Phoronix

Linus Torvalds has just issued the third weekly release candidate of the forthcoming Linux 5.4 kernel that should debut as stable before the end of November...

For those not following on Twitter, recently I picked up one of the new Dell XPS 7390 laptops for finally being able to deliver Linux benchmarks from Intel Ice Lake! Yes, it's real and running under Linux! For those eyeing the Dell XPS 7390 with this being the first prominent laptop with Ice Lake, here is a brief look at the initial experience with using Ubuntu 19.10.

WireGuard is still working on transitioning to the Linux kernel's existing crypto API as a faster approach to finally make it into the mainline kernel, but for those using the out-of-tree WireGuard secure VPN tunnel support, a new development release is available...

The openSUSE's Open Build Service (OBS) has been picking up the ability to build Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) images for those wishing to craft their own WSL distribution or just rebuild openSUSE from source as a reproducible/verifiable build...

While longtime X11 developer Keith Packard is now working for SiFive on RISC-V processors by day, he's still involved in the Linux graphics world through his contract work for Valve. At the XDC2019 conference earlier this month he presented on display timing, the current Linux plumbing for it, and also bringing up Vulkan will better support variable rate displays in the future...

With many of the prominent fixes that we've talked about for GNOME Shell and Mutter since last month's 3.34 release having been back-ported to 3.34.1, this weekend's release of GNOME Shell 3.35.1 and Mutter 3.35.1 as the first steps towards GNOME 3.36 aren't all that big. But at least in the case of this new Mutter development release are some worthwhile fixes...

Lead developer of the open-source Godot 2D/3D game engine Juan Linietsky has continued working daily on the engine's Vulkan renderer ahead of Godot 4.0...

With KDE Plasma 5.17 releasing soon, it's been seeing a lot of last minute fixes while feature activity is also brewing around Plasma 5.18...

GNU Binutils 2.33 was tagged in Git two weeks ago but seemingly without any release announcement while now Binutils 2.33.1 has been released...

Red Hat had been looking to hire another experienced open-source graphics driver developer and for that their newest member on their growing open-source graphics team is a longtime AMD/ATI developer...

FreeBSD 12.1 is near with the first release candidate shipping this weekend. While a point release over the nearly one year old FreeBSD 12.0, it does come with some notable changes in tow...

Friday marked the release of dav1d 0.5 as the newest version of this speedy open-source AV1 video decoder. With dav1d 0.5 are optimizations to help out SSSE3 most prominently but also AVX2 and ARM64 processors. Here are some initial benchmarks so far of this new dav1d video decoder on Linux...

There is yet another significant improvement found for XWayland in the latest X.Org Server code that will hopefully see a long overdue release soon...

With The Qt Company working hard now on development around Qt 6, the KDE developers are beginning their early discussions over their path forward to adopting this next evolutionary tool-kit update...

AMD has released a new version of their X.Org display driver...

For years we have been looking forward to the realistic X-Plane flight simulator rendered by Vulkan as an alternative to their long-standing OpenGL render and with X-Plane 11.50 that is finally being made a reality...

Rspamd 2.0 has been released as the newest version of this leading open-source spam filtering software and it's coming with plenty of changes...

A lot of the Tiger Lake "Gen 12" graphics compiler infrastructure changes to Mesa for Intel's open-source OpenGL and Vulkan Linux drivers were just merged into the Mesa 19.3 code-base...

The KDE Plasma Mobile team has begun publishing weekly reports on their development efforts for making KDE software more suitable for mobile devices as well as convergence and other efforts in common with KDE on the desktop...

Back during the summer Eric Anholt who had been the lead developer of Broadcom's VC4/V3D graphics driver stack most notably used by Raspberry Pi boards left the company to join Google. In his place, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is working with consulting firm Igalia to continue work on the DRM/KMS kernel driver and Gallium3D drivers for this open-source graphics driver support...

As written about a few days ago, Intel engineers added Gen12/Xe Tiger Lake support to their compute stack "NEO" for Linux users. That support has now made it into their latest weekly release of the Intel Compute Runtime...

Canonical's developers continuing to advance the Mir display server that continues to be focused on providing an abstraction for Wayland support have issued a new feature release...

It's fairly rare these days seeing big patch sets out of AMD focused on improving the open-source Linux driver support for the likes of aging GPUs such as the Sea Islands and Volcanic Islands generations, but this Friday there is some notable development activity...

Intel's open-source IWD wireless daemon that continues work on replacing WPA Supplicant is up to version 0.22...

Recently on Phoronix you have likely heard a lot about the LRU "bulk moves" functionality for the AMDGPU driver after it was talked up by a Valve Linux developer for the performance help to Linux games and then the change landing in Linux 5.4 as a "fix"...

The "VIRTME" project was started years ago as a set of simple tools for running a virtualized Linux kernel that uses the host distribution or basic root file-system rather than a complete Linux distribution image. There hasn't been a new release of VIRTME in years but that changed on Thursday...

Mesa's DRM library could soon be shifting to a date-based versioning scheme similar to what is already employed by Mesa itself (year.release) and the X.Org Server is also looking at similar versioning...

While Intel's SVT-VP9 video encode has been public since February and receiving frequent Git commits for advancing this very fast open-source VP9 video encoder, finally today it saw its first tagged release, being called the SVT-VP9 0.1 pre-release...

While not exactly a big surprise with System76 having done an "OSFC Edition" Coreboot laptop at small scale at the end of the summer, but System76 is now formally announcing two Linux laptops shipping with Coreboot as an alternative to their proprietary BIOS...

Earlier this week I provided some fresh Windows vs. Linux web browser benchmarks for both Firefox and Chrome. For those curious how the current Windows 10 vs. Linux performance is for other workloads, here is a fresh look across a variety of software applications and while testing the near-final Ubuntu 19.10, Intel's rolling-release Clear Linux, and Debian 10.1 while running off an Intel Core i9 HEDT platform.

The promising ACO compiler back-end for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver now has support for GFX10/Navi graphics!..

In addition to Intel this week sending out their first big batch of graphics driver changes for the Linux 5.5 kernel cycle kicking off at year's end, today AMD developers sent in their first batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver changes targeting this next version of the Linux kernel...

There hasn't been a major release of the X.Org Server now in 17 months... Not because there haven't been any changes (in fact, a lot of GLAMOR and XWayland work among other fixing) but because no one has stepped up as release manager to get the next version out the door. But to workaround that, developers are looking at moving the X.Org Server to purely time-based releases and letting their continuous integration testing be the deciding factor on if a release is ready to ship...

While Ubuntu developers are busy adding experimental ZFS support to their installer, the SUSE developers working on their YaST installer are working on offering better security options for their platform by beefing up the encryption capabilities at install-time...

RenderDoc has already been the leading open-source graphics debugging tool for OpenGL / Vulkan / Direct3D across multiple platforms and it continues only getting more useful with each new feature release...

Google's newest open-source contribution for benefiting the Linux kernel is SchedViz...

Valve has released Proton 4.11-7 as the newest version of their Wine downstream that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

We are hitting the autumn Linux distribution update season and out today is NixOS 19.09 as the latest installment for this operating system built around the functional Nix package manager...

With Stallman sticking around as head of the GNU and with that the Free Software Foundation re-evaluating their GNU relationship, Richard Stallman is already saying there will be no major changes to the project he founded...

Last week I shared benchmark results of the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X vs. Intel Core i9 9900K in 400+ benchmarks in the largest comparison ever for these two competing ~$500 USD processors. If that wasn't enough, I repeated the hundreds of CPU/system benchmarks again but without any of the recent CPU security mitigations in place to see how the situation would have played out pre-2018.

The Qt Company has shipped Qt 5.14 beta as the newest version of the Qt5 tool-kit and their last real feature update as Qt 5.15 will focus more on bug fixes as development is shifting towards Qt 6.0 due out in one year's time...

Currently when resuming from systemd suspend or switching back to the KDE desktop from an alternate VT, it's possible with the NVIDIA proprietary driver to see screen corruption or leakage of previous screen contents to areas of the lock screen / desktop. This annoying issue is now being better addressed with Qt 5.14...

As we reported this weekend, the Ubuntu desktop installer "Ubiquity" has landed the much anticipated ZFS install support. That's now propagated through to the Ubuntu 19.10 daily ISOs and does indeed make for a quick and easy setup of Ubuntu Eoan running off a root ZFS file-system...

Intel engineers have contributed GPU-accelerated memory copy support to FFmpeg when making use of their preferred video decode implementation...

There still is another month until the feature freeze for Mesa 19.3 to end out 2019 and it will be a big one...

There weren't out in time for yesterday's formal GNOME 3.34.1 point release, but GNOME Shell and Mutter have out their prominent point releases today that are exciting on the correction front...

Besides RADV ACO compiler testing and AMDGPU bulk moves restored another common test request recently on the Radeon Linux graphics side has been looking at the NIR support...

The in-kernel staging Amlogic Meson video decode driver could soon handle H.264 support as soon as Linux 5.5...

For those annoyed by random textures appearing when launching the popular Rocket League game with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, a workaround has landed in Mesa 19.3-devel Git while also marked for back-porting to currently supported stable series...

RDPRU is one of the new instruction set extensions of AMD "Zen 2" CPUs that is for reading a processor register that is typically limited to privilege level zero. RDPRU allows for reading select registers at any privilege level. With Linux 5.5, the RDPRU presence will be advertised by the CPU features...