Phoronix

Less than one full week after their previous code drop, the AMD developers maintaining the AMDVLK Vulkan Linux driver today pushed out their freshest code...

LibreOffice 6.1 is planned for release by the middle of August but for that next version to happen without a hitch, the LibreOffice team could use a hand with the testing of their latest release candidates...

Since January there has been KPTI in the x86_64 Linux kernel as Kernel-based Page Table Isolation for mitigating the Meltdown CPU vulnerability. On the back-burner since then has been KPTI support for the Linux x86 32-bit kernel to protect those using older 32-bit-only processors. With the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel, KPTI is landing for Linux x86 32-bit. Here are sone benchmarks showing the performance penalty when upgrading to this new kernel on an Ubuntu i686 laptop.

With the cutoff of new feature material to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 4.19 cycle coming to an end, here is an overview of the prominent Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) changes on the plate for this next kernel version...

Out today is a new release of the Intel IWD network stack, the wireless daemon hoping to eventually replace WPA Supplicant...

While Fedora 28 has been a fantastic release, Fedora 29 that is currently under development for releasing in October is going to be what feels like a massive amount of changes...

C-SKY is the 32-bit embedded CPU architecture developed in Hangzhou, China for the CK610/CK807/CK810/CK860 cores, among others...

An Intel engineer has today published a patch providing support for enhanced IBRS within the Linux kernel, which aims to provide better Spectre Variant Two protection by default with future generations of Intel CPUs...

In between hacking on patches to RadeonSI Gallium3D for better performance and new functionality, AMD's prolific Mesa contributor Marek Olsak has written a new OpenGL extension...

Several Chromebooks now have upstream support for Coreboot...

Back in 2012 was feature work to upgrade Fedora from using the Liberation Fonts to Liberation Fonts 2. That change at the time for Fedora 19 was then diverted due to the updated fonts causing some fuzzy/blurred rendering. That issue has been fixed now following an update to F18 at the time and with Fedora 29 they are looking at once again trying Liberation Fonts 2 by default...

The V3D Gallium3D driver (formerly known as VC5) for supporting Broadcom's VideoCore V hardware and newer is reaching a better grade for OpenGL ES conformance...

Valve has shipped SteamOS 2.154 as their latest Brewmaster upgrade and promoting what was previously in their beta channel...

Yet another change proposal for Fedora 29 is upgrading its Xfce packages to what is currently in the 4.13 "development" series...

Since the transition from Unity 7 to GNOME Shell as the default desktop environment on Ubuntu, designers have been working on a proper new theme called "Communitheme" while now it has a new name...

While GCC 9 has just been under development for a relatively short period of time, here are our initial benchmarks of GCC 9.0 SVN on and AMD EPYC server compared to the GCC 8.2 stable release candidate when tested at various optimization levels as well as PGO (Profile Guided Optimizations).

Another Vulkan extension that Mesa RADV developers can cross off their TODO list is VK_KHR_16bit_storage...

The latest company joining The Khronos Group to promote cross-platform industry APIs is Magic Leap...

If there is one part of the Radeon/AMDGPU open-source graphics driver stack that feels like it's been somewhat neglected over time has been the HDMI/DP audio support. Fortunately, another improvement is on the way for bettering it...

After being on hiatus since the end of April, Mozilla's Servo Blog has finally put out a status update concerning their web engine improvements made over the past three months...

The open-source upbringing of Intel's Tremont micro-architecture is continuing with some new Linux kernel patches outed today...

Vulkan 1.1.81 is now available as the latest minor update for this graphics/compute API...

While ReactOS 0.4.9 images have been available for download the past week, today this "open-source Windows" operating system project officially introduced this latest version...

Right now if using the Cougar 500k gaming keyboard on Linux, when pressing any of the special function keys the keyboard will stop responding. With Linux 4.19 that will be fixed thanks to a new "HID_COUGAR" driver...

Another open-source operating system doing a stable update this morning is Slax, the revived Linux distribution focused on delivering a lightweight desktop that when the project was restarted last year shifted off its Slackware origin and onto a Debian stable base...

For those relying upon BSD in security-critical environments, a new HardenedBSD 11-STABLE update is now available for this security-enhanced fork of FreeBSD...

Recently there have been several Linux distribution benchmark comparisons on Phoronix to test the latest Linux OS releases, including several comparing to the current Microsoft Windows 10 performance. Those recent tests have all be done with various Intel CPUs, but for those curious about the AMD Windows vs. Linux performance, here are some fresh benchmarks as we approach the end of July.

The sixth weekly test release of the Linux 4.18 kernel is now available for evaluation...

While early in the year was talk of introducing NXP i.MX8 SoC support in the Linux 4.17 kernel, that didn't happen. Support for that latest-generation i.MX SoC also didn't make it for Linux 4.18 and it also looks like it will not make it for Linux 4.19...

Back in May we covered the big rewrite of the Linux kernel's HID multi-touch code and in the process supporting the Microsoft Surface Dial and Dell Canvas 27's Totem input device. That work will be landing in the Linux 4.19 kernel...

Earlier this month I posted some results when looking at the Windows 10 versus Linux power consumption using a Kabylake-R Dell XPS 13 laptop and testing Windows 10, Ubuntu 18.04, Fedora Workstation 28, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Clear Linux. For some additional numbers, I took three other distinctly different laptops and tested them on a few Linux distributions to see how their battery life and power efficiency compare as additional metrics to complement this earlier data.

Fedora's LXQt desktop is at risk of being dropped if new packagers do not step up to maintain this lightweight Qt desktop environment's support...

AMD released a minor update to their AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler...

Following Friday's release of Wine 3.13 is now the adjoining Wine-Staging 3.13 version debut that incorporates various extra/testing patches atop this code-base for running Windows programs/games primarily on Linux and macOS systems...

While it's been on mirrors for a few days, NetBSD 8.0 was officially released this weekend...

The first development snapshot of Phoronix Test Suite 8.2 is now available as what will be the next quarterly feature update to our open-source Linux / BSD / macOS / Windows automated benchmarking software and framework...

For those planning to enjoy their favorite Direct3D 11 games under Wine this weekend and utilizing the DXVK D3D11-over-Vulkan layer for greater performance, DXVK 0.63 is now available...

While developers have begun discussing plans for Qt 6.0 with plans to ship this upgraded tool-kit in 2020, one of the unanswered questions is over what build system should Qt 6 be using...

GNOME 3.29.4 was released on Friday night as another step towards this September's stable release of GNOME 3.30...

For what just started out as a tool to ensure you are using the "performance" frequency scaling governor when running Linux games, Feral's open-source GameMode system tool has slowly been picking up some extra functionality...

The feature list for Fedora 29 continues growing and the latest is about shipping GnuTLS with TLS 1.3 support enabled...

Following the recent rounds of Linux distribution benchmarking with Windows Server vs. FreeBSD vs. Linux, Windows vs. Linux laptop benchmarks, and other recent comparisons, one of the latest requests was a fresh look at the performance of different Linux distributions deployed within Docker containers.

Wine 3.13 was released today as just another bi-weekly development release towards Wine 4.0, but this time around it's a pretty darn exciting update!..

The AMD folks maintaining their official Vulkan driver code have done their common end-of-week code dump into the open-source AMDVLK Linux Vulkan driver repository across the PAL, XGL, LLVM, and SPVGEN code-bases...

Canonical and Microsoft have just announced that PowerShell Core is now available for Ubuntu users in Snap format...

The Linux Mint team has shared a routine status update about the work they have been engaged in over the past month, including dealing with some nasty package updates and readying the beta of Linux Mint Debian Edition 3 (LMDE 3)...

In last month's round of IBM POWER9 benchmarking on the Talos II systems compared to various Intel/AMD x86_64 CPUs, one of the areas where POWER was struggling especially was with multimedia encoding performance. Fortunately, since those POWER9 Phoronix benchmarks this year, various developers have been working on optimizations...

Google in cooperation with Microsoft, Twitter, and Facebook have announced the open-source Data Transfer Project to promote universal data portability...

Last month I wrote about a new attempt at improving the ATI RAGE 128 X.Org driver... Yes, for the for the Rage graphics cards from the late 90's in the days of AGP and PCI where core/memory clock speeds were commonly in the double digits... If you are a hobbyist fond of these vintage graphics cards and are still running with these OpenGL 1.1~1.2 capable GPUs, there is a new X.Org driver update...

The long overdue NetBSD 8.0 operating system update appears ready now to ship...