Phoronix

Linus Torvalds has just issued the sixth weekly release candidate for the upcoming Linux 5.0 kernel, which should debut as stable around the end of the month...

GreenWithEnvy v0.11 has been released, the latest version of this third-party, open-source utility for altering the power limits of NVIDIA graphics cards on Linux as well as more overclocking information/controls than what is exposed through the NVIDIA Settings panel with the NVIDIA proprietary driver...

It's been a number of months since last trying the RadeonSI NIR back-end, which is being developed as part of the OpenGL 4.6 SPIR-V bits for this AMD OpenGL driver, but eventually RadeonSI may end up switching from TGSI to NIR by default. Given the time since we last tried it out and the increasing popularity of NIR, this weekend I did some fresh tests of the NIR back-end with a Radeon Vega graphics card.

With the feature freeze for KDE Applications 19.04 happening next month in order to meet the planned 18 April release date, KDE developers are busy getting their new features ready and reviewed for this next round of application updates...

If you missed out on last weekend's FOSDEM event for your fix of Linux technical talks or are just looking for a Linux/open-source event taking place in the beautiful Scandinavia, FOSS-North is coming up now in less than two months...

The Apple MacBook / MacBook Pro laptops of the past few years have been notoriously bad on Linux at least as far as the mainline / out-of-the-box support is concerned. The current MacBook's keyboard and touchpad don't even work out-of-the-box on Linux. There has been an out-of-tree driver available for changing that while coming soon it might finally be merged to the mainline kernel...

Gfx-rs Portability is the library being developed within the Rust programming language that implements the Vulkan Portability Initiative as an effort akin to MoltenVK for easily getting Vulkan applications running on macOS and other platforms where Vulkan API support may not be natively available...

Like GCC, Debian, and other leading free software projects, Wine is hoping to have a few interested students take on some interesting summer projects this year thanks to the annual Google Summer of Code...

This week NVIDIA's research engineers open-sourced StyleGAN, the project they've been working in for months as a Style-based generator architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks...

One bit of Intel consumer hardware support not currently handled by the Linux kernel was for their Cherry Trail Whiskey Cove PMIC LEDs -- that's for the LEDs connected to their power-management IC on various laptops...

RISC-V remains of a lot of interest to open-source/Linux users for being a royalty-free and completely open CPU architecture. In part due to the lack of affordable RISC-V hardware limiting developers from working more on this architecture, the state of RISC-V support by Linux distributions varies but at least has improved a lot in recent years...

The long-awaited OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 distribution update entered alpha for Christmas and this weekend was finally succeeded by the Lx 4.0 Beta 1 milestone...

Back in our NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier benchmarks from December, besides looking at the incredible Carmel+Volta GPU compute potential for machine learning and other edge computing scenarios, we also looked at the ARMv8 Carmel CPU core performance against various other ARM SoCs on different single board computers. But how do these eight NVIDIA Carmel CPU cores compare to x86_64 low-power processors? Here are some of those benchmarks for those curious about the NVIDIA CPU potential.

Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has published a whitepaper looking at the Android application performance impact on Intel-powered Chromebooks when the Android Bionic Library is optimized for AVX2...

The Electron software framework that allows creating desktop GUI application interfaces using JavaScript and relies upon a bundled Chromium+Node.js run-time is notorious among most Linux desktop users for being resource heavy, not integrating well with most desktops, and generally being despised. For those that are fond of using web standards for creating desktop GUIs, now there is a way to create desktop application front-ends using HTML5 and Golang but with less baggage...

Following a move by SUSE blacklisting legacy / less-used file-systems in SUSE Linux Enterprise, OpenSUSE is looking at doing the same to blacklist the kernel modules for a number of esoteric file-systems as well as the likes of JFS and F2FS...

The open-source projects that regularly participate in Google's annual Summer of Code initiative for helping student developers start out their career in free software development are already thinking about GSoC 2019. Debian is among the projects working out their Google Summer of Code 2019 plans and have some interesting project possibilities should they find enough interested students...

Google developers on Friday pushed Chrome 73 into their beta channel as they prepare to button up this web browser update for debuting as stable around 12 March...

With the cutoff this weekend of new material in DRM-Next that hopes to make it in the upcoming Linux 5.1 cycle, besides Intel sending in a last batch, so has AMD with some more AMDGPU changes for this next version of the Linux kernel...

As anticipated with the DRM-Next feature cutoff upon us for the next kernel cycle, Intel's open-source developers today sent out their last planned set of feature changes slated for the Linux 5.1 kernel cycle...

Earlier this week I delivered the results of our largest-ever GCC vs. LLVM Clang Linux x86_64 compiler comparison with a dozen systems from various generations of Intel and AMD CPUs and using 62 benchmarks tested on GCC 8/9 and Clang 7/8 releases. In this article the compiler performance is being looked at for the IBM POWER9 architecture with the benchmarks done on a Raptor Computing Systems Talos II workstation running Ubuntu Linux.

Beyond the FOSDEM conference itself this past week in Brussels, GNOME developers also used the occasion once again for hosting a developer "hackfest" as they prepare for the home stretch in GTK 4.0 development...

Several System76 laptops are beginning to see Coreboot support! This is a nice sign of progress in making System76 hardware more attractive to Linux/open-source users though they aren't yet shipping Coreboot on the systems by default...

Developers working on the "Gallium Nine" Direct3D 9 state tracker are working on supporting the NIR intermediate representation as an alternative option to the default TGSI IR used traditionally by Gallium3D drivers. In supporting NIR, Gallium Nine opens up to some interesting new possibilities...

Formerly known as Intel GPU Tools, the scope of "IGT" has been expanding now for providing tools and functionality testing not only around the Intel DRM/KMS driver but also the other mainline Linux display drivers...

The GCC 9.1.0 release as the first stable version of GCC 9 is stabilizing at a rate where it should debut by/around April. For those sticking to the GCC 8 series a bit longer, the GCC 8.3.0 compiler update is also on the way...

KiCad remains the leading open-source electronic design suite for PCB design and other features. KiCad had a successful 2018 with the software even being used by System76 as part of the daughter board PCB designs with Thelio desktop computer, but looking ahead the developers are still working towards version 6.0...

Besides the ZFS file-system just being a heck of a lot better all-around than FreeBSD's traditional UFS, tooling around ZFS paired with its native snapshot capabilities is allowing for more resilient installations and upgrades of FreeBSD...

With today's launch benchmarks of the AMD Radeon VII graphics card on Linux, tests were done using the latest Linux 5.0 Git kernel as well as Mesa 19.0 providing the OpenGL/Gallium3D drivers. Details on the support going back to older releases were covered, but in this article is looking at the performance difference between those recent Linux kernel and Mesa releases.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has certified the Vikings D8 motherboard and D8 workstation as they "Respect Your Freedom" as the newest endorsed hardware...

With the upcoming Linux 5.0 kernel release there is initial support for Adiantum and implemented within the fscrypt file-system encryption framework in Google's pursuit to offering more viable data encryption on low-end Android devices...

For those uncomfortable in building your own Linux kernel and Mesa in order to attain Radeon VII support (or don't want to leverage third-party package repositories), there is a new Radeon Software for Linux driver release now available with Radeon VII support...

Today we can finally reveal the Linux performance details for the AMD Radeon VII graphics card... Especially if you are an open-source driver fan, it's quite a treat thanks to having fully open-source and fairly mature driver support, but can this $699 USD graphics card dance with the likes of the GeForce RTX 2080? Here is our initial look at the Radeon VII performance on Linux using fifteen different AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards for both OpenCL compute and Vulkan/OpenGL gaming on Ubuntu Linux.

The boot experience may be improved moving forward for AMDGPU-using Radeon Linux users...

If Microsoft Office 2019 isn't your thing, The Document Foundation is today debuting LibreOffice 6.2 as the latest major release for this cross-platform, open-source office suite...

Well known AMD open-source OpenGL driver developer Marek Olšák has published an interesting new patch series for RadeonSI that can help boost the performance of this Gallium3D driver in select cases...

Daniel Kiper of Oracle presented at last week's FOSDEM European conference on the latest upstream work happening around the GRUB boot-loader...

The mainline Linux kernel support continues to improve for various ARM SoCs and different Android smartphone features. The latest driver on its way to the mainline Linux kernel is an adaptation of Android's Qualcomm MSM vibrator...

The Radeon RADV and Intel ANV Vulkan drivers have support for the new VK_EXT_buffer_device_address extension with the in-development Mesa 19.1...

The LLVM Linker "LLD" has slowly been gaining more ground as developers try it out as a drop-in replacement to the GNU system linkers. What turns on many developers to LLD is the often "lightning fast" performance compared to the GNU linkers, even the Gold linker...

GNOME 3.31.90 has been released as what is effectively the GNOME 3.32 beta and also marks the feature/UI/API freezes for this next half-year update to the GNOME desktop...

The first release candidate of FreeDOS 1.3 is now available, which is the open-source effort continuing to maintain compatibility with classic MS-DOS...

While Dell is offering the option of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS as the Linux option with their new XPS 9380 laptop, what happens if the Bionic Beaver isn't of interest to you? As part of our testing of the Dell XPS 9380 with Core i7 8565U laptop, I've just finished up testing six different Linux distributions on this 13-inch laptop.

Marc Di Luzio continues working on interesting features for GameMode as the daemon to optimize Linux systems for gaming... The latest is integrating AMD and NVIDIA overclocking support within GameMode, which is now under review...

It was just at the end of January last year when the Linux Foundation announced LinuxBoot to replace some firmware with the Linux kernel as another step for freeing traditionally proprietary firmware mostly on server hardware. LinuxBoot does continue making advanced at least on server class hardware and shows a lot of potential for 2019...

The open-source ARM Mali space certainly seems to be heating up this year... The Panfrost Gallium3D driver was just merged to mainline Mesa days ago as developers work on bringing up an open-source 3D stack for the Mali Midgard and Bifrost graphics processors. For those with older Mali 400/500 series hardware, the separate Lima-revived effort has sent out their latest patch series for trying to get their DRM driver into the kernel...

On Windows there is no shortage of GUI configuration utilities for tweaking Intel CPUs around overclocking and under-volting, but less so on Linux with no official utility/library. But there is now an unofficial GUI project for manipulating Intel CPU voltages from the Linux desktop...

Building off Monday's Wine 4.1 release that is the first bi-weekly development milestone in the trek towards Wine 5.0, the Wine-Staging crew has just released their first new post-4.0 version that includes various experimental/testing patches on top of this code-base...

It looks like AMD is about to release ROCm 2.1 for the Radeon Open Compute stack...

The latest batch of AMDGPU graphics driver fixes were sent out on Tuesday for the Linux 5.0 kernel, including a fix for the FreeSync/VRR support that was merged at the start of this cycle...