Phoronix

It's been nearly seven years already since some kernel developers called for deprecating FBDEV drivers. FBDEV is still alive and well within the Linux kernel but at least more embedded/mobile developers are pursuing DRM/KMS drivers these days and less code targeting these frame-buffer device drivers. With Linux 4.21, FBDEV is picking up a few improvements...

The kernel work has been revived for supporting encryption and authentication of hibernation snapshot images for better security...

The latest change/feature proposal is to ship Fedora 30 with Go 1.12...

With the proposed Libre RISC-V Vulkan accelerator aiming to effectively be an open-source GPU built atop the open-source RISC-V ISA there were recently some new details published on how the design is expected to work out...

Debhelper, the package offering various scripts to assist in the creation of Debian packages, has reached version 12 in time for Debian Buster...

Fedora 29 aimed to provide UEFI support for ARMv7 given the maturing support to U-Boot and other components, but that didn't turn out as planned so is now being worked on for Fedora 30...

While the long-awaited Haiku R1 Beta debuted back in September, development activity didn't lighten up after that point but the developers of this open-source BeOS-inspired operating system were very busy through the holidays...

Fedora 29 succeeded at a long elusive and rather mystical flicker-free boot experience that has continued to improve since release. With Fedora 30, that flicker-free boot experience should be in even better standing...

For Debian Developers and other contributors that list their personal blog(s) on Planet Debian, there is a new set of rules for DD blogs being aggregated by their site...

The NVIDIA 410.93 Linux driver is out today as the company's first Linux driver release of 2019...

SUSE's Jiri Kosina sent in the HID subsystem pull request today with some interesting additions that we've been monitoring in recent weeks...

Back in November was the surprising announcement of the Necunos Mobile as an open-source Linux phone making use of KDE Plasma Mobile. That phone is now preparing to ship and pre-orders are open, but I wouldn't get too excited at this stage...

Is there enough interest in seeing new point releases for older X.Org Server release branches to ship fixes almost exclusively aimed at improving decades old graphics/display hardware? We'll see, but at least one person wants to work on such releases...

Back during the Linux 4.20 kernel cycle, support for the C-SKY CPU architecture was introduced while now for Linux 4.21 it has seen its first round of improvements...

While a few days ago I wrote about the Reiser4 port to the Linux 4.20 kernel being a work-in-progress, now it's officially been released with their first tagged patch release since Linux 4.18...

Up to now the AMDKFD kernel driver needed for running the ROCm user-space has only worked on x86_64 CPUs, but with some simple changes, it turns out this Radeon compute kernel driver can work on 64-bit ARM as well...

Spun on top of last Friday's Wine 4.0-RC4 release is now the Wine-Staging re-base update...

Finally with the in-development Linux 4.21 kernel will be the input driver for supporting the Raspberry Pi 7-inch touchscreen...

The UBports folks that continue to maintain and advance Ubuntu Touch are preparing their OTA-7 update for release with a few new features...

As the first update to the GNU Tar program in more than one year, Tar 1.31 is out today and it has support for Zstd compression...

Khronos President Neil Trevett just commented on the current state of Vulkan/OpenCL compute and reaffirmed that OpenCL will continue to evolve as well...

As a longtime Thunderbird user going back to its original release, the details Mozilla revealed today about their development focus on their mail client for 2019 have me excited and adding to what I am looking forward to in 2019...

With 2019 started and also the 15th year since starting Phoronix.com, what am I most excited for in 2019 from a Linux/open-source perspective? Here is a look at what has me motivated for the year ahead...

It was another busy year for the Phoronix Test Suite in 2018, which also marked ten years since the public debut of the Phoronix Test Suite for open-source, cross-platform automated performance benchmarking...

The GIMP team has posted their 2018 redux covering the debut of GIMP 2.10 and the various improvements they focused on over the past year. Additionally, they provided a sneak peak of where they will be focusing their development efforts for 2019...

Back on New Year's Eve I shared what I viewed as some of the biggest open-source and Linux letdowns of 2018. Since then via the forum comments and elsewhere some other current shortcomings were also brought up...

The Xfce 4.14 remains long overdue for release but with Xfce4-Panel 4.13.4 being released on New Year's Day gives us hope we could see this long-awaited desktop environment out in 2019...

After being an opt-in feature since Fedora 28, this year's Fedora 30 release will enable Python generators by default to help in crafting packages around Python code...

With the start of a new month brings the Steam Survey results for the month prior where we see the Linux gaming market-share ending at a high point for the year...

FAudio, the re-implementation of the Microsoft XAudio/XAudio2 interfaces by the FNA-XNA project, is out today with its first tagged release...

Red Hat's systemd team who also work on BUS1 and D-Bus Broker announced a new version of Dbus-Broker to kick off 2019...

There hasn't been a formal Reiser4 file-system patch release since September when it was ported to the Linux 4.18 kernel, but via Git this week there is a port for the Linux 4.20 kernel should you want to utilize this once promising file-system under the latest stable patch series...

Even with the downtime by companies and developers in December around the holidays, December 2018 was action-packed with Linux 4.20 releasing, continued development controversies, talk of deprecating the Linux x32 ABI, Microsoft continuing to make surprising open-source actions, Intel's interesting Architecture Day where we learned of work to open-source the FSP, and many other events made last month interesting...

The ARM platform and board changes were sent in on New Year's Eve for the Linux 4.21 kernel...

Linux power management expert Rafael Wysocki, who is also the maintainer of the ACPI/PM subsystems, has been working on the "TEO" the past few months as the Timer Events Oriented governor for CPUIdle framework...

Open-source developer Adriaan de Groot who has done a lot of the KDE work for FreeBSD has shared an update about what's now possible with KDE Plasma on FreeBSD and what should be coming down the pipe in 2019...

GhostBSD 18.12 was released on New Year's Eve as the latest version of this FreeBSD-derived operating system that focuses on delivering a good BSD desktop experience aside from manually installing FreeBSD or any other *BSD and having to manually setup a graphical environment and desktop of your choosing...

Released last September was the PlayOnLinux 5.0 alpha with a redesigned web interface to this graphical front-end around Wine. Besides the new UI, there was also a lot of low-level work as part of its new platform while for kicking off 2019 a second alpha is available...

That's a wrap for 2018 with Phoronix this year having published 3,693 original Linux/open-source related news articles and 314 featured articles comprising of our Linux hardware reviews and multi-page benchmark specials. 2019 will bring us into the 15th calendar year since I started Phoronix and now around 4,000 featured articles in its time and more than 27,300 original news articles...

As of this New Year's Eve afternoon, the Linux kernel saw 74,974 commits this year that added 3,385,121 lines of code and removed 2,512,040 lines...

The IOMMU changes were sent in today for the Linux 4.21 kernel merge window. There are some AMD IOMMU improvements, new Qualcomm SMMUv2 IOMMU hardware support, NUMA-aware allocations in the IOMMU DMA code for some very slight performance benefits, and most notably is likely the scalable mode support within the Intel VT-d driver...

Besides the many GNU toolchain highlights for the year, LLVM developers working on that compiler infrastructure stack, Clang C/C++ front-end, LLDB debugger, and numerous other sub-projects were as busy as ever advancing this open-source, cross-platform focused compiler...

While 2018 was a grand year for open-source and Linux as we've been recapping all of the highlights in recent days on Phoronix, it wasn't without some shortcomings or areas that have yet to pan out... As we end 2018, for some interesting New Year's Eve discussions in the forums, here is a look at some of the biggest Linux/open-source letdowns of the year...

Last week I posted benchmarks of Windows Server 2019 against various Linux distributions using a Tyan dual socket Intel Xeon server. In this article are some complementary results when adding in the performance of FreeBSD 11.2 against the new FreeBSD 12.0 stable release for this leading BSD operating system. As some fun benchmarks to end out 2018, here are the results of FreeBSD 11.2/12.0 (including an additional run when using GCC rather than Clang) up against Windows Server and several enterprise-ready Linux distributions.

January should bring the release of Wine 4.0 as the annual stable release of this software for running Windows applications/games on Linux. As Wine 4.0 continued to be developed over the course of bi-weekly development releases all year, here's a look back at the notable features to find with this upcoming Wine 4.0.0 release...

It was a very exciting year for Red Hat's Fedora Linux distribution process with the successful releases of Fedora 28 and 29, each of those new Fedora releases adding in plenty of new features, achieving the long-desired flicker-free polished boot experience, and Fedora Silverblue taking shape for what was formerly their Atomic Workstation initiative. Next year though could be even more radical for the project...

It was a very busy year in kernel space from mitigating security vulnerabilities to preparing new features. Here is a look back at the most popular kernel topics of this year...

It's been nearly one year to the day since the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities were made public. While the security vulnerabilities were quickly buttoned up in the Linux space, kernel developers continue working to offset the performance overhead introduced by these mitigations. They made a lot of overhead reductions in 2018 while still there are some patch-sets pending still for bettering the experience. One of these patch-sets was known as "Relpolines" but now has been updated and morphed into what is being called Optpolines...

Con Kolivas has announced a New Year's Eve release of his Linux 4.20-ck1 kernel patch-set and the newest MuQSS scheduler...

While a number of BSDs already have great LLVM toolchain support and are generally quite fond of this liberally licensed compiler alternative to GCC, the NetBSD support has lagged behind a bit for LLVM but that is continuing to improve...