Phoronix

Canonical's Chris Halse Rogers has shared a road-map for Mir (or terrain map as he prefers calling it) about their future plans for this open-source display server that remains focused now on providing Wayland support...

Following last week's release of Firefox 70 and Chrome 78 I posted some fresh Linux web browser benchmarks where the Mozilla browser continued to get beat severely by Google on Linux. But is the situation any better with Firefox 71 in beta? Not really...

The Ubuntu 20.04 cycle is now officially underway. Following the recent release of Ubuntu 19.10, the "Focal" archive has been created and back to syncing against the latest Debian unstable packages...

While marketed as a point release, the dav1d 0.5.1 "Asiatic Cheetah" release is quite significant for those needing to perform AV1 video decoding on older processors...

Philip Rebohle has released his latest weekly update to DXVK for accelerating Direct3D 10/11 games using Vulkan as a big boost for Steam Play (Proton) and Wine...

Linus Torvalds released the fifth weekly RC of Linux 5.4 a few hours early due to his travels around this week's Linux Foundation events in Lyon, France...

Here are the latest numbers in our ongoing AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" series benchmarking. This time around for some curiosity over the weekend is a look at the EPYC 7642 and EPYC 7742 up against the Xeon Platinum 8280 all in 2P configurations while running benchmarks publicly recommended by Intel in one of their whitepapers. Even going by Intel-recommended tests, the EPYC 7642/7742 deliver significantly better performance and cost savings over the comparable Xeon Platinum 8280.

Huawei laptops will see some support improvements with the upcoming Linux 5.5 kernel cycle...

It was another busy month in KDE space as we approach the end of October...

Fscrypt as the file-system encryption framework used by the likes of EXT4 and F2FS for offering native encryption capabilities continues being improved upon, especially by the likes of Google that are making use of it for Android devices...

Just over one year ago were proposed changes to improve the insight into per-client load activity for Intel graphics under Linux. The changes would indicate how busy each Intel graphics engine (render, blitter, video, etc) was on a per-client basis and other metrics similar to what users have to look at when it comes to analyzing CPU activity. Those patches were never followed up on or merged but have been revived this past week...

Just in time for Halloween there is a new release of GhostBSD, the operating system focused on providing a good BSD desktop experience built off FreeBSD and the MATE desktop environment...

With the soon to be released Qt 5.14 is the start of their new high-level 3D API that itself is graphics API independent for being able to target the likes of Apple Metal and Vulkan as well as Direct3D and still falling back to OpenGL. The start of the graphics API independent scenegraph renderer is turning out well for Qt 5.14 but there will be more to come in the spring with Qt 5.15 while at the end of next year with Qt 6.0 should be a much more compelling story...

As a late change that was merged yesterday for the Linux 5.4 kernel that will be released in the next few weeks, Xen 32-bit PV guest support has been deprecated...

For those looking to make use of VP9 hardware accelerated video decoding with FFmpeg, that support has landed in its latest Git code...

Following this week's Intel Core i7-1065G7 Ice Lake Linux benchmarks there was some questions and speculations about the per-clock performance of this long-awaited Intel microarchitecture update. Here is some additional data shedding light on the clock frequencies under load and ultimately how the per-clock performance compares to the common Intel previous-generation mobile CPUs.

Slated for introduction with the upcoming Linux 5.5 kernel is a System76 ACPI driver needed for their new laptops that are now shipping with an open-source Coreboot firmware implementation...

The latest feature contribution by Valve's Linux driver developers to the open-source RADV driver is a "secure compile" feature...

Complementing the big AMDGPU feature pull request from two weeks ago, on Friday AMD sent out a second batch of features targeting the upcoming Linux 5.5 kernel merge window...

NVIDIA on Friday released the 435.27.02 Linux beta driver that features a few Vulkan updates...

The Xiph rav1e AV1 video encoder written in the Rust programming language recently picked up more optimizations among other improvements...

Following a lot of work on the AMD "ACO" compiler back-end to the RADV Vulkan driver for GFX10/Navi, this experimental alternative to AMDGPU LLVM is about ready to go for these newest AMD graphics processors...

There is much greater performance potential out of RISC-V now with SiFive having announced the U8-Series...

MPV 0.30 is out as the newest release to this cross-platform, open-source video player derived from MPlayer/mplayer2...

For those curious how the Ubuntu 19.04 vs. Ubuntu 19.10 performance is looking for higher-end Intel/AMD desktops, here are some fresh benchmarks.

Oracle today released their second public beta of the forthcoming VirtualBox 6.1 virtualization software...

Canonical's Daniel Van Vugt who has become well known for focusing on his GNOME performance optimizations over the past two years is not done yet. While recapping their performance achievements around GNOME Shell for Ubuntu 19.10, he commented on performance work to happen for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Ubuntu 20.10 later on...

Con Kolivas is normally quite quick following new kernel releases in turning around a re-spin with his patch-set atop that also has his MuQSS scheduler optimized for desktop responsiveness. His Linux 5.3 kernel support is late to the party due to being tied up with other work, but Kolivas introduced his latest code today...

One of the interesting features for PHP 7.4 that is due for release at the end of next month is the long-awaited FFI (Foreign Function Interface) support. PHP 7.4's FFI lets developers call functions / variables / data structures defined in the C programming language from native PHP code...

The newest Vulkan extension now supported by Intel's open-source "ANV" Linux driver is VK_KHR_vulkan_memory_model...

Mesa 19.2.2 was released on Thursday as the second point release to this quarter's Mesa 19.2 stable series...

While Fedora 31 didn't make its original release target of this week due to being delayed by installer issues and DNF bugs, those blocker bugs have now been addressed and this next installment of Red Hat's Fedora Linux is coming out next week!..

Zink is the year-old effort led by Collabora's Erik Faye-Lund on developing a Mesa driver that maps OpenGL over Vulkan. It's now nearly within Mesa pending the merge request to actually add it...

Intel's Stephen Robinson is presenting today at the Linley Fall Processor Conference on the company's Tremont microarchitecture. Here is a look at Tremont from our pre-briefing earlier this week.

Earlier this week I delivered our initial look at the Core i7-1065G7 Icelake Linux performance compared to Whiskey Lake and Kabylake-R. The CPU performance improvements and performance-per-Watt for this 10nm+ CPU is a big upgrade over those earlier notebooks while now here is our first look at how the Icelake "Gen11" graphics compare to those aging Gen9 graphics.

The second beta of the forthcoming Qt 5.14 is now available for testing ahead of this Qt5 tool-kit update before more attention turns to focusing on Qt 6.0 for release around this time next year...

Red Hat engineers are busy working on oVirt 4.4 as the next feature release for this virtualization management platform that forms the basis of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. For this next release they are planning to ship a new Windows installer for their drivers to ease the deployment...

Similar to the transparent file-system compression that has been available on the likes of Btrfs and ZFS for years, the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) is also in the process of receiving native compression support...

On top of the many Linux 5.4 features we have been talking about so far, it turns out with this kernel update due out in November that 8K display support for Intel (Gen11 Icelake and newer) should be in order...

SwiftShader had traditionally been about OpenGL and Direct3D over CPUs as a fallback while in recent years Google has been focused on making it viable for Vulkan. Recently SwiftShader reached Vulkan 1.1 conformance, but besides being conformant to the standard it's also showing it has some CPU performance potential...

The SYCL train continues rolling: besides this single-source high-level C++ target for OpenCL playing a big role at Intel with their forthcoming oneAPI and as part of that also working on SYCL LLVM support for upstream, new SYCL learning courses, and other industry adoption around this Khronos standard, Imagination Technologies is getting behind it in at least one way...

A number of recent laptops have begun appearing that offer support for built-in privacy screens with the press of a button. These privacy screens reduce much of the visible light when viewed at angles to try to block out the screen contents from anyone that may be sitting besides the user. Linux has finally begun seeing this support prepared...

Following the closure of Librem 5 initial "Aspen" batch shipping window and it coming out that the devices were just sent to employees/insiders, Purism has now provided more information on the shipping windows ahead and known issues...

The UBports community has released the eleventh over-the-air update to Ubuntu Touch that they continue advancing as the open-source Linux smartphone/tablet stack based currently on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS...

Just earlier this month NVIDIA announced their funding of the Blender Foundation at the flagship "patron" level and now AMD has followed them in backing this foundation for assisting the development of this leading 3D creation software...

With the new releases of Mozilla Firefox 70 and Google Chrome 78 here are fresh benchmarks of these web browsers with testing under Ubuntu Linux. Additionally, on the Firefox side looking at the performance with WebRender and compared to prior releases.

With Ubuntu 19.10 having successfully shipped last week and the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS cycle just getting off the ground, longtime Ubuntu Desktop Director Will Cooke announced he is leaving Canonical...

It's always great waking up and to find RADV improvements in Mesa Git for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver that is particularly popular with Linux gamers...

In addition to Mozilla Firefox 70 having been released on Tuesday, Google released Chrome 78 as the newest version of their web-browser...

SteamOS Brewmaster hasn't seen any updates in a while (SteamOS 2.195 came out this summer with minor updates) though recently Valve's SteamOS Compositor GitHub repository did see some activity igniting hopes we could see a new release still this year... Well, it would be really great seeing a release re-based to Debian 10 "Buster" but any activity would be welcome even just pulling in all of their Linux graphics driver infrastructure updates they've funded in recent times...