Phoronix

For those of you running KDE Plasma on Wayland and making use of windowed games (or other apps) that make use of SDL2, the experience is about to become a lot better...

While Wayland/Weston development might be lightening up a bit for now with Samsung OSG closing up shop and they being one of the major drivers in recent years to this stack, fortunately, other developers remain. Tomohito Esaki of IGEL endpoint management solutions has introduced a remoting plugin with output streaming for Weston...

Prolific open-source AMD hacker Marek Olšák has sent out a revised patch enabling support for the yet-to-be-released Raven 2 APUs within the RadeonSI Gallium3D...

The pull requests adding new ARM chip/SoC support and various platforms/boards were merged on Monday evening. For this Linux 4.20 (or 5.0) kernel cycle there is a lot of new hardware support, especially among the popular ARM SBCs. NVIDIA Tegra upstreaming bits is also another big standout for this kernel...

For those looking at an easy-to-use Arch Linux desktop experience, Manjaro Linux -- like Antergos -- fills that void. Manjaro today is celebrating their big "18.0" release...

A Google developer has proposed /proc/pid/kill as a new procfs-based kill interface for killing a process on Linux...

Fedora Workstation 30 will continue to use the GNOME Shell by default (more than likely, GNOME 3.32) but adding to the list of alternative desktop environments could be the elementaryOS' Pantheon Desktop. Pantheon has been available for a few releases on Fedora, but this change proposal is about upgrading the desktop...

While Fedora 29 is cleared for release tomorrow, 30 October, the LXQt and Xfce spins may be delayed a bit...

As a big win for Radeon Linux gamers using the RADV and enjoying Steam Play (Proton) or Wine games and making use of the DXVK library, this open-source AMD Vulkan driver has merged support for transform feedback!..

Adding to the big list of changes for Linux 4.20~5.0 is a number of updates within the kernel's staging area...

Beginning today the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2970WX and 2920X processors are shipping and we are now allowed to share our performance benchmarks for these latest Zen+ Threadripper 2 processors. Here's a look at the Linux performance and related metrics for these new 12-core/24-thread and 24-core/48-thread processors.

While Qt's Qbs build system was once planned as the default build system for Qt6 and shaping up to be the de facto successor to QMake, there is a change of course with The Qt Company now announcing they are deprecating this custom build system...

The Chinese C-SKY 32-bit CPU architecture looks now for sure that it will be added to the in-development Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel. This might also be the last new CPU architecture ever to be added to the mainline Linux kernel...

While we still don't know yet whether Linus Torvalds intends to call this next kernel Linux 4.20 or Linux 5.0, we do know that whatever the version ends up being, this is going to be a very big kernel release with a lot of new features...

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has a new language front-end! The D language support has finally been merged...

With the in-development Linux 4.20 kernel, it is now effectively VLA-free... The variable-length arrays (VLAs) that can be convenient and part of the C99 standard but can have unintended consequences...

Released on Friday was Wine 3.19 with some new I/O work, new synchronization primitives, better handling for 32-bit .NET binaries on 64-bit, better dealing with broken RPC connections, and other changes. Wine-Staging 3.19 is now available with even more work to this stack for running Windows games/applications on Linux...

Halcyon is a research and development engine being built by Electronic Arts' SEED group (Search for Extraordinary Experiences Division). While previously they talked up Microsoft DirectX ray-tracing and have been experimenting with it, they have also begun work on a Vulkan back-end for Halcyon that also includes Linux support...

In a deal that could potentially be announced as soon as today, IBM is reportedly close to inking a deal to acquire Red Hat...

Six years after AMD introduced "Piledriver" as the successor to the original Bulldozer CPUs, the LLVM Clang compiler is seeing a revised scheduling model for these processors that can yield faster performance of generated code targeting this older class of AMD CPUs...

The AMDGPU DRM Linux kernel driver has offered GPU reset recovery for a while now in case of hangs that can be toggled by a module parameter, but the default behavior for the next kernel release is slated to change where it will be enabled by default for the newer Radeon GPUs...

With the Freedreno Gallium3D driver's reverse-engineered, open-source 3D/OpenGL driver support for Qualcomm Adreno hardware in pretty darn good shape these days even for the latest-generation Adreno 600 series, the developers have begun working on more optimizations -- including a new effort trying to reduce the OpenGL driver's overhead...

In addition to working on OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 as this distribution's next major release with its roots tracing back to the legendary Mandrake, its developers have also been working on clean ports of this Linux distribution to other CPU architectures...

The POWER architecture changes have been submitted for the in-development Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel cycle, including more optimizations on the POWER9 front for these latest-generation IBM CPUs...

For those of you using the Network File-System System (NFS), the client code has queued some optimizations that may be worthwhile when upgrading your kernel that will be christened as either Linux 4.20 or Linux 5.0...

If you are looking for new open-source talent for your organization, check out LinkedIn but it's under unfortunate circumstances for the availability of a sudden surplus in skilled Linux/FLOSS developers... Samsung has apparently shut down the Samsung Open-Source Group (Samsung OSG) as a blow to the wider free software ecosystem considering the group's prolific contributions over the years from low-level open-source projects to desktop/user-facing code-bases...

Now that WebRender has reached beta within Firefox Nightly, I decided to run some fresh web-browser benchmarks to see how this GPU-accelerated web rendering is working out for Firefox and how it compares to that of Google Chrome in some popular browser benchmarks.

When Linus Torvalds announced last month that he would be taking a temporary leave of absence to work on his empathy and interpersonal skills as well as the adoption of a Linux kernel Code of Conduct, some Internet commenters thought this would lead Linus to being less strict about code quality and his standards for accepting new code to the mainline tree. Fortunately, he's shown already for the new Linux 4.20~5.0 cycle he isn't relaxing his standards but is communicating better when it comes to bringing up coding issues...

Reported at the start of the month were plans for FreeBSD 12 to deprecate many of their 10/100 Ethernet drivers with just leaving the popular fast Ethernet drivers and focusing on Gigabit and beyond networking drivers moving forward...

While the UBports community just released Ubuntu Touch OTA-5 earlier this month, the next over-the-air update is taking shape for release in November...

For those making use of Linux software RAID, a number of improvements are on deck to the kernel's MD code with the forthcoming Linux 4.20~5.0 cycle...

As the first update in nearly two years, GVPE 3.1 has been released as the GNU Virtual Private Ethernet implementation that provides a many-to-many VPN with support for a variety of transport protocols and where nodes do not need to trust each other...

The Linux port to the C-SKY 32-bit CPU architecture is trying to get into the Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel...

Introduced in the Linux 4.18 kernel was the Restartable Sequences "rseq" system call intended to yield faster user-space operations on per-CPU data. As covered during a presentation at this week's Open-Source Summit Europe, that system call is indeed providing performance wins while it's not widely utilized yet...

Better/easier debugging for Intel VT-d IOMMU is on the way to help iron out any lingering issues with virtualization for directed I/O...

Pushed out yesterday to the Linux Firmware Git tree were updated AMDGPU firmware files for these binary-only bits needed for proper Radeon GPU initialization...

In the past number of years have been a lot of changes in prepping the kernel for Year 2038, but that work still isn't over and with the in-development Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel are yet more time keeping changes for prepping for this Y2K-like event...

While System76 is officially announcing their Thelio systems next week on 1 November with plans to then begin shipping these "open hardware" systems in December, today the Linux-friendly PC vendor shared with us some more exclusive details on the forthcoming hardware being manufactured in Denver, Colorado. Here are those exciting details -- much more than just some digital web saga.

This week marked the release of Radeon Software 18.40 as the latest release of AMD's Linux driver stack targeting workstation users. While the sole mentioned change was the addition of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 support, I decided to run some benchmarks of this latest driver compared to the other open-source Radeon Linux driver options.

Wine 3.19 is out today as the latest bi-weekly development release for this widely-used software to handle running Windows programs on Linux and macOS...

After two years worth of point releases, GCC 6.5 was released this morning as a final update to the GNU Compiler Collection 6 series...

WebRender, the very exciting multi-year project for providing more GPU-accelerated rendering of web content and originally developed as part of the experimental Servo engine, has reached the beta milestone...

The developers working on the official AMD Vulkan Windows/Linux driver have done their weekly push of the latest code to the open-source AMDVLK repositories...

As part of QEMU's emulated display support they have long had a lot of old VGA/SVGA support code around. But as that code is overly complex, has been prone to security issues, and less used these days with modern interfaces, the developers behind this important piece of the open-source virtualization stack have been working on eliminating the legacy display support...

Greg Kroah-Hartman began sending in his feature pull requests this morning for the newly-started Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel cycle...

Red Hat developers continue advancing the capabilities of the GFS2 cluster file-system and this week Andy Price shared an update on their efforts at the Open-Source Summit Europe in Edinburgh...

The next Linux kernel has scheduler improvements that will benefit some tasks when running on ARM big.LITTLE type systems where select CPU cores are more much more powerful than the other cores...

The changes are not as notable as Btrfs having multiple performance improvements or multiple new features for F2FS, but the XFS and EXT4 mature file-systems have their latest advancements now queued for the next kernel cycle...

Across Ingo Molnar 's x86-focused kernel branches (including x86 64-bit) there are some performance optimizations to note in this new material for Linux 4.20~5.0...

The past month Linux PC/laptop vendor System76 has been teasing its open-source fan-base about building a new "open-source" PC with their new Colorado factory...