Phoronix

For fans of the Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution, the third beta of their next major update is now available for evaluation...

Due to traveling in China, Linus Torvalds has released the Linux 4.18-rc2 kernel a half-day ahead of schedule, but overall things are looking good for Linux 4.18...

The ASUS P8H61-M PRO is now the latest motherboard working with mainline Coreboot...

While the GNOME tool-kit developers have been hard at work on GTK4 roughly the past two years and have kept GTK3 frozen at GTK+ 3.22, a GTK+ 3.24 release is now being worked on to deliver some new features until GTK+ 4.0 is ready to be released...

For those still using the Debian 8 GNU/Linux "Jessie" release, the 8.11 point release is now available and it's also the last planned update...

The latest Fedora 29 feature proposal is about offering "modules for everyone" across all Fedora editions...

Canonical/Ubuntu developers are working on improvements to the GNOME Software "app store" and recently held an in-person design sprint along with one upstream GNOME developer for coming up with improvements...

If software development isn't your forte but are looking to help out a leading open-source project while logistics and hospitality are where you excel, the X.Org Foundation is soliciting bids for the XDC2019 conference...

Recent reader requests have come in about having a tipping/donation option that is more FOSS-friendly than PayPal. In particular, requests for Liberapay...

While Red Hat officially launched RHEL7 for ARM servers last November, on Friday Oracle finally announced the general availability of their RHEL7-derived Oracle Linux 7 for ARM...

Wine 3.11 is now available as the newest bi-weekly development release of this software for running Windows programs/games/applications on Linux and other operating systems...

The Freedreno Gallium3D driver now supports all extensions required by OpenGL ES 3.1 and is also quite close to supporting desktop OpenGL 3.3...

With the Ubuntu Hardware/Software Survey that was introduced in Ubuntu 18.04 and presented to users upon new installations, it's been collecting data since the Bionic Beaver launch in April but the data hasn't been made public up to this point. Viewing the survey data is currently being worked on for the Ubuntu 18.10 cycle and today a first look at these numbers have been shared...

Right now on systems with low amounts of available system memory, GNOME Shell can sometimes fail to launch applications due to an error over not being able to allocate memory in the fork process. With the latest rounds of Glib optimizations, this should no longer be the case...

The big systemd 239 feature update is now officially released...

Here are some fresh benchmarks comparing the performance of a variety of cross-platform Windows/Linux desktop applications when benchmarking the native Windows 10 binaries, the Windows binaries under Wine 3.10 on Ubuntu 18.04, and then the native Linux binaries itself on Ubuntu 18.04. All tests were done on the same system and these results do a good job at showing the potential (and shortcomings) of Wine from a performance perspective.

It's been a few months since the Kodi 18 Alpha while available today is the second alpha release of this major update to the open-source, cross-platform HTPC software...

It was just a few days ago that the OpenGL compatibility profile support in Mesa reached OpenGL 3.3 compliance for RadeonSI while now thanks to the latest batch of patches from one of the Valve Linux developers, it's soon going to hit OpenGL 4.4...

DXVK 0.60 is now available as the newest feature release for this translation layer that allows Direct3D 11 games running on Wine to be mapped to Vulkan rather than Wine's default OpenGL translation layer. With DXVK 0.60 there are more performance optimizations and other feature additions...

Intel open-source developer Joone Hur has provided a guide about using the Chrome OS graphics stack on Intel-based Linux desktop systems...

While the initial EGLStreams-based support for using the NVIDIA proprietary driver with XWayland was merged for the recent X.Org Server 1.20 release, the next xorg-server release will feature more improvements...

Less than one week after the close of the Linux 4.18 kernel merge window, AMD developers working on the AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager driver have already submitted their first batch of changes to DRM-Next to begin queuing for the Linux 4.19 kernel cycle. There are a few new features with this latest batch of code...

Adding to the list of busy software releases today is the availability of Rust 1.27...

Version 2.18 of the Git distributed revision control system is now available...

Red Hat's Alexander Larsson who has been leading much of the Flatpak development going back to the days of XDG-App has today announced the release of Flatpak 0.99.1 as the first pre-release prior to the major 1.0 release...

When it comes to obscure projects under the official GNU Project umbrella, GNU FreeDink is one of them as being a free software game whose lineage traces back to the Dink Smallwood title from the late 90's. Nearly twenty years after the game's original release, the latest GNU FreeDink release is now available that allows it to be played within web-browsers...

LVM2 as the user-space tools for Logical Volume Management (LVM) on Linux is in the process of going through a big re-work...

Here are some quick benchmarks I ran this week of the newly open-sourced Zapcc C++ caching compiler based upon LLVM/Clang and compared to the upstream Clang performance, GCC, and Ccache with the speed on the original compilation of the benchmark code and then again on a subsequent compilation...

While Intel's second quarter revenue and non-GAAP EPS is exceeding their prior guidance, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich has resigned effective immediately...

PulseAudio 12.0 was quietly released yesterday as the newest version of this open-source, cross-platform sound server...

Just shy of two weeks since PHP 7.3 went into alpha, the second alpha release of this upcoming annual feature release to the PHP programming language is now available...

The KDE/Qt-aligned Krita digital painting program has published the first beta of their next feature release, Krita 4.1...

Oracle has promoted its Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 5 to general availability for x86_64 and ARM64 (AArch64) architectures...

Equus Compute Solutions has announced the release of their new WHITEBOX OPEN server platform that is intended to be cost-optimized and an open hardware platform...

GlusterFS. the network-attached storage file-system focused on cloud computing and more that is developed by Red Hat, is up to version 4.1 as its newest release...

At the recent Qt Contributors' Summit as previously covered on Phoronix were some early discussions over plans to release Qt 6.0 in 2020. A few more tidbits of information have come to light on these interesting tool-kit plans...

KDE's Elisa music player is just over one year old and with a few months having passed since the Elisa 0.1 inaugural release, succeeding that today is the beta for the upcoming Elisa 0.2...

The AMDGPU DRM driver appears to finally be crossing the milestone of exposing the current GPU load (as a percentage) in a manner that can be easily queried via sysfs...

The Radeon Software "AMDGPU-PRO" 18.20 hybrid driver stack is now available with official support for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 17.20...

GNOME 3.29.3 is out today as the latest development release in the road to this September's GNOME 3.30 desktop update...

Not to be confused with Fedora Core going back to the early days of Fedora as a Red Hat project, but Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller has just announced Fedora CoreOS...

Following the news yesterday of OpenBSD disabling Intel Hyper Threading by default within its OS over security concerns and plans to disable Simultaneous Multi Threading for other processors/architectures too, here are some fresh Intel HT benchmarks albeit on Ubuntu Linux. The OpenBSD developer involved characterized HT/SMT as "doesn't necessarily have a positive effect on performance; it highly depends on the workload. In all likelihood it will actually slow down most workloads if you have a CPU with more than two cores." So here are some benchmarks using a current-generation Intel Core i7 8700K six-core processor with Hyper Threading.

For users of openSUSE's Tumbleweed rolling-release Linux distribution, it's been a very busy month on the update front...

While Spectre and Meltdown mitigation has been available to RHEL6 users via kernel upgrades, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.10 is out today as the newest release while its bundled kernel features Retpolines and KPTI for mitigating against these CPU vulnerabilities...

Intel's Chen Yu has sent out a set of patches providing experimental support for in-kernel encryption support for hibernation...

Red Hat / GNOME developer veteran Matthias Clasen has recently begun a series of blog posts going in-depth with Flatpaks for those wondering how this application deployment technology is taking over the Linux desktop...

Laminar Research has published their latest usage statistics on the incredible X-Plane flight simulator software...

Coreboot's latest development code now supports parsing and booting of FIT payloads. FIT in this context is a Flattened Image Tree that leverages DeviceTree...

There hasn't been a new AMDGPU DC code drop in a while as AMD developers work to improve their internal processes, but hitting the wire today is a set of 51 new patches for this "display code" stack that work on a variety of improvements...

Keith Packard's long in development work for improving the Linux display stack infrastructure for better dealing with VR head-mounted displays is about rounded out with the new Vulkan extension support being merged into Mesa...