Phoronix

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...

The third beta of the Qt 5.13 tool-kit is now available for testing as the developers try to get this update ready to ship as stable in May...

In addition to squaring up the massive ZFS On Linux 0.8 milestone and helping with bringing ZFS On Linux to FreeBSD, the OpenZFS / ZFS On Linux team is also assembling a Code of Conduct...

While it's looking like we are months out from seeing Intel "Gen 11" graphics in any Icelake parts and the Iris Gallium3D driver should be the default driver before year's end, the current "i965" Mesa driver has enabled fast color clears support for these next-generation graphics processors...

Strange Brigade is a third-person shooter game released last August for Microsoft Windows and game consoles. This game is powered by Rebellion Developments' Asura Engine and while there is no native Linux port, is running well on Linux via Steam Play. Here are benchmarks with twenty-two different graphics cards looking at the current performance on Ubuntu Linux.

In addition to investing in their new "Iris" Gallium3D OpenGL driver and continuing to mature their "ANV" Vulkan driver, they do continue bolstering their OpenCL "NEO" open-source Linux driver that doesn't receive as much attention by the community but is beginning to appear within Linux distribution repositories as the successor to their earlier "Beignet" OpenCL driver...

A new release of OpenBLAS is now available, the widely-used open-source BLAS implementation for optimized linear algebra kernels. With OpenBLAS 0.3.6, work has continued on maximizing the BLAS performance for a variety of CPU architectures...

Assuming Linux 5.1 manages to ship next weekend, the Linux 5.2 merge window will immediately kick off following that release. In our close monitoring of the different development branches in recent weeks, the Linux 5.2 kernel is shaping up to be an outright massive release...

Announced earlier this year was Purism PureBoot for the company's bundle of safeguards for protecting a user's boot process by having Intel ME disabled, Coreboot in place of a proprietary system BIOS, a USB Librem Key as their security token, and other mechanisms for securing the boot process and preventing theft/rootkits/security risks...

As the first of our benchmarks for Fedora 30 that is set to be released on Tuesday, here are some benchmarks comparing Fedora 29, Fedora 29 with current updates, and Fedora 30 on Intel Core i9 7980XE and AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX HEDT platforms. Fedora 30 benchmarks on other systems are coming as well.

With Mesa 19.1 due to see its code branched this week and that marks the start of the feature freeze and release dance ahead of the official debut in late May, here are some development stats for the current state of the Mesa3D code-base...

Confirming recent leaks, AMD today announced the Ryzen 7 2700X Gold Edition and Radeon VII Gold Edition products in marking the 50th anniversary of Advanced Micro Devices...

Back in January Intel made available their new open-source, LLVM-based SYCL compiler that they are looking to contribute to upstream LLVM. Their SYCL compiler will be used for single-source programming to target the company's growing diverse range of devices and is part of their new "oneAPI" initiative. The SYCL support isn't yet in upstream LLVM, but they are making progress while continuing to evolve the code...

The developers at iX Systems continue to be on a roll this spring. Just days after announcing their new FreeBSD images built with "ZFS On Linux" for testing as the new FreeBSD ZFS implementation, this weekend they announced their new FreeBSD "pkgbase" images are now available for testing...

The Apache Software Foundation has moved its 350+ open-source projects onto GitHub for its Git hosting infrastructure...

Linus Torvalds has recovered from last week's memma eating and this evening released Linux 5.1-rc7 as the newest test release of the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel...

VMware can be thanked for one of the performance optimizations coming with the upcoming Linux 5.2 kernel cycle...