Phoronix

With SIGGRAPH 2019 happening next week in LA, The Khronos Group has already kicked off the news cycle by making several announcements from forming a 3D Commerce Initiative Working Group to releasing new WebGL extensions to making use of Binomical's Basis Universal tech for better compression...

For those wondering how the performance compares of AMD's new Zen 2 processors between Windows 10 and Linux, here are our initial benchmarks across dozens of benchmarks for the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X on Windows 10 Pro 1903 against Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS.

Two months from today marks the beta and kernel freezes for the Ubuntu 19.10 release while in less than one month is already the feature freeze. Canonical developers and others within the Ubuntu community remain quite busy this summer working on this "Eoan Ermine" release and is of particular importance with next cycle being the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS swing...

While a bit quiet over the summer months and their Data Parallel C++ announcement was recently made, Intel's LLVM-based SYCL compiler continues maturing and picking up new features as the beta roll-out of oneAPI is expected in Q4...

OpenGL is still evolving and days ahead of SIGGRAPH 2019, NVIDIA has published a set of new GL extensions for improving multi-GPU rendering...

Zink is the year-old project implementing OpenGL over Vulkan using Mesa/Gallium3D infrastructure. While Zink had been making some good progress by developer Erik Faye-Lund of Collabora, he went back to rewriting some core pieces of Zink to address some design defects. In the process of this rewrite, Zink is currently back to OpenGL 2.1 era support over Vulkan...

S3 Graphics drivers are still alive and well on Linux, well, sort of. On Thursday was the first new open-source xf86-video-s3 driver update in seven years...

As the first Simple DirectMedia Layer release of 2019, SDL 2.0.10 has debuted today for this library that's widely used by cross-platform games including as part of the Steam run-time...

Jolla has released Sailfish OS 3.1 "Seitseminen" as their Linux-based mobile operating system update and their biggest since shipping Sailfish OS 3 back in 2018...

XCP-ng, the enterprise-focused hypervisor based on Xen Server that offers a web UI for management, scalability optimizations, live migration support, and other community features, is up to version 8.0...

After already having gone through three alpha releases, PHP 7.4 has reached its feature freeze and branching. As a result, the first PHP 7.4 beta is now available that will follow by multiple betas and release candidates while hopefully being released by the end of November...

Remember back in 2017 when Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan talked about plans for better Linux support for their high-end gaming laptops on Linux? More than two years later, they have yet to ship a Linux laptop nor make any other measurable improvements to their Linux support...

Two months have already passed since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 8.8 while today marks the first development snapshot/milestone of the next quarterly feature update, Phoronix Test Suite 9.0-Asker...

Another late change proposal being talked about for this autumn's Fedora 31 release is introducing a 64-bit ARM (AArch64) Xfce desktop spin...

In recent months we've heard of Intel engineers working on better supporting third-party packages on Clear Linux that would be akin to Arch's AUR, Ubuntu's PPA, or Fedora's Copr systems for allowing unofficial/third-party packages to be more easily made available particularly in cases of closed-source software. It looks like that internally that system is now in beta as they work towards having more software available on Clear Linux...

DragonFlyBSD is replacing their 48-core Opteron server named "Monster" with two of the new AMD Ryzen 9 3900X "Zen 2" processors as well as a spare Xeon server. DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon continues to be mighty impressed by AMD's latest processor offerings...

The open-source MoltenVK continues advancing for supporting a healthy subset of the Vulkan API on Apple's macOS and iOS platforms. MoltenVK 1.0.36 was released today with support for more Vulkan extensions, many bug fixes, and a variety of other improvements...

The gNewSense that is based on Debian GNU/Linux but comprised entirely of free software without any non-free software support is now without a maintainer...

Following the Antergos Linux distribution being discontinued one of the new projects stemming from that decision is Endeavour OS as a new convenient to use Arch Linux distribution. Here are some early benchmarks of Endeavour OS compared to Ubuntu, Clear Linux, and other distributions on an Intel Core i9 system.

Ahead of the first point release to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 due out around October, the first beta of RHEL 8.1 is now available for early evaluation...

Released last week was Deepin 15.11 with various desktop improvements for this popular third-party desktop option. This desktop option could be on its way to Fedora 31's package repository to replace the existing Deepin 5.9 packaging...

With OpenSUSE now LTO'ing their Tumbleweed packages by default, SUSE's compiler team is looking at improving the compilation experience and one of those steps is via a proposed "-flto=auto" option...

It's arriving one week late, but GNOME 3.33.4 is now available as the latest snapshot in the trek towards GNOME 3.34 this September...

It was a year and a half ago that Red Hat acquired CoreOS while today they are announcing their first preview release of Fedora CoreOS...

The excitement over the open-source AMD Radeon Navi graphics driver support for Linux gamers/users continues. On Tuesday the RADV driver saw support land for binning to boost performance but while Bas was doing that, Samuel Pitoiset of Valve posted patches allowing GFX10/Navi to support Vulkan transform feedback...

Another late change proposal coming in for Fedora 31 is to allow update-alternatives to optionally point /usr/bin/ld as the default linker to /usr/bin/lld for the LLVM linker...

The latest change for Mesa 19.2 to better the new Radeon RX 5000 "Navi" series support is binning in the RADV driver...

Radeon Cauldron 1.0 is AMD's new graphics SDK framework for developing Vulkan and Direct3D 12 demos/prototypes/samples...

If you are sticking to stable versions of Mesa, the Mesa 19.1.3 point release is out today as the latest and greatest version of this collection of open-source graphics drivers...

While for Intel x86_64 with the latest compilers it's a very competitive race between LLVM Clang and GCC, how is that battle playing out on the IBM POWER9 front? Using the interesting Raptor Blackbird with IBM POWER9 4-core / 16-thread CPU, here are some recent benchmarks I did between GCC 9, GCC 10, and LLVM Clang 8.

While debating new CPU requirements for Fedora 32 potentially taking it all the way to AVX2 CPUs as a new base requirement, before that Fedora 31 still needs to get finished up and there is some late feature work happening for this current cycle...

While AMD developers published their "Znver2" compiler patches for Zen 2 originally back in November, months ahead of the recent Ryzen 3000 series launch, this compiler support was incomplete as it re-used the existing scheduler model and costs table of Znver1. Now though one of SUSE's compiler experts who often works in cooperation with AMD has published the new Znver2 scheduler model and costs table for Zen 2...

Linux sound maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE has posted a set of patches implementing HD audio component notifier support for the Radeon and Nouveau DRM kernel drivers...

Darling is the long-standing (albeit for some years idling) effort to allow macOS binaries to run on Linux that is akin to Wine but focused on an Apple macOS layer rather than Windows. This summer it's been moving along and seeing some new developer contributions...

An early change being talked about for Fedora 32, due out in the spring of next year, is raising the x86_64 CPU requirements for running Fedora Linux. When initially hearing of this plan, the goal is even more ambitious than I was initially thinking: AVX2...

Coreboot 4.10 was released today with some 2,500+ commits over the past eight months for this increasingly popular open-source alternative to proprietary BIOS implementations...

The GFX-RS high performance graphics API for the Rust programming language and based on Vulkan while mapping to Metal when on Apple systems is out with a new release...

Feral Interactive has just announced they've brought the Commander Update DLC for Company of Heroes 2 over to Linux (and macOS) as well...

As it's been a few weeks since last hosting any Linux distribution comparison and now with the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed enabling LTO by default, here are some fresh Linux distribution comparison results plus tossing the newly-released Debian 10.0 into the mix as well. This round of testing included Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Ubuntu 19.04, Fedora Workstation 30, openSUSE Leap 15.1, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Clear Linux 30450, and Debian 10.0.

The BFQ I/O scheduler is working out fairly well these days as shown in our benchmarks. The Budget Fair Queueing scheduler supports both throughput and low-latency modes while working particularly well for consumer-grade hardware. Should the Ubuntu desktop be using BFQ by default?..

GNOME developers continue to be hard at work on GTK4 and trying to ensure this major tool-kit update will be a great success...

When it comes to open-source processor ISAs, RISC-V currently captures much of the spotlight but OpenRISC continues chugging along as another open-source CPU architecture. The OpenRISC GCC compiler back-end and other software tooling also continues to move along for this architecture that's been in the works since 2000...

Independent Linux kernel hacker Con Kolivas has released his newest "ck1" patch-set for the recently released Linux 5.2 kernel code-base. Complementing these kernel changes is his primary focus: the MuQSS scheduler that continues to aim for better interactivity and performance on mobile/desktop systems...

Just as expected, Linus Torvalds this afternoon issued the first release candidate of the forthcoming Linux 5.3 kernel...

Vulkan 1.1.116 was released today as the latest weekly update to this high performance graphics API and comes with one new extension in tow...

The Linux 5.3 kernel merge window is expected to close today so here is our usual recap of all the changes that made it into the mainline tree over the past two weeks. There is a lot of changes to be excited about from Radeon RX 5700 Navi support to various CPU improvements and ongoing performance work to supporting newer Apple MacBook laptops and Intel Speed Select Technology enablement.

Feral developers released a new version of their GameMode Linux game performance optimization daemon/client this weekend in order to allow this update to land in the upcoming Fedora Workstation 31. GameMode 1.4 offers up many features including new interfaces for allowing better GNOME integration and thus the Fedora interest in seeing this version in their autumn Linux distribution update...

With the KDE Plasma 5.17 release, the desktop will make it easy to see a network's QR code for in turn making it super quick and simple for sharing network information with other users and devices...

As a last minute surprise for the Linux 5.3 kernel merge window is support for the keyboard and trackpads on newer Apple MacBooks and MacBook Pro laptops...

IO_uring is designed to deliver fast and efficient I/O operations thanks to a re-designed interface introduced in Linux 5.1 with various efficiency improvements compared to the kernel's existing asynchronous I/O code. But it turns out there was a big bottleneck within the current IO_uring code up until now...