Phoronix

Vulkan 1.1.99 is now available to kick off February and features two new extensions plus a number of documentation fixes/clarifications...

For those running Ivybridge/Haswell era Intel graphics and older, better support for ETC2 texture compression is on the way...

The recently releases of FreeBSD 12.0 and DragonFlyBSD 5.4 have been exciting in the BSD space while moving forward there is the NetBSD 9.0 release a ways out on the horizon...

Glibc 2.29 was released a few days back and like most GNU C Library releases -- particularly in recent times -- does offer up more CPU performance optimizations... Some early benchmarks done this weekend do show some nice performance improvements in select workloads at least out of our initial benchmarking.

Linus Torvalds just issued the fifth weekly release candidate for the upcoming Linux 5.0 kernel...

For those that have been wanting to see case-insensitive filename support or even encoding of filenames in UTF-8 or other character encoding, the work is still on going...

Two years ago we covered Greenfield as an in-browser HTML5-based Wayland compositor. While at first it may seem like just a short-lived toy, it turns out the project is still around and advancing with its functionality for running Wayland apps inside modern web browsers without any browser plug-ins...

A patch series queued into Linux's driver core infrastructure ahead of the 5.1 kernel cycle is set to enhance the boot performance particularly for larger NUMA servers/systems. This latest round of kernel work was another contribution to the core kernel code thanks to Intel...

One of the sessions we look forward to each year at FOSDEM is in regards to the GNU Hurd status update... It's one of the few times per year where we hear anything new presented on the Hurd. GNU Hurd is nearly three decades old and has yet to see its v1.0 milestone reached, but Samuel Thibault and a small group of other free software developers continue working on this GNU micro-kernel...

Yet another open-source project out of Intel is SVT-AV1, which is a new AV1 video encoder implementation for Windows and Linux Systems...

Last month I shared the work going into Gallium-Nine-Standalone that aims to make it easier to utilize the Gallium3D Direct3D 9 "Nine" state tracker on Wine. There is now a new release of that code, including easy-to-use binaries, for those pursuing faster D3D9 Windows gaming performance on Linux...

WireHub is a new open-source project aiming to provide decentralized, peer-to-peer and secure overlay networks that is tooled around the WireGuard secure VPN software...

One of the Linux desktop technologies that is quite exciting and will hopefully see more widespread adoption this year is the Red Hat backed PipeWire initiative...

It's been a love affair going on for years, but should you not already know, Netflix has long been leveraging FreeBSD as part of its in-house content delivery network (CDN) for serving its millions of users with on-demand video. This weekend at FOSDEM, Jonathan Looney of the company talked about their usage of FreeBSD...

After seeing a new GNU C Library release this week, the GNU toolchain has another update with the availability now of Binutils 2.32...

VkRunner is a tool inspired by Mesa's Piglit shader runner and developed by consulting firm Igalia initially as part of their work on the Intel Linux graphics driver stack. VkRunner allows for running a variety of Vulkan shaders for testing a driver's compiler back-end...

While current-generation Intel/AMD CPUs are still supporting the MMX SIMD instruction set from two decades ago, a set of GCC compiler patches are pending to begin implementing MMX intrinsics using SSE instructions...

Dell recently announced the XPS 9380 Developer Edition laptop as a minor refinement over the 9370: there's now Intel Whiskey Lake processors with minor performance boosts and the web camera is better positioned, while for the "Developer Edition" Sputnik models it means Ubuntu 18.04 LTS rather than Ubuntu 16.04 on the former model or Microsoft Windows 10. The testing so far of the Dell XPS 9380 Developer Edition has been going well and I will have my full benchmark review out soon, but for this weekend are some preliminary data points...

With Kodi 18.0 having been released earlier this week, the LibreELEC project is out with their 9.0 release as a lightweight Linux distribution built around this HTPC/multimedia software...

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver team has sent out another feature batch of changes for queuing in DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel cycle...

The fifth alpha of the Debian Installer for the upcoming Debian 10.0 "Buster" release is now available for testing. What makes this new release particularly important to test is that it features the initial UEFI Secure Boot support...

Since the notorious S3TC patent expired at the end of 2017, this common texture compression implementation for OpenGL has been supported by mainline Mesa. It's now been extended to also support sRGB non-linear color components...

The Haiku open-source operating system project inspired by BeOS is out with their newest monthly report on the happenings...

AMD's Linux graphics driver developers are preparing a set of Mesa patches that allow for compute shaders to be used for the video compositor render process within Gallium3D's video layer code...

In making it easier to persistently enable Weston's Pixman rendering code, the next Weston release offers up a configuration file option for flipping it on...

Valve has just published their monthly "Steam Survey" results that are always interesting for seeing the Linux usage metrics...

After hinting another major OEM was to join the LVFS, Richard Hughes of Red Hat announced today that HP is the latest company backing the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for distributing system firmware updates via this platform that is then applied on systems via Fwupd and conveniently exposed through the likes of GNOME Software...

For those using the Lutris open-source gaming platform that aims to enhance the experience of managing games and better integration from Wine to Steam games, the huge 0.5 release is now available for upgrades...

While Intel is finally poised to enable Fastboot by default for recent generations of their Iris/HD/UHD Graphics hardware, which could happen as soon as Linux 5.1, for now Fedora is comfortable enough enabling the support by default on their own...

AMD normally just does one code drop per week to their open-source "AMDVLK" Linux Vulkan driver code-base but now today marks the second time this week being greeted by new code. This latest release, v-2019.Q1.5, should provide for some fun weekend testing by Linux gamers preferring this driver over Mesa's RADV...

While we frequently compare the performance of many x86_64 Linux distributions, we haven't done one under IBM POWER9 since getting our hands on the Raptor Computing Systems' Talos II back in November. It's been very interesting to benchmark this libre hardware that's high performance with having 44 cores / 176 threads at 3.80GHz. But how much more performance can be tapped by using other Linux distributions? Here's a look with some of the current POWER9 Linux distribution options.

Kenneth Graunke of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center team is the developer who has been leading the charge for the past year on developing the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver that eventually should succeed their "i965" classic Mesa driver for Broadwell hardware and newer. Today he issued a pull request for some improvements to Gallium3D's Mesa state tracker itself...

Qt 5.12 was released in early December as the latest Long-Term Support release for the Qt5 tool-kit. Out today is the first point release that contains hundreds of fixes...

Last week AMD submitted their initial batch of feature changes slated for Linux 5.1 with their AMDGPU DRM graphics driver. Today that's been complemented by a second pull request of new material to come with this next version of the Linux kernel...

Qt Design Studio, the solution for rapidly prototyping and developing complex user-interfaces with the Qt5 tool-kit while being a bridge between designers and developers, has reached its public beta release for the inbound Qt Design Studio 1.1...

The Linux kernel's Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) code getting a "CRTC background color" property value may not seem exciting, but it can mean video memory bandwidth savings and thus better performance or power savings...

While many are looking forward to the day when WireGuard support is mainlined within the Linux kernel and declared as stable and widely supported as a next-gen secure VPN tunnel, for those making use of OpenVPN currently, the OpenVPN 3 Linux client has been taking shape as a big step forward on the OpenVPN front...

January was certainly an exciting month with the Linux 5.0 kernel taking shape, the GeForce RTX 2060 launch and other new hardware, approaching the exciting open-source Radeon VII launch, and other Linux/open-source events to help warm up those otherwise experiencing a frigid winter...

Mesa 18.3.3 was released today as the newest stable release for the current Mesa 18.3 series from Q4...

Ending out January is the version 2.29 release of the GNU C Library (glibc)...

OPNsense, the FreeBSD-based firewall/router platform forked from m0n0wall, is out with its first release of 2019 and it also marks four years since the original OS release...

If the folks at Purism weren't busy enough working on their Librem 5 Linux smartphone initiative and adjoining projects like creating a new software app store, they also are eyeing an entrance into offering "ethical" subscription services and ultimately expand into other areas...

Arm Holdings has been developing their next-generation "Komeda" Direct Rendering Manager driver and they believe it's ready for mainline integration with the upcoming Linux 5.1 cycle...

Unity Tech has put out their first public beta of the upcoming Unity 2019.1 game engine update. There's some notable work on both the Linux and Vulkan fronts...

GNOME 3.32 is shaping up to be a darn fine release especially with the performance improvements slated to be part of this six-month desktop environment update due out in March...

For the Linux kernel's Speculative Store Bypass Disable (SSBD) handling for Spectre Variant 4 protection is support for processes opting into force disabling of speculation via a prctl() interface. Currently when speculation is disabled, that is carried through to new processes started via the execve() system call. But a new bit will allow clearing that state when a new program is started by a process otherwise relying upon PR_SPEC_DISABLE, in what will help the performance in such cases...

Last month the Ubuntu/Debian-based Linux Mint distribution crew collected more than twenty-two thousand dollars in donations during the holiday period. With that record high in monthly donations for the project, they are as motivated as ever for delivering more improvements to their desktop-focused distro this year...

While Intel's Clear Linux is known to the most of you for its speed, it's also a distribution that is very easy to build off of for specific use-cases should you want your own pre-configured Linux OS...

Fresh on the Mesa 19.1 development cycle, the Virgl Gallium3D driver that is used as part of OpenGL acceleration for KVM guests with VirtIO-GPU is seeing some improvements...

Just in time for the Sway 1.0 release, support for the Wayland pointer constraints and relative pointer protocols has been merged, which is important for handling various games primarily first person shooters...