Phoronix

VLC 3.0.6 was released on Thursday while VideoLAN developers were at CES in Las Vegas celebrating the milestone of their cross-platform multimedia software surpassing three billion total downloads...

While the Linux 5.0 kernel has a lot of enticing features and improvements, if you rely upon ZFS On Linux (ZOL) you will probably want to hold off on trying the Linux 5.0 release candidates at this time...

While released too late for making it into GNOME 3.31.4 proper as the newest GNOME 3.32 development release, out today are GNOME Shell 3.31.4 and Mutter 3.31.4 and both of these components offer up performance fixes/improvements...

While the Linux desktop's display stack has largely reached parity with Windows and macOS in recent years (most recently, the DRM core properties hitting Linux 5.0 around Adaptive-Sync / VRR), but one of the areas that has remained elusive has been for full HDR display support. We've seen NVIDIA working on nursing the X.Org-based display stack for HDR while now Intel appears to be working on the necessary Wayland changes...

Last month when running FreeBSD 12.0 benchmarks on a 2P EPYC server I wasn't able to run any side-by-side benchmarks with the new DragonFlyBSD 5.4 as this BSD was crashing during the boot process on that board. But fortunately on another AMD EPYC server available, the EPYC 1P TYAN Transport SX TN70A-B8026, DragonFlyBSD 5.4.1 runs fine. So for this first round of BSD benchmarking in 2019 are tests of FreeBSD 11.2, FreeBSD 12.0, DragonFlyBSD 5.4.1, the new TrueOS 18.12, and a few Linux distributions (CentOS 7, Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS, and Clear Linux) on this EPYC 7601 server in a variety of workloads.

For those that wait for a point release or two before upgrading to a new PHP release on your development box or web server, PHP 7.3.1 is out today as the first bug-fix release since last month's big PHP 7.3 release...

With yesterday's surprise announcement of the Radeon VII "Radeon 7" as a new $699 7nm second-generation Vega consumer graphics card launching in early February, you may be wondering about the open-source Linux driver support state. While nothing official has come down the wire yet, here is what appears to be the state for this new Vega graphics card on Linux...

For those with older graphics processors, rejoice as with the upcoming Mesa 19.0 driver release it might now be possible to have OpenGL 4.0 thanks to software-based implementations of ARB_gpu_shader_int64 and ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 finally being merged to mainline. The FP64 one is most notable with that being a requirement for OpenGL 4.0 but some older GPUs lacking that capability for bumping past OpenGL 3.3...

A late addition to the GCC 9 code compiler are new additions around ARMv8.5 as the latest revision to the AArch64 specification...

EditShare, which continues developing the professional-grade Lightworks video editor, does continue maintaining their Linux support and this year they are planning for more improvements. But not shared as part of their 2019 plans is any word on making good about the "open-source" version of the software they originally announced back in 2010...

Longtime Red Hat / Fedora designer Máirín Duffy has shared some proposals for a new Fedora logo and the lengths they are going to in coming up with this new logo/marks...

It's been over a decade since VIA x86 hardware has been relevant and with that their Unichrome/Chrome integrated graphics chipsets, but the effort still isn't over for trying to get the OpenChrome DRM/KMS driver into the mainline Linux kernel for these vintage systems...

GNOME 3.31.4 is out today as their latest development snapshot towards this March's GNOME 3.32 desktop release. GNOME 3.31.4 comes with several exciting additions ranging from enhancing its default web browser to the GNOME Boxes virtualization component enabling 3D/OpenGL support with VirtIO-GPU...

The first point release to the two-week-old Linux 4.20 kernel is now available...

While Monday was the Intel keynote at CES 2019, this morning AMD took the spotlight with Lisa Su's keynote in Las Vegas...

The folks at Purism have shared their latest status update on the Librem 5 Linux-powered, security-minded smartphone they plan to begin shipping in the months ahead...

While the ROCm "Radeon Open Compute" stack has been fully open-source for a while and in recent months even able to work fine off a mainline Linux kernel, a barrier to its adoption has been officially just have binaries produced by AMD for RHEL/CentOS/Ubuntu and not seeing these components including its OpenCL driver available through Linux distribution repositories. Fortunately, in 2019, that may finally be changing...

Last month firmware vendor AMI joined the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) while today the other big firmware vendor, Phoenix Technologies, is also backing LVFS for their OEM/ODM partners that want to distribute firmware update capsules on this RedHat-based service...

Not making it for the Linux 5.0 kernel but continuing to be revised is atomic replace functionality for the livepatching code. The Linux livepatch atomic replace feature allows for cumulative patches and the ability to remove a patch lower in the stack / patch series...

There is just one week to go until LLVM 8.0 and sub-projects like the Clang 8.0 C/C++ compiler will enter its feature freeze ahead of next month's official 8.0.0 milestone...

While the Btrfs file-system supports many next-gen features from SSD optimizations to transparent file-system compression to snapshots, it hasn't natively offered any encryption support. There have been Btrfs encryption attempts in the past, but nothing that has panned out in mainline short of running Btrfs atop dm-crypt. A new patch series was published overnight having another go at adding AES encryption to Btrfs...

After releasing Qt 5.12 a month ago, The Qt Company is using CES week to announce Qt Automotive Suite 5.12. This is the company's effort for getting their UI toolkit within more vehicles/automobiles for forming next-generation digital cockpits...

Given yesterday's release of Ubuntu Touch OTA-7, you might be curious how this UBports project is moving along with their adoption of the modern Mir 1.x that provides Wayland support... Unfortunately, it will still be a while before that is being shipped in production on Ubuntu Touch...

With Mesa 19.0 entering its feature freeze in three weeks, the race is on for finishing up OpenGL/Vulkan driver changes to make it in this next quarterly installment of these 3D open-source Linux graphics drivers...

The upcoming Chrome 72 release enables the "Mojo Video Decoders" by default on Windows while that milestone is set to be realized for Linux systems with the following Chrome 73 web-browser update...

One of the major open-source GPU compute driver initiatives going the past year has been the Red Hat folks working on adding Nouveau SPIR-V support as part of allowing GPU compute to work for this open-source NVIDIA driver. By longtime Nouveau contributor Pierre Moreau has also been work on adding SPIR-V support to Clover, the Gallium3D OpenCL state tracker...

After being in testing over the holidays, Ubuntu Touch OTA-7 via the UBports community is now officially out today...

The AMD Radeon "GCN" compiler back-end to the GCC open-source code compiler might still be merged ahead of the GCC 9 stable release due out in April...

Yesterday NVIDIA kicked off their week at CES by announcing the GeForce RTX 2060, the lowest-cost Turing GPU to date at just $349 USD but aims to deliver around the performance of the previous-generation GeForce GTX 1080. I only received my RTX 2060 yesterday for testing but have been putting it through its paces since and have the initial benchmark results to deliver ranging from the OpenGL/Vulkan Linux gaming performance through various interesting GPU compute workloads. Also, with this testing there are graphics cards tested going back to the GeForce GTX 960 Maxwell for an interesting look at how the NVIDIA Linux GPU performance has evolved.

AMD developers have now offered up an AMDVLK Vulkan driver build for Ubuntu as a Debian package based upon yesterday's source drop...

Last month Fedora developers were planning on building their Firefox package with Clang rather than GCC to follow the move by upstream Mozilla in transitioning their production builds from being built under GCC to LLVM Clang. But now Fedora has reversed course and will continue building with GCC though now benefiting also from PGO and LTO optimizations...

The developers behind the open-source, cross-platform 2D/3D Godot game engine have placed a release freeze on the upcoming Godot 3.1 with today's beta reveal...

A new conversion process has wrapped up for the LLVM Git repositories in their migration from Subversion. Unless there are any new, last-minute objections, the conversion is considered final and ready to be made official...

While the Linux 5.0 kernel merge window (nee Linux 4.21) just closed this past Sunday, already there are Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver updates queuing for DRM-Next to then premiere with the Linux 5.1 kernel cycle in about two months...

New Fedora releases go hand-in-hand with the latest and greatest GNOME releases. But as a formality, the change proposal has been submitted to officially approve shipping Fedora Workstation 30 with the GNOME 3.32 desktop...

With Mesa3D having a nice release rhythm going on now for their quarterly, time-based release cycles, all of their planned major release dates for the year are now published...

Intel's CES 2019 press conference is now wrapping up with some interesting announcements and other new information to relay, some of which was also covered at last month's Intel Architecture Day event in California but under NDA until now...

The release of the upcoming GNU Bash 5.0 shell release is now available. Bash 5.0 is packing various fixes over Bash 4.4 but also a number of new features and improvements to better conform to POSIX specifications...

GNUstep, the long-standing implementation of Apple's Cocoa/Objective-C frameworks as open-source and supported on Linux, BSDs, and other platforms, started off 2019 with some new releases. GNUstep GUI 0.27, GNUstep Base 1.26, and GNUstep GUI Backend 0.27 are the new releases out today...

With all of the major file-systems seeing clean-up work during the Linux 4.21 merge window (now known as Linux 5.0 and particularly with F2FS seeing fixes as a result of it being picked up by Google for support on Pixel devices, I was curious to see how the current popular mainline file-system choices compare for performance. Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS were tested on a SATA 3.0 solid-state drive, USB SSD, and an NVMe SSD.

While most major Linux distributions have been supporting UEFI SecureBoot for years already in order to work nicely on modern locked-down (generally Windows pre-loaded) PCs, Debian stable releases have yet to properly support SecureBoot but that should be changing with this year's release of 10.0 Buster...

Fedora developers are looking at implementing a per-system UUID identifier leveraged by the DNF package manager in order to more accurately count their user-base...

2019 is looking to be the year where we will finally see Multi-Gig Ethernet controllers appearing on desktop/enthusiast motherboards rather than Gigabit Ethernet controllers. Aquantia is using CES to show off its new Multi-Gig controllers and has already courted ASUS to use their chips on forthcoming motherboards...

AMD developers maintaining the open-source AMDVLK Vulkan driver that is derived from the same cross-platform code-base of their proprietary Vulkan Windows/Linux driver has seen its first code push of the new year...

SUSE's Richard Biener announced this morning that "stage three" development on GCC 9 is now over, which means all that's left before releasing it as GCC 9.1 is to carry out more regression and documentation fixes...

Huawei announced today the Kunpeng 920, which they are saying is the highest performance ARM-based processor to date...

Open-source driver developer Tomeu Vizoso of Collabora has taken to some Panfrost driver work for greatly enhancing the viability of this open-source, reverse-engineered ARM Mali Linux graphics driver...

Phoronix Test Suite 8.6-Spydeberg Milestone 1 is now available as the first development snapshot towards this next open-source, cross-platform benchmarking software release due out later in Q1...

Longtime GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) developer Jan Hubicka of SUSE is looking at enabling vectorization as part of the -O2 optimization level for Intel Core, AMD Zen, and generic x86_64 CPU targets...

At least until D3D9-over-Vulkan is in better shape, the means by which you can achieve the greatest Direct3D 9 performance right now under Wine/Linux is by using Gallium3D's "Nine" state tracker. Unfortunately though upstream Wine developers have been reluctant to support it upstream since its limited to just Linux and of that just Gallium3D drivers, but Gallium-Nine-Standalone makes this support easier to deploy across Wine versions...