Phoronix

With carrying out the ZFS/HAMMER2 vs. Linux ZoL and other file-system benchmarks this weekend, while having those clean installs of each operating system under test, I also took the opportunity to run some other non-storage benchmarks...

There is a new version of the Catfish search utility, which is GTK3 based and part of the Xfce project, but works on other desktop systems as a Linux/Unix system search tool as well...

The Intel WiFi Linux driver "IWLWIFI" will see support for various new WiFi adapters with the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel cycle...

With many current ARM/embedded devices having their GPU render and display hardware split into different blocks, Mesa is seeing infrastructure improvements for making it easier to support new platforms in this split configuration...

It's been another busy week in the KDE space for seeing that 2019 will be another successful year for the KDE project...

Given the increasing rise of hardware accelerators for compute offloading of particular tasks especially now around deep/machine learning with more chips coming to market, the Linux kernel will likely soon see the introduction of a formal subsystem for these different accelerator drivers...

The release plans for the next version of the Weston reference compositor have been firmed up as well as joining that release by a new version of Wayland itself...

While running the Windows vs. BSD vs. Linux 10GbE network benchmarks among other recent 10GbE Linux network performance figures, the test request came in from a premium patron to look at the current 10GbE network performance hit as a result of the default Spectre+Meltdown mitigations...

DXVK 0.96 has been released as the newest version of this library for mapping Direct3D 10/11 to Vulkan for faster Wine/Proton gaming performance on Linux...

With TrueOS offering daily snapshots built against the "ZFS on FreeBSD" code derived from OpenZFS / ZFS on Linux, I decided to run some benchmarks to see how the performance compares to that of FreeBSD 12.0 with its ZFS file-system support, DragonFlyBSD 5.2.1 with its HAMMER2 file-system alternative, and then Linux with ZFS/ZoL and other file-system options.

Systemd doesn't tend to have tagged release candidates or any development releases aside from Git prior to issuing new stable releases, but that's different today with the systemd 241 RC1 debut...

As a follow-up to the story earlier this week about a Mesa EGL extension needed for a universal driver configuration GUI, that extension (MESA_query_driver) was re-merged into Mesa 19.0 now that the build issue was addressed. The developer behind ADriConf is also looking for ideas on further improving this open-source 3D driver configuration utility...

The LXQt team has announced version 0.14.0 of their lightweight Qt5-powered Linux desktop environment...

In making it easier to manage and access the Linux kernel headers for a particular kernel build, Google engineers working on Android are proposing an in-kernel solution for mainline where a compressed archive of a given kernel's headers could be accessible via /proc...

The Virtual I/O Device standard, VIRTIO, is moving closer to seeing its big 1.1 release. The VIRTIO standard as a reminder devices/drivers around networking, storage, and other areas akin to Xen paravirtualized drivers and VMware Guest Tools but designed with cross-hypervisor and cross-OS support in mind...

Taking place this week in Christchurch, New Zealand was the annual Linux.Conf.Au conference, one of the best Linux/open-source events. For those that weren't down under for the event, the videos of the various technical sessions have begun to be uploaded to YouTube...

The initial batch of new AMDGPU feature changes slated for the Linux 5.1 were sent out on Friday evening for staging in DRM-Next until the 5.1 kernel merge window opens at the end of February or early March...

It's been a while since last having anything major to report on MythTV, the once very common HTPC software for open-source DVR/PVR needs albeit less so these days given all the Internet streaming and on-demand video platforms. This month the project released MythTV 30.0 as their newest feature release...

For the past two and a half years there has been a non-default Firefox package with Wayland support available to Fedora users running Fedora Workstation with the GNOME Shell. For the Fedora 30 release due out this spring, they are planning to ship the Firefox Wayland back-end by default...

The Qt5 tool-kit continues picking up new features outside of the traditional scope of a graphical tool-kit. The latest feature announced, which is currently a Qt Labs project and developed by The Qt Company, is an HTTP server...

Yesterday we shared that Wine developers at CodeWeavers have begun exploring a Vulkan back-end for WineD3D for their Direct3D 11 support and lower, separate from their work on VKD3D that is targeting Direct3D 12 atop Vulkan. More details on that effort have now been shared...

FreeBSD 12.0, Windows Server 2019, and five Linux distributions were tested for comparing the Gigabit and 10GbE networking performance as part of our latest benchmarks. Additionally, the performance was looked at for the Mellanox 10GbE adapter when also using the company's Linux tuning script compared to the out-of-the-box performance on the enterprise Linux distribution releases.

AMD Linux graphics driver developers this morning posted a set of 138 patches introducing a new software SMU driver that is geared for "future ASICs."..

Going back seven years has been the Intel Linux graphics driver's "Fastboot" support for allowing a more polished initial boot experience by allowing unnecessary mode sets to be avoided by the hardware. There have been multiple attempts over the years to enable this cleaner boot experience by default, but each time it ended up being rejected or later reverted due to running into issues with problematic hardware. This year looks like we might finally see it enabled by default for Skylake HD/Iris Graphics and newer...

One of the exciting user additions to the forthcoming Linux 5.0 kernel is high resolution scroll wheel support for various Logitech and Microsoft mice. While the kernel support has landed, the user-space support is still pending...

If your new year's resolution was to try out a Linux rolling-release distribution, openSUSE Tumbleweed has shipped a number of updates ahead of the weekend for those wanting to give it a try. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is now making use of the Linux 4.20 stable kernel, KDE desktop package updates, and much more...

AMD developers have done their latest weekly code push comprising the open-source AMDVLK driver stack for the official open-source Vulkan API support...

If Wine 4.0 is having issues with some of your Windows applications or games, Wine-Staging 4.0 is now available and worth a glass...

Last week Purism announced the PureOS Store as their planned software / app store for their current Librem laptops and upcoming Librem 5 smartphone. The actual app store isn't available yet, but today they announced a few more details...

In addition to Canonical's Daniel van Vugt having been tackling various performance issues with the GNOME desktop, the Ubuntu developer has also been working on addressing various usability issues and other glaring problems...

WireGuard lead developer Jason Donenfeld has announced the release of WireGuard 0.0.20190123 as the latest snapshot for this secure VPN tunnel implementation for Linux systems and other platforms...

While Wine developers have already been working on VKD3D as Direct3D 12 implemented on top of Vulkan for Windows programs, it turns out Wine developers are exploring getting WineD3D on top of Vulkan for older versions of Direct3D using Vulkan rather than OpenGL...

With the AMD Radeon VII graphics card shipping in two weeks as the second-generation Vega GPU at 7nm, I figured it would be an interesting time to see how far the original Radeon RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64 graphics card performance has evolved since their launch back in August 2017. Here is a fresh look at the current Radeon RX Vega 56/64 GPU performance today using the bleeding-edge Linux graphics drivers compared to the driver state back in 2017 for OpenGL and Vulkan gaming performance.

ModemManager is the FreeDesktop.org project for controlling mobile broadband devices/connections that is akin to NetworkManager for networking. Last week ModemManager 1.10 was quietly outed as the latest feature release...

There still is two months to go until the annual Game Developers Conference kicks off in San Francisco while on Wednesday, The Khronos Group published their initial sessions for their developer day during the highly anticipated event...

The MESA_query_driver extension for EGL is of fundamental importance if there is to be a "universal" graphics driver control panel / configuration GUI for Mesa 3D drivers. The extension briefly landed today in Mesa but ended up being reverted due to build problems...

Now included in the Debian 10.0 Buster release and pending as part of the upstream MATE desktop environment is support for making it remote desktop aware...

While LLVM 8.0 embarked on its feature freeze and subsequent code branching last week, tagged today the first release candidate was tagged for this upcoming compiler stack release...

While the LLVM Clang compiler has a -Weverything switch to enable every possible warning, it's unlikely the GNU Compiler Collection will offer a similar option...

Debian 9.7 is out today as an emergency release for the project...

Dell is now shipping their new XPS 13 8th gen (9380) laptop in a developer edition that comes preloaded with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS...

While it was not too long ago that Microsoft Windows Server 2019 began shipping and that we conducted some end-of-year benchmarks between Windows and Linux, with being in the process of running a number of Windows and Linux benchmarks as part of our ongoing 10GbE OS performance testing, I also took the opportunity to run some other benchmarks on Windows Server 2016 and 2019 as well as a set of Linux distributions.

In addition to the many big ticket changes being worked on for GNOME 3.32 like better performance and Wayland improvements, it also marks the project embarking on a big overhaul of their application icons...

While Allwinner Technology isn't known as one of the most gracious contributors to the Linux kernel, their continued work on the "pstore_block" kernel patches will be of interest to many especially in the ARM/embedded space and just not for those using Allwinner SoCs...

TressFX, the library backed by AMD GPUOpen for advanced hair/fur/grass rendering and used by games like Tomb Raider, is seeing some improvements with its inclusion in The-Forge rendering framework...

As was discussed in 2018 and has largely reached consensus, the LLVM code-base and its sub-projects like Clang will move past being bound by C++11 and will moving to a newer C++ standard so they can begin making use of newer language features in the development of this compiler stack...

While we are most often focused on the Radeon and Intel drivers within Mesa as being the most commonly used Mesa-based drivers on Linux systems, Freedreno and friends have also been seeing some nice improvements for Mesa 19.0 with its feature freeze quickly coming upon us...

The once notorious AMDGPU "DC" code (formerly known as DAL) saw a fresh round of patches on Tuesday further improving this display stack shared between the Windows and Linux drivers for advanced functionality from FreeSync to HDMI/DP audio and much more...

Habana Labs is one of the companies working on an "AI" processor for speeding up deep learning inference and training workloads. Their initial product is the Goya processor that is already production-qualified. Today they published initial open-source Linux kernel driver patches for review to potentially include in the mainline kernel moving forward...

Wine 4.0 is now officially available as the new annual stable release to Wine for running Windows programs and games on Linux and other operating systems...