Phoronix

Adding to the excitement of 7 July is the release of the Linux 5.2 stable kernel, which also means the opening of the Linux 5.3 merge window...

Leading up to today's Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" series launch it was looking like there wouldn't be any support within Mesa's Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver for this community-maintained open-source implementation. But the open-source developers at Valve managed to not only deliver Navi 10 support but also Navi 12 and Navi 14 are also supported with this new Mesa 19.2 code...

As a follow-up to this morning's Radeon RX 5700 / RX 5700 XT Linux benchmarks, AMD has now published a packaged launch-day Linux driver for those wanting to use these new RDNA/Navi graphics cards on Linux without building your own kernel/Mesa/libdrm/LLVM... Well, assuming you are on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS...

After weeks of anticipation, we can now share how the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X and Ryzen 9 3900X performance is under Linux. These first Zen 2 processors do indeed deliver a significant improvement over Zen/Zen+ processors and also battle Intel's latest 14nm CPUs but for Linux users there is one big, unfortunate issue right now.

While last month we could talk all about the specifications for the Radeon RX 5700 series, today the embargo has lifted concerning the Radeon RX 5700/5700XT graphics cards so we can finally talk about the actual (Linux) performance. The road is a bit rougher than we had hoped, but it's possible to drive these new Navi graphics cards today using their open-source graphics driver stack at least for OpenGL games/applications. Over the weeks ahead, the Linux driver support for Navi will continue to improve.

Now that Debian 10 "Buster" shipped, Debian developers are preparing already to kickoff the Debian 11 "Bullseye" development and begin with uploading new packages for this next major release of Debian GNU/Linux...

Wine's bi-weekly development snapshots do not normally see point releases, but this time around there's an immediate bug fix release to Friday's Wine 4.12...

In addition to the release of Debian 10.0 "Buster" this weekend, the team maintaining the Debian port to the GNU Hurd micro-kernel did their unofficial "2019" release...

It wasn't a particularly busy week in the KDE development space due to being in the middle of summer and also the US Independence Day landing at the end of the week. But there still were some achievements made in KDE development over the past week...

Huawei's EROFS file-system has been part of the mainline Linux kernel for about one year albeit as part of the "staging" area until it's been proven stable and mature. Now with this file-system reportedly in use on "10+ millions of Huawei Android mobile phones", they are looking to have this file-system promoted out of staging...

After a long day of preparations, Debian 10.0 "Buster" is now available as planned with the CD/DVD images having just hit the mirrors...

A few days ago the Navi 10 support landed in AMD's open-source RadeonSI OpenGL driver within Mesa 19.2. It looks like landing in the next few days will be some follow-up work to address some features and performance for the soon-to-ship Radeon RX 5700 series...

Hot off yesterday's Wine 4.12 release, the Wine-Staging crew has announced their v4.12 release that is carrying more than 800 patches atop upstream Wine...

Not a particularly new feature itself, but recently Microsoft has begun promoting a workflow for developers of encouraging them to use Windows 10 to do Linux development by leveraging Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and Visual Studio Code Remote...

Feral's GameMode as the Linux gaming mode daemon to try to put the system in an optimized state automatically when running Linux games is seeing another possible addition thanks to GNOME developer Christian Kellner of Red Hat...

As a follow-up to the story about GCC eyeing Zstd compression for its LTO data, that support has now been merged into the GCC 10 code compiler...

ARM Error Source Table is an extension of ACPI that provides a table for RAS errors. Support for this new error table is being worked on with the new "AEST" Linux kernel driver...

Wine 4.12 is now available as the newest bi-weekly development release of this program for running Windows software on Linux...

While we had been looking forward to Intel FSGSBASE support for yielding some performance benefits especially in areas impacted by Spectre / Meltdown / Foreshadow / Zombieload, after the support was queued for merging into Linux 5.3, the code has now been reverted over "serious bugs" with the implementation...

Adding to the list of Linux 5.3 kernel features is a new "GVE" network driver from Google...

Arm's Komeda Linux DRM/KMS display driver for supporting their latest display IP such as the Mali D71 is seeing VRR support ala Adaptive-Sync / HDMI VRR...

While the Linux support around Intel Icelake is largely settled, one area that has gone under the radar until now has been the Thunderbolt support, which now is available in patch form but won't be mainlined until Linux 5.4...

It's been two years since the release of GRUB 2.02 while today it's finally been replaced by the long-awaited GRUB 2.04 bootloader release...

Issued today was the second release candidate for OpenHMD 0.3.0, the open-source project providing a common API and different drivers for VR/AR hardware...

The Rust language team is marking this US Independence Day by rolling out Rust 1.36...

For those using Samba for better Windows interoperability with SMB/CIFS/AD, the forthcoming Samba 4.11 will be a lot more scalable so it can be used within massive organizations...

Now being into Q3, we're waiting to see if Purism will be able to deliver the Librem 5 GNU/Linux smartphone this quarter after being pushed back twice from their original January ship date. They haven't released any finished design yet or the finalized specifications (they still haven't finalized on the RAM, battery, cameras, and speaker(s)), but their latest series of blog posts are showing that GNOME/Linux applications can run on their Librem 5 developer kit...

A big set of patches landed this morning in RADV Git for Mesa 19.2...

It looks like CentOS 8 as the "community" version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 is still a few weeks away, but good progress is being made...

While there is the open-source OpenGL driver support in RadeonSI now part of Mesa 19.2 for the Radeon RX 5700 series launching on Sunday, for the open-source Vulkan driver support due to timing you might be needing to wait a little bit...

Last week I wrote about Navi (10) support pending for the RadeonSI OpenGL driver to complement the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver support for the Radeon RX 5700 series currently queued into DRM-Next for Linux 5.3. That OpenGL driver support has been now been merged into Mesa 19.2 for debuting as stable around the end of August for providing open-source OpenGL on these next-gen AMD GPUs...

Valve has been funding work on "ACO", a new shader compiler alternative to the de facto AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler currently used by both the RADV and RadeonSI Mesa graphics drivers for AMD Radeon hardware...

While Apple computers once ran well with Linux, that's not been the case in recent years particularly for MacBook Pros but now really all newer Apple computers have become a mess on Linux. There's been really messy issues in trying to run Macs on Linux. With MacBook Pros from recent revisions, it's now only finally possible for Linux to read/write to the solid-state drive if using an out-of-tree patch...

WireGuard 0.0.20190702 has been released as the newest snapshot for this increasingly popular open-source network VPN tunnel that has showed much potential and has now been ported to all major platforms...

While Debian 10.0 "Buster" is due to be released this weekend, a seemingly last release candidate of the Debian Installer is now available...

Intel's open-source developers working on their Scalable Video Technology video encoders (and decoders) on Tuesday released SVT-AV1 0.6 as their latest work on high-performance AV1 support using CPU-based encoding/decoding...

It looks like in July we could finally see an "experimental ZFS" option within Ubuntu 19.10 and its daily images for those wanting an easy-to-use ZFS On Linux based installation of Ubuntu...

AMD's Marek Olšák released a new version of the Mesa DRM library (libdrm) on Tuesday...

While the Radeon RX 5700 "Navi 10" series is launching on 7 July and there was the recently presented open-source Linux patches (so far for the AMDGPU kernel driver and RadeonSI OpenGL; Vulkan support still pending), today was the surprise move of posting the kernel patches for an unannounced "Navi 14" graphics processor...

A few years back we looked at the ASUS ZenScreen USB-C Portable Monitor that took until recently when it began playing working nicely on Linux due to its DisplayLink hardware and also the state of Type-C DP AlternateMode support at the time. What we've been trying out over the past week has been the Odake BladeX as a much more interesting portable monitor: it's a 15.6-inch display in 1080p and 4K options that also supports native HDMI input and other functionality unmatched by the ZenScreen.

NVIDIA announced via their newsletter today that they've open-sourced their TensorRT library and associated plug-ins...

AMDVLK 2019.Q3.1 is out as the latest update to AMD's official open-source Vulkan Linux driver...

For those looking for a small form factor workstation-oriented graphics card or just a budget workstation GPU in general, AMD today announced the Radeon Pro WX 3200...

Following weeks of leaks and other rumors, NVIDIA today finally lifted the lid on their new "SUPER" line-up with the revised RTX 2060 / RTX 2070 / RTX 2080 graphics cards with more competitive value especially in light of AMD's Radeon RX 5700 series offerings coming to market next week...

The latest work by Valve open-source Linux graphics driver contributor Samuel Pitoiset is on offering Delta Color Compression (DCC) support for layers with the Vulkan RADV driver...

Mir 1.3 was released today as the newest version of Canonical's project making it easier to write desktop shells with Wayland support...

NVIDIA released update Vulkan beta drivers on Monday for both Windows and Linux...

While Linux usage of Steam as a percentage has generally been flat or ticking up slightly each month since last year when Valve introduced Steam Play for allowing many Windows games to run gracefully on Linux, during June was the first time in a while seeing a decline...

Godot lead developer Juan Linietsky has been spending much of his time working on porting their open-source game engine to Vulkan for the Godot 4.0 release to follow Godot 3.2. Good progress is being made in getting this increasingly popular game engine rendering with Vulkan...

The 2019 X.Org Developers Conference for "all-things open-source graphics" is coming up at the start of October. But if you've been wanting to talk about something related to the Linux kernel, Mesa, Wayland, or related components, this week is your last chance to apply...