Phoronix

If you are waking up this morning to find all of your Mozilla Firefox add-ons have expired, you are certainly not alone. A major blunder has found users of Firefox finding most add-ons getting disabled...

Last month Arm announced Scalable Vector Extension 2 (SVE2) and Transactional Memory Extension (TME) as two new technologies for its A-Profile architecture. That TME support is already being plumbed into the Linux toolchain stack...

Longtime GCC developer Honza Hubička of SUSE has posted a lengthy and quite interesting blog post concerning some of the optimization work that went into the now-released GCC 9 compiler. It turns out some of the GCC 9 optimization work was motivated by the Firefox developers and their desire to switch to LLVM Clang in the name of performance. Separately, openSUSE Tumbleweed has been looking at using link-time optimizations (LTO) by default for their packages and that has also motivated developers and help ensured the LTO support was in good shape for this annual compiler release...

Aspeed BMCs have seen a lot of mainline Linux kernel driver activity from a recent Aspeed video engine driver to an AST2500 SoC DRM driver queued for Linux 5.2 and now also joining that is the Aspeed P2A CTRL driver...

The Radeon (and Intel) graphics driver support on DragonFlyBSD has improved a lot compared to where it was at many years ago, but it remains a perpetual catch-up game with the porting of this driver code from Linux to their BSD kernel...

It looks like Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver support is now officially ready to roll for the "Gen 11" graphics to be found with Icelake, Elkhart Lake, and whatever other Gen11 graphics parts may end up coming. The latest open-source OpenGL/Vulkan driver code now marks Gen 11 as being feature-complete...

With today's release of the GCC 9 code compiler among the many features offered in this annual update to the GNU Compiler Collection is the initial "cascadelake" target/tuning support that enables AVX-512 VNNI tuning by default as the most notable change over the former "skylake-avx512" GCC target. Anyhow, for those wondering how the GCC 9 performance differs compared to last year's GCC 8 compiler release, here are some preliminary benchmarks...

Sway 1.0 was released nearly two months ago as the i3-inspired Wayland compositor while now on approach is Sway 1.1 as the newest feature release...

Intel's Clear Linux operating system wasn't their only open-source project seeing various performance improvements over the course of April but it turns out their Scalable Video Technology AV1 (SVT-AV1) video encoder also saw a nice performance improvement at the end of April...

Longtime Mesa developer Nicolai Hähnle of AMD has sent out a big patch series today introducing a real runtime linker for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and hopefully to be used by the RADV Vulkan driver as well...

GNU Compiler Collection 9.1 was released today with a D language front-end joining the family while on the back-end is now the long-awaited Radeon GCN GPU target (although not too useful in its current form), Intel Cascadelake support, initial AMD Zen 2, C-SKY CPU support, OpenRISC CPU support, and many other features throughout this massive open-source compiler...

While we haven't yet spotted any of the other AMD Radeon "Navi" next-generation GPU support in the other software components making up AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver stack, there continues to be a lot of work happening on the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end within the mainline LLVM code-base. In fact, there's been over eleven thousand lines of new code so far pertaining to Navi/GFX10...

GNOME's Mutter compositor has seen a new, integrated clipboard manager for the in-development GNOME 3.34 cycle...

Darling is the open-source project we first covered back in 2012 that aimed to be able to run macOS software (binaries) on Linux. It's what Wine is to running Windows programs on Linux but rather to be able to handle Apple/Mac software. While we haven't heard much from the project recently, they still are pursuing their goal...

Should you be looking to control a vibrator over GPIO (general-purpose input/output), that capability is coming to the Linux 5.2 kernel thanks to a new driver...

One of the early features merged back in February for Mesa 19.1 was the new Vulkan Overlay layer to expose various performance metrics akin to the Gallium3D "HUD" also living within Mesa. Ahead of the Mesa 19.1 feature freeze, some more capabilities are now added to this Vulkan overlay/HUD...

Following the recent Chrome 74 web browser update, Google has now promoted Chrome 75 to its beta channel...

With the Linux 5.1 kernel release expected this weekend, it's too late to see any real features added to the prominent drivers in DRM-Next for the now imminent 5.2 merge window, but some fixes and FreeSync improvements are deemed ready for this next kernel cycle...

While Hitman was ported to Linux by Feral Interactive, Hitman 2 that was released back in November of 2018 hasn't seen a native Linux port. However, in recent months Hitman 2 has been running under DXVK+Proton with Steam Play for allowing this stealth video game to run nicely under Linux. More recently the latest Proton updates have worked around an issue that previously prevented our benchmarking of this game, so in this article is a look at the Hitman 2 Linux gaming performance with different AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

In addition to Dell releasing "budget-friendly" laptops with Ubuntu Linux on Wednesday, the company released new Thunderbolt and USB-C docks that should be working fine out-of-the-box on Linux...

While Clear Linux has been outperforming other Linux distributions the past several years, it's a never ending job for them of continuing to lead the way in squeezing more performance out of x86_64 hardware on Linux. During the month of April, some more performance improvements were achieved though also a few regressions appeared to have slipped into their builds...

After seven years of development and more than forty-thousand commits, GNU Guix 1.0 has been released. Guix as a refresher is the transactional package manager that can be used atop other Linux distributions while the Guix System Distribution also serves as its own GNU/Linux flavor...

While Ubuntu is not currently using Wayland by default with its GNOME Shell desktop and it doesn't look like they will try again until Ubuntu 20.10, the option is still available and they continue working in the direction of a Wayland Linux desktop future. One of their interesting "upstream" contributions in this area is with the Wayland Conformance Suite...

Adding to the many changes for Linux 5.2 is Arm's new Komeda DRM/KMS driver being extended to support the Mali D71...

The KDE Partition Manager is now much more capable and in better shape after going through a modernization process for shifting to use the newest/ideal libraries for handling disk partitioning. KDE Partition Manager 4.0 is the new release making use of these newer libraries...

While Steam Play continues getting in better shape for running more interesting Windows games on Linux, there hasn't yet been a compelling enough reason for Windows gamers to switch over to Linux and that is reflected in the latest monthly Steam numbers...

Newer Realtek WiFi chipsets are about to see better hardware support under Linux thanks to Realtek contributing the new "RTW88" driver to the mainline Linux 5.2 kernel...

Separate patch series sent out on Wednesday by Intel and AMD Linux developers are continuing work on prepping cgroup infrastructure support around graphics processors...

Yesterday Purism launched the Librem One suite of services that initially consists of a privacy-minded, but even with priding themselves on security, there ended up being a nasty launch-day security issue uncovered. The fact that their offered software was quietly re-branded open-source software also rubbed some users the wrong way...

While next week we may see the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 (RHEL8) or at least learn a release date during Red Hat Summit 2019 Boston, the Oracle folks today released their first public beta of Oracle Linux 8...

While the new Dell XPS 9380 Developer Edition is a beauty and offers very capable performance, if the price is too much, Dell has launched their "budget" Mobile Precision laptops now with Ubuntu Linux options...

Wio is the newest Wayland compositor out there and re-implements Rio, the windowing system used by Bell Labs' Plan 9 operating system...

To not a lot of surprise compared to the world of proprietary graphics drivers on Windows where once the support is retired the driver releases stop, old open-source Linux OpenGL drivers are found to be better maintained...

The Haiku operating system that continues to be the open-source project living on in the traditions of BeOS is continuing to advance its modern hardware support and application compatibility...

Now that the Radeon FreeSync support is in good standing with Linux 5.0+ and Mesa 19.0+ (or Mesa 19.1+ for RADV Vulkan support) as well as NVIDIA offering G-SYNC Compatible Linux support, if you have been desiring a FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync display but are on a limited budget, LG has an interesting 24-inch contender... A 4K FreeSync-supported display for just $219 USD?!?

Landing in time for the imminent Mesa 19.1 branching and feature freeze is a set of Gallium "Nine" improvements for improving the Direct3D 9 support for Wine/Proton Windows gaming on Linux...

Softpipe, the Gallium-based software rasterizer fallback for Mesa (not to be confused with the faster LLVMpipe), has seen some OpenGL 4.x support additions land for the upcoming Mesa 19.1...

At last month's EuroLLVM conference, NVIDIA provided an update on the "Flang" project for offering first-rate Fortran support within LLVM, including some initial benchmark figures...

Nouveau DRM maintainer Ben Skeggs at Red Hat has sent in the changes targeting the upcoming Linux 5.2 kernel...

Of the 298 original pieces of content on Phoronix during April, here is a look back at the most popular open-source news and Linux hardware reviews...

Version 0.3 of the "dav1d" AV1 video decoder was released on Tuesday and it delivers faster performance...

Yesterday we began with our preliminary performance benchmarks of Fedora 30. From those results Intel Core i9 and AMD Threadripper systems and what we're seeing on other systems in the labs, Fedora 30 indeed is coming out generally slightly faster than Fedora 29 when looking at the performance overall. In some cases the performance is much better thanks to GCC 9 and other upgrades, but overall it's a small, modest performance improvement. While that's better than seeing Fedora 30 running slower than its predecessor, there still is more potential to squeeze out of the system.

Well, here's a surprise... EA (yes, Electronic Arts) has joined The Khronos Group as a contributing member...

Valve has published the complete specifications and details on their much anticipated VR Index headset with new controllers and base stations...

Sam Hartman, Debian's new Project Leader, has issued his first (partial) monthly report with his initial activities serving in the "DPL" role...

Purism is now in the service business of selling privacy-minded software services to compete with the likes of Google's G-Suite, Twitter, and other platforms. Today the company rolled out Librem One as this new software effort...

Barring any glaring bugs being discovered in the next few days, GCC 9.1 will be released on Friday as the first stable release of the GCC 9 compiler...

Fedora 30 has managed to ship on time per its original release schedule and is packing globs of new features...

The LLVM Foundation recently accepted the f18 Fortran compiler as a new LLVM sub-project so this hugely popular compiler stack will finally have first-rate Fortran language support...

With Ubuntu 19.04 having sailed and looking in good shape by the bug counts, Ubuntu 19.10, the Eoan [EANIMAL] release, is proceeding and open for development...