being buttoned up for release and available today is the first release candidate...

Since last week the big set of DRM driver changes has been part of the mainline kernel for Linux 5.1 while working its way to mainline now are a couple of early fixes to the AMDGPU driver...

The newest feature addition for systemd is supporting L2TP, the Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol, as part of its networking code...

It's busy as ever for the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver developers bringing up support for upcoming hardware like the recently published driver patches for Comet Lake, continuing to tweak the maturing Icelake "Gen 11" graphics, and also plotting the necessary re-engineering of the driver needed to bring-up Intel's in-development "Xe" discrete graphics. And Intel developers this evening sent out their initial enablement work for Elkhart Lake...

In seeking to improve the out-of-the-box experience when running the Ubuntu desktop as a guest virtual machine within VMware's products, Ubuntu is planning on having the open-vm-tools-desktop package be automatically installed for providing a better initial experience...

GNOME 3.32, which is codenamed "Taipei" given the location of GNOME.Asia Summit 2018, has been officially released on time...

Google today rolled out their first public beta/development release of the upcoming Android Q that will be formally released in the second half of 2019...

Mesa 19.0 has finally been released! It's more than two weeks late, but it should be worth the wait given all the improvements in this quarterly feature update to this open-source graphics driver stack...

It's been over one year since Godot 3.0 debuted and today it's finally been succeeded by the release of Godot 3.1, the latest feature update for this leading cross-platform, open-source game engine...

The Flatpak 1.3 unstable series has kicked off starting the latest round of feature work to this leading Linux sandboxing / app distribution technology...

One month since the release of ROCm 2.1, the Radeon Open Compute stack has now been succeeded by ROCm 2.2...

Barring any last minute delays, GNOME 3.32 is expected to ship today as the latest six-month update to this popular open-source desktop environment. GNOME 3.32 personally has me quite excited more so for the improvements -- and bug fixes -- over "new" features, but here is a look at some of what there is to get excited about with this latest update to the GNOME 3 desktop...

With the Raspberry Pi Foundation recently having begun rolling out a Linux 4.19-based kernel to Raspberry Pi boards, here are some benchmarks looking at the performance of two Raspberry Pi systems with the new Linux 4.19 kernel compared to its previous 4.14 kernel.

While we are looking forward most to Icelake with the new "Gen 11" graphics, Intel has been working on Comet Lake for introduction this year as a Coffeelake derived successor to Whiskey Lake for desktops and mobile devices. The patches needed for Comet Lake graphics driver support on Linux are now pending...

Over the past day there has been some notable NIR improvements landing in Mesa 19.1...

Mesa 19.1 has added support for the GLX extension to create an OpenGL / OpenGL ES context that doesn't generate errors -- assuming the driver supports the likes of KHR_no_error. For applications/games acquiring their GL/GLES context in this no-error mode, it can yield possible performance benefits...

Google has released version 73 of the Chrome/Chromium web-browser today...

TURNIP is the newest Mesa-based Vulkan driver in development that provides open-source support for this graphics/compute API on Qualcomm Adreno hardware...

Ted Ts'o sent in the main EXT4 feature pull request today for the Linux 5.1 kernel merge window while David Sterba sent in a secondary batch of Btrfs material...

Thanks to the Qualcomm / Linux Foundation Code Aurora, patches are pending for the Freedreno MSM DRM kernel driver to allow the latest-generation Adreno 600 series hardware to leave its "secure" mode...

It's been a while since last running any P-State/CPUFreq frequency scaling driver and governor comparisons on Intel desktop systems, so given the recent release of Linux 5.0 I ran some tests for looking at the current state of affairs. Using an Intel Core i9 9900K I tested both the P-State and CPUFreq scaling drivers and their prominent governor options for seeing not only how the raw performance compares but also the system power consumption, CPU thermals, and performance-per-Watt.

It's been just one week since Linux 5.0 was christened followed this weekend by the first point release and now that brand new kernel is shipping to users of Intel's rolling-release Clear Linux platform...

Recent kernels like Linux 4.20 brought various performance enhancements to FUSE, the kernel code allowing for file-systems to run in user-space. With Linux 5.1 there is additional FUSE optimization work...

For those habitually riding the bleeding-edge open-source Radeon graphics driver stack, there are some updated firmware files now available for newer AMD graphics processors...

Fedora 31 will likely be enabling various GCC security hardening flags by default in trying to further enhance the security of the software in its repositories and those building software on their own Fedora systems...

While there is the MuQSS CPU scheduler that lives out of tree as a promising CPU scheduler for the Linux kernel, it is not alone. Another option has been the PDS scheduler while now its author, Alfred Chen, has announced another new CPU kernel scheduler option he has dubbed the BitMap Queue...

Fedora 30 is aiming to ship with the Wayland native version of Firefox by default rather than relying upon XWayland. This Wayland-native Firefox has long been offered in the Fedora repository but not used as the default browser. While it's not all squared away yet, more time has been granted to get it ready for this spring update to Fedora...

We are over half-way through the Linux 5.1 kernel merge window. While we've had many articles detailing the individual changes thus far of the new kernel, if you are unfortunately behind on your Phoronix reading, here's a quick look at some of what has been queued this far for this next major kernel update...

The work done by Red Hat's Karol Herbst over the past year for plumbing in NIR intermediate representation support within the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" Gallium3D driver will finally be landing...

F5 Networks, a cloud application services firm, is acquiring NGINX Inc as the company behind the open-source, lightweight NGINX web-server...

The recently open-sourced Intel video encoders for VP9, AV1, and HEVC under the "Streaming Video Technology" (SVT) umbrella continue looking very positive especially for the newer VP9/AV1 video formats...

One week has passed since the official debut of Linux 5.0 and now long-time kernel hacker Con Kolivas is out with his 5.0-ck1 kernel patch as well as an updated MuQSS scheduler...

It's been a poorly kept secret for months, but today Microsoft formally announced DTrace for Windows...

Up for discussion on the Linux kernel mailing list is adding support for the Secure Launch boot protocol to Linux. This is part of the recent efforts to supporting Linux in "secure" boot environments around Intel Trusted Execution Technology and AMD SKINIT platform security...

While nearly all Linux distributions have been mitigated against the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities for over one year, the performance ahead associated with these speculative execution vulnerabilities can vary. This is especially more so with the enterprise Linux distributions that are generally shipping on older kernel branches prior to where the initial kernel support was mainlined. With recent kernel releases we've also seen varying optimizations and other changes around the Spectre/Meltdown/L1TF mitigations. So for those wondering about the varying impact, here are some side-by-side benchmarks.

Sway 1.0 is now available for this independent Wayland compositor that is inspired by the i3 X11 window manager and has matured with quite an in-depth feature set as well as evolved along with its own "WLROOTS" Wayland library...

While earlier this month it looked like Intel was going to be the likely suitor to Mellanox Technologies, NVIDIA has managed to edge out Intel and the others bidding for the networking chip provider...

The input subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 5.1 kernel include a number of touch-screen driver additions...

A new release of the GNU "Core Utilities" is out that brings with it the new basenc command...

LLVM 8.0 had been expected for release prior to the end of February, but now as we approach the middle of March, this major compiler update along with associated sub-projects like Clang 8.0 have yet to see the light of day...

The latest work within Mesa 19.1 is for the Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver and that is dumping more shader information within the VK_EXT_debug_report extension. The output of that is then used by the Mesa developers' VKpipeline-DB utility for offline analysis...

While we are expecting to see more Intel Optane NVDIMMs this year that offer up persistent memory using 3DXPoint memory on the DDR4 bus for persistent storage, the Linux 5.1 kernel might pick-up support for treating this persistent memory back as traditional RAM if so desired...

Meson 0.50 is now available as the latest feature update to this increasingly used cross-platform build system that is powering the likes of many GNOME projects, many X.Org/FreeDesktop.org low-level software components, and other software that when paired with Ninja is known for its lightning fast build times and better cross-OS support compared to traditional alternatives...

The Panfrost Gallium3D driver has been quick to take form since it was merged to the Mesa 19.1 development code a month ago providing open-source 3D support for Arm Mali Midgard and Bifrost graphics hardware. The latest achievement for this Gallium3D driver in Mesa Git is being able to run with the yet-to-be-merged DRM kernel driver...

SIMPLE_LMK is a simple low-memory killer being worked on for potential upstreaming in the mainline Linux kernel in the future but for now is simply seeking comments on its design approach...

Back when kernel mode-setting (KMS) was originally talked about a decade ago one of the talked about possibilities of implementing a Linux "Blue Screen of Death" / better error handling when a dramatic system problem occurs. Such an implementation never really materialized but now in 2019 there is a developer pursuing new work in this area with a DRM-based kernel oops viewer...