Phoronix

A few days ago we wrote about Red Hat developer and Flatpak creator Alexander Larsson getting Flatpaks running on Windows albeit using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). He's now shared more details on that accomplishment...

Mir 1.0 was talked about for release last year but at the last minute they reverted it to Mir 0.28. There is now a patch pending that is once again attempting the Mir 1.0 milestone...

Later this week the GeForce RTX 2080 "Turing" GPUs begin shipping and one of the interesting additions with this new GPU architecture is support for mesh shaders...

Last week I provided a fresh look at the latest Linux performance on 22 Intel/AMD systems while for kicking off the benchmarking this week is a look at the current Linux performance on sixteen different ARM single board computers / developer boards from low-end to high-end.

The LLVM/Clang 7.0 release had been running a bit behind schedule and warranted a third release candidate, but this week LLVM 7.0.0 is now ready to ship...

Back in June, Valve announced "Moondust" as a new VR technical demo to showcase their hardware efforts (primarily with the Knuckles EV2 VR controllers) and consists of some mini games. It looks like this tech demo might be soon open-sourced...

Last month we covered early work being done on an Intel 2.5G Ethernet Linux driver. That "IGC" driver for Intel I225-LM/I225-V 2.5G Ethernet adapters didn't make it for Linux 4.19, but it looks like it will be on track for the Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel...

One of the features that didn't materialize for LLVM / Clang 7.0 is the SPIR-V support within the compiler toolchain...

Happening back at the end of June was WineConf 2018 in The Hague as the annual Wine developer conference. The remaining video recordings from that event are finally available...

Prior to releasing Linux 4.19-rc4 and Linus Torvalds taking a temporary leave of absence to reflect on his behavior / colorful language, he did apply a Code of Conduct to the Linux kernel...

Linux 4.19-rc4 is out today as the very latest weekly development test kernel for Linux 4.19. It's another fairly routine kernel update at this stage, but more shocking is that Linus Torvalds will be taking a temporary leave from kernel maintainership and Greg Kroah-Hartman will take over the rest of the Linux 4.19 cycle...

SQLite 3.25 was released this weekend as the newest feature update to this embed-friendly SQL database library...

Released this week was the first RC milestone for the PHP 7.3 feature update due out before year's end. This weekend I ran some fresh PHP benchmarks looking at its performance...

After writing yesterday about kernel contributions of AMD vs. NVIDIA vs. Intel, I kicked off the hours-long process of gitstats analyzing the Linux kernel Git repository for some fresh numbers on the current kernel development trends...

One of the coolest innovations landing this year in PostgreSQL was LLVM-based JIT support to speed up database queries. But it's not going to be enabled by default in the upcoming PostgreSQL 11 release...

Come KDE Applications 18.12 in time for the holidays, the KMail KDE email client will finally offer a unified inbox...

Busy since Friday's release of Wine 3.16, the volunteers maintaining the Wine-Staging tree with the various experimental/testing patches atop upstream Wine are out with their adjoining update that continues with just under 900 patches being re-based...

OpenGL 4.6 has been out for more than a year but the Mesa-based drivers (namely RadeonSI and Intel) remain blocked from officially advertising this latest GL revision due to not yet supporting the ARB_gl_spirv extension and related ARB_spirv_extensions...

Given all the new hardware enablement work going into the Linux kernel recently, I was curious how the code contributions were stacking up by some of the leading hardware vendors... Here are those interesting numbers...

Flatpak creator and lead developer Alexander Larsson of Red Hat has got the basics of Flatpak applications working under Microsoft Windows 10...

It was a busy Friday for the open-source AMD folks as in addition to releasing AMDGPU DDX 18.1 and the big ROCm 1.9 release, their latest batch of feature changes were also submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel cycle. This is going to be another exciting release for Radeon Linux users...

The latest revised patches were sent out on Friday evening for WireGuard, the very promising secure VPN tunnel technology developed over the past few years by Jason Donenfeld...

Elisa is one of several options when it comes to music players for the KDE desktop. Elisa 0.3 entered beta this week as another step forward for this relatively young project...

For months we have been looking forward to ROCm 1.9 as the latest feature update to the Radeon Open Compute stack while on Friday that big release finally took place. This ROCm update for GPU compute purposes has a lot of new features...

Following the release candidate last week, NetworkManager 1.14 is now officially available as the latest feature release to this widely-used Linux networking software component...

While Wine 3.0.3 was released this week as the newest stable release of this program for handling Windows games/applications on Linux and other operating systems, out now is Wine 3.16 if you prefer something a bit more lively...

Just in time for the weekend Linux gamers, DXVK 0.72 has been released as the newest version of this Direct3D 10/11 to Vulkan API translation layer that is used by Wine and also now by Steam Play / Proton...

At the European Open-Source Firmware Conference happening this week in Erlangen, Intel announced the open-source "Slimbootloader" (also referred to as Slim Bootloader) project that is quite exciting...

AMD has issued rare updates today to their xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-amdgpu DDX drivers for use with the X.Org Server...

While AMD has been sending out Linux enablement patches for the yet-to-be-released Vega 20 for months now, what didn't see any work until today was for the AMDKFD driver support so this expected 7nm Vega GPU can work with their ROCm/OpenCL compute stack...

Next week is when the GeForce RTX 2080 "Turing" graphics cards will begin to ship while today is when NVIDIA lifted the embargo on "unboxing" videos/pictures and talking more about this new GPU microarchitecture...

Samuel Pitoiset working for Valve's Linux GPU driver team has now sent out shaderInt16 support for the RADV driver...

Multiple individuals are reporting that they have been just recently banned by Blizzard for playing their games -- seemingly Overwatch is the main title -- when using Wine with the DXVK D3D11-over-Vulkan translation layer...

Last week SiFive published their HiFive Unleashed open-source boot-loader code for this first RISC-V SoC on their Linux-friendly development board. This code being open-sourced has already helped improve the support for the FU540 SoC within Coreboot...

One of the notable additions to the Linux 4.19 kernel is the initial VKMS driver for "virtual kernel mode-setting" that in the long run should be significant for headless Wayland/X.Org systems. The driver is still in its early stages but continuing to be improved...

Following last week's Chrome 69 release, Chrome 70 is now in beta as the latest feature-update to Google's browser...

As happens almost every Fedora Linux release cycle, the initial development release has been pushed back...

The KDE community has released the beta of the upcoming Plasma 5.14 desktop update...

One of the Mozilla technologies we have been most excited about in recent years is WebRender, the Rust-written restructuring of the graphics/GPU code...

Released this past weekend was Vulkan 1.1.84 and one of the newly introduced extensions was..

Feral Interactive released today Life is Strange: Before the Storm for Linux and macOS...

The first public beta of the Unity 2018.3 game engine is now available for testing and evaluation...

Sam Spilsbury who was the former Compiz lead developer at Canonical and involved in the Unity desktop shell development is creating a new library spun out of Compiz...

YouTube has begun transcoding videos into the new royalty-free AV1 video codec...

Lots of changes are happening in the Lubuntu camp...

If you are a user of the Wine stable releases rather than the bi-weekly Wine development releases or Wine-Staging (or now Proton too), Wine 3.0.3 is out today as the latest version...

Just one day after releasing Phoronix Test Suite 8.2, our "cloud" component to this open-source benchmarking software served up its 34 millionth test profile / test suite download to Phoronix Test Suite users...

NVIDIA used their GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in Japan that's happening this week to announce a slew of new offerings and technology advancements...

The RADV Mesa-based Radeon Vulkan driver is picking up support for another extension...

The Wine project's Direct3D 12 to Vulkan API translation layer has implemented a basic Vulkan pipeline cache that may help with performance...