Phoronix

Thanks to a new dedicated protocol for KWayland/KWin around virtual desktops, that support is finally in place. This stems from a two and a half year old bug report for said support...

Longtime Wayland developer Derek Foreman is working on coordinating the next release of the Weston reference compositor. Here are those early details and his hope to ship this next feature release in March...

With the Linux 5.1 kernel cycle that should get underway in just over one month's time, there will now be the long in development work (it's been through 15+ rounds of public code review!) for supporting atomic replace and cumulative patches...

Libhandy is the library backed by Purism for use on their Librem 5 among other potential use-cases for allowing adaptive GTK+ widgets depending upon screen real estate. It's still a ways out from version 1.0, but libhandy 0.0.7 was released this weekend as the latest achievement...

With yesterday's release of Wine 4.0-RC7, the regression/bug count is low enough and the situation looking good that the stable Wine 4.0.0 release should be tagged in the next few days...

When recently publishing the PlaidML deep learning benchmarks and lczero chess neural network OpenCL tests, some Phoronix readers mentioned they were seeing vastly different results with using the PAL OpenCL driver in AMDGPU-PRO (Radeon Software) compared to using the ROCm compute stack. So for seeing how those two separate AMD OpenCL drivers compare, here are some benchmark results with a Vega GPU while testing ROCm 2.0 and AMDGPU-PRO 18.50.

A new release of the GNU Binutils programming tools will soon be available. The upcoming Binutils 2.32 release is primarily made up of new CPU ports...

Timothy Arceri of Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team has landed patches in Mesa 19.0 that drastically reduce the amount of system memory used when firing up the Team Fortress 2 game...

XGI Tech, the nearly two decade old spin off from SiS that was short-lived and once aimed to be a competitor to ATI and NVIDIA, still has a Linux driver within the mainline kernel. But this frame-buffer driver is slated to soon be removed...

GStreamer 1.15.1 was announced on Friday as the first development release in the trek towards GStreamer 1.16 for this powerful open-source multimedia framework...

The developers behind Godot, one of the leading open-source game engines, have announced their second beta release for the upcoming Godot 3.1 feature release...

The NetBSD project has been making good progress in utilizing the LLVM compiler stack not only for the Clang C/C++ compiler but also for the different sanitizers, the libc++ standard library for C++, and other improvements most of which are working their way into the upstream code-bases. One area of NetBSD's LLVM support being explored most recently is using the LLD linker...

Wine 4.0 should be officially out soon, but this weekend the latest test release of it is Release Candidate 7 that brings more than one dozen fixes...

The Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver for Linux systems has picked up two more extensions ahead of the Mesa 19.0 feature freeze that is coming up before month's end...

Making the news rounds a few months back was "WLinux", which was the first Linux distribution designed for Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) on Windows 10. But is this pay-to-play Linux distribution any faster than the likes of Ubuntu, openSUSE, and Debian already available from the Microsoft Store? Here are some benchmarks of these different Linux distribution options with WSL.

The AMDGPU Linux kernel driver for a while has now offered command-line-driven OverDrive overclocking for recent generations of Radeon GPUs. This has allowed manipulating the core and memory clock speeds as well as tweaking the voltage but has not supported increasing the TDP limit of the graphics card: that's in place with Linux 4.20..

Among the many Linux 5.0 kernel features is initial open-source NVIDIA driver support for the latest-generation Turing graphics processors. Missed out on during the Linux 5.0 merge window was "TU102" support but now that is coming down as a fix for the 5.0 kernel...

One of the GCC compiler features unfortunately not taken advantage of by most Linux distributions is FMV - Function Multi-Versioning. FMV is what allows for the compilation of different tuned code paths depending upon the processor and for the particular code-path to be chosen at run-time, i.e. optimizing to your heart's content with AVX, SSE4, and other instruction set extensions and compiling all of that into a single binary and for the preferred code path to be taken depending upon the CPU running the binary so it will still run on older CPUs as well as today's most powerful processors...

For those Linux gamers with a NVIDIA RTX "Turing" graphics card, there's finally an interesting open-source workload to enjoy that makes use of the RTX hardware and NVIDIA's VK_NV_ray_tracing extension... A real-time path tracing port of the legendary Quake 2 game...

Next month MoltenVK will celebrate one year since being open-sourced for allowing the Vulkan API to function on Apple's macOS/iOS by mapping the Vulkan calls to the Apple Metal graphics/compute API. Just in time for that first birthday, a big MoltenVK update is now available...

Inkscape on Thursday announced their 0.92.4 release that brought many stability and bug fixes but also some performance improvements and other enhancements. Most exciting though is the debut of Inkscape 1.0 alpha...

Adding to the platter of tasks for Purism as they prepare to ship their Librem 5 Linux smartphone in just a few months, they announced their plans to introduce the PureOS Store for not only their mobile initiative but also their laptops running the Debian-based PureOS operating system...

It was just yesterday that Valve dropped a big Steam client update including several long sought improvements for Linux gamers. Today that's been succeeded by another rather nice beta upgrade...

For fans of Rustlang, it's time to fire up rustup: Rust 1.32 is out today as the latest feature update for this increasingly popular programming language...

The next release of the Qt5 tool-kit might introduce a potentially controversial module to facilitate anonymous data collection of Qt applications...

With the latest AMDVLK Vulkan driver improvements back to coming out on a weekly basis by AMD and Mesa 19.0 development progressing ahead of its feature freeze later this month, here is a fresh Linux gaming benchmark comparison of the AMD Radeon Vulkan driver options on Linux. Tested this round with a Radeon RX 590 and RX Vega 64 was the latest Mesa 19.0 development state for RADV, this week's new AMDVLK 2019.Q1.2 driver snapshot, and the Radeon Software 18.50 proprietary driver while running a slew of Vulkan-powered Linux games and DXVK.

Now available for testing ahead of GNOME 3.32 in March is GNOME Software 3.31.2, the first development release for this "app store" / software center seeing its first release since v3.31.1 last October...

KDE Plasma 5.15 is scheduled for release on 12 February while for a round of preliminary testing, KDE Plasma 5.15 is out today...

The long-in-development AMD "GCN" back-end for the GNU Compiler Collection that allows targeting recent generations of Radeon GPUs for compute offloading has been merged into the upcoming GCC 9 release...

With the Mesa 18.2.8 release at the end of December being the last release of that driver series, users should really consider upgrading to Mesa 18.3. Fortunately, Mesa 18.3.2 is out this morning with dozens of fixes...

The Finnish developers persevering with the Sailfish OS Linux-based mobile operating system have announced their new "Sipoonkorpi" operating system feature release...

Last week I reported on ZFS On Linux breaking with Linux 5.0 due to some kernel symbols sought by this out-of-tree file-system driver no longer being exported and the upstream developers not willing to adjust for the ZoL code. That's still the case but the ZFS On Linux developers have a patch so at least the file-system driver will be able to build on Linux 5.0...

The lead developer of the GNOME Builder integrated development environment, Christian Hergert, has just led his project through its largest code re-factoring yet. Builder 3.32 coming out in March with GNOME 3.32 features more than 100k lines of code changed with various underlying improvements as well as some new features for developers...

The Linux 4.19 kernel brought the ability to disallow the opening of FIFOs and regular files not owned by the user in world-writable sticky directories in the name of security. Had this ability been around previously it could have prevented a number of CVEs going back a long time. In helping ensure this functionality gets utilized, Systemd 241 will now set these sysctl options to enable the behavior by default...

Fedora has been working on transitioning to Zchunk for its DNF metadata due to its good compression ratio while being delta-friendly and leveraging the existing work of Zstandard and Zsync/casync. The metadata has been offered in Zchunk for some weeks while more client testing is needed before landing that support in Rawhide and in turn for Fedora 30...

Entangle is the long-standing open-source software that allows you to control DSLR cameras from Linux. With various Nikon and Canon DSLRs, among others, it's possible to view a live preview, automatically download images, and snap pictures all over the USB connection to the camera...

Intel's Linux graphics driver stack has never offered its own vendor-specific driver control panel GUI like is common among all major graphics vendors on Windows, but instead they've opted for the command-line experience and making use of common interfaces with what's offered by the different desktop environments for resolution handling, multi-monitor setup, etc. But moving forward they may end up bringing a new graphics driver control panel to Linux...

Valve has just released their biggest Steam client beta update of the year so far for Linux gamers...

Last month was a proposed patch that would have killed the Autotools build system within Mesa. Developers have decided for the upcoming Mesa 19.0 release not to eliminate this GNU Autotools support but rather to mark it as deprecated and require an extra flag in order to make use of it...

For those curious how the 10 Gigabit Ethernet performance compares between current Linux distributions, here are some benchmarks we ramp up more 10GbE Linux/BSD/Windows benchmarks. This round of testing was done on two distinctly different servers while testing CentOS, Debian, Clear Linux, and Fedora.

From VR to autonomous vehicles to edge computing, The Khronos Group continues working on new industry standards for today's expanding compute landscape. Today the organization announced they are soliciting industry feedback and creating an exploratory group for a new, open industry standard around High Performance Embedded Computing (HPEC)...

The popular China-based Deepin Linux distribution derived from Debian and featuring its own Qt5-based desktop environment is out today with version 15.9...

The code for the upcoming LLVM 8.0 release (Clang 8.0 included) is now branched and the release candidate process will begin shortly. That means LLVM 9.0 is now open for development on its master branch...

Should you be seeking a career in compiler development, Google is continuing to ramp up their teams working on LLVM/Clang...

Arm continues plumbing the open-source GNU compiler toolchain support for their next-generation "Ares" high-performance server/HPC core...

Lead VC4/V3D driver developer Eric Anholt of Broadcom has landed a batch of improvements to the next-generation V3D driver in Mesa 19.0...

The drm-next-5.1-wip branch has been created by open-source AMD developers as they begin vetting the changes they plan to submit to DRM-Next for inclusion in the Linux 5.1 kernel cycle when it kicks off around the start of March...

Back in October, MongoDB announced the Server Side Public License v1 (SSPLv1) as their new license moving forward for this document-oriented database server over their existing AGPL code. SSPL was met with much controversy upon its unveiling and Fedora's legal team has now ruled it an invalid free software license for packaged software in its repositories...

The Genode operating system framework based on a micro-kernel design and various original user-space components continues going strong a decade since its start. But it hasn't achieved too much appeal outside of its niche even when it began working on "Sculpt" as an operating system for general purposes use-cases and supporting common PC/laptop hardware. But they hope to change that in 2019...

Samba 4.10 release candidate 1 was announced today as the open-source SMB implementation with support for Windows Server and Active Directory domains...