Phoronix

With LibreOffice 6.4 branched ahead of its release next year, feature development is open on what will be the next follow-on release for later in 2020. And this week one big underlying code change was merged... Using Skia for drawing the interface in an effort to ultimately replace the Cairo usage...

Built off yesterday's release of Wine 4.21 is now a new Wine-Staging release that continues shipping over 800 patches on top of upstream Wine for offering an experimental/testing blend that often works out much better for gaming on Linux...

Sent in on Thursday were the platform-drivers-x86 updates targeting the Linux 5.5 kernel...

Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in the char/misc changes earlier this week and were already merged for Linux 5.5...

The Rust-based "rav1e" AV1 video encoder continues picking up performance optimizations...

Earlier this week as part of his series of pull requests, Greg Kroah-Hartman has submitted the USB subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 5.5 kernel...

Wine 4.21 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release as the feature freeze approaches for the Wine 5.0 release in early 2020...

The new AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X is performing faster on Linux than Microsoft Windows 10. When carrying out more than 80 different tests on Windows 10 compared to five Linux distributions, Windows 10 was beat out by the open-source competition. However, the performance loss for Windows isn't as dramatic as we have seen out of earlier generations of Ryzen Threadripper HEDT workstations. Here are those benchmarks of Windows 10 compared to Ubuntu 19.10, CentOS 8, Clear Linux, Fedora Workstation 31, and openSUSE Tumbleweed.

Systemd has a present for you with a new release that comes bearing more features for this Linux init system...

As we've known for a long time, VirtIO-GPU / Virgl Vulkan support to allow accelerated Vulkan within virtual machines is in the works but still has a long road ahead. A number of other VirtIO-GPU features are also in the works or at least planning stages...

When X.Org Server 1.21 finally lands those relying upon XWayland for running various Linux games should find less (or ideally, none at all) stuttering or tearing...

Just a friendly reminder that our Black Friday / US Thanksgiving / Cyber Monday promotion ends on Tuesday. Show your support for Linux hardware benchmarking and daily open-source news coverage...

Reported on earlier this month is the decision by Linux kernel developers to disable HPET for Intel Coffee Lake systems. The High Precision Event Timer was being disabled since on some Coffee Lake systems at least this timer skews when entering the PC10 power state and that makes the time-stamp counter unstable...

The Cedrus video decode driver developed by Bootlin after successful crowdfunding for creating an open-source Linux video decoder for Allwinner SoCs now has H.265 support!..

This week Microsoft released Windows Terminal Preview 0.7 with some groundbreaking features... Well compared to Command Prompt and the existing PowerShell terminal, but capabilities many Linux terminal emulators have offered for years...

While EXT4 is the most common Linux file-system among distributions and is quite mature at this stage, it does continue seeing noteworthy improvements every so often with new kernel releases. With Linux 5.5 there are more notable improvements on deck...

Even with all the light shed on Spectre over the past nearly two years, with the Spectre RSB (Return Stack Buffer) disclosure that did affect IBM POWER processors it turns out the mitigations applied didn't cover all of the CPUs that should have been in place until this week...

Canonical's Ubuntu engineers in cooperation with community members have figured out their 32-bit support adjustments for the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release...

The W3C put out an interesting status update this week on web games technologies and the various standardization efforts at play...

More Mesa drivers continue to be embracing NIR as the modern intermediate representation shared between these OpenGL and Vulkan open-source implementations...

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics/display driver updates were sent out last night for the Linux 5.5 kernel and quickly landed into the mainline tree...

Over a decade ago all the Linux desktop rage was over the likes of Compiz, Beryl, Compiz Fusion, and the like... Ah the memories. But to much surprise, Compiz saw a new release today. Compiz 0.9.14.1 isn't the most exciting update, but the project is still alive...

PHP 7.4 is out this US Thanksgiving day as the newest feature release for the PHP scripting language. PHP 7.4 comes with a number of prominent language additions while, yes, also having even better performance on the PHP series...

The ACPI and power management updates were sent in back on Tuesday for the Linux 5.5 kernel and punctually landed in the mainline tree...

While Mesa 19.3.0 was supposed to be out last week, it didn't happen nor is it happening this week due to blocker bugs. Given the US holiday week, it's looking like Mesa 19.3's blocker bugs might not be cleared in time for releasing next week either, but in any case the Mesa 19.3 Release Candidate 5 is now available for testing...

Coming together just over a day ago was the Google folks working on Golang figuring out many Go issues stemmed from a bug on the Linux 5.2 kernel and newer that was worked out to be some sort of a register corruption issue. That issue is now sorted out and fortunately it's a one-line kernel fix and boils down to being a caching issue...

The Linux 5.5 kernel is set to finally eliminate the code backing the sysctl system call, which has been deprecated for about a decade and should have no impact on modern systems of any architecture...

The OpenGL 4.6 extension is nearly two and a half years old while finally the open-source Mesa OpenGL drivers are catching up to this latest OpenGL revision that offers Vulkan/SPIR-V interoperability and other additions...

The SDL2 library has been seeing a number of additions in recent days to its game controller database by Valve's Sam Lantinga. The latest game controller to be added is for Google's now-shipping Stadia Controller...

Greg Kroah-Hartman mailed in the staging area changes today for the Linux 5.5 kernel and they have already been pulled into mainline...

As part of the exciting benchmark week and our ongoing tests of Intel Ice Lake on Linux, this next piece has been driven out of curiosity... While recently I posted new benchmark results of Intel Haswell to Ice Lake laptop performance, what about going further back like to the days of Nehalem? Here is that comparison of Core i7 Nehalem to Core i7 Ice Lake including power / performance-per-Watt data, thermal, and performance-per-MHz data too. Enjoy this fun comparison for how the Intel mobile performance on Ubuntu has evolved over the past decade.

While coming a few weeks later and two months after the original "shipping" of Librem 5 smartphones, the Librem 5 Birch batch has begun shipping to actual consumers who pre-ordered the privacy-minded Linux smartphone...

Flatpak 1.5.1 was released today as a new development release for this Linux application sandboxing technology. With Flatpak 1.5.1 it also begins laying the groundwork for a future payments system around Flathub as what's starting off for allowing donation-based software acquisition but could ultimately turn into a paid app store...

AMD's Vulkan driver team has today volleyed their third open-source "AMDVLK" code drop of the quarter. This AMDVLK 2019.Q4.3 driver comes with new extensions as well as Navi 14 enablement...

It's been a wild past few weeks for WireGuard as the secure VPN tunnel destined for the mainline Linux kernel and also supported on all other major platforms. It turns out WireGuard could quite well end up in the Linux 5.5 kernel rather than having to wait until Linux 5.6...

Complementing our launch-day Intel Core i9 10980XE and AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X/3970X Linux benchmarks, here is much more data now that we've had the additional time for carrying out more tests... For your viewing pleasure this US holiday week are more than 330 benchmarks carried out on both the Core i9 10980XE and Threadripper 3960X in the same configuration while running Ubuntu Linux.

Recently the CentOS Board met for the first time since the recent CentOS 8.0 and CentOS Stream releases. It was an interesting outcome...

While the release of Linux 5.3-ck1 with MuQSS was quite tardy and only arrived a few weeks ago, Con Kolivas has returned to his punctuality in releasing Linux 5.4-ck1 with the updated MuQSS scheduler intended to improve the responsiveness of desktop/mobile class Linux systems...

Simon Ser has stepped up again to manage the upcoming release of the Weston 8.0 Wayland reference compositor. No Wayland update itself is planned with nothing real to release at this point, but Weston 8.0 should arrive before the end of January...

The RISC-V kernel code has some interesting changes ready for Linux 5.5...

As covered earlier this month, the next version of the Linux kernel is finally offering mainline support for SGI's Octane / Octane II MIPS workstations from the SGI IRIX days about two decades ago. Not only is the vintage SGI IP30 hardware seeing mainline kernel support, but there is other new MIPS hardware support too...

The X.Org Server and its integrated "modesetting" DDX driver that is most commonly used on modern Linux systems in place of hardware-specific DDX drivers is finally getting more robust with xorg-server 1.21... It will no longer rely upon the server's PCI ID driver mapping for figuring out the DRI driver to load as needed for GLAMOR 2D acceleration over OpenGL...

It's that time of the year for our annual promotion of Phoronix Premium for the US Thanksgiving / Black Friday / Cyber Monday sales week... Here is the latest on how you can show your support for our Linux and open-source news coverage and benchmarking while enjoying the site ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits...

Just under three months past Lutris 0.5.3 as this open-source game manager/platform tool particularly for Wine-based gaming outside of Steam, Lutris 0.5.4 is now available in getting Linux gamers ready for any extra holiday-time gaming...

While AMD announced ROCm 3.0 earlier this month at SuperComputing 19 as the next major iteration to Radeon Open Compute, it looks like they aren't quite ready to ship it and instead released ROCm 2.10...

The Linux 5.2 kernel and newer appears to be suffering from an AVX register corruption bug stemming from signal delivery. This register corruption issue is manifesting itself at least for Golang programs leading to a variety of bug reports when running on Linux 5.2 through at least the newly-minted Linux 5.4...

While the Motorola 68000 32-bit processors are from the 80's and early 90's, there still is a loyal following of hobbyists who managed to save the "m68k" compiler back-end from being removed in GCC 11...

As part of the sound subsystem updates coming with the Linux 5.5 kernel is wake-on-voice capabilities with newer Google Chromebook device hardware...

For several release cycles already the Linux kernel has supported Intel's 5-level paging for increasing the virtual and physical address space available to systems while for Linux 5.5 the five-level support is being enabled by default...

Currently Fedora Linux supports empty passwords for local users by default but that could change with next year's Fedora 32 release...