Phoronix

Mesa 19.0 has finally been released! It's more than two weeks late, but it should be worth the wait given all the improvements in this quarterly feature update to this open-source graphics driver stack...

It's been over one year since Godot 3.0 debuted and today it's finally been succeeded by the release of Godot 3.1, the latest feature update for this leading cross-platform, open-source game engine...

The Flatpak 1.3 unstable series has kicked off starting the latest round of feature work to this leading Linux sandboxing / app distribution technology...

One month since the release of ROCm 2.1, the Radeon Open Compute stack has now been succeeded by ROCm 2.2...

Barring any last minute delays, GNOME 3.32 is expected to ship today as the latest six-month update to this popular open-source desktop environment. GNOME 3.32 personally has me quite excited more so for the improvements -- and bug fixes -- over "new" features, but here is a look at some of what there is to get excited about with this latest update to the GNOME 3 desktop...

With the Raspberry Pi Foundation recently having begun rolling out a Linux 4.19-based kernel to Raspberry Pi boards, here are some benchmarks looking at the performance of two Raspberry Pi systems with the new Linux 4.19 kernel compared to its previous 4.14 kernel.

While we are looking forward most to Icelake with the new "Gen 11" graphics, Intel has been working on Comet Lake for introduction this year as a Coffeelake derived successor to Whiskey Lake for desktops and mobile devices. The patches needed for Comet Lake graphics driver support on Linux are now pending...

Over the past day there has been some notable NIR improvements landing in Mesa 19.1...

Mesa 19.1 has added support for the GLX extension to create an OpenGL / OpenGL ES context that doesn't generate errors -- assuming the driver supports the likes of KHR_no_error. For applications/games acquiring their GL/GLES context in this no-error mode, it can yield possible performance benefits...

Google has released version 73 of the Chrome/Chromium web-browser today...

TURNIP is the newest Mesa-based Vulkan driver in development that provides open-source support for this graphics/compute API on Qualcomm Adreno hardware...

Ted Ts'o sent in the main EXT4 feature pull request today for the Linux 5.1 kernel merge window while David Sterba sent in a secondary batch of Btrfs material...

Thanks to the Qualcomm / Linux Foundation Code Aurora, patches are pending for the Freedreno MSM DRM kernel driver to allow the latest-generation Adreno 600 series hardware to leave its "secure" mode...

It's been a while since last running any P-State/CPUFreq frequency scaling driver and governor comparisons on Intel desktop systems, so given the recent release of Linux 5.0 I ran some tests for looking at the current state of affairs. Using an Intel Core i9 9900K I tested both the P-State and CPUFreq scaling drivers and their prominent governor options for seeing not only how the raw performance compares but also the system power consumption, CPU thermals, and performance-per-Watt.

It's been just one week since Linux 5.0 was christened followed this weekend by the first point release and now that brand new kernel is shipping to users of Intel's rolling-release Clear Linux platform...

Recent kernels like Linux 4.20 brought various performance enhancements to FUSE, the kernel code allowing for file-systems to run in user-space. With Linux 5.1 there is additional FUSE optimization work...

For those habitually riding the bleeding-edge open-source Radeon graphics driver stack, there are some updated firmware files now available for newer AMD graphics processors...

Fedora 31 will likely be enabling various GCC security hardening flags by default in trying to further enhance the security of the software in its repositories and those building software on their own Fedora systems...

While there is the MuQSS CPU scheduler that lives out of tree as a promising CPU scheduler for the Linux kernel, it is not alone. Another option has been the PDS scheduler while now its author, Alfred Chen, has announced another new CPU kernel scheduler option he has dubbed the BitMap Queue...

Fedora 30 is aiming to ship with the Wayland native version of Firefox by default rather than relying upon XWayland. This Wayland-native Firefox has long been offered in the Fedora repository but not used as the default browser. While it's not all squared away yet, more time has been granted to get it ready for this spring update to Fedora...

We are over half-way through the Linux 5.1 kernel merge window. While we've had many articles detailing the individual changes thus far of the new kernel, if you are unfortunately behind on your Phoronix reading, here's a quick look at some of what has been queued this far for this next major kernel update...

The work done by Red Hat's Karol Herbst over the past year for plumbing in NIR intermediate representation support within the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" Gallium3D driver will finally be landing...

F5 Networks, a cloud application services firm, is acquiring NGINX Inc as the company behind the open-source, lightweight NGINX web-server...

The recently open-sourced Intel video encoders for VP9, AV1, and HEVC under the "Streaming Video Technology" (SVT) umbrella continue looking very positive especially for the newer VP9/AV1 video formats...

One week has passed since the official debut of Linux 5.0 and now long-time kernel hacker Con Kolivas is out with his 5.0-ck1 kernel patch as well as an updated MuQSS scheduler...

It's been a poorly kept secret for months, but today Microsoft formally announced DTrace for Windows...

Up for discussion on the Linux kernel mailing list is adding support for the Secure Launch boot protocol to Linux. This is part of the recent efforts to supporting Linux in "secure" boot environments around Intel Trusted Execution Technology and AMD SKINIT platform security...

While nearly all Linux distributions have been mitigated against the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities for over one year, the performance ahead associated with these speculative execution vulnerabilities can vary. This is especially more so with the enterprise Linux distributions that are generally shipping on older kernel branches prior to where the initial kernel support was mainlined. With recent kernel releases we've also seen varying optimizations and other changes around the Spectre/Meltdown/L1TF mitigations. So for those wondering about the varying impact, here are some side-by-side benchmarks.

Sway 1.0 is now available for this independent Wayland compositor that is inspired by the i3 X11 window manager and has matured with quite an in-depth feature set as well as evolved along with its own "WLROOTS" Wayland library...

While earlier this month it looked like Intel was going to be the likely suitor to Mellanox Technologies, NVIDIA has managed to edge out Intel and the others bidding for the networking chip provider...

The input subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 5.1 kernel include a number of touch-screen driver additions...

A new release of the GNU "Core Utilities" is out that brings with it the new basenc command...

LLVM 8.0 had been expected for release prior to the end of February, but now as we approach the middle of March, this major compiler update along with associated sub-projects like Clang 8.0 have yet to see the light of day...

The latest work within Mesa 19.1 is for the Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver and that is dumping more shader information within the VK_EXT_debug_report extension. The output of that is then used by the Mesa developers' VKpipeline-DB utility for offline analysis...

While we are expecting to see more Intel Optane NVDIMMs this year that offer up persistent memory using 3DXPoint memory on the DDR4 bus for persistent storage, the Linux 5.1 kernel might pick-up support for treating this persistent memory back as traditional RAM if so desired...

Meson 0.50 is now available as the latest feature update to this increasingly used cross-platform build system that is powering the likes of many GNOME projects, many X.Org/FreeDesktop.org low-level software components, and other software that when paired with Ninja is known for its lightning fast build times and better cross-OS support compared to traditional alternatives...

The Panfrost Gallium3D driver has been quick to take form since it was merged to the Mesa 19.1 development code a month ago providing open-source 3D support for Arm Mali Midgard and Bifrost graphics hardware. The latest achievement for this Gallium3D driver in Mesa Git is being able to run with the yet-to-be-merged DRM kernel driver...

SIMPLE_LMK is a simple low-memory killer being worked on for potential upstreaming in the mainline Linux kernel in the future but for now is simply seeking comments on its design approach...

Back when kernel mode-setting (KMS) was originally talked about a decade ago one of the talked about possibilities of implementing a Linux "Blue Screen of Death" / better error handling when a dramatic system problem occurs. Such an implementation never really materialized but now in 2019 there is a developer pursuing new work in this area with a DRM-based kernel oops viewer...

Linux 5.1 is bringing another change to help bolster the security of Linux systems in light of recent exploits...

The KDE stack continues seeing a lot of bug fixing and polishing in time for the spring Linux distribution updates...

It's been just one week since the debut of the big Linux 5.0 kernel release and today that's been succeeded by Linux 5.0.1 as the first fix-things-up release...

While Fedora is generally known to ship the very latest upstream software with each release, Fedora has continued shipping Mono 4.8 even though Mono 5.0 shipped in May 2017. With the Fedora 31 release due out later in the year, they are finally working on switching to Mono 5...

The x86 platform driver updates were sent in Friday for the Linux 5.1 kernel...

The BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system now has good USB3/XHCI support in place with their latest daily snapshots...

The Lemote Yeeloong netbooks came out a decade ago and based on the MIPS Loongson 2F processor clocked up to 900MHz, offered up to 1GB of RAM, some models featuring an 8GB SSD, and driving the display was a Silicon Motion controller. The Yeeloong netbooks/laptops were even used by Richard Stallman for being open-source friendly and he used the devices as his own system for several years. Finally in 2019, better mainline Linux kernel support is being worked on...

Support is coming together within the Linux kernel and QEMU for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack to handle Extended Display Identification Data (EDID) for the virtual displays to handle some practical improvements moving forward...

KDE Frameworks 5.56.0 is out as the latest monthly update to this collection of add-on libraries complementing Qt5...

With GNOME 3.32 now buttoned up for release next week, the developers are already getting ready to kick off the GNOME 3.34 development cycle...

NVIDIA will no longer be officially supporting Kepler mobile/notebook GPUs by their mainline driver. For now at least they will continue supporting Kepler desktop GPUs by their mainline driver...