Phoronix

It's sure been a busy week in the Intel open-source graphics driver space... The latest improvement is a patch series providing better context restoration in the case of GPU hangs...

Under a late change proposal for Fedora 30, the DNF package manager's "best" mode might be enabled by default...

Following a small delay, Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS is now available as the latest point release to the Bionic Beaver for a Valentine's Day debut...

The Intel DRM/KMS kernel driver will soon see PSR2 panel self refresh capabilities enabled by default for allowing more power-savings on Intel-powered ultrabooks/notebooks...

The Panfrost Gallium3D driver that was recently merged into Mesa 19.1 will soon have better support for the Mali T600/T700 series graphics...

Yesterday's patches introducing RadeonSI primitive culling via async compute yielded promising initial results, at least for the ParaView workstation application. I've been running some tests of this new functionality since yesterday and have some initial results to share on Polaris and Vega...

If you enjoy the new and original content on Phoronix each and every day of the year, now approaching the 15th birthday of Phoronix, consider taking part in our Valentine's Day special to "go premium" to help support the site while being able to enjoy the site ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits...

A big patch series was sent out today amounting to 42 patches and over four thousand lines of code for introducing the concept of memory regions to the Intel Linux graphics driver. The memory regions support is preparing for device local memory with future Intel graphics products...

Stemming from Clear Linux detailing how they optimize Python's performance using various techniques, there's been reader interest in seeing just how their Python build stacks up. Here's a look at the Clear Linux Python performance compared to a few other configurations as well as Ubuntu Linux...

Arm Holdings today announced ARMv8.1-M as their newest M-series architecture with enhancements around signal processing and machine learning for embedded devices...

It missed the GNOME 3.32 Beta by a week, but out today is the WebKitGTK 2.23.90 release, the downstream of the WebKit web layout engine focused on GTK integration and used by the likes of GNOME Web (Epiphany)...

The Linux kernel is getting a new ring for Valentine's Day... io_uring. The purpose of io_uring is to deliver faster and more efficient I/O operations on Linux and should be coming with the next kernel cycle...

Lennart Poettering has just tagged the systemd 241 update that includes the "system down" security fixes and other improvements to this widely-used Linux init system...

Back during the Intel Architecture Day event in December, Intel confirmed that finally with Icelake "Gen 11" graphics there is Adaptive-Sync support after talking about it for several years. While they didn't explicitly mention Linux support, they've been largely spot on for years with supporting new display features on Linux and this should be the case as well with Adaptive-Sync and their next-generation graphics...

While disabling Windows Defender or other anti-virus programs may partially help offset the performance losses imposed by running Windows Subsystem for Linux, a.k.a. "Bash for Windows" or Ubuntu and other distributions running natively atop Windows 10 and now Windows Server 2019, it's not the root cause of the I/O performance bottleneck and is not a recommended course of action...

While Fedora 30 isn't debuting for another three months, with the system-wide change deadline already having passed on that release, ambitious Fedora developers are already thinking about early feature plans for Fedora 31 that will debut in November...

After yesterday's botched Mesa 19.0-RC3 release, Mesa 19.0-RC4 is now available while it's looking like two weeks or so until the stable debut...

Should you be running into any display problems or just want to help in testing out the open-source AMD Linux driver's display code, a new round of patches were published today...

While we are still waiting on NVIDIA to publish the signed firmware images for Turing GPUs in order to bring-up 3D hardware acceleration on the GeForce RTX 2000 series graphics cards with the open-source Nouveau driver, today they did post the signed firmware image files for their Type-C controller found on these new GPUs...

The Qt Company has announced the alpha release of the forthcoming Qt 5.13 tool-kit...

Prolific open-source AMD Linux driver developer Marek Olšák has sent out his latest big patch series in the name of performance. His new set of 26 patches provide primitive culling with asynchronous compute and at least for workstation workloads yields a big performance uplift...

Clear Linux's leading performance isn't limited to just C/C++ applications but also scripting languages like PHP, R, and Python have seen great speed-ups too. In a new blog post, one of Intel's developers outlines some of their performance tweaks to Python for delivering greater performance...

While VK9 was the first open-source project to pursue mapping Direct3D over Vulkan, at least for now the project has halted...

When setting various debug options for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver -- like enabling its NIR back-end among many other options -- that has traditionally been done through the R600_DEBUG= environment variable. But that variable name makes little sense these days since RadeonSI doesn't even support the now-vintage R600 GPUs. Thankfully, AMD_DEBUG= is now a supported alternative...

The Nouveau kernel driver tree where development happens on this open-source NVIDIA DRM driver saw a fresh batch of changes on Tuesday in aiming for new material with Linux 5.1...

The latest weekly release candidate of Mesa 19.0 is now available for testing, but it's a very petite release due to failing to include all of the latest back-ported patches intended for this release...

Since the start of December the NVIDIA Video Codec SDK 9.0 update has been available in the company's early access program while now this SDK with the NVENC/NVDEC APIs has rolled out as stable...

With Clang 8.0 due out by month's end and GCC 9 due for release not long after that point, this week we've been running a number of GCC and Clang compiler benchmarks on Phoronix. At the start of the month was the large Linux x86_64 GCC vs. Clang compiler benchmarks on twelve different Intel/AMD systems while last week was also a look at the POWER9 compiler performance on the Raptor Talos II. In this article we are checking out these open-source compilers' performance on 64-bit ARM (AArch64) using an Ampere eMAG 32-core server.

Unreal Engine 4.21 back in November was a big update for Linux gamers in that this game engine now defaults to the Vulkan renderer and also had various other fixes. With today's Unreal Engine 4.22 Preview 1 release, there are no Linux/Vulkan-specific changes mentioned, but some other interesting changes in general...

Earlier this month I reported on how Ubuntu developers indicated they were looking at ZFS support on the desktop as part of their work developing the new Ubuntu desktop installer GUI. It's quite clear now that they are indeed pursuing the work to allow Ubuntu desktop installs via their work-in-progress installer to support ZFS root installations...

In addition to needing a recent version of the Linux kernel and Mesa (ideally, Linux 5.0 and Mesa 19.0 if enjoying the very best performance and features) for using a Radeon VII graphics card on Linux, you also need to have the necessary firmware binaries manually installed if not using the Radeon Software for Linux driver package. Those firmware bits are now in the linux-firmware.git repository...

The KDE community is out with their first big update to the Plasma desktop for 2019...

For years now Google has been designing their own embedded controller (EC) for use within Chromebooks / Chrome OS devices...

The latest Qualcomm driver working its way to the mainline Linux kernel is the FastRPC driver and should arrive with Linux 5.1...

After going through several rounds of patch review in recent months, a patch series providing for tracking AVX-512 usage of tasks and exporting it to user-space is poised to be part of the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel...

While Fedora 31 was once talked about to never happen or be significantly delayed to focus on re-tooling the Linux distribution, they opted for a sane approach not to throw off the release cadence while working on low-level changes around the platform. A draft of the release schedule for Fedora 31 has now been published and it puts the release date at the end of November...

While IBM has their own in-house XL C/C++ compiler for their AIX operating system and GCC is also supported there too, IBM engineers are looking at adding AIX support to LLVM/Clang...

LLVM has merged its support finally for supporting "asm goto" with this inline Assembly support needed for building the Linux x86/x86_64 kernel...

HHVM, formerly known as the HipHop Virtual Machine and what was born at Facebook as a higher-performance PHP implementation only to shift focus to running their own PHP-derived Hack programming language, has reached version 4.0 as it officially no longer supports PHP...

Right now on most Linux distributions when using higher-end Bluetooth headphones, the low-end SBC audio codec ends up being utilized by default which is subpar for the potential audio quality of the more expensive headphones. Fortunately, there are PulseAudio modules that allow for the higher-end codecs to be used...

Fedora's Engineering and Steering Committee approved new work around the in-development Fedora 30...

At the end of January, Dell announced the Dell XPS 13 9380 Developer Edition laptop as an upgraded version of the XPS 9370 with now having Intel Whiskey Lake CPUs and other minor improvements. Over the past two weeks I've been testing out the Dell XPS 9380 with Intel Core i7 8565U processor with 256GB of NVMe SSD storage and 16GB of RAM. Here are benchmarks of the Dell XPS 9380 compared to several other laptops running Ubuntu Linux as well as looking at the system thermal and power consumption among other metrics.

PyPy, the popular Python implementation alternative to the de facto CPython and often faster thanks to its JIT compiler, is up to version 7.0 as of this morning...

Out today is the second release candidate of the feature-packed Sway 1.0 Wayland compositor that continues to be inspired by the i3 window manager...

Pixman 0.38 is out this morning to kick off a new week of open-source software releases. Pixman is the pixel manipulation library used by the X.Org Server, Cairo, and other Linux software projects...

Vulkan 1.1.100 was published this morning as the latest version of this high-performance, multi-platform graphics and compute API...

After failing to make it out last week due to a boot failure bug blocking the release, Ubuntu developers are working on getting out the 18.04.2 LTS point release this week that will ship a new Hardware Enablement "HWE" stack...

We've been looking forward to the possibility of having a nice 64-bit ARM Linux laptop with decent power and nice build quality. Several major vendors having been rolling out Windows ARM laptops powered by Qualcomm chips and the like with decent specs and quality, unlike some of the cheap ARM Linux laptop efforts we've seen. For those Windows ARM laptops, headway is being made in being able to run Linux on them...

KDE Frameworks 5.55 was released this weekend as the latest monthly update to this collection of add-on libraries to Qt5...

While NVIDIA is no longer active promoting their Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix "VDPAU" in favor of the cross-platform, CUDA-focused Video Codec SDK with NVENC/NVDEC, the VDPAU library still sees some rare activity from time to time...