In addition to GNOME's involvement and stewarding of the Outreachy program (back to the days when it was known as GNOME's "Outreach Program for Women"), they have just launched an Inclusion and Diversity Team to help the desktop environment community become more inclusive...
While this year's GCC 9 compiler release brought initial support for AMD Zen 2 processors with the Znver2 target, the support was sadly incomplete. While the GCC 9 support added some of the new instructions, it wasn't complete (such as RDPRU support remains missing) and the cost tables and scheduler model were not updated from Znver1 to account for the microarchitectural changes. Thankfully, SUSE's compiler experts recently fixed up this support for the GCC 10 compiler and more recently were able to get it back-ported for the upcoming GCC 9.2 for the Linux distributions that will upgrade to that point release. Here are some benchmarks looking at the performance impact of that updated AMD Zen 2 compiler code.
Intel's open-source driver team has sent in their initial batch of kernel graphics driver changes to DRM-Next for material that will be targeting the Linux 5.4 cycle later this year...
With this week's release of the Chrome 76 web browser, here are some fresh benchmarks of that latest Google web browser release compared to Firefox 68 on Ubuntu Linux...
Linux Mint 19.2 "Tina" is now officially available in its Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce flavors while continuing to be powered off the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS base...
While GCC and Clang are now competing neck-and-neck on Linux x86_64 when it comes to the performance of generated binaries, when it comes to each of their initiatives to transition to Git it looks like LLVM will take the cake...
AMD has published their instruction set architecture documentation for their new RDNA 1.0 architecture found on their new Radeon RX 5700 series GPUs and other forthcoming products...
While Steam Play continues getting better for allowing more Windows games to run on Linux to enhance the overall Linux gaming ecosystem, Valve's latest monthly data for Steam shows another month-to-month decline in usage at least on percentage terms...
While we've already seen the RADV Vulkan driver land their slated support for Navi 12 GPUs on top of the recently launched Radeon RX 5700 "Navi 10" graphics cards, today is the first time we're seeing patches from AMD to wire in the support to the AMDGPU DRM Linux kernel driver for this next iteration of Navi...
Over the course of July, Intel's rolling-release Clear Linux distribution shifted from Linux 5.1 to the brand new Linux 5.2 kernel, pulled in the latest GCC9 branch compiler fixes, updated to Python 3.7.4, rolled out a new OpenJDK build, and had many other package updates and original optimizations applied...
For those wondering what the SMT performance impact is for new Zen 2 processors, here are some tests done using a Ryzen 9 3900X with Ubuntu Linux when testing at the default 12-core / 24-threads and then again when disabling SMT to look at just the twelve physical cores...
Up until now the Intel Linux graphics driver hasn't had to worry about supporting multiple devices concurrently since, well, it hasn't been a possibility. But with the first Intel Xe discrete GPU hardware expected to arrive next year, the "i915" kernel driver has begun seeing restructuring work to support multi-GPU setups, or what most commonly will be Intel integrated graphics paired with a discrete Xe GPU...
Releasing on schedule was the GNU C Library 2.30 release. Glibc 2.30 brings with it more optimizations and new features for this all-important part of the GNU toolchain...
GNOME's Sysprof profiler continues on a trajectory of becoming an incredibly versatile component for developers looking to maximize performance and efficiency under this desktop environment. Sysprof already picked up a number of new features for GNOME 3.34 but work is not yet finished...
Xfce 4.12 was released in February 2015 while finally getting ready to succeed that is the long talked about Xfce 4.14 that is expected to ship this month...
AMD dominated the Linux hardware conversations and benchmarking in July with their 7/7 launch of their 7nm Ryzen 3000 series "Zen 2" processors and Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" processors. Of the 273 original news articles on Phoronix during July and the 19 featured Linux hardware reviews / benchmark specials, AMD news and Linux benchmark results tended to dominate many of the top spots...
The newest initiative within the Fedora camp is a "Minimization Team" seeking to reduce the size of packaged applications, run-times, and other software available on Fedora Linux...
The latest upstream GNOME performance shortcomings being investigated by prolific contributor Daniel Van Vugt of Canonical are OpenGL pipeline stalls...
Thanks to Valve's open-source driver developer Samuel Pitoiset, there is now experimental support for using Wave32 support on Navi graphics cards for compute shaders...
A Phoronix reader has talked about the efficiency of using Raptor Computing Systems' open-source Blackbird POWER9 desktop system for Monero cryptocurrency mining in 2019...
We've been eagerly watching Intel's open-source LLVM-based SYCL compiler support developed over the past number of months and today it finally premiered as an experimental feature in their modern OpenCL Linux driver package for its CPU run-time component...
The NetBSD 9.0 code has now been branched and preparations underway for releasing the next version of this BSD operating system known for its vast architecture support...
The UBports community developers continuing to advance Ubuntu Touch have shared their latest work items and plans. OTA-10 is being developed while they are also working on ports for the PinePhone and Librem 5 smart-phones, among other items on their radar...
Lennart Poettering has made available the first release candidate of the upcoming systemd 243 update. Systemd 243 is a big one in seeing more than 1,700 commits since the April release of systemd 242...
Linux laptop/PC vendor System76 has become a Thunderbolt licensee so that they can officially offer support for it in the Coreboot-based open-source system firmware initiative they are pursuing...
The recent proposal to drop Fedora's Modular and Everything repositories for the upcoming Fedora 31 release is yet to be decided after it was deferred at this week's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) meeting...
Intel's "CREATE" event is ongoing right now at SIGGRAPH 2019 where they are using it to repeat their goal of seeing a "1,000x advancement in performance" over the years ahead...
Valve's Linux developers today released Proton 4.11 as the newest release of their Wine-based software that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux under the Steam client...
Complementary to yesterday's Radeon RX 5700 / RX 5700 XT Linux Gaming Performance With AMDGPU 5.3 + Mesa 19.2-devel, here are some benchmarks showing how the RadeonSI OpenGL performance has evolved for the Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT since they launched three weeks ago for this open-source OpenGL Linux stack...
The open-source MoltenVK project that offers Vulkan API support for Apple devices on iOS and macOS is out with a new release for mapping Vulkan atop Apple's Metal graphics/compute stack...
Last week I wrote about the GCC 10 compiler picking up a new scheduler model and cost tables for AMD Zen 2 CPUs to build off the initial "znver2" microarchitecture target from last year. Fortunately, those Znver2-specific improvements have now been back-ported to the GCC 9 compiler branch so it will see user systems with not as long of a wait until GCC 10 stable...
Valve's interesting ACO shader compiler alternative to AMDGPU LLVM currently for the RADV Vulkan driver as well as for RadeonSI OpenGL in the future now can handle vertex shaders...
In continuation of the article last week how the RISC-V Linux kernel support has been maturing and various missing gaps filled in, another feature just arrived in patch form: support for KVM virtualization...
In addition to new patches coming out on Monday for addressing power management with AMD's unreleased "Arcturus" GPU, a set of Mesa patches were merged for adding RadeonSI Gallium3D driver support...
While LLVM 9.0 was branched nearly two weeks ago and it was anticipated that the release candidate would immediately follow, only yesterday did 9.0-RC1 materialize...
Earlier this month AMD's Linux driver team sent out their initial open-source patches bringing up the "Arcturus" GPU as a new Vega family product. Today a second batch of patches adding in two thousand more lines of Linux kernel driver code were sent out...
Now that the flow of initial Navi fixes and optimizations has settled down for both the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver and the Mesa RADV/RadeonSI user-space driver components, here is a look at AMD Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT graphics card performance on Ubuntu Linux at the end of July, now three weeks after these 7nm graphics cards first shipped.
It still remains to be seen if Purism will be able to ship the Librem 5 Linux smartphone this quarter as is their current revised target, but at least today they are publishing the finalized specifications for the phone's hardware...
In addition to the release of OpenXR 1.0 for kicking off SIGGRAPH 2019 week, The Khronos Group has released Vulkan 1.1.117 as a fairly notable update to this high-performance graphics API...
Back during the Game Developers Conference was the release of the OpenXR provisional specification by The Khronos Group while today for SIGGRAPH they have formally announced OpenXR 1.0...
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