Phoronix

With the Fedora Workstation 31 feature outlook covered earlier this week, there was an interesting comment in that article by Red Hat's Christian Schaller that deserves special coverage...

Newer AMD GPUs are capable of offering hardware accelerated decoding for 10-bit VP9 content, but that wasn't the case with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. Fortunately, a simple patch is pending to expose this support...

While it doesn't appear to be an official part of Xfce at least at this time, Xfway is a Wayland compositor inspired by Xfce's Xfwm4 window manager...

For fans of the Kodi project for providing the flagship open-source HTPC experience, Kodi 18.3 is out today as the newest maintenance update...

Considering how resource intensive modern Linux desktops are particularly on OpenGL for compositing, it's quite an achievement that the Panfrost open-source Gallium3D driver for Arm Mali Bifrost/Midgard hardware can now run the GNOME Shell...

We've known that Linux PC vendor System76 has been investing engineering resources into Coreboot support and while not yet ready for end-users, they are making progress. For once it's ready for their customers, they have also begun crafting a graphical user-interface for these firmware upgrades to Coreboot...

At least for the newest Intel Xeon "Cascade Lake" processors, the LLVM Clang compiler is running incredibly well compared to the long-standing GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). Overall, LLVM clang is now nearly at performance parity to GCC 9 and the in-development GCC 10 compilers. Here are some Linux compiler benchmarks using the dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 server built around the Gigabyte S3461-3R0.

With the Linux kernel driver support for the upcoming "Navi" graphics cards only having been sent out last week for AMDGPU/AMDKFD, given it was more than 450 patches and more than 400 thousand lines of code (granted much of that automated header files), there was some risk it could be postponed given the imminent cut-off of new material to DRM-Next for Linux 5.3 given the rigid release cycle. Fortunately, that pull request has been honored...

The Qt Company has released Qt 3D Studio 2.4 as the latest release of its 3D user-interface creation suite...

The GNOME Foundation has issued their 2018 annual report that is particularly notable due to a massive rise in their income following two large donations...

Thanks to longtime open-source Linux graphics developer Daniel Stone, Wayland's Weston reference compositor now has support for the EGL_KHR_partial_update extension to provide for potentially better performance...

The second alpha release for this year's PHP 7.4 release is now available for testing...

Last week AMD posted more than 400 patches providing the AMD Navi support within their AMDGPU DRM kernel driver while this week has brought dozens of patches amounting to 4,293 lines as a patch for their RadeonSI Gallium3D driver in order to provide OpenGL support on these next-gen GPUs being introduced next month as the Radeon RX 5700 series...

Following all the drama caused by Canonical announcing last week they'd stop their 32-bit archive with Ubuntu 19.10 and that leading to a mess of concerns including Valve saying they would not be officially supporting Ubuntu 19.10 and later, today they issued a statement reaffirming their commitment to Linux...

With Debian 10 "Buster" aiming to be released in early July, a second release candidate of the Debian Installer has been made available...

VESA announced their first major update to the DisplayPort interface in three years...

With last week having delivered fresh benchmarks of the mid-range NVIDIA/AMD graphics cards using the very latest drivers, particularly the in-development Linux 5.2 and Mesa 19.2 components with the Radeon graphics cards tested, here is a similar comparison when moving up the spectrum and focusing on the higher-end graphics cards. Here's a look at how the RX 590, RX Vega 56, RX Vega 64, and Radeon VII are performing with the newest open-source AMD driver code compared to the NVIDIA Turing line-up backed by their latest binary driver.

Back in April we wrote about a proposal for providing better parallelization within GCC itself to address use-cases such as very large source files. That effort was accepted as part of this year's Google Summer of Code and the student developer pursing this parallelization with threads has issued his first progress report...

If you happen to have a Saitek R440 Force Wheel or looking to purchase a cheap and used racing wheel for enjoying the various Linux racing game ports or even the number of games working under Steam Play like F1 2018 and DiRT Rally 2.0, Linux support is on the way...

Similar to the recent LLVM compiler work, the in-development GCC 10 compiler also now has support for the AVX-512 VP2INTERSECT instructions being introduced on Intel Tiger Lake CPUs...

Fedora's version of the FDK-AAC library that they began shipping in 2017 to finally provide AAC audio support strips out what was patented encumbered functionality. But that gutting of the code did cause some problems like audio playback glitches that are now being addressed...

Freedreno founder Rob Clark, who is now employed by Google to work on open-source graphics, has sent in the batch of MSM Direct Rendering Manager driver changes to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.3 kernel cycle...

A new security vulnerability has been made public over AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) having insecure cryptographic implementations. Fortunately, this AMD SEV issue is addressed by a firmware update...

As part of Google's consolidating their different toolchains around LLVM, they are exploring the possibility of writing a new C library "libc" implementation...

With Bcachefs core development being done and the possibility of this file-system being mainlined soon, here are some fresh benchmarks of this file-system compared to Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, XFS, and ZFS On Linux.

Ubuntu's software stores / software centers have gone through several revisions over the years and now a new Snap Store is in development...

With Linux PC vendors System76 and Purism among those embracing Coreboot for freeing more of the system and appealing to open-source enthusiasts, Linux PC vendor TUXEDO from Germany is also eyeing a similar move...

Mesa 19.1.1 is out as the first point release to this quarter's Mesa 19.1 series that was christened earlier this month...

Not to be confused with Ubuntu's varying stance on dropping 32-bit packages beginning with their next release later this year, Fedora 31 now has a proposal pending to discontinue their i686 kernel builds but they will still be keeping with their 32-bit packaging...

Adding to the growing list of features for the upcoming Linux 5.3 kernel is now Intel UMWAIT support for better power-savings...

Mesa 19.0.7 was released on Monday as the last Mesa 19.0 stable release, ending this quarterly update series from Q1...

A new "-O1g" optimization level has been proposed for the GNU Compiler Collection that would allow better performance but still relative ease for debugging the generated binaries...

A final set of drm-misc-next Direct Rendering Manager driver changes were sent out at the end of last week as the remaining feature work now queued up for the upcoming Linux 5.3 kernel merge window...

Arriving late, a few days after the GNOME 3.33.3 development snapshot, the Mutter and GNOME Shell updates are now available...

Fedora Workstation 31 is shaping up to be another exciting release for this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution. As usual, a ton of original upstream features are being worked on for this innovative desktop/workstation Linux spin...

Weston 6.0 was released back in March with a remote/streaming plug-in and Meson becoming the preferred build system among other improvements. Weston 6.0.1 was released today by Simon Ser with various fixes to this reference Wayland compositor...

It looks like my info from this weekend was accurate, "I'm hearing that Canonical may revert course and provide limited 32-bit support." Canonical issued a statement today that they indeed will provide "selected" 32-bit packages for the upcoming Ubuntu 19.10 as well as Ubuntu 20.04 LTS...

As covered last week, the Linux kernel is finally about to see FSGSBASE support a feature supported by Intel CPUs going back to Ivybridge and can help performance. Since that earlier article the FS/GS BASE patches have been moved to the x86/cpu branch meaning unless any last-minute problems arise the functionality will be merged for the Linux 5.3 cycle. I've also begun running some benchmarks to see how this will change the Linux performance on Intel hardware.

Just a few days ago I wrote how the Panfrost Gallium3D driver continues making incredible progress for this community-driven, open-source graphics driver targeting Arm Bifrost/Midgard graphics. There's yet another batch of new features and improvements to talk about...

Vulkan 1.1.112 was outed this morning as the newest documentation update to this high performance graphics and compute API...

Managing to make it out today as a surprise is the Raspberry Pi 4. The Raspberry Pi 4 is a major overhaul and their most radical update yet while base pricing still starts out at $35 USD...

Zhaoxin is the company producing Chinese x86 CPUs created by a joint venture between VIA and the Shanghai government. The current Zhaoxin ZX CPUs are based on VIA's Isaiah design and making use of VIA's x86 license. With the Linux 5.3 kernel will be better support for these Chinese desktop x86 CPUs...

In addition to disabling root password-based SSH log-ins by default, another change being made to Fedora 31 in the name of greater security is adding some additional GRUB2 boot-loader modules to be built-in for their EFI boot-loader...

Well known FreeBSD developer and leader of their release engineering team, Glen Barber, has left the FreeBSD Foundation but will continue working on FreeBSD as well as coordinating its releases...

Digital camera startup Octopus Cinema has been designing the "OCTOPUSCAMERA" as a digital cinema camera that's professional grade yet is an open platform with removable/upgradeable parts and this camera platform itself is running Linux...

Following Valve saying they won't be officially supporting Ubuntu 19.10 and Wine developers questioning their Ubuntu 32-bit builds following the announcement this week of not providing new 32-bit packages for new Ubuntu releases, longtime Ubuntu developer and Canonical employee Steve Langasek is trying to provide some clarity into the situation...

On Saturday night AMDGPU/Radeon DRM maintainer Alex Deucher sent in the final batch of feature updates to DRM-Next that is targeting the upcoming Linux 5.3 kernel...

It's another busy summer in the KDE space with a nice mixture of bug fixes and features being pursued for KDE Frameworks, KDE Plasma, and KDE Applications...

Fedora 31 will harden up its default configuration by finally disabling password-based OpenSSH root log-ins, matching the upstream default of the past four years and behavior generally enforced by other Linux distributions...

It didn't make it for the Linux 5.2 kernel and now it's up to its 33rd revision on the Linux kernel mailing list... The "lockdown" patches for locking down access to various kernel hardware features has been reworked now and is a Linux Security Module (LSM) as it still tries to get enough endorsements to be mainlined...