Phoronix

After being on hiatus since the end of April, Mozilla's Servo Blog has finally put out a status update concerning their web engine improvements made over the past three months...

The open-source upbringing of Intel's Tremont micro-architecture is continuing with some new Linux kernel patches outed today...

Vulkan 1.1.81 is now available as the latest minor update for this graphics/compute API...

While ReactOS 0.4.9 images have been available for download the past week, today this "open-source Windows" operating system project officially introduced this latest version...

Right now if using the Cougar 500k gaming keyboard on Linux, when pressing any of the special function keys the keyboard will stop responding. With Linux 4.19 that will be fixed thanks to a new "HID_COUGAR" driver...

Another open-source operating system doing a stable update this morning is Slax, the revived Linux distribution focused on delivering a lightweight desktop that when the project was restarted last year shifted off its Slackware origin and onto a Debian stable base...

For those relying upon BSD in security-critical environments, a new HardenedBSD 11-STABLE update is now available for this security-enhanced fork of FreeBSD...

Recently there have been several Linux distribution benchmark comparisons on Phoronix to test the latest Linux OS releases, including several comparing to the current Microsoft Windows 10 performance. Those recent tests have all be done with various Intel CPUs, but for those curious about the AMD Windows vs. Linux performance, here are some fresh benchmarks as we approach the end of July.

The sixth weekly test release of the Linux 4.18 kernel is now available for evaluation...

While early in the year was talk of introducing NXP i.MX8 SoC support in the Linux 4.17 kernel, that didn't happen. Support for that latest-generation i.MX SoC also didn't make it for Linux 4.18 and it also looks like it will not make it for Linux 4.19...

Back in May we covered the big rewrite of the Linux kernel's HID multi-touch code and in the process supporting the Microsoft Surface Dial and Dell Canvas 27's Totem input device. That work will be landing in the Linux 4.19 kernel...

Earlier this month I posted some results when looking at the Windows 10 versus Linux power consumption using a Kabylake-R Dell XPS 13 laptop and testing Windows 10, Ubuntu 18.04, Fedora Workstation 28, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Clear Linux. For some additional numbers, I took three other distinctly different laptops and tested them on a few Linux distributions to see how their battery life and power efficiency compare as additional metrics to complement this earlier data.

Fedora's LXQt desktop is at risk of being dropped if new packagers do not step up to maintain this lightweight Qt desktop environment's support...

AMD released a minor update to their AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler...

Following Friday's release of Wine 3.13 is now the adjoining Wine-Staging 3.13 version debut that incorporates various extra/testing patches atop this code-base for running Windows programs/games primarily on Linux and macOS systems...

While it's been on mirrors for a few days, NetBSD 8.0 was officially released this weekend...

The first development snapshot of Phoronix Test Suite 8.2 is now available as what will be the next quarterly feature update to our open-source Linux / BSD / macOS / Windows automated benchmarking software and framework...

For those planning to enjoy their favorite Direct3D 11 games under Wine this weekend and utilizing the DXVK D3D11-over-Vulkan layer for greater performance, DXVK 0.63 is now available...

While developers have begun discussing plans for Qt 6.0 with plans to ship this upgraded tool-kit in 2020, one of the unanswered questions is over what build system should Qt 6 be using...

GNOME 3.29.4 was released on Friday night as another step towards this September's stable release of GNOME 3.30...

For what just started out as a tool to ensure you are using the "performance" frequency scaling governor when running Linux games, Feral's open-source GameMode system tool has slowly been picking up some extra functionality...

The feature list for Fedora 29 continues growing and the latest is about shipping GnuTLS with TLS 1.3 support enabled...

Following the recent rounds of Linux distribution benchmarking with Windows Server vs. FreeBSD vs. Linux, Windows vs. Linux laptop benchmarks, and other recent comparisons, one of the latest requests was a fresh look at the performance of different Linux distributions deployed within Docker containers.

Wine 3.13 was released today as just another bi-weekly development release towards Wine 4.0, but this time around it's a pretty darn exciting update!..

The AMD folks maintaining their official Vulkan driver code have done their common end-of-week code dump into the open-source AMDVLK Linux Vulkan driver repository across the PAL, XGL, LLVM, and SPVGEN code-bases...

Canonical and Microsoft have just announced that PowerShell Core is now available for Ubuntu users in Snap format...

The Linux Mint team has shared a routine status update about the work they have been engaged in over the past month, including dealing with some nasty package updates and readying the beta of Linux Mint Debian Edition 3 (LMDE 3)...

In last month's round of IBM POWER9 benchmarking on the Talos II systems compared to various Intel/AMD x86_64 CPUs, one of the areas where POWER was struggling especially was with multimedia encoding performance. Fortunately, since those POWER9 Phoronix benchmarks this year, various developers have been working on optimizations...

Google in cooperation with Microsoft, Twitter, and Facebook have announced the open-source Data Transfer Project to promote universal data portability...

Last month I wrote about a new attempt at improving the ATI RAGE 128 X.Org driver... Yes, for the for the Rage graphics cards from the late 90's in the days of AGP and PCI where core/memory clock speeds were commonly in the double digits... If you are a hobbyist fond of these vintage graphics cards and are still running with these OpenGL 1.1~1.2 capable GPUs, there is a new X.Org driver update...

The long overdue NetBSD 8.0 operating system update appears ready now to ship...

Those still relying upon x86 32-bit Linux kernels for aging hardware and continuing to update to the latest software will find mitigation for the Meltdown CPU vulnerability with the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel cycle. You'll find this mitigation but at the cost of performance...

On top of AMDGPU improvements/features already staged for Linux 4.19, the AMD folks on Thursday sent in their seemingly last set of feature updates to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window...

It's been a while since we last ran some GCC PGO benchmarks, the Profile Guided Optimizations or feedback-directed optimization technique that makes use of profiling data at run-time to improve performance of re-compiled binaries. Here are some fresh benchmarks of GCC PGO impact on a Xeon Scalable server while using the newly-released GCC 8.2 release candidate.

The NVIDIA Unix developers have released the 396.45 binary display driver today with just two listed bug-fixes...

Last week Intel sent in a "final" batch of i915 DRM driver feature updates to DRM-Next for the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel cycle but it turns out there is one more batch of changes now focused on landing...

While waiting for the big ROCm 1.9 update, another point release to the ROCm 1.8 series is available for this Radeon Open Compute stack...

GCC 8.2 as the first point release to the stable GCC 8 compiler is tentatively set to debut next Thursday, 26 July, but available now for testing is the release candidate...

Just in case you have your hands still on the Samsung Galaxy S or Galaxy S 4G that were released back in 2010 as once high-end Android smartphones, they have DeviceTree support with the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel cycle...

The Raven Ridge Linux support continues to maturing. The latest on these Zen+Vega APUs using the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver stack should be slightly better performance when using the RADV Vulkan driver...

A rather late self-contained feature proposal for the in-development Fedora 29 is to better support FPGAs...

Linux 4.19 is going to be another exciting kernel on the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) front with a lot of good stuff included while hours ago we finally got a look at what's in store for the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver...

It's been a while since last having any news to report on Freedrenon, the open-source, community-driven Gallium3D driver for providing accelerated 3D support for Qualcomm Adreno graphics hardware. But ahead of the upcoming Mesa 18.2 feature freeze, Freedreno founder Rob Clark has been landing a number of improvements...

The Sway Wayland compositor continues maturing like a fine wine and as it nears the big 1.0 milestone new features continue to be introduced...

Adding to the big batch of feature additions and improvements queuing in DRM-Next for the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel merge window is another round of drm-misc-next improvements...

GNOME 3.29.4 is coming out this week as the latest development release building up to GNOME 3.30 this September. GNOME Shell and Mutter have put out their latest releases for this development milestone...

Epic Games has today rolled out Unreal Engine 4.20 as the latest version of their Linux-friendly, cross-platform game engine while also promoting Unreal Studio 4.20 to beta...

Red Hat's Christian Schaller has provided an update regarding some of the new feature work and improvements that the Red Hat developers have been working on this summer for Fedora Workstation...

The great folks at Red Hat have open-sourced a new security checker that is able to scan compiled Linux x86_64 binaries to look for potential Spectre Variant One vulnerabilities...

With the April release of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on the server front was a brand new, in-house developed server installer created by Canonical to differentiate it from Debian's long-used text installer for the Ubuntu Server images. While it offered a fresh look and some new features, it shipped without many features common to Linux server installers. Fortunately, that is changing with the upcoming Ubuntu Server 18.04.1 release...