Phoronix

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

AMD developers maintaining their official Vulkan driver have carried out another weekly code push to the open-source AMDVLK code-base...

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 is shipping today as the most affordable Turing GPU option to date at $349 USD. Last week we posted our initial GeForce RTX 2060 Linux review and followed-up with more 1080p and 1440p Linux gaming benchmarks after having more time with the card. In this article is a side-by-side performance comparison of the GeForce RTX 2060 up against the GTX 1060 Pascal, GTX 960 Maxwell, and GTX 760 Kepler graphics cards. Not only are we looking at the raw OpenGL, Vulkan, and OpenCL/CUDA compute performance between these four generations, but also the power consumption and performance-per-Watt.

With NVIDIA today officially shipping the GeForce RTX 2060 as the new $349 USD Turing graphics card, the 415.27 Linux driver was released today to officially support this new graphics card...

It's been more than a month since the debut of Mesa 18.3 and the emergency 18.3.1 release while due the holidays and the release manager being sick, the next point release fell off the tracks. Mesa 18.3.2 is now being crafted and should be out in the next few days. Given the time since the previous release, Mesa 18.3.2 is heavy on fixes...

Solus founder Ikey Doherty who is back working for Intel on the Clear Linux team and brought the Linux Steam Integration (LSI) into that fold has issued a new release of this software for improving the Steam integration on Linux...

With Mesa 19.0 entering its feature freeze this week, the race is on for developers to land their last minute additions to this next quarterly installment of Mesa. Valve developer Samuel Pitoiset has landed support in the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver for the new memory budget extension...

Yesterday I posted a number of Lczero chess engine benchmarks on NVIDIA GPUs using its OpenCL back-end as well as its CUDA+cuDNN back-end, which offered massive performance gains compared to CL on the many tested NVIDIA GPUs. With the CUDA+cuDNN code performing so much better than OpenCL, some wondered whether NVIDIA was intentionally gimping their OpenCL performance. Well, here are results side-by-side now with Radeon GPUs on OpenCL...

While Qt 6.0 isn't due out for the better part of two years still, early patches planned for Qt 6 are expected to begin taking shape within a Git staging branch...

While the Linux 5.0 kernel won't even debut as stable until around the end of February, as is standard practice, it's open season for new feature improvements of the changes developers want to end up queuing into the "-next" branches ahead of the Linux 5.1 cycle. The Intel open-source driver developers on Monday sent in their initial batch of graphics driver changes for this next kernel cycle...

Built atop LLVM's clangd server, Apple recently open-sourced SourceKit-LSP as a language server protocol for Swift and C-based languages. This allows for better integration with various IDEs and development tools...

One of the lesser known compiler backends/targets by the LLVM compiler is Nios II, which is for the 32-bit embedded FPGA processor designs...

ZFS On Linux (ZOL) 0.8 is going to be a big release... No, a huge release. But for ensuring it's going to be a successful release, a third release candidate was just issued for further vetting of all the new code...

Last month we mentioned that Fedora 30 was possibly picking up a Deepin Desktop Environment option for this Qt5-based desktop developed by the Deepin Linux distribution...

Pointed out by a Phoronix reader a few days ago and added to the Phoronix Test Suite is the PlaidML deep learning framework that can run on CPUs using BLAS or also on GPUs and other accelerators via OpenCL. Here are our initial benchmarks of this OpenCL-based deep learning framework that is now being developed as part of Intel's AI Group and tested across a variety of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

The Solus project has laid out some of their grand plans for the year from their GTK-based Budgie desktop environment to seeing the release of the highly anticipated Solus 4 Linux distribution to working on new software components further out in the year...

GNOME developers are currently testing some changes to the Adwaita theme as a minor refresh to GTK3 applications...

Now available via the official linux-firmware tree are the AMDGPU firmware binaries needed for initializing the forthcoming Raven 2 and Picasso AMD APUs...

Wine's VKD3D project for working towards Direct3D 12 support mapped atop the Vulkan graphics API now has patches for utilizing transform feedback in order to implement Direct3D Stream-Output functionality...

While Purism remains very busy with their Librem 5 smartphone efforts, today they have announced their fourth version of the Librem 13/15 laptops...

Debian 10 "Buster" continues moving along for its hopeful stable release later in 2019. The first freeze is now underway while the new artwork/theme for Debian 10.0 has been decided...

While there has already been a lot of exciting GNOME performance improvements so far during the GNOME 3.32 cycle, even more could be on the way with there still being a number of open merge requests for enhancing the performance of the GNOME desktop...

A Phoronix reader pointed out LCZero (Leela Chess Zero) a few days ago as an interesting chess engine powered by neural networks and supports BLAS, OpenCL, and NVIDIA CUDA+cuDNN back-ends. Particularly with the FP16 cuDNN support, this chess engine can be super fast on NVIDIA's latest Turing GPUs with tensor cores...

While Godot 3.1 isn't even out yet, our eyes are already looking forward to Godot 4.0 for 2D and 3D rendering improvements, but most notably Vulkan API support...

The ET: Legacy open-source project derived from the id Tech 3 sources and letting Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory live on almost two decades later is out with their biggest release yet: version 2.76. ET: Legacy 2.76 itself is a big release but the developers involved still have more plans moving forward...

Linus Torvalds has just released the second weekly release candidate for the upcoming Linux 5.0 kernel...

Kodi 18 Leia RC5 is available this weekend as what should be the last release candidate before this major release is out of this widely-used, cross-platform HTPC software...

Last weekend there was the Vulkan 1.1.97 specification update with five new extensions including some notable ones like memory priority and buffer device address while out today is the much more mundane Vulkan 1.1.98...

Since receiving the powerful NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier with its ARMv8 Carmel cores on this Tegra194 SoC a while back, it's been quite a fun developer board for benchmarking and various Linux tests. One of the areas I was curious about was whether GCC or Clang would generate faster code for this high performance ARM SoC, so here are some benchmarks.

While systemd 240 was released right before Christmas, it looks like systemd 241 will soon be released in order to address the recent "System Down" security vulnerabilities...

The work around better GPU/infrastructure handling for GNOME 3.32 continues with the most recent work merged this weekend being for better handling by Mutter over deciding the primary GPU of the system in multi-GPU systems whether it be multiple graphics cards, notebooks with dual GPUs, or systems with a USB-based external display adapter...

KDE developers continue being very productive this winter working on various improvements to their desktop stack...

The DragonFlyBSD operating system dropped its i386 install support back in 2014 with DragonFlyBSD 4.0 and since then has been focused on x86_64-only. Over the past two years or so they have gutted much of their i386-specific code from their kernel that is no longer needed for today's modern processors while over the weekend they got back to doing some more of that cleansing...

If you are able to make it to Brussels, Belgium in three weeks, the wonderful FOSDEM event is taking place as easily one of the best open-source/Linux events in the world and it's free to attend...

Helping to make the SDL cross-platform library more attractive for mobile/Android developers, the latest SDL2 code has an initial OpenSL ES implementation...

The KDE project has released KDE Frameworks 5.54 as their monthly update to these complementary components to Qt5...

The DXVK project for mapping Direct3D 10/11 atop Vulkan for Wine/Proton (Steam Play) users continues inching closer to its eventual 1.0 milestone...

As a follow-up to the story a few days ago about interest in getting the Radeon GCC compiler back-end merged for this year's GNU Compiler Collection 9 (GCC9) release, it's been approved!..

With the mention earlier this week of GCC potentially enabling the vectorize options at the -O2 optimization level, I carried out some fresh GCC 9 development benchmarks at various optimization levels for reference.

With GCC 9 being released in just a short time and being now onto the final stage of development, besides fixing regressions the developers are also getting the documentation in order...

The resurrected Linspire Linux distribution formerly known as Lindows is planning to enter the Linux server market as well as an upcoming "Office 365" edition...

X-Plane 11.30 is now available as the latest feature update to this realistic, cross-platform, mature flight simulator system that has long provided native support for Linux...

Beginning with February's KDE Frameworks 5.55 release, there will be an Android notifications back-end introduced...

SYCL, the single-source programming model developed by the Khronos Group and based upon standard C++, might soon be supported by the LLVM Clang compiler thanks to Intel...

While last week's Wine 4.0-RC5 release was quite a small release due to the holidays, Wine 4.0-RC6 is now available and it's back on track with more bug-fixing...

Canonical's Mir display server is off to a good start for 2019 with a lot of work and pet projects being worked on over the holidays by the developers involved...

Complementing the benchmarks done earlier this week in the our NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Linux review, here are more benchmarks of the GeForce RTX 2060 $349 USD graphics card that is beginning to ship next week. This article offers up a plethora of 1920 x 1080 and 2560 x 1440 Linux gaming benchmarks while providing the very latest driver performance results on the AMD Radeon RX 590, RX Vega 56, and RX Vega 64 while on the NVIDIA side was the GeForce GTX 1060/1070/1080 and RTX 2060/2070 graphics cards.

The Tux-themed MarioKart-inspired SuperTuxKart animated racing game is out with its v0.10 Beta 1 release that delivers on initial LAN/Internet-based multiplayer support...

From the end of the year to already this year there are several new test profiles available via OpenBenchmarking.org and the Phoronix Test Suite...

With just days to go until the Mesa 19.0 branching and feature freeze, it's a busy time on Mesa Git with developers working to land their latest changes into this next quarterly feature release...