Phoronix

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...

KDE Plasma right now is affected by an annoying bug where connecting or disconnecting a monitor will end up resetting your HiDPI scaling factors. Fortunately, that is now fixed for Plasma 5.16.0...

Facebook has worked on various programming language innovations over the years from all their work on HHVM at a time when PHP was slow to working on a super fast C/C++ pre-processor to other open-source language work. Their latest work in this area is on supporting just-in-time compilation of C++ code to treat it like a scripting language...

For those running Linux on older Apple MacBook Pros and other Macs sporting Thunderbolt 1/2 controllers, there is better support for them coming with the upcoming Linux 5.2 kernel cycle...

There hasn't been much to report on recently for Radeon's AMDKFD driver that serves as the kernel code for the Radeon GPU compute stack and part of the company's ROCm offering. AMDKFD work hasn't let up but has just been queuing for a while in the amd-kfd-staging Git branch and now there are a host of improvements to be mainlined...

OpenMandriva remains among the few Linux distributions using the LLVM Clang compiler by default where possible in place of the GCC compiler. While at times it's difficult in maintaining this combination, they continue to find great success in using Clang as their default compiler...

With next month's Linux 5.2 kernel merge window there are a number of notable improvements queued up for improving the Logitech hardware support...

While there are just a few days left to the Mesa 19.1 development period before the code branching and feature freeze, the Gallium Nine state tracker for Direct3D 9 acceleration with Mesa drivers has a set of last minute patches...

If you are interested in FreeBSD at all, their core team of developers is hoping you will take a few minutes and participate in their survey...

There are two separate but exciting adoption milestones for the Vulkan graphics API...

While we are eager for the release of Debian 10 this summer, Debian 9.9 is out this weekend as the latest stable release update to "Stretch" and primarily delivering security fixes...

There's a new open-source NVIDIA driver heading to the mainline kernel with Linux 5.2, but don't get too excited...

A patch series being worked on by Thomas Zimmermann of SUSE allows sharing the TTM memory management implementation between Linux's different DRM frame-buffer drivers...

Fresh off the release of yesterday's Wine 4.7 update, Wine-Staging 4.7 is rolling out with 830+ patches re-based on top of this code-base for running Windows games/applications on Linux/macOS...

In addition to the work this week on exposing EXT_gpu_shader4 / EXT_texture_buffer_object, well known AMD open-source developer Marek Olšák has also been working a patch to help lower the input lag with Mesa...

RenderDoc 1.3 is now available as the newest update for this cross-platform, multi-API graphics debugging tool...

Wine 4.7 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release of Wine for running your favorite Windows games and programs on Linux and other operating systems...

This week NVIDIA introduced the $149 USD Turing-powered GTX 1650 graphics card. On launch day I picked up the ASUS GeForce GTX 1650 4GB Dual-Fan Edition (Dual-GTX1650-O4G) graphics card for Linux testing and have out now the initial GTX 1650 Linux performance benchmarks under Ubuntu compared to an assortment of lower-end and older AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

While yesterday it was a "No-Go" for releasing Fedora 30, the developers and testers did a stellar job over the past twenty-four hours and got Fedora into shape for releasing on-time next week Tuesday...

Following yesterday's branching of the GCC 9 code-base after hitting no high priority regressions left and thus opening trunk for GCC 10 development, the release candidate of GCC 9 is now available while the official GCC 9.1.0 compiler may be released next week if all goes well...

The Linux 5.2 kernel will allow the EXT4 file-system on a per-directory basis to selectively support case-insensitive files/folders...

Queued now into staging for introduction with the upcoming Linux 5.2 kernel cycle is a Generic Counter Interface to allow counter devices/drivers to re-use this common code rather than having to implement redundant code into each of these drivers...

Since the FreeSync AMDGPU kernel driver support was introduced earlier this year in the Linux 5.0 kernel, it's continued to be improved upon and another round of updated patches were posted today aiming to help the variable rate refresh behavior in low frame-rate scenarios...

Red Hat's lead X.Org developer Adam Jackson is looking at reworking the VESA display code path for Fedora moving forward. The plan would entail removing some old "sketchy code" from the X.Org Server and moving to UVESAFB as the VESA-based FBDEV driver but would mean dropping support for the OpenChrome driver among other changes...

Developers at IBM are working on a new concept for the Linux kernel of "system call isolation" in order to isolate parts of the kernel when impacted by vulnerabilities...

It's been just one month since GNOME 3.32 shipped as the latest and greatest work going into the GNOME desktop environment. Premiering today is GNOME 3.33.1 as the first development snapshot in the road to the release of GNOME 3.34 this September...

While the Mesa-based Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver has been exposing Vulkan 1.1 since last year, the upcoming Mesa 19.1 will bring support for Vulkan 1.1 when this driver is active on Android systems...

While Fedora 30 isn't even out the door yet and Fedora 32 not coming out until roughly one year from now, we already know one big change on the table: dropping Python 2 and packages depending upon it...