Phoronix

With Mesa 19.3 scheduled to be branched today and that marking the end of feature development for this next quarterly installment to these open-source Linux OpenGL/Vulkan drivers, developers are in a mad rush landing last minute improvements. The open-source Radeon driver support has a lot to stand in particular from today's work...

For those interested in running Android on x86 Intel/AMD hardware, the Android-x86 project is still churning along but while Google is onto Android 10, this project is still tracking Android 8 Oreo...

Today the Intel Core i9 9900KS is shipping at $513 USD for this specially-binned Coffeelake CPU that is capable of achieving a 5.0GHz all-core turbo frequency. The all-core 5.0GHz turbo is great, but it remains an eight-core / sixteen-thread 14nm processor going up against AMD's similarly priced Ryzen 9 3900X. Here are our initial benchmarks of the Core i9 9900KS compared to the Core i9 9900K and Ryzen 9 3900X.

Intel's IWD wireless daemon for Linux systems that could potentially replace WPA_Supplicant has reached the big 1.0 milestone...

Deprecated for the upcoming GCC 10 compiler release and set for removal in GCC 11 one year later is the CC0 representation code that is being used for handle condition codes in GCC back-ends. That in turn means a number of older CPU targets will be removed in GCC 11 should they not receive some development attention to transition them to the modern MODE_CC representation...

While many fled from GitHub to GitLab following Microsoft acquiring the code hosting service, GitLab has come under a bit of fire of its own with plans they had been working on around telemetry support that would begin tracking its users and potentially sharing the data with third-party firms...

We first wrote about the Landlock Linux security module in 2016 with its aspirations for offering powerful security sandboxing abilities. Landlock has seen revisions every few months and this week marks the 11th time the patches have been volleyed for this interesting sandboxing Linux Security Module (LSM)...

In addition to Mir's other road-map items around replaceable renderers and hybrid graphics driver support, it also turns out the Canonical developers involved are working on expanding the graphics platform support...

The open-source MoltenVK is out with another new update based against the Vulkan 1.1.126 specification and allowing the Vulkan API to be used on Apple's macOS and iOS by mapping those calls to the underlying Metal graphics drivers...

Cleaning up of the Pango layout engine library as some much needed housekeeping by GNOME developers resulted in shifting to the Harfbuzz library for font loading. That quietly meant dropping support for bitmap fonts from Pango, which is now reaching Linux desktop users when upgrading to the Pango 1.44 stable release...

Debian Project Leader Sam Hartman has determined it's necessary to pursue a general resolution among Debian developers over their init system policy and whether to still care about init system diversity outside of systemd...

Fedora 31 is now officially available as the latest update for this prominent Linux distribution backed by Red Hat and continuing uninterrupted under IBM's ownership of Red Hat...

For those curious about the performance of AMD Radeon open-source Linux gaming out-of-the-box on the newly released Ubuntu 19.10, here are those benchmarks compared to the Radeon driver state on Ubuntu 19.04. Additionally, there are benchmark results if manually upgrading your Ubuntu 19.10 installation to using the in-development Linux 5.4 kernel and Mesa 19.3 for the very newest AMD Linux driver support.

After weeks of information leaking on these new ~$200 GTX SUPER graphics cards, NVIDIA today officially announced the GTX 1660 SUPER that is shipping today and the GTX 1650 SUPER that will hit store shelves in late November...

Happening this week over in Lyon, France is the Embedded Linux Conference Europe and Open-Source Summit Europe events. Developer Chris Simmonds spoke today about systemd and boot time optimizations around it...

AMD open-source developer Marek Olšák is landing the last of his changes for the Mesa 19.3 imminent feature freeze...

The "AST" DRM/KMS display driver that can be used with the many servers supporting ASpeed display hardware now has work pending for atomic mode-setting...

With Mesa 19.3 embarking on its feature freeze this week unless the period is extended, Intel developers have been working on landing more of their Gen12 graphics code into this release for future Tiger Lake CPUs as well as the basis for their first Xe discrete graphics card...

With Ubuntu 19.10 it's the first time we have seen the Radeon gaming performance under a GNOME Wayland session match or exceed the performance found under the default GNOME X.Org session...

While we have seen a lot of open-source AMD Linux graphics driver patches for Renoir and that initial support within the 5.4 kernel, support for this 2020 APU platform is still maturing. The newest work on the Linux upbringing for Renoir is enabling the "DMCUB" support...

Building off yesterday's DXVK 1.4.4 release, D9VK 0.30 is out as the similar project that implements the Direct3D 9 API atop Vulkan...

In addition to this month bringing the release of the Ubuntu 19.10 "Eoan Ermine", Apple also shipped macOS 10.15 "Catalina" as the sixteenth major release of their macOS operating system. So with that it makes for an interesting time seeing how macOS 10.15 competes against both Ubuntu 19.10 and Windows 10 on an Apple MacBook Pro. Here are those results from dozens of benchmarks.

The Intel Core i9 9900KS is still on track for shipping this month as the revived Coffeelake CPU that is capable of hitting an all-core turbo frequency of 5.0GHz. Linux benchmarks of the Core i9 9900KS are coming...

The Zink Gallium3D code for running OpenGL / OpenGL ES over Vulkan has now been merged into the Mesa 19.3 development code...

Canonical's Chris Halse Rogers has shared a road-map for Mir (or terrain map as he prefers calling it) about their future plans for this open-source display server that remains focused now on providing Wayland support...

Following last week's release of Firefox 70 and Chrome 78 I posted some fresh Linux web browser benchmarks where the Mozilla browser continued to get beat severely by Google on Linux. But is the situation any better with Firefox 71 in beta? Not really...

The Ubuntu 20.04 cycle is now officially underway. Following the recent release of Ubuntu 19.10, the "Focal" archive has been created and back to syncing against the latest Debian unstable packages...

While marketed as a point release, the dav1d 0.5.1 "Asiatic Cheetah" release is quite significant for those needing to perform AV1 video decoding on older processors...

Philip Rebohle has released his latest weekly update to DXVK for accelerating Direct3D 10/11 games using Vulkan as a big boost for Steam Play (Proton) and Wine...

Linus Torvalds released the fifth weekly RC of Linux 5.4 a few hours early due to his travels around this week's Linux Foundation events in Lyon, France...

Here are the latest numbers in our ongoing AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" series benchmarking. This time around for some curiosity over the weekend is a look at the EPYC 7642 and EPYC 7742 up against the Xeon Platinum 8280 all in 2P configurations while running benchmarks publicly recommended by Intel in one of their whitepapers. Even going by Intel-recommended tests, the EPYC 7642/7742 deliver significantly better performance and cost savings over the comparable Xeon Platinum 8280.

Huawei laptops will see some support improvements with the upcoming Linux 5.5 kernel cycle...

It was another busy month in KDE space as we approach the end of October...

Fscrypt as the file-system encryption framework used by the likes of EXT4 and F2FS for offering native encryption capabilities continues being improved upon, especially by the likes of Google that are making use of it for Android devices...

Just over one year ago were proposed changes to improve the insight into per-client load activity for Intel graphics under Linux. The changes would indicate how busy each Intel graphics engine (render, blitter, video, etc) was on a per-client basis and other metrics similar to what users have to look at when it comes to analyzing CPU activity. Those patches were never followed up on or merged but have been revived this past week...

Just in time for Halloween there is a new release of GhostBSD, the operating system focused on providing a good BSD desktop experience built off FreeBSD and the MATE desktop environment...

With the soon to be released Qt 5.14 is the start of their new high-level 3D API that itself is graphics API independent for being able to target the likes of Apple Metal and Vulkan as well as Direct3D and still falling back to OpenGL. The start of the graphics API independent scenegraph renderer is turning out well for Qt 5.14 but there will be more to come in the spring with Qt 5.15 while at the end of next year with Qt 6.0 should be a much more compelling story...

As a late change that was merged yesterday for the Linux 5.4 kernel that will be released in the next few weeks, Xen 32-bit PV guest support has been deprecated...

For those looking to make use of VP9 hardware accelerated video decoding with FFmpeg, that support has landed in its latest Git code...

Following this week's Intel Core i7-1065G7 Ice Lake Linux benchmarks there was some questions and speculations about the per-clock performance of this long-awaited Intel microarchitecture update. Here is some additional data shedding light on the clock frequencies under load and ultimately how the per-clock performance compares to the common Intel previous-generation mobile CPUs.

Slated for introduction with the upcoming Linux 5.5 kernel is a System76 ACPI driver needed for their new laptops that are now shipping with an open-source Coreboot firmware implementation...

The latest feature contribution by Valve's Linux driver developers to the open-source RADV driver is a "secure compile" feature...

Complementing the big AMDGPU feature pull request from two weeks ago, on Friday AMD sent out a second batch of features targeting the upcoming Linux 5.5 kernel merge window...

NVIDIA on Friday released the 435.27.02 Linux beta driver that features a few Vulkan updates...

The Xiph rav1e AV1 video encoder written in the Rust programming language recently picked up more optimizations among other improvements...

Following a lot of work on the AMD "ACO" compiler back-end to the RADV Vulkan driver for GFX10/Navi, this experimental alternative to AMDGPU LLVM is about ready to go for these newest AMD graphics processors...

There is much greater performance potential out of RISC-V now with SiFive having announced the U8-Series...

MPV 0.30 is out as the newest release to this cross-platform, open-source video player derived from MPlayer/mplayer2...

For those curious how the Ubuntu 19.04 vs. Ubuntu 19.10 performance is looking for higher-end Intel/AMD desktops, here are some fresh benchmarks.

Oracle today released their second public beta of the forthcoming VirtualBox 6.1 virtualization software...