Phoronix

As has been expected the past several weeks, NVIDIA rolled out a driver update today providing DXR ray-tracing support going back to non-RTX Pascal GPUs. While NVIDIA has mostly been trumpeting the DirectX 12 ray-tracing abilities now with these older GPUs lacking RTX cores, their work does include enabling of Vulkan VK_NV_ray_tracing support on these graphics processors...

With the continuously evolving RADV Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver and near-weekly updates to the AMD's official "AMDVLK" open-source tree Vulkan driver, how are these competing AMD Vulkan Linux drivers comparing these days? As it's been a while since our last benchmarking comparison of the official AMDVLK driver against the open-source and more common/popular Mesa RADV driver, here are some fresh benchmarks of RADV from Mesa 19.0 on Ubuntu 19.04 as well as 19.1-devel compared to the latest AMDVLK driver code.

Proxmox VE 5.4 was released today as the server virtualization environment based on Debian and allows for easily deploying LXC containers and KVM-based virtual machines from a web-based interface...

Complementing the initial set of AMDGPU changes for Linux 5.2, Alex Deucher of AMD has sent in another pull request of new material for this next version of the Linux kernel...

Well known open-source developer Lennart Poettering has shined some light onto Fedora Workstation's packaging state that it could be beneficial reducing the set of packages installed by default...

While the U2F Zero has already been superseded by the "Solo" FIDO2 security key, this USB-based U2F token for two-factor authentication is finally seeing mainline support come Linux 5.2...

The belated Mesa 19.0.2 is now available as the newest stable release to these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers...

Seven years after Luc Verhaegen started the Lima driver project for open-source Mali graphics -- one of the first reverse-engineered, open-source Arm graphics driver attempts in general -- while he is no longer involved with the initiative, developer Qiang Yu picked it up and has successfully worked it into a functioning open-source OpenGL Gallium3D driver that has been merged into Mesa Git...

It's been a while since NVIDIA last issued a new Windows/Linux Vulkan beta driver update but that changed today with gamers and developers on Linux today having access to the 418.52.03 driver build...

Over the past week we've been delivering several benchmarks of the new Intel Xeon Scalable "Cascade Lake" processors under Linux with the Platinum 8280 processors. The Linux support and performance is hitting expectations, but what about on the BSDs? I spent some time this week trying out the dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 processors within the Gigabyte S451-3R0 Storage Server. The FreeBSD 12.0 support has been in great shape and in this article are some comparison benchmarks between various Linux distributions and FreeBSD for those curious.

For those intrigued by Dbus-Broker as a high-performance, user-space D-Bus compatible implementation, Dbus-Broker 20 has been released...

Following yesterday's Ubuntu 18.10 vs. 19.04 Radeon gaming/graphics benchmarks I decided to try out the Radeon VII on Ubuntu 19.04, which should be working out-of-the-box given its use of Linux 5.0 and Mesa 19.0. Unfortunately, earlier Radeon VII (Vega 20) issues I've been encountering are still plaguing the card...

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released a new version of Raspbian, its Debian-based operating system for Raspberry Pi devices...

Mesa's "RADV" Radeon Vulkan open-source driver has landed support for VK_AMD_gpu_shader_half_float...

While Linux users can today manually enable WebRender support for their Firefox installations, Mozilla is making the necessary adjustments to begin experimenting with enabling this Rust-written GPU-based rendering element for "qualified" Linux devices...

With Ubuntu 19.04 due for release next week, here is a look at how the AMD Radeon Linux gaming performance is looking out-of-the-box on the Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco Dingo" compared to the current Ubuntu 18.10 release.

Not to be confused with NVMe or any other memory/storage tech, NetBSD's NVMM is a new hypervisor that has been in-development the past half-year for Intel/AMD x86-64 processors and will premiere with the NetBSD 9.0 release...

In February of 2018 Intel open-sourced their new OpenCL Linux driver dubbed "NEO" that is the replacement to their long-standing "Beignet" OpenCL driver. This modern OpenCL stack is on its way now to the repositories of Ubuntu and Debian distributions...

For the past number of months we've seen Canonical developers working on ZFS support in the Ubuntu desktop and ZFS root partition support so that the Ubuntu desktop could (optionally) be installed to a ZFS On Linux partition. That work has been continuing and it's looking like we could see the fruits of that work for the Ubuntu 19.10 cycle...

The GCC 9 compiler is due to be released in the next few weeks and among the many new and improved features is an option designed to help generate binaries that are friendly for live-patching purposes. With the Linux 5.2 kernel, this option will be used by default when building a kernel with live-patching support and that has the potential for some slight slowdowns...

It's been 23 months since the release of GRUB 2.02 while the next release, GRUB 2.04, is finally around the corner. GRUB 2.04-rc1 was issued today as the first test release for this widely-used open-source bootloader...

Yesterday Intel finally announced their SVT-AV1 video encoder as a promising high-performance AV1 encoder but it turns out they also have open-source plans this year for developing a performant AV1 decoder, among other interesting items on their road-map...

Mesa developers have been off to a busy start this week with a lot of new code merged affecting multiple drivers...

At Monday's weekly Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) meeting, a number of changes pertaining to Fedora 31 were approved...

Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux distribution is preparing to be one of the first distributions relying upon LLVM 8 (and Clang 8) out-of-the-box as the latest major release for this widely-used compiler stack...

Released at the start of February was Lutris 0.5 with a much improved GTK3 user interface, GOG.com integration, and other improvements to this open-source Linux game manager that works from Wine-based games to Steam and various other offerings. Lutris 0.5.2 is now out with the latest set of improvements on top...

The OpenVPN 3 Linux client has been in the works for a number of months with some big features including a rewrite in C++11, exposing a D-Bus interface that yields a number of usability improvements, better DNS configuration, and various other enhancements...

Blackmagic Design has announced Davinci Resolve 16 beta as the newest feature update to the very feature-rich and cross-platform but proprietary video editor...

We've been pretty much exclusively reporting on - and benchmarking - the Intel SVT-AV1 open-source encoder since the start of February while finally today Intel has formally announced this initiative. It also turns out Netflix is cooperating with Intel on this Scalable Video Technology with their plan to make use of it...

With the Linux 5.0 kernel the AMDGPU landed its support for FreeSync / Variable Rate Refresh support and that's already been joined by FreeSync/VRR support within Mesa's RadeonSI OpenGL driver. But FreeSync support for the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver has been delayed -- a merge request is now open but it's not expected to be merged at this point for a lack of a configuration management system...

GZDoom, one of the actively maintained open-source ports of the original Doom game, reached version 4.0 support this weekend with an initial Vulkan renderer in tow...

It's been over two weeks since the release of Vulkan 1.1.105 while now it's been succeeded by Vulkan 1.1.106...

While we are quite looking forward to Ryzen 3000 (Zen 2) desktop processors this summer, for those in the market for AMD mobile processors in business notebooks/laptops, AMD today announced the 2nd Gen Ryzen PRO mobile processors...

We've been looking forward to the ability to run Linux distributions on the recent Windows 10 Arm laptops and there has been some work in making it happen albeit not yet out-of-the-box and various hardware/kernel quirks with the different port attempts so far. But it looks like it could soon become an easy reality thanks to Red Hat...

Almost one year to the day after more than 2,000 open-source projects were referencing Vulkan in some capacity on GitHub, over the weekend it breached the threshold of more than 3,000 projects...

In addition to Intel's work on IWD as the new Linux wireless daemon aiming to compete with WPA-Supplicant, another Linux networking project still being worked on by Intel's Open-Source Technology Center is ConnMan for as a Linux Internet/network connection daemon...

Linus Torvalds just announced the release of Linux 5.1-rc4 a few minutes ago as the latest weekly release candidate and just a few weeks out from the stable Linux 5.1 debut...

GIMP 2.10.10 was released today as the first stable release for this open-source image manipulation program since last November when GIMP 2.10.8 released...

April is off to a busy start for KDE developers as besides preparing for KDE Applications 19.04, some early work on KDE Applications 19.08 is already underway as is development work for KDE Plasma 5.16 as the next desktop update and the next monthly KDE Frameworks 5.57 collection...

While we remain hopeful about potentially seeing WireGuard in the mainline Linux 5.2 kernel, for those using this secure network tunnel already with the out-of-tree DKMS Linux support (or running WireGuard on another supported operating system), WireGuard "0.0.20190406" is out this weekend as the newest development snapshot...

For those currently using a Raptor Talos II or awaiting the Raptor Blackbird or are running another IBM POWER system like the recently covered cheap POWER servers, there is a CPU Idle patch-set on the way that helps improve the power/performance...

IWD, the Intel open-source wireless daemon for Linux systems that they are positioning to potentially replace WPA Supplicant in the future, is out this week with two new updates...

With game engines becoming increasingly advanced, Unity Technologies is looking to expand their compiler team with more LLVM expertise...

LVFS, the Linux Vendor Firmware Service, that pairs with Fwupd integration for offering firmware/BIOS updates to Linux users could be offering up more than ten thousand distinct firmware files before the end of the calendar year...

DXVK 1.1 is out this weekend in time for some weekend Linux game testing. This library, which is used for implementing Direct3D 10/11 over Vulkan for the benefit of Windows games running on Linux under Wine/Proton (Steam Play), has new abilities and performance enhancements with today's update...

Continuing on from yesterday's Linux OS comparison/benchmarks on Intel 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable Cascade Lake CPUs, here are some follow-up tests focusing on the video encode performance for this dual Xeon Platinum 8280 server when focusing on Intel's high-performance "Streaming Video Technology" (SVT) encoders for VP9, AV1, and H.265/HEVC...

By the time the next Linux kernel is released it will have been roughly a year and a half since the Spectre and Meltdown CPU speculative execution vulnerabilities went public and the mitigations started appearing within the kernel. Finally now it's being discussed again by upstream developers over improving the switches / tunable knobs for easily configuring these performance-degrading mitigations...

If you are looking for some kid-friendly Linux gaming this weekend, SuperTuxKart 0.10 has reached release candidate maturity with its LAN/Internet multiplayer support...

While Cascade Lake Xeon Scalable processors launched just this week, already with their successor "Cooper Lake" we are looking forward to Intel supporting the BFloat16 floating-point format designed for machine learning workloads. GNU's Gas now has assembler/disassembler support for BF16 instructions...

Beginning with next week's Wine 4.6 development release, this program for running Windows games/applications on Linux/macOS will now support a shared Wine-Mono installation rather than requiring this open-source .NET implementation to be installed per-prefix. The benefit of this change is reducing the disk space if you keep around multiple Wine prefixes and likely a speedier creation of new prefixes...