Phoronix

Blender 2.80 development had been running a few months behind schedule but coming out in the next few weeks will be their beta milestone...

The recently covered PCI peer-to-peer memory support for the Linux kernel has indeed landed for the 4.20~5.0 kernel cycle. This is about PCI Express devices supporting peer-to-peer DMA that can bypass the system memory and processor via a standardized interface...

Last week Corsair announced the Force Series MP510 M.2 PCIe NVMe solid-state drives as the company's fastest SSDs to date. While being Corsair's latest and fastest NVMe SSDs, the pricing is competitive with the 240GB model starting out at $70 USD, 480GB for $130 USD, $239 for 960GB, or $475 for a 1920GB version.

I am still finishing up work on my Linux 4.19 kernel stable benchmarks given it's been (and continues to be) a very busy month for Linux hardware testing, but of interest so far has been seeing a few EPYC performance improvements in some of the real-world workloads...

While Btrfs has been sorting out performance improvements, the crew working on the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) have been working on a number of feature additions for this next Linux kernel under development...

A new release of the Illumos-powered OpenIndiana Hipster operating system is now available as one of the leading open-source Solaris-derived operating systems...

With just one week of feature development remaining for the in-development Mesa 18.3, the race is on for landing the remaining feature work ahead of this next quarterly Mesa3D stable version...

The Qt Project has been the latest open-source community constructing a Code of Conduct. The motivation for this CoC in the Qt camp has been driven to "establish a formal line-in-the-sand about what is unacceptable behavior. We want new members of the Qt community to feel comfortable and accepted, and we want to foster a healthy working environment for both current and new members."..

Overnight the networking subsystem changes were merged into the mainline kernel for the Linux 4.20~5.0. Sadly not part of this pull request is the much sought after WireGuard secure VPN tunnel but it does bring one of the other features we've been monitoring: the new Intel 2.5G Ethernet driver...

The EFI support code within the mainline Linux kernel continues to be improved upon. While EFI firmware has matured in the past few years to become more reliable, there still are systems/motherboards shipping with various bugs. One of the additions for this next kernel release will better handle rare cases where buggy firmware could hang the kernel...

Google engineers are developing the DM-BOW device mapper driver with plans to use the code on Android devices to provide a restoration path should a system upgrade fail...

Going back several release cycles has been an effort to add the XArray data structure to the Linux kernel but to date that hasn't happened. It wasn't accepted for Linux 4.19 and now Matthew Wilcox -- who began this work about two years ago as a programmer at Microsoft -- is hoping Linux 4.20~5.0 will be the lucky release...

The HID driver updates have a few nice improvements for the recently opened Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel merge window...

Just ahead of the Fedora 29 release where Fedora Silverblue has become quite usable for a Flatpak-focused, atomic experience built using OSTree, Fedora developers have unveiled Fedora Toolbox...

Intel open-source developer Dylan Baker has laid out a proposed release schedule for the upcoming Mesa 18.3 quarterly feature release...

On the Spectre front for the recently-started Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel is STIBP support for cross-hyperthread Spectre Variant Two mitigation...

Hygon's Dhyana SoC, the facsimile of the AMD Zen microarchitecture as a result of the AMD-Chinese joint venture to begin spinning up domestic x86 chips for the Chinese data center market, will be supported by the next version of the Linux kernel...

Red Hat announced this morning they are collaborating with NVIDIA around open-source innovations for emerging workloads such as artificial intelligence and deep learning...

Earlier this year the Speck encryption algorithm was added to the Linux kernel as at the time Google intended to use it for EXT4/fscrypt file-system encryption with low-end Android devices. But Speck with all its controversy due to being developed by the US National Security Agency (NSA) led to immediate backlash. The removal of Speck from the Linux kernel tree is finally happening...

We've long been looking forward to WARHAMMER II on Linux and it looks like that could be realized next month...

Oracle's Munich developers responsible for maintaining the VirtualBox virtualization software this morning announced the first public test release of the upcoming VirtualBox 6.0...

Intel's Rafael Wysocki sent in the power management updates today for the Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel cycle...

The open-source display driver for supporting these graphics cards where 32MB of SDRAM was suitable, 250 nm fabrication was standard, and core clocks around 100MHz were competitive is still being maintained... Two decades after the release of the ATI RAGE series, the open-source Linux driver continues seeing some activity and in fact a new driver release...

Should you be into Linux on z Systems, the IBM s390 code for the Linux 4.20~5.0 cycle is coming with several feature additions...

Yesterday OpenBenchmarking.org, our "cloud" component to the open-source Phoronix Test Suite open-source benchmarking framework, served up its thirty-five millionth test profile / test suite download...

It's not often we get to talk about the LED drivers for the Linux kernel... Yes, the class of Linux kernel drivers to support controlling the brightness of LEDs via supported drivers and exposing that to user-space. With Linux 4.20~5.0 comes finally the ability to program "patterns" for LEDs...

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...