Phoronix

GNOME 3.31.90 has been released as what is effectively the GNOME 3.32 beta and also marks the feature/UI/API freezes for this next half-year update to the GNOME desktop...

The first release candidate of FreeDOS 1.3 is now available, which is the open-source effort continuing to maintain compatibility with classic MS-DOS...

While Dell is offering the option of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS as the Linux option with their new XPS 9380 laptop, what happens if the Bionic Beaver isn't of interest to you? As part of our testing of the Dell XPS 9380 with Core i7 8565U laptop, I've just finished up testing six different Linux distributions on this 13-inch laptop.

Marc Di Luzio continues working on interesting features for GameMode as the daemon to optimize Linux systems for gaming... The latest is integrating AMD and NVIDIA overclocking support within GameMode, which is now under review...

It was just at the end of January last year when the Linux Foundation announced LinuxBoot to replace some firmware with the Linux kernel as another step for freeing traditionally proprietary firmware mostly on server hardware. LinuxBoot does continue making advanced at least on server class hardware and shows a lot of potential for 2019...

The open-source ARM Mali space certainly seems to be heating up this year... The Panfrost Gallium3D driver was just merged to mainline Mesa days ago as developers work on bringing up an open-source 3D stack for the Mali Midgard and Bifrost graphics processors. For those with older Mali 400/500 series hardware, the separate Lima-revived effort has sent out their latest patch series for trying to get their DRM driver into the kernel...

On Windows there is no shortage of GUI configuration utilities for tweaking Intel CPUs around overclocking and under-volting, but less so on Linux with no official utility/library. But there is now an unofficial GUI project for manipulating Intel CPU voltages from the Linux desktop...

Building off Monday's Wine 4.1 release that is the first bi-weekly development milestone in the trek towards Wine 5.0, the Wine-Staging crew has just released their first new post-4.0 version that includes various experimental/testing patches on top of this code-base...

It looks like AMD is about to release ROCm 2.1 for the Radeon Open Compute stack...

The latest batch of AMDGPU graphics driver fixes were sent out on Tuesday for the Linux 5.0 kernel, including a fix for the FreeSync/VRR support that was merged at the start of this cycle...

Remember Zink, that project started a few months back for implementing OpenGL over Vulkan using Mesa/Gallium3D? While there may have not been too much to report on it recently, that side project by Collabora developer Erik Faye-Lund does continue to progress and currently allows for OpenGL 3.0 to be implemented and run over the Intel and Radeon Vulkan drivers...

Monday's weekly Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee approved of a means for the DNF package manager to integrate some user counting capabilities as long as it's a "sane" approach and not the UUID-driven proposal originally laid out...

Last week System76 announced the new Darter Pro laptop with Intel 8th Gen CPUs while today the ordering process has opened up on this latest 15-inch laptop from the Linux-focused vendor. They hadn't revealed pricing information last week but we now know that information...

Following last week's code branching / feature freeze for Mesa 19.0, the second release candidate is now available for testing of this latest quarterly feature release...

After nearly two weeks of benchmarking, here is a look at our most extensive Linux x86_64 compiler comparison yet between the latest stable and development releases of the GCC and LLVM Clang C/C++ compilers. Tested with GCC 8, GCC 9.0.1 development, LLVM Clang 7.0.1, and LLVM Clang 8.0 SVN were tests on 12 distinct 64-bit systems and a total of 62 benchmarks run on each system with each of the four compilers... Here's a look at this massive data set for seeing the current GCC vs. Clang performance.

RustPython is a new Python 3.x implementation written within the Rust programming language...

The big Sway 1.0 Wayland compositor release is upon us with now having weekly release candidates until the code-base is deemed stable enough to officially ship...

For those still trying to find a suitable non-linear open-source Linux video editing solution that fits your needs, Flowblade 2.0 is now available for this decade old video editor that is arguably not as well known as the likes of Kdenlive and OpenShot. Flowblade 2.0 comes with the largest workflow and user experience improvements since the early days of the project...

Phoronix Test Suite 8.6.0 is now available as our latest quarterly feature release to this open-source, fully-automated Windows / Linux / BSD / macOS benchmarking software...

Intel has been developing a new Media Driver for the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) geared for Icelake "Gen 11" graphics hardware and future generations. For Icelake video encode there is new functionality that needs to be exposed in the kernel to user-space for use by the Intel media-driver and it looks like that user-space interface will be christened by the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel...

While in some areas it's still an extremely cold winter, many open-source projects are already preparing for their participation in Google's annual Summer of Code initiative. The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) crew that always tends to see at least a few slots for interested student developers has begun formulating some potential project ideas...

A few things in Ubuntu's latest weekly development summary caught our attention... As has been going on for months, a new Ubuntu installer "Ubiquity-NG" continues to be worked on, but seemingly tying into that they are looking at ZFS support on the desktop...

It was nearly one year ago to the day that there was the huge VLC 3.0 feature release and while that was a great update to this open-source, cross-platform media player there is a lot more out on the horizon...

Tim-Philipp Müller once again presented at FOSDEM in Brussels about the current GStreamer release and a bit of what they have planned for moving forward. This multimedia framework continues to evolve and is quite exciting with everything they have in store...

The in-development Mesa 19.1 graphics stack release due out next quarter will feature a new Gallium3D driver... The initial Panfrost driver for open-source, reverse-engineered ARM Mali graphics hardware support of newer generations...

It's been just over a year since the debut of libvpx 1.7 while today a major new release is available for this library providing VP8/VP9 video encode/decode capabilities...

Interest in building the mainline Linux kernel with LLVM Clang as an alternative to GCC seemed like it waned for several years, but in recent months that effort has been moving forward thanks to Google's involvement...

With Wine 4.0 out the door, feature development is back on for Wine with what will be known as Wine 5.0 with their next stable timed feature release next year. Wine 4.1 is out today to mark the kick-off of this new bi-weekly series...

MidnightBSD, the downstream of FreeBSD focused on desktop support and offers the Lumina desktop as well as GNOME 3 and other options, is out with its minor v1.1 update...

Yesterday I posted some initial benchmarks looking at the performance improvements with Glibc 2.29, the newest feature release of the GNU C Library. Here are more benchmarks on eight different systems using Glibc 2.29 on Clear linux...

AMD's Radeon VII as their Vega 7nm consumer graphics card will be launching on 7 February at $700 USD ($699), but today marks the embargo expiry for the "unboxing" content... Yep, the Radeon VII is in the process of being tested under Linux.

While Canonical often takes heat for their various project "forks", their work on LXD for further innovating atop LXC for Linux containers has really paid off. Over the past few years LXD has really evolved into quite a capable system container manager beast...

Waffle is the seven year old project that started out as an Intel side-project to allow run-time selection of X11/Wayland support as well as OpenGL or OpenGL ES. It's been a while since hearing much about Waffle, but it is still being consumed and improved upon...

Vulkan 1.1.99 is now available to kick off February and features two new extensions plus a number of documentation fixes/clarifications...

For those running Ivybridge/Haswell era Intel graphics and older, better support for ETC2 texture compression is on the way...

The recently releases of FreeBSD 12.0 and DragonFlyBSD 5.4 have been exciting in the BSD space while moving forward there is the NetBSD 9.0 release a ways out on the horizon...

Glibc 2.29 was released a few days back and like most GNU C Library releases -- particularly in recent times -- does offer up more CPU performance optimizations... Some early benchmarks done this weekend do show some nice performance improvements in select workloads at least out of our initial benchmarking.

Linus Torvalds just issued the fifth weekly release candidate for the upcoming Linux 5.0 kernel...

For those that have been wanting to see case-insensitive filename support or even encoding of filenames in UTF-8 or other character encoding, the work is still on going...

Two years ago we covered Greenfield as an in-browser HTML5-based Wayland compositor. While at first it may seem like just a short-lived toy, it turns out the project is still around and advancing with its functionality for running Wayland apps inside modern web browsers without any browser plug-ins...

A patch series queued into Linux's driver core infrastructure ahead of the 5.1 kernel cycle is set to enhance the boot performance particularly for larger NUMA servers/systems. This latest round of kernel work was another contribution to the core kernel code thanks to Intel...

One of the sessions we look forward to each year at FOSDEM is in regards to the GNU Hurd status update... It's one of the few times per year where we hear anything new presented on the Hurd. GNU Hurd is nearly three decades old and has yet to see its v1.0 milestone reached, but Samuel Thibault and a small group of other free software developers continue working on this GNU micro-kernel...

Yet another open-source project out of Intel is SVT-AV1, which is a new AV1 video encoder implementation for Windows and Linux Systems...

Last month I shared the work going into Gallium-Nine-Standalone that aims to make it easier to utilize the Gallium3D Direct3D 9 "Nine" state tracker on Wine. There is now a new release of that code, including easy-to-use binaries, for those pursuing faster D3D9 Windows gaming performance on Linux...

WireHub is a new open-source project aiming to provide decentralized, peer-to-peer and secure overlay networks that is tooled around the WireGuard secure VPN software...

One of the Linux desktop technologies that is quite exciting and will hopefully see more widespread adoption this year is the Red Hat backed PipeWire initiative...

It's been a love affair going on for years, but should you not already know, Netflix has long been leveraging FreeBSD as part of its in-house content delivery network (CDN) for serving its millions of users with on-demand video. This weekend at FOSDEM, Jonathan Looney of the company talked about their usage of FreeBSD...

After seeing a new GNU C Library release this week, the GNU toolchain has another update with the availability now of Binutils 2.32...

VkRunner is a tool inspired by Mesa's Piglit shader runner and developed by consulting firm Igalia initially as part of their work on the Intel Linux graphics driver stack. VkRunner allows for running a variety of Vulkan shaders for testing a driver's compiler back-end...

While current-generation Intel/AMD CPUs are still supporting the MMX SIMD instruction set from two decades ago, a set of GCC compiler patches are pending to begin implementing MMX intrinsics using SSE instructions...