Phoronix

Adding to the excitement around Linux 4.20~5.0 are now multiple performance improvements to the Btrfs file-system to be presented for this next Linux kernel release...

Last week I wrote about new patches adding Coreboot Flashrom support for Radeon GPUs for being able to re-program the SPI blocks on AMD graphics processors. Initially that was for old Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 series hardware but now it's moved onto the GCN world...

Ahead of the expected official release announcement tomorrow, Firefox 63.0 is now available from the Mozilla servers...

There is already a lot of features slated for the Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel with its development cycle officially having gotten underway this morning. Adding to that lengthy list of expected work is the possible introduction of the I3C subsystem...

Richard Stallman has announced the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines. The GNU founder hopes these guidelines will encourage women to get involved in free software development and be more kind in project discussions...

Last week following the launch of the RTX 2070 Turing graphics cards, I carried out some initial RTX 2070 compute benchmarks including of TensorFlow and more common OpenCL/CUDA workloads. The GPU compute performance for this $499+ Turing GPU was quite good and especially for INT16 test cases often beating the GTX 1080 Ti. Available now are the Linux gaming benchmarks for the GeForce RTX 2070 compared to an assortment of other NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards on Ubuntu 18.10.

After the big Vulkan 1.1.88 update earlier this month that brought transform feedback and other new extensions, Vulkan 1.1.89 is now available...

The Linspire Linux distribution that was rebooted earlier this year is preparing for its next installment, Linspire 8.0...

While the Linux kernel has its own out-of-memory (OOM) killer when system memory becomes over-committed, Facebook developers have been developing their own user-space based solution for handling this situation...

Following this morning's Linux 4.19 release announcement, one of the first pull requests sent in of feature updates for the next 4.20~5.0 feature cycle is the hardware monitoring "hwmon" updates...

Greg Kroah-Hartman went ahead and released the Linux 4.19 kernel...

Next year is when all of the pieces of the open-source puzzle for fully supporting FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync/VRR displays with AMD graphics cards should be in place for allowing out-of-the-box support...

With my initial Core i9 9900K benchmarks out there following Friday's embargo expiration, for some weekend benchmarking fun I decided to pull out the old Core i7 990X to see how it compares to the new 9900K... The Gulftown and Coffeelake processors were compared not only on raw performance but also overall power consumption and performance-per-Watt.

This week the Kazan project (formerly known as "Vulkan-CPU") celebrated a small but important milestone in its trek to having a CPU-based Vulkan software implementation...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly recap of interesting development activities impacting Plasma, Frameworks, and the Applications stack...

Intel's IWD iNet Wireless Daemon that is hoping to one day supplant WPA Supplicant on Linux systems is out this weekend with version 0.10...

NVIDIA developers have expressed interest in helping the open-source GCC libstdc++ and LLVM Clang libc++ standard libraries in bringing up support for the standardized parallel algorithms...

The Panfrost open-source, community-driven, reverse-engineered graphics driver for ARM Mali graphics processors continues panning out pretty well...

If all goes as planned, tomorrow will mark the availability of the Linux 4.19 stable kernel. That is also expected to mark the return of Linus Torvalds from his retreat where he was working on his empathy skills and politeness. The 4.19 stable release will then kick off the merge window for the next kernel cycle...

The Sway Wayland compositor inspired by X11's i3 window manager is now up to its beta ahead of the big 1.0 release...

After a series of alpha releases, FreeBSD 12.0 Beta 1 was issued today to help encourage testing ahead of this operating system update due out in early December...

The Linux Code of Conduct introduced last month that ended up being quite contentious will see some revisions just ahead of the Linux 4.19 stable kernel release. Greg Kroah-Hartman has outlined the planned changes as well as a new Code of Conduct Interpretation document...

Systemd's latest feature is the concept of "boot counting" that will track kernel boot attempts and failures as part of an automatic boot assessment. Ultimately this is to provide automatic fallback to older kernels should a newer kernel be consistently failing...

The Arcan display server, which started off years ago sounding like a novelty with being a display server built off a game engine in part and other interesting features, is nearing feature parity with the X.Org Server...

Well, the virtual reality (VR) demo scene is now complete with having glxgears-inspired gears and Utah teapot rendering on VR head mounted displays with the new XRGEARS...

While LLVM's Clang compiler already supports C++17, what this change is about is the LLVM code itself and for sub-projects like Clang can begin making use of C++17 code itself. This in turn ups the requirements for being able to compile the code-base...

While ODROID is most known for their various ARM single board computers (SBCs), some of which offer impressive specs, they have dabbled in x86 SBCs and on Friday announced the Intel-powered ODROID-H2...

It's been four years since the debut of the Cairo 1.14 stable series and today that has been succeeded by Cairo 1.16. Cairo, as a reminder, is the vector graphics library for 2D drawing and supports back-ends ranging from OpenGL to PDF, PostScript, DirectFB, and SVG outputs. Cairo is used by the likes of the GTK+ tool-kit, Mozilla's Gecko engine, Gnuplot, Poppler, and many other open-source projects...

In addition to System76 being busy finishing up work on their new PC build factory in Denver and making their first foray into open-source hardware, they also continue working on Pop!_OS as their downstream of Ubuntu Linux with various features added in...

Among other software releases, yesterday brought the debut of the PostgreSQL 11.0 database server. Given it has possible performance enhancements and the new (non-default) LLVM-based just-in-time compilation ability, I decided to run some benchmarks on the powerful Dell PowerEdge EPYC 2P server...

While LG isn't often thought of as a laptop manufacturer, their Gram laptop line-up has recently been making some waves. The LG Gram laptops are powered by Intel Core CPUs and are designed to be slim and sleek yet durable. With the next Linux kernel (4.20~5.0), they should be better supported should you want to wipe the default Microsoft Windows installation...

Mesa 18.2.3 is out today as the latest point release to the Mesa 18.2 stable series. Notable to this point release are several bug fixes and workarounds to benefit Steam Play / Wine (and the Valve downstream Proton) and various new games being brought up there thanks in part to DXVK...

A few days back Linux game porter/developer Ethan Lee joined CodeWeavers to work on Wine/Proton for Valve. In particular, he's going to be focusing on his FAudio project as a Windows XAudio(2) re-implementation. CodeWeavers appears to be eager on getting FAudio merged into upstream Wine...

Intel sent over the Core i9 9900K as their first 9th Gen Coffeelake-S CPU hitting store shelves today. With the embargo on that now expired, let's have a look at how well this eight-core / sixteen-thread processor performs under Linux.

Complementing the just-published Intel Core i9 9900K Linux benchmarks with the launch-day embargo lift are the Linux gaming benchmarks... This article is looking at the Linux performance between the Core i9 9900K and AMD's Ryzen 7 2700X in a variety of native Linux games as well as comparing the performance-per-Watt. So if you are a Linux gamer and deciding between these sub-$500 processors, this article is for you.

It had been more than two weeks since the last time AMD developers updated their public source trees making up the official AMDVLK Vulkan driver but fortunately that has now changed. Given the time since the last commit, there is a lot of goodies with this new AMDVLK driver refresh...

Intel developers today announced the release of KVMGT 2018-Q3 (also known as Intel GVT-g for KVM) as well as the accompany Xen hypervisor tailored XenGT 2018-Q3 update...

In addition to LLVM's multi-year effort on re-licensing their code, some developers also remain hard at work on officially migrating the project from an SVN development workflow to Git...

The HarfBuzz open-source text shaping library that is used by GNOME, KDE, Firefox, LibreOffice, Chrome OS, Java, and countless other desktop applications has reached version 2.0...

Canonical managed to announce on the same-day as the Ubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish" debut their goal for this cycle of opening up their software/hardware survey results that began with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS desktop installations. Those initial results are now available but the available data and analytic capabilities are rather underwhelming...

Here are the first of our benchmarks for the GeForce RTX 2070 graphics card that launched this week. In our inaugural Ubuntu Linux benchmarking with the GeForce RTX 2070 is a look at the OpenCL / CUDA GPU computing performance including with TensorFlow and various models being tested on the GPU. The benchmarks are compared to an assortment of available graphics cards and also include metrics for power consumption, performance-per-Watt, and performance-per-dollar.

Igalia's Juan Suarez Romero as the Mesa 18.2 series release manager is putting the finishing touches on the 18.2.3 point release to benefit Steam Play / Proton / Wine games...

Fedora 29 will not be managing to deliver its final release right on time due to lingering blocker bugs...

The busy release date continues with Mozilla/Xiph.Org announcing the release of the Opus 1.3 audio codec...

It should come as no surprise, but the official release of Ubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish" is now available with the announcement just hitting the wire...

Adding to the exciting release day is Theo de Raadt releasing OpenBSD 6.4 as the newest version of this BSD operating system known for its security mindfulness...

Besides Ubuntu 18.10 releasing today, another cause for celebration today is the official debut of the PostgreSQL 11 database server...

Among the changes to find in Ubuntu 18.10 are the latest stable Linux kernel as well as a significant Mesa upgrade and also the latest X.Org Server. These component upgrades make for a better Linux gaming experience particularly if using a modern AMD Radeon graphics card. Here are some results as well as whether it's worthwhile switching to Linux 4.19 and Mesa 18.3-dev currently on Ubuntu 18.10.

Nadav Amit of VMware has announced their (currently experimental) work on "dynamic indirect call promotion" or what they have dubbed "RELPOLINES" -- not to be confused with the traditional Retpolines for "return trampolines" as one of the Spectre Variant Two software-based mitigation approaches. Relpolines is designed to have lower overhead than Retpolines...

When it comes to open-source ARM graphics drivers, the Raspberry Pi / VC4 effort and Freedreno continue to be the two best examples of fully open-source graphics driver coverage including 3D support. Freedreno has been attracting contributions from Qualcomm / CodeAurora in what started out as solely a community reverse-engineered effort and with the latest-generation Adreno 600 series hardware the open-source support is in great shape...