Phoronix

For those running Linux on older Apple MacBook Pros and other Macs sporting Thunderbolt 1/2 controllers, there is better support for them coming with the upcoming Linux 5.2 kernel cycle...

There hasn't been much to report on recently for Radeon's AMDKFD driver that serves as the kernel code for the Radeon GPU compute stack and part of the company's ROCm offering. AMDKFD work hasn't let up but has just been queuing for a while in the amd-kfd-staging Git branch and now there are a host of improvements to be mainlined...

OpenMandriva remains among the few Linux distributions using the LLVM Clang compiler by default where possible in place of the GCC compiler. While at times it's difficult in maintaining this combination, they continue to find great success in using Clang as their default compiler...

With next month's Linux 5.2 kernel merge window there are a number of notable improvements queued up for improving the Logitech hardware support...

While there are just a few days left to the Mesa 19.1 development period before the code branching and feature freeze, the Gallium Nine state tracker for Direct3D 9 acceleration with Mesa drivers has a set of last minute patches...

If you are interested in FreeBSD at all, their core team of developers is hoping you will take a few minutes and participate in their survey...

There are two separate but exciting adoption milestones for the Vulkan graphics API...

While we are eager for the release of Debian 10 this summer, Debian 9.9 is out this weekend as the latest stable release update to "Stretch" and primarily delivering security fixes...

There's a new open-source NVIDIA driver heading to the mainline kernel with Linux 5.2, but don't get too excited...

A patch series being worked on by Thomas Zimmermann of SUSE allows sharing the TTM memory management implementation between Linux's different DRM frame-buffer drivers...

Fresh off the release of yesterday's Wine 4.7 update, Wine-Staging 4.7 is rolling out with 830+ patches re-based on top of this code-base for running Windows games/applications on Linux/macOS...

In addition to the work this week on exposing EXT_gpu_shader4 / EXT_texture_buffer_object, well known AMD open-source developer Marek Olšák has also been working a patch to help lower the input lag with Mesa...

RenderDoc 1.3 is now available as the newest update for this cross-platform, multi-API graphics debugging tool...

Wine 4.7 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release of Wine for running your favorite Windows games and programs on Linux and other operating systems...

This week NVIDIA introduced the $149 USD Turing-powered GTX 1650 graphics card. On launch day I picked up the ASUS GeForce GTX 1650 4GB Dual-Fan Edition (Dual-GTX1650-O4G) graphics card for Linux testing and have out now the initial GTX 1650 Linux performance benchmarks under Ubuntu compared to an assortment of lower-end and older AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

While yesterday it was a "No-Go" for releasing Fedora 30, the developers and testers did a stellar job over the past twenty-four hours and got Fedora into shape for releasing on-time next week Tuesday...

Following yesterday's branching of the GCC 9 code-base after hitting no high priority regressions left and thus opening trunk for GCC 10 development, the release candidate of GCC 9 is now available while the official GCC 9.1.0 compiler may be released next week if all goes well...

The Linux 5.2 kernel will allow the EXT4 file-system on a per-directory basis to selectively support case-insensitive files/folders...

Queued now into staging for introduction with the upcoming Linux 5.2 kernel cycle is a Generic Counter Interface to allow counter devices/drivers to re-use this common code rather than having to implement redundant code into each of these drivers...

Since the FreeSync AMDGPU kernel driver support was introduced earlier this year in the Linux 5.0 kernel, it's continued to be improved upon and another round of updated patches were posted today aiming to help the variable rate refresh behavior in low frame-rate scenarios...

Red Hat's lead X.Org developer Adam Jackson is looking at reworking the VESA display code path for Fedora moving forward. The plan would entail removing some old "sketchy code" from the X.Org Server and moving to UVESAFB as the VESA-based FBDEV driver but would mean dropping support for the OpenChrome driver among other changes...

Developers at IBM are working on a new concept for the Linux kernel of "system call isolation" in order to isolate parts of the kernel when impacted by vulnerabilities...

It's been just one month since GNOME 3.32 shipped as the latest and greatest work going into the GNOME desktop environment. Premiering today is GNOME 3.33.1 as the first development snapshot in the road to the release of GNOME 3.34 this September...

While the Mesa-based Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver has been exposing Vulkan 1.1 since last year, the upcoming Mesa 19.1 will bring support for Vulkan 1.1 when this driver is active on Android systems...

While Fedora 30 isn't even out the door yet and Fedora 32 not coming out until roughly one year from now, we already know one big change on the table: dropping Python 2 and packages depending upon it...

Today was a Go/No-Go meeting for the final release of Fedora 30 but the Linux distribution in its current state isn't ready to be released. Fortunately, a week delay hasn't been set in stone yet but will be convening tomorrow to see if the latest release candidate is ready in the next 24 hours to be promoted as final...

Radeon Software for Linux 19.10 was quietly released at the end of last week and seemed to go unnoticed until a Phoronix reader pointed out the existence of this updated hybrid driver featuring the AMDGPU All-Open and AMDGPU-PRO components...

GCC 9 has reached zero "P1" regressions that mark issues of the highest priority. With that list cleared, GCC 9.1 is moving towards release as the first stable version of GCC 9. GCC 9.1-RC1 will be out soon while GCC 10.0 is open on master...

Hardkernel's newest single board computer is the ODROID-N2 that they sent over a few weeks ago for benchmarking. The ODROID-N2 is built around the Amlogic S922X SoC and features four Cortex-A73 cores and two Cortex-A53 cores, options for 2GB or 4GB of DDR4 system memory, eMMC connectivity, Gigabit Ethernet, and four USB 3.0 ports for starting out just above $60 USD.

Following questions from our forum goers, there's now an overview of the current state of Intel's new "Iris" Gallium3D driver and its road-map for the remainder of the year in being the company's next-gen OpenGL driver that should be in especially good shape by the time Icelake "Gen 11" hardware arrives...

After being in development pretty much this entire decade, KernelShark 1.0 will soon be released as the visualizer around the trace-cmd that wraps Ftrace for internal Linux kernel tracing...

Feral Interactive has just announced the release of Total War: WARHAMMER II - The Prophet and The Warlock for Linux and macOS gamers...

For ironing out the OpenGL 4.4+ support within their VMWGFX virtual graphics driver stack and/or for starting out work on bringing up Vulkan support to guest VMs running VMware virtualization products, their longtime graphics driver team is working on emulated coherent graphics memory support...

While it's not looking like Mesa 19.1 will end up exposing OpenGL 4.6 capabilities, it is picking up various other extensions including some prominent several year old extensions like EXT_texture_buffer_object and the decade old EXT_gpu_shader4...

NVIDIA has been working on a new GLX extension to help the PRIME GPU offloading situation where multiple GPU vendors are involved and thus different OpenGL driver implementations. In particular, the proposed GLX_EXT_server_vendor_select is designed to better fit in to address PRIME GPU offloading obstacles introduced by their work on the now common GLVND OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch library...

With iX Systems having released new images of FreeBSD reworked with their ZFS On Linux code that is in development to ultimately replace their existing FreeBSD ZFS support derived from the code originally found in the Illumos source tree, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the FreeBSD 12 performance of ZFS vs. ZoL vs. UFS and compared to Ubuntu Linux on the same system with EXT4 and ZFS.

It looks like the AMD posting of the open-source Radeon driver enablement code for next-gen "Navi" GPUs is imminent. In fact, the first bits of it quietly were pushed out today...

With the last of the MPEG-2 patents having expired last February, the Fedora / Red Hat legal team is ready to okay the shipping of MPEG-2 video support out-of-the-box in Fedora Linux at long last... But they don't yet know what implementation to use...

Purism has shared their latest update on the efforts around their Librem 5 GNU/Linux smartphone they hope to begin shipping in Q3...

OpenBSD 6.5 was released today, about one week ahead of schedule for this security-minded BSD operating system. OpenBSD 6.5 is bringing several prominent new features including RETGUARD as its new stack protector and OpenRSYNC as its ISC-licensed in-progress replacement to rsync...

Nsight Systems, NVIDIA's proprietary cross-platform tool providing a timeline view of system resource analysis and other metrics while running GPU compute/graphics workloads, now can handle the Vulkan API...

Over the past decade there's been talks on a few occasions about either spinning NetBSD as a desktop platform or offering up various desktop usability improvements to make it easier to use this BSD as a desktop operating system. In 2019 there still isn't a great desktop experience to NetBSD but the new "OS108" is seeking to improve that with a NetBSD OS paired with the MATE desktop environment...

If you have been hit by a bug on Linux 5.1 where your X.Org Server would no longer start or separately where when using VirtIO DRM that XWayland and GNOME Shell would break, fixes have now landed in Linux 5.1 Git...

While Windows 10 users are gushing over Chrome finally introducing a "dark mode" for the web browser, on the Linux front there are no dramatic user-facing changes but just a lot of continued lower-level improvements for this cross-platform web browser...

On top of Intel's new open-source OpenGL driver seeing some hefty performance optimizations, the Iris Gallium3D driver has picked up another OpenGL extension ahead of the Mesa 19.1 branching...

Filament is Google's real-time physically based rendering engine that supports Android along with Linux and all other major platforms, including a target for WebAssembly+WebGL. Filament 1.2.0 was released on Tuesday as the latest step forward for this PBR rendering engine...

The Cage Wayland Compositor for kiosk / full-screen-one-app environments has managed to materialize...

While on the kernel-side there has been FreeSync support with the AMDGPU DRM driver since Linux 5.0 and for the OpenGL driver with RadeonSI there has been this functionality in Mesa 19.0 when paired with a supported kernel, the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver has missed out on this action until now. But landing just in time for the Mesa 19.1 feature freeze is now the FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync enablement for RADV...

The big QEMU 4.0 release is now available for this critical piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

Adding to the list of Mesa 19.1 changes is now AMD_compressed_ATC_texture being plumbed into Mesa/Gallium3D primarily with a focus on the Freedreno driver...