Phoronix

A new subsystem queued for introduction in the upcoming Linux 5.2 cycle is the Fieldbus Subsystem, which is initially being added to the staging area of the kernel...

As we've been expecting from NVIDIA's recent DXR ray-tracing support back-ported to Pascal/Volta GPUs, there's now a NVIDIA Linux driver beta that offers VK_NV_ray_tracing for pre-Turing graphics processors...

Going back to the late Linux 2.6 kernel days has been the CONFIG_DMESG_RESTRICT (or for the past number of years, renamed to CONFIG_SECURITY_DMESG_RESTRICT) Kconfig option to restrict access to dmesg in the name of security and not allowing unprivileged users from accessing this system log. While it's been brought up from time to time, Linux distributions are still generally allowing any user access to dmesg even though it may contain information that could help bad actors exploit the system...

While on one side of the table is the Purism Librem 5 Linux smartphone on the high-price/high-end side, the Pine64 folks continue working on the PinePhone as a lower-end Linux smartphone. A new video now shows the PinePhone running on Linux 5.0 with Wayland's Weston...

Coming as a late addition to the Linux 5.1 kernel are some long overdue keyboard key mappings for different functionality...

While there were the recent X.Org Foundation board elections, a do-over was needed as their new custom-written voting software wasn't properly recording votes... So here's now your reminder to re-vote in these X.Org elections...

Feature work on DRM-Next for the Linux 5.2 kernel cycle is winding down while today AMD has sent in what could be their last round of AMDGPU feature updates for this next kernel release...

Mesa 19.1 is due to be released at the end of May and for that to be the feature freeze is in two weeks followed by the weekly release candidates. With the feature development ending soon for this next quarterly Mesa release, the Radeon "RADV" and Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver developers in particular have been quite busy on their remaining feature work...

While the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) is needed for targeting the Xbox One, Microsoft HoloLens, and IoT, The Qt Company is thinking about gutting out their UWP support in the big Qt 6 tool-kit update...

Last year FreeBSD developers decided to re-base their ZFS file-system code based on the "ZFS On Linux" port rather than the Illumos source tree where they originally had been acquiring the support for this BSD. There's now FreeBSD 12 and FreeBSD 13/Head images available for testing of this re-worked ZFS file-system support...

Back during the BeOS days of the 90's, NVM Express solid-state storage obviously wasn't a thing but the open-source Haiku OS inspired by it now has an NVMe driver...

The Virtual I/O Device standard has christened its VIRTIO 1.1 specification this month. This is the virtualization standard around network/storage/graphics/other-hardware in mind for cross-hypervisor compatibility...

Following last month's Proton 4.2 for Steam Play that is derived from Wine 4.2 with many patches applied, Proton 4.2-3 has been released for the latest Windows gaming on Linux experience ahead of any Easter weekend gaming time...

For those wondering about Intel's MKL-DNN "Math Kernel Library for Deep Neural Networks" performance on Cascade Lake, here are some reference benchmarks using the dual Xeon Platinum 8280 setup including when using the GCC 9 compiler for building this Intel open-source library and employing the "cascadelake" compiler tuning...

With Ubuntu 19.04 out the door, it's time to kick off Ubuntu 19.10 as the next six-month installment of Ubuntu Linux and the last before Ubuntu 20.04 as the next LTS release...

Mozilla WebThings is what was formerly known as "Project Things" while serving as an experiment around a platform for IoT devices on the web...

KDE Applications 19.04 is now officially out as the first update of 2019 for this collection of prominent KDE desktop programs...

The Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco Dingo" has been officially released as the latest non-LTS, six-month installment to Ubuntu Linux...

Leading up to the Ubuntu 19.04 release, several premium supporters requested fresh results for seeing the X.Org vs. Wayland performance overhead for gaming, how GNOME Shell vs. KDE Plasma is performing for current AMD Linux gaming, and related desktop comparison graphics/gaming metrics. Here are such benchmarks run from the Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco Dingo" while benchmarking GNOME Shell both with X.Org and Wayland, Xfce, MATE, Budgie, KDE Plasma, LXQt, and Openbox.

On Wednesday night Valve issued their latest stable Steam client update and carries much of the work we've seen out of their recent beta releases...

Intel's open-source developers sent in another pull request this morning to DRM-Next of additional feature material they are planning on having in the upcoming Linux 5.2 kernel...

While it may not seem like a big release with Xfce 4.14 having yet to materialize, the Xubuntu developers have been doing a fine job providing a nice upgrade with Xubuntu 19.04 for those appreciating a lightweight, GTK-based desktop environment built around Ubuntu...

Theo de Raadt and the OpenBSD developers maintaining OpenSSH today unveiled OpenSSH 8.0...

SQLite 3.28 is now the latest version of this widely-used, embed-friendly cross-platform database library...

We haven't been seeing as much GLAMOR activity these days but then again the pace of X.Org Server development has certainly slowed up in recent years. GLAMOR as a reminder allows for X.Org Server 2D acceleration to happen in a generic manner via OpenGL / GLES and has been a common area for improvement...

While missing the GNOME 3.32.1 point release that shipped last week, GNOME Shell and Mutter today experienced their 3.32.1 updates with a variety of fixes...

Valgrind 3.15 has been released, the programming utility famous for catching memory leaks and helping with memory debugging/profiling...

The ZFS On Linux (ZoL) crew released version 0.8-RC4 of their Linux file-system port today as the newest pre-release for this massive feature update...

GentooLTO is a configuration overlay for Gentoo's overlay to make it easy to enable Link Time Optimizations (LTO) and other compiler optimizations for enabling better performance out of the Gentoo packages. GentooLTO appears to be inspired in part by the likes of Clear Linux who employ LTO and other compiler optimization techniques like AutoFDO for yielding better performance than what is conventionally shipped by Linux distributions. The GentooLTO developers and users have wrapped up their survey looking at how practical this overlay configuration is on the massive Portage collection...

For those wondering how the Linux smartphone stack is shaping up for Purism's long-awaited Librem 5 smartphone that is currently aiming to ship in Q3, the company has released several video recordings of different operations running on their Librem 5 software on their developer kits...

The newest project being hosted by the Linux Foundation is Laminas, what was the PHP Zend Framework...

While Ubuntu 19.04 isn't even coming out until tomorrow, the indications around Ubuntu desktop ZFS support and functionality likely debuting the next cycle has us already quite eager for the Ubuntu 19.10 release coming out in October...

It's approaching two years since the release of Mageia 6 but at least the wait for Mageia 7 shouldn't be too much longer...

The engineers at Facebook maintaining Zstandard "Zstd" as a speedy real-time compression algorithm debuted version 1.4.0 on Tuesday with some notable improvements...

Mesa 19.1 is now even more exciting as RADV's co-lead, Bas Nieuwenhuizen has requested the Radeon Vulkan's FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync support be a blocker bug for this quarterly Mesa update...

We've seen many efforts like DXVK that are mapping Direct3D atop Vulkan, efforts like Zink in getting OpenGL over Vulkan, and less popular but still progressing is getting OpenCL -- at least a reasonable subset of it -- working under Vulkan. That's what the CLVK project is about and it's been making more progress since we last looked at it on Phoronix...

It's been nearly one year already since the previous patch series working on speculative page faults for the Linux kernel were sent out for review. Fortunately, IBM's Laurent Dufour has once again updated these patches against the latest code and sent them out for the newest round of discussions...

The effort to provide a more convenient / easy to remember kernel option for toggling Spectre/Meltdown mitigations is out with a second revision and they have also shortened the option to remember...

GLFW is the traditionally OpenGL library (now also encompassing the Vulkan graphics API) that offers a basic API for the creation of windows/contexts/surfaces across software platforms. GLFW works for both desktop and mobile, various devices, and works across all major operating systems while being under the liberal Zlib license. GLFW 3.3 is now available with some exciting enhancements...

AMD today announced the Ryzen Embedded R1000 series with the inaugural R1505G and R1606G SoCs...

Following yesterday's Intel Iris vs. i965 OpenGL benchmarks against Windows 10, there is already an optimization out of our latest testing as a result...

Vulkan 1.1.107 is out today as the newest version of the Vulkan graphics/compute API...

Nearly one month after the release of the Qt 5.13 Beta 1, the second beta of this forthcoming tool-kit upgrade is now available...

Unity Tech has just released Unity 2019.1 as a big update for this cross-platform game engine...

Yesterday marked the final freeze for the upcoming Fedora 30 distribution release. The problem with Red Hat / Fedora developers being on the forefront of contributing innovations upstream to GNOME and other key components is that often exposes them to new bugs and this cycle is no different...

Juan A. Suarez Romero of Igalia is serving as the release manager for Mesa 19.1 and sent out a reminder on Monday of the planned release schedule for this quarterly driver update...

Mozilla presented at the NAB Streaming Summit last week over the state of the royalty-free AV1 video format aiming to compete with H.265/HEVC and succeeding VP9 for open-source use-cases...

It's been quite fascinating to watch the development of the Intel Iris Gallium3D driver that has now been in development by their open-source team for more than one year while back in February is where this currently experimental driver was merged into Mesa. It's been over one month since last looking at the Intel Iris Gallium3D performance relative to Intel's default "i965" Mesa OpenGL driver. Here are fresh benchmarks looking not only at their current and next-gen OpenGL Linux driver options but also how that performance compares to their current Windows 10 OpenGL driver.

While there are around 150 release critical bugs to be addressed before Debian 10.0 "Buster" can make its debut, the Debian Installer continues getting in great shape and is out today with its release candidate...

Quite a surprise this Monday morning is finding that KDE's EGLStreams back-end for the KWin Wayland compositor has been merged! The KDE Plasma 5.16 release this summer will thus introduce support for running the KDE Plasma Wayland session with the proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver stack...