Phoronix

With the Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco Dingo" release less than one month away, we are getting ready for rolling out more tests of this next six-month installment to Ubuntu Linux. For those curious about the direction of Ubuntu 19.04's performance, here are some very preliminary data points using the latest daily state of Ubuntu 19.04 right ahead of the beta period. Tests were done on a high-end Intel Core i9 9900K desktop as well as a Dell XPS Developer Edition notebook when comparing Ubuntu 19.04 to Ubuntu 18.10 and also tossing in Clear Linux as a performance reference point.

As expected, Feral Interactive has officially released the DiRT 4 racing game for macOS and Linux this morning...

Add CloudFlare to the list of companies interested in WireGuard as an open-source, next-gen secure network tunnel solution. CloudFlare even ended up writing their own user-space implementation of WireGuard in the Rust programming language, meet BoringTun...

Last week marked the release of Wayland 1.17 but at the time the Weston compositor update wasn't ready to ship, but overnight it has now set sail. Weston 6.0 is the latest Wayland reference compositor release with many improvements over its predecessor...

POCL, the "Portable CL" implementation for allowing OpenCL kernels to be executed on CPUs among other use-cases, is closing in on its version 1.3 release...

The second development release of Phoronix Test Suite 8.8-Hvaler is now available for your Linux / Windows / macOS / BSD benchmarking needs...

For those trying to keep to a systemd-free system, Gentoo developers have GNOME once again working without being dependent on systemd. The developers have managed with GNOME 3.30 the ability to use any init system desired, well, primarily OpenRC as is popular with Gentoo users...

Earlier this month the Intel open-source developers sent out their initial Linux kernel patches for "Elkhart Lake" graphics support. Elkhart Lake is a SoC successor to Geminilake based on Icelake and will feature Gen11 graphics...

For being the first point release of a new series, today's Mesa 19.0.1 is abnormally quiet as a pleasant update...

The Rust-written gfx-rs portability initiative that has similar goals to MoltenVK for allowing the Vulkan API to be supported/translated on non-native platforms can now run the Vulkan-ized Quake game...

Yesterday Valve released Proton 4.2 as a big step forward for this Wine-based software that is integral to their "Steam Play" for running Windows games on Linux. CodeWeavers, which is working on Proton/Wine improvements under contract for Valve, provided a look today at the massive amount of patches that have been upstreamed already from Proton to Wine...

While Purism is engaging with several different open-source communities for supporting different operating systems and interfaces with their in-development Librem 5 smartphone, by default they are planning to use assets from GNOME for their default user experience to jive with their GNOME-based Pure OS desktop Linux distribution. Here are some new mock-ups on the GNOME side for this privacy-minded Linux smartphone...

Mesa 18.3.6 is expected to be officially released this week as the last point release in the Mesa 18.3 series...

One month after the beta of the Qt Creator 4.9 integrated development environment, The Qt Company has rolled out the release candidate for this updated Qt/C++-focused development environment...

Flatpak 1.2.4 was issued today as an emergency release to address a new CVE vulnerability...

Earlier this month we wrote about the quandary Ubuntu Studio was in, the flavor of Ubuntu shipping with multimedia production and content creation software: none of their active developers had upload rights for updating packages. Fortunately, that situation has now been resolved...

Logic Supply, a manufacturer of several industrial-grade Linux-supported PCs in the past, has introduced the Karbon 300 has their latest compact and rugged PC intended for IoT/edge computing use-cases...

QEMU 4.0-RC1 was released today as the second test release for this forthcoming feature update to this important component of the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

Valve today released Proton 4.2 as their latest update to this Wine-based software for further empowering Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 was released earlier this month while the UBports community developers continue working to further along this Ubuntu-based mobile Linux OS...

The X.Org Foundation is once again participating in the Google Summer of Code where student developers engage with various open-source efforts on a range of projects. If there are interested and capable participants, GSoC 2019 could bring a Vulkan settings/preferences user-interface for the Mesa drivers, new OpenMAX acceleration bits, and other possible initiatives...

It turns out Fedora 29's Mesa 19.0 packages have recently been shipping in a "debug" mode since they switched to using the Meson build system and that has been leading to slower performance...

SUSE developer Thomas Zimmermann has posted his work on "FBDEVDRM" as a new Direct Rendering Manager driver for exposing the DRM interfaces on top of legacy "FBDEV" frame-buffer drivers. For old frame-buffer drivers not ported to modern DRM/KMS interfaces, this could open up some interesting possibilities and at least allow these vintage display drivers to work with the likes of Plymouth and other programs only supporting the DRM interfaces...

For nearly six years there has been a bug report about high CPU load when using the NVIDIA proprietary driver causing high CPU load when running the KDE desktop and making use of double buffering. This issue has been finally resolved...

AMD's Vulkan driver team this morning issued their AMDVLK 2019.Q1.9 Linux driver update as the latest tagged release for this official open-source Radeon Vulkan driver that does include a binary driver build for Ubuntu systems...

The Gallium Nine state tracker providing Direct3D 9 API support for Windows games/applications running on Linux under Wine will now be a little bit faster when using Intel's new Iris Gallium3D driver...

Another change being sought for Fedora 31 is including some newer GRUB2 modules as part of the distribution's GRUB EFI boot-loader build to provide some additional security functionality...

Google developer Matthew Garrett recently took over work on the long-standing "LOCKDOWN" kernel patches with a goal of preventing the running kernel image from being modified and strengthen the boundary between UID 0 and the kernel. These patches, which have been around for years and shipped by some Linux distributions, didn't make it into the recent Linux 5.1 merge window but now a pull request has been issued in trying to ship it with Linux 5.2...

Earlier this month was the feature proposal for Fedora 31 to finally upgrade to Mono 5, which has been out for nearly two years for this open-source .NET environment. This feature request has been approved for Fedora 31 while it's also been decided to allow it into Fedora 30 if it can land within the next week...

In the past few months a number of M.2 NVMe SSD to USB adapters have been appearing on the market. Curious about the performance potential on Linux of an NVMe SSD drive attached to a USB 3.1 connection, I recently picked up a QNINE NVMe solid-state drive enclosure for benchmarking.

Feral Interactive just announced they will be releasing their DiRT 4 racing game port this week for macOS and Linux...

Jolla has announced the release today of Sailfish OS "Oulanka" as their version 3.0.2 update...

It's just one week past the end of the Linux 5.1 merge window and the Intel open-source developers have already sent out their first pull request to DRM-Next of new graphics driver material they are planning for the Linux 5.2 release this summer...

GNU Compiler Collection 9 (GCC 9) will be formally released in the coming weeks as version 9.1. With GCC 9 are many big improvements as the annual update to this longest serving free software code compiler...

While Intel's Iris Gallium3D driver is not enabled by default and considered still experimental in its support of Broadwell graphics and newer, in all of our tests thus far it's been working out very well and haven't encountered any hangs so far in our tested OpenGL workloads. But with no OpenGL driver being immune from potential GPU hangs, a patch series is pending to improve the GPU recovery heuristics...

Valve Software has been backing work on Fossilize as an open-source project providing a serialization format for persistent Vulkan object types...

Since the short-lived Ubuntu 17.10 GNOME + Wayland experience, the Ubuntu desktop has still been using the trusted X.Org Server session by default. While Ubuntu 19.04 will soon be shipping and the Ubuntu 19.10 development cycle then getting underway, don't look for any Wayland-by-default change to be around the corner...

It's been just over one year since the previous release of Redox OS while today this Rust-written operating system has finally been succeeded by Redox OS 0.5...

Last month brought the release of PyPy 7.0 as the JIT-ed performance-optimized Python implementation. PyPy 7.0 brought alpha Python 3.6 support, an updated CFFI module, and other enhancements. Out now is PyPy 7.1 as its successor...

Linus Torvalds has announced the second weekly release candidate for Linux 5.1...

A few days ago I posted some Chrome vs. Firefox benchmarks using the latest Linux builds. Some readers suggested Firefox could be more competitive if forcing WebRender usage and/or moving to the latest nightly builds, so here are some complementary data sets looking at such combinations...

For fans of GNU's Nano text editor, version 4.0 was released this Sunday where overlong lines are no longer automatically hard-wrapped, smooth scrolling has been enabled by default, and other improvements made...

During this week's Game Developers Conference was the usual Khronos Dev Day where Vulkan, WebGL, glTF, and OpenXR took center stage. During the Vulkan State of the Union some details on their future endeavors were covered...

It's Sunday and that means KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his (great) weekly recap of the interesting improvements made over the past week in KDE land...

There still is no sign of Xfce 4.14, but this week marked the release of a big update to Xfce's screensaver component...

With existing Windows APIs being a nuisance, under NDA'ed documentation, and other problems, WireGuard developers have taken to developing a "good" TUN driver for Windows. This lets user-space programs serve as virtual network adapters to read/write directly into the network stack...

The OpenChrome driver is still inching towards the mainline kernel more than one decade after VIA x86 graphics were last somewhat common. The newest achievement for the OpenChrome DRM driver is the merging of the new TTM memory allocator code...

The MOTU 8Pre is a Firewire-connected device for digital audio workstations to be able to connect eight microphone inputs. The hardware itself is more than one decade old and in fact the manufacturer already discontinued the product, but with Linux 5.2 the kernel will be supporting this device...

Released for GDC/GTC week was Nsight Graphics 2019.2, the proprietary cross-platform, closed-source utility tool for debugging, profiling, and analyzing Direct3D, OpenGL, and other GPU-accelerated APIs...

For those with a PRIME style notebook or just making use of dual/multiple graphics processors in your system, Primus-VK allows for using a secondary/dedicated GPU for rendering while driving the display from the alternative (often integrated graphics) GPU. Primus-VK is implemented as a Vulkan layer as a clean approach for dealing with multiple GPUs in a Vulkan world...