Phoronix

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.

Fresh off yesterday's Qt 5.13 tool-kit release, The Qt Company today announced the Qt Creator 4.10 beta as their primarily Qt/C++ focused integrated development environment but that has been growing thanks to its Language Server Protocol support...

While there still is a few weeks until the Linux 5.2 kernel will debut and thus the opening of the Linux 5.3 merge window, due to DRM-Next halting new feature code from merging prior to that point, in preparation Intel open-source developers sent in their final batch of feature work aiming for Linux 5.3...

SUSE/openSUSE continues embracing the Btrfs file-system and now their YaST installer/manager can deal with multi-device Btrfs configurations...

Auke Kok of Intel / Clear Linux carried out the distribution's first ask-me-anything session today where he fielded questions ranging from Steam to under-served software projects...

Coreboot now supports the UP Squared, the new single board computer / maker board based on an Intel Apollo Lake SoC...

Intel announced an interesting development in their oneAPI initiative: they are developing a new programming language/dialect...

Purism today issued their June software status update on how things are going with bringing up their privacy-minded Linux software stack for their Librem 5 smartphone. On the software side things are still moving along though still rather primitive with a goal of shipping in Q3. Similarly, this status update lacks any talk of the hardware progress for seeing how that is moving if there is any chance of shipping their planned phone next month after already having been setback twice...

The US National Security Agency (NSA) has developers contributing to the Coreboot project...

Alpine Linux 3.10 is out today as the newest feature release for this lightweight, security-minded Linux distribution built atop Musl libc and Busybox while catering being quite popular in the container crowd...

Released this week was OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 as the latest major release for this Linux distribution of Mandriva/Mandrake heritage and continues on the interesting trend of innovations. In addition to continuing to use the LLVM Clang compiler by default rather than GCC, among other changes that position it more uniquely than many other Linux distributions out there, their 4.0 release has a "znver1" spin that is optimized for AMD Ryzen/Threadripper/EPYC processors. Here are benchmarks comparing not only OpenMandriva 4.0's x86-64 and Znver1 options but also how that performance compares to the likes of Ubuntu 19.04, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Intel's Clear Linux.

After being marred by delays the past several weeks, Qt 5.13 is shipping today as the latest major update to the Qt5 tool-kit and another step closer towards seeing Qt 6.0 around the end of 2020...

While as of Linux 5.2 the support for Intel's Icelake CPUs appear production ready with all of the bits in place from new IDs to the much enhanced "Gen 11" graphics, there are a few stragglers of items to land with the upcoming Linux 5.3 merge window though could be back-ported to current series. Fortunately, we haven't found anything major to be missing...

In addition to discontinuing i386 support, Canonical announced another change being worked on for Ubuntu 19.10 is compiler hardening...

After Dell Canvas Totem support wasn't merged for libinput 1.13, the code for this nifty input device was merged last week and will be part of the upcoming Libinput 1.14...

Building off the initial Turing mode-setting bits that were in place since Linux 5.0 and have continued stepping along to support newer variants on successive kernel releases, the Linux 5.3 kernel is slated to add support for the TU116 graphics processor...

With the newly released DragonFlyBSD 5.6 there are improvements to its original HAMMER2 file-system to the extent that it's now selected by its installer as the default file-system choice for new installations. Curious how the performance now compares between HAMMER and HAMMER2, here are some initial benchmarks on an NVMe solid-state drive using DragonFlyBSD 5.6.0...

While PCI Express 4.0 up to this point has only been found in a few systems like Talos' POWER9 platforms and coming soon with the new AMD graphics cards and chipsets, the PCI SIG today announced PCI Express 6.0...

Panfrost only made its initial debut as part of the recent Mesa 19.1 release for providing open-source Arm Mali Bifrost/Midgard graphics driver support on Linux independent of Arm and their official binary driver. While the resources are limited, so far Panfrost is making stellar progress...

KDE developer Tomaz Canabrava is working on a set of improvements around their Konsole terminal emulator when running on Wayland...

Ubuntu and their downstream flavors all stopped shipping x86 32-bit images and now for the 19.10 cycle they have decided to stop their i386 support entirely. Beginning with Ubuntu 19.10, the archive/packages will not be built for x86 32-bit...

VKHR is an open-source, real-time hybrid hair renderer written in Vulkan and developed under the support of AMD/RTG...

While the AMDGPU kernel driver has shipped with the long-awaited FreeSync support since the Linux 5.0 release earlier this year and was quickly wired up for the RadeonSI Gallium3D OpenGL driver in Mesa 19.0 while the recent Mesa 19.1 update brought FreeSync for the RADV Vulkan driver, AMDVLK as AMD's official open-source Vulkan driver isn't yet supporting this variable rate refresh technology...

As Netflix's first security bulletin for 2019, they warned of TCP-based remote denial of service vulnerabilities affecting both Linux and FreeBSD. These vulnerabilities are rated "critical" but already being corrected within the latest Git code...

In addition to Clang-Scan-Deps being merged a few days ago, another new feature for LLVM's Clang is called the Clang Interface Stubs and brings a concept from Windows/macOS over to Linux/ELF systems...

Quietly released last week was Radeon Software for Linux 19.20, the latest quarterly update to AMD's packaged Linux driver that consists of their AMDGPU-PRO binary driver option as well as the AMDGPU-Open packaged components using a snapshot of Mesa...

DragonFlyBSD 5.6 is now available as the latest major update to this popular BSD operating system...

As we've been expecting, AMD's open-source developers today posted their set of patches enabling Navi (10) support within their AMDGPU DRM kernel driver. Bringing up the Navi support in kernel-space are 459 patches amounting to more than four-hundred thousand lines of code, not counting the work done to LLVM as part of their shader compiler back-end or the yet-to-be-published OpenGL/Vulkan driver patches...

For those eager to see CentOS 8.0 as the community open-source rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0, progress is being made but it looks like the release is still some weeks out...

Debian's Apt packaging system was tagged today as 1.9.0 experimental and is already in the process of being added to Ubuntu 19.10. Apt 1.9 is working towards the eventual Apt 2.0 release...

NVIDIA announced this morning for ISC 2019 that they are bringing CUDA to Arm beyond their work already for supporting GPU computing with lower-power Tegra SoCs...

With Debian 10 "Buster" due to be releasing in early July, I've begun testing the near-final Buster images on various systems. Here is a look at a common Intel Core i7 system comparing the current performance of Debian 10.0 to the current stable 9.9 release...

The FSGSBASE instruction set has been present on Intel processors going back to Ivy Bridge processors and while there have been Linux kernel patches for this feature going on for years, it looks like with the Linux 5.3 kernel cycle is this support for merging. Making us eager for this support is the prospect of better performance, especially for context switching workloads that already have been suffering as a result of recent CPU mitigations...

Debian's RISC-V support has been coming together but how's the state of affairs for the imminent Debian 10.0 "Buster" release?..

Currently NVIDIA's packaged drivers on Ubuntu can get a bit stale on Ubuntu stable releases since they aren't updated in-step with the latest driver releases. But a new stable release update (SRU) policy/exception similar to the Firefox approach is being made for Ubuntu so that new releases will end up working their way into currently supported Ubuntu series...

Arm's Wilco Dijkstra landed some more optimizations this past week in the Glibc development code for the upcoming GNU C Library 2.30 release...