Phoronix

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...

Slipping just past this week's DragonFlyBSD 5.6 release is now an early feature for the next series: continued work on the Radeon DRM driver ported to this BSD from the Linux kernel...

AMD has lost one of their leading LLVM compiler developers as well as serving as a Vulkan/SPIR-V expert with being involved in those Khronos specifications...

Linus Torvalds released the Linux 5.2-rc6 development kernel a day ahead of schedule to better fit around his summer travels...

Debuting two weeks ago was the Mesa 19.1 quarterly feature update while due out early next week is the first bug-fix point release...

Somewhat surprisingly, OpenBSD has added the Vulkan library and ICD loader support as their newest port...

In addition to the recent preview of Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2), Microsoft also kept to their word from the Build 2019 conference of issuing their first preview of "Windows Terminal" in June. The first of several preview releases of Windows Terminal is now available from the Microsoft Store...

As some good news this week amid all the 32-bit Linux gaming drama this week and the networking snafu... Valve is now funding another developer to work on upstream open-source code, in particular on the KDE side this time with a developer who had been working for Blue Systems...

Just hours after releasing Wine 4.11, the team maintaining the experimental/testing version of Wine -- Wine-Staging -- issued their release with more than 800 patches re-based on top...

It's been a year since the release of PulseAudio 12 and even eleven months since the last point release but it looks like the next PulseAudio release will be out very soon...

The planned dropping of 32-bit support on Ubuntu saga continues... Well known Valve Linux developer Pierre-Loup Griffais has said they plan to officially stop supporting Ubuntu for Steam on Linux...

As a follow-up to the issue reported on Friday regarding the latest Linux kernel releases causing problems for Valve's Steam client, a fix appears pending that with changing around one line of code does appear to address the regression...

Wine 4.11 is out tonight as the latest bi-weekly development release for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms...

In response to the decision to drop 32-bit x86 support beginning in Ubuntu 19.10, Alan Pope of Canonical and longtime Ubuntu member decided to try running some GOG games under an Ubuntu 19.10 daily build that he configured to remove the 32-bit packages ahead of the actual removal. Unfortunately, his experience didn't go so smoothly...

As another one of the prerequisites for landing the AMD Radeon RX 5000 series "Navi" support in Mesa, the libdrm bits have just been merged...

With the Linux 5.2 kernel a few weeks out from its stable release and now being in the middle of the Mesa 19.2 development cycle for the RADV Vulkan and RadeonSI OpenGL drivers, here are some fresh results looking at the latest open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver stack compared to the latest NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver. In this article the focus is on the mid-range (Polaris) line-up against the NVIDIA competition while similar tests on the high-end are currently being carried out.

GNOME 3.33.3 is out this morning as the latest development release in the trek towards the very exciting GNOME 3.34 desktop update due out this September...

If you are planning to enjoy some Linux gaming this week via Steam, you may want to think twice about upgrading to the latest Linux kernel Git code or even the newest stable point releases...

The latest use-case for the increasingly popular Zstd compression algorithm could be employment by the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for compressing its link-time optimization (LTO) data...

The Bzip2 open-source compression program is about to see its first real release since September 2010. This new version brings new build systems, security fixes, and much more...

In addition to Ubuntu planning to drop 32-bit packages with their 19.10 release, the OpenMandriva development team is another high profile Linux distribution drafting plans to eliminate their 32-bit support...

Google's GAPID, also known as the Graphics API Debugger, continues serving as an interesting open-source and cross-platform Vulkan debugger. On Thursday version 1.6 of GAPID was released...

Well known open-source AMD developer Marek Olšák sent out a set of eight RadeonSI Gallium3D patches this morning that appear mostly mundane and namely come down to some minor code alterations. This work though is in stepping towards the actual Navi/GFX10 support we expect to be dropped incredibly soon...

While DragonFlyBSD 5.6 was just released earlier this week, DragonFlyBSD 5.6.1 is already available to fix some bugs that crept into this big update...

It's looking like the plans announced by Canonical this week to drop their 32-bit packages/libraries beginning with Ubuntu 19.10 will be causing problems for the Wine camp at least in the near-term until an adequate solution is sorted out for providing their 32-bit Wine builds to Ubuntu users...

Adding to the excitement of GNOME 3.34 and the many changes being worked on is Mutter seeing the initial merging of transactional kernel mode-setting (KMS) support...

This round of benchmarking fun consisted of packing two Intel Optane 900p high-performance NVMe solid-state drives into a system for a fresh round of RAID Linux benchmarking atop the in-development Linux 5.2 kernel plus providing a fresh look at the ZFS On Linux 0.8.1 performance.