Phoronix

Following a Phoronix reader pointing out a NVIDIA driver setup guide for Clear Linux, I decided to have a go at it to see how well NVIDIA's proprietary graphics driver stack can work with Intel's high-performance Linux distribution.

The Mesa 19.1 release candidate is running a few days behind schedule but the code branching has indeed occurred while Mesa 19.2 is now under development on Git master...

Jolla released Sailfish OS 3.0.3 "Hossa" as the newest feature update to their mobile Linux OS. With this update they've begun a number of much-needed low-level improvements to their platform...

Systemd developers are sounding the alarms that some AMD processors might lose randomness (yielding non-random data) via the RdRand instruction following a suspend/resume alarm. However, initial indications don't appear for this to be some glaring widespread issue and might be limited to the older AMD CPUs and/or BIOS/motherboard combination...

While Ubuntu Touch that continues to be worked on by the UBports community remains one of the most viable and furthest along Linux open-source smartphone operating systems, it doesn't look like there will be any solid support in time for launch-day of the upcoming Purism Librem 5 smartphone...

As we've been expecting, Red Hat just announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0...

AMD and Cray announced today they won a contract to provide the US Department of Energy with the hardware to the "Frontier" supercomputer that is expected to go online in 2021 and deliver 1.5 exaflops of compute power...

With Valve's Index VR headset slated to ship starting in July, this premium $999 USD headset has now been quirk'ed to properly behave under Linux...

The IBM System Z kernel code with the now in-development Linux 5.2 kernel is finally supporting kernel address space layout randomization (KASLR)...

For those enjoying Valve's Counter-Strike: Global Offensive on the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, a workaround has been added to Mesa Git that is also marked for back-porting to the Mesa 19.0/19.1 series to address incorrect rendering issues...

In addition to Google announcing the accepted GSoC 2019 summer projects, the Outreachy organization on Monday also announced their accepted participants and projects for this internship effort that encourages women and other under-represented groups in technology to get involved in the open-source movement...

The HID subsystem updates for the Linux 5.2 kernel have two changes in particular we have been eager to see merged...

What comes after Eoan in the Ubuntu codename fun? It's not Elephant, Eagle, Eel, or even Earwig... Ubuntu 19.10 is the Eoan Ermine...

Google announced the list of accepted students/projects this year for their annual Summer of Code program...

David Sterba sent in the Btrfs file-system updates already for the now-open Linux 5.2 merge window...

In addition to the Windows Terminal app, Microsoft announced from their Build 2019 conference that Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) will be coming out this summer...

Microsoft announced from their Build 2019 conference this morning Windows Terminal as the newest Linux-inspired feature coming to Windows 10...

If you are looking to soon upgrade your graphics card for Linux gaming -- especially with the increasing number of titles running well under Steam Play -- but only have a budget of around $200 USD for the graphics card, this comparison is for you. In this article we're looking at the AMD Radeon RX 560 / RX 570 / RX 580 against the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 / GTX 1650 / GTX 1660 graphics cards. Not only are we looking at the OpenGL/Vulkan Linux gaming performance both for native titles and Steam Play but also the GPU power consumption and performance-per-dollar metrics to help guide your next budget GPU purchasing decision.

Hot off the release of Linux 5.1 from last night, the Free Software Foundation Latin America team has released GNU Linux-libre 5.1-gnu as their sanitized kernel that strips out support for loading binary-only microcode/firmware files, the ability to load binary-only kernel modules, and related code they deem supporting "non-free" software...

Beginning with the Linux 5.2 kernel, it will be easier to disable Spectre, Meltdown, and other CPU vulnerability mitigations if you prefer maximum performance out of your system instead...

Baytrail era systems have been a bit notorious on Linux but at least one recent regression is now resolved that for the past few kernel releases had broke hibernation support for Intel Baytrail and Cherrytrail SoC systems...

DXVK lead developer Philip Rebohle is experimenting with "DXVK-AGS" as a new exploration project to see if it makes sense implementing AMD AGS SDK support within DXVK for this Direct3D 11 to Vulkan translation layer...

Following last night's release of Linux 5.1, the Linux 5.2 merge window is now open. There's already been several pull requests sent in today that Linus is expected to begin acting on shortly...

Kicking off Tuesday in Boston is Red Hat Summit 2019 where Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 could be released or at least hearing more about the company's plans for releasing this next major installment of RHEL...

As was expected, Linus Torvalds just tagged the Linux 5.1 stable kernel...

After a long weekend, Mozilla has released Firefox 66.0.4 to address the glaring omission on Friday that led to most browser add-ons getting disabled due to an expired certificate used for signing these plug-ins...

While there are no major games currently shipping that make use of the Unigine 2 engine, the company appears to be seeing great success in the industrial simulation space as they keep making great strides in features for their cross-platform engine. Unigine 2.8 was released this week as the newest feature release...

Intel's patches for providing shared virtual address (SVA) support for IOMMU and VT-D in the Linux kernel have been revised...

For those running Arm servers powered by the Cavium ThunderX2, a big performance optimization is on the way for Glibc 2.30...

Linus Torvalds will be celebrating Cinco de Mayo today with the anticipated release of the Linux 5.1 kernel...

KDE developers have been off to a busy start of May with continuing to get Plasma 5.16 ready for debut next month as well as ongoing improvements to the monthly KDE Frameworks 5 and work on KDE Applications 19.08...

In the run up to the Ubuntu 19.04 release I ran various gaming/graphics benchmarks looking at different desktops and X.Org vs. Wayland sessions. Check that article out if interested in the situation while this posting is just some complementary data I did from Fedora Workstation 30 when looking at the graphics performance under GNOME Shell's X.Org and Wayland sessions...

At the start of April was the DXVK 1.1 release that offered many changes but it was eventually recalled over nasty bugs that entered the release. Now is the DXVK 1.1.1 to address that fallout...

Linux 5.2 is certainly going to be a big kernel release... On top of many new features and other changes, AMD Ryzen laptops will be better supported by this kernel update to be released as stable around July...

If you are waking up this morning to find all of your Mozilla Firefox add-ons have expired, you are certainly not alone. A major blunder has found users of Firefox finding most add-ons getting disabled...

Last month Arm announced Scalable Vector Extension 2 (SVE2) and Transactional Memory Extension (TME) as two new technologies for its A-Profile architecture. That TME support is already being plumbed into the Linux toolchain stack...

Longtime GCC developer Honza Hubička of SUSE has posted a lengthy and quite interesting blog post concerning some of the optimization work that went into the now-released GCC 9 compiler. It turns out some of the GCC 9 optimization work was motivated by the Firefox developers and their desire to switch to LLVM Clang in the name of performance. Separately, openSUSE Tumbleweed has been looking at using link-time optimizations (LTO) by default for their packages and that has also motivated developers and help ensured the LTO support was in good shape for this annual compiler release...

Aspeed BMCs have seen a lot of mainline Linux kernel driver activity from a recent Aspeed video engine driver to an AST2500 SoC DRM driver queued for Linux 5.2 and now also joining that is the Aspeed P2A CTRL driver...

The Radeon (and Intel) graphics driver support on DragonFlyBSD has improved a lot compared to where it was at many years ago, but it remains a perpetual catch-up game with the porting of this driver code from Linux to their BSD kernel...

It looks like Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver support is now officially ready to roll for the "Gen 11" graphics to be found with Icelake, Elkhart Lake, and whatever other Gen11 graphics parts may end up coming. The latest open-source OpenGL/Vulkan driver code now marks Gen 11 as being feature-complete...

With today's release of the GCC 9 code compiler among the many features offered in this annual update to the GNU Compiler Collection is the initial "cascadelake" target/tuning support that enables AVX-512 VNNI tuning by default as the most notable change over the former "skylake-avx512" GCC target. Anyhow, for those wondering how the GCC 9 performance differs compared to last year's GCC 8 compiler release, here are some preliminary benchmarks...

Sway 1.0 was released nearly two months ago as the i3-inspired Wayland compositor while now on approach is Sway 1.1 as the newest feature release...

Intel's Clear Linux operating system wasn't their only open-source project seeing various performance improvements over the course of April but it turns out their Scalable Video Technology AV1 (SVT-AV1) video encoder also saw a nice performance improvement at the end of April...

Longtime Mesa developer Nicolai Hähnle of AMD has sent out a big patch series today introducing a real runtime linker for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and hopefully to be used by the RADV Vulkan driver as well...

GNU Compiler Collection 9.1 was released today with a D language front-end joining the family while on the back-end is now the long-awaited Radeon GCN GPU target (although not too useful in its current form), Intel Cascadelake support, initial AMD Zen 2, C-SKY CPU support, OpenRISC CPU support, and many other features throughout this massive open-source compiler...

While we haven't yet spotted any of the other AMD Radeon "Navi" next-generation GPU support in the other software components making up AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver stack, there continues to be a lot of work happening on the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end within the mainline LLVM code-base. In fact, there's been over eleven thousand lines of new code so far pertaining to Navi/GFX10...

GNOME's Mutter compositor has seen a new, integrated clipboard manager for the in-development GNOME 3.34 cycle...

Darling is the open-source project we first covered back in 2012 that aimed to be able to run macOS software (binaries) on Linux. It's what Wine is to running Windows programs on Linux but rather to be able to handle Apple/Mac software. While we haven't heard much from the project recently, they still are pursuing their goal...

Should you be looking to control a vibrator over GPIO (general-purpose input/output), that capability is coming to the Linux 5.2 kernel thanks to a new driver...

One of the early features merged back in February for Mesa 19.1 was the new Vulkan Overlay layer to expose various performance metrics akin to the Gallium3D "HUD" also living within Mesa. Ahead of the Mesa 19.1 feature freeze, some more capabilities are now added to this Vulkan overlay/HUD...