Phoronix

Vulkan 1.1.116 was released today as the latest weekly update to this high performance graphics API and comes with one new extension in tow...

The Linux 5.3 kernel merge window is expected to close today so here is our usual recap of all the changes that made it into the mainline tree over the past two weeks. There is a lot of changes to be excited about from Radeon RX 5700 Navi support to various CPU improvements and ongoing performance work to supporting newer Apple MacBook laptops and Intel Speed Select Technology enablement.

Feral developers released a new version of their GameMode Linux game performance optimization daemon/client this weekend in order to allow this update to land in the upcoming Fedora Workstation 31. GameMode 1.4 offers up many features including new interfaces for allowing better GNOME integration and thus the Fedora interest in seeing this version in their autumn Linux distribution update...

With the KDE Plasma 5.17 release, the desktop will make it easy to see a network's QR code for in turn making it super quick and simple for sharing network information with other users and devices...

As a last minute surprise for the Linux 5.3 kernel merge window is support for the keyboard and trackpads on newer Apple MacBooks and MacBook Pro laptops...

IO_uring is designed to deliver fast and efficient I/O operations thanks to a re-designed interface introduced in Linux 5.1 with various efficiency improvements compared to the kernel's existing asynchronous I/O code. But it turns out there was a big bottleneck within the current IO_uring code up until now...

Landing this week in Mesa 19.2 for the Lima Gallium3D driver for Arm Mali 400/450 series hardware is a reworked GPIR regiaster scheduler...

Just one week after releasing DXVK 1.3, lead developer Philip Rebohle has released DXVK 1.3.1 with a few more features plus a number of bug fixes -- including performance work...

Florian Müllner released new development versions of GNOME Shell and Mutter today for this week's GNOME 3.33.4 development milestone...

Adding to the list of new features for systemd 243 is another last-minute addition to this growing init system... Systemd picked up a new service and while some may view it as bloat, should be quite practical at least for those encountering kernel crashes from time to time...

One of the new features to the RDNA architecture with Navi is support for single cycle issue Wave32 execution on SIMD32. Up to now the RadeonSI code was using just Wave64 but now there is support in this AMD open-source Linux OpenGL driver for Wave32...

The Arm SoC/platform changes arrived a bit late to the Linux 5.3 merge window ending this weekend. The Arm SoC/platform changes were only sent in on Friday night but include Librem 5 Developer Kit support in terms of the DeviceTree bits as well as improving the NVIDIA Jetson Nano support and various other SoC/platform additions...

Sent out on Thursday were the NFS client updates for the Linux 5.3 kernel merge window. This time around are a few interesting changes...

Wayland release manager Simon Ser announced the alpha release of the Weston 7.0 reference compositor on Friday that also marks the feature freeze for this Wayland compositor update...

Intel's Clear Linux crew has launched a twelve-question survey seeking feedback on your Linux usage though the survey slightly caters towards developers. While the survey is being put out by Intel's performance-oriented Linux distribution, users of any Linux platform are encouraged to participate...

Back in May there were the plans shared by Red Hat's Matthias Clasen to work out some improvements to the Pango layout engine library after going fairly stale in recent years. That work is coming to fruition with a Pango 1.44 release looking like it will be here soon with new features...

Zstd 1.4.1 is out today as a maintenance release to Facebook's Zstandard compression algorithm but with this update comes even more performance optimizations...

With last week's big DRM pull request for Linux 5.3 that brought Navi support most notably on the AMD side while Intel received HDR display support, continued Icelake/Gen11 work, and more, there weren't any changes to the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver. It was another unfortunate cycle of no major improvements for the Nouveau driver but at least sent out today were a set of new "fixes" for this driver that remains crippled on Maxwell GPUs and newer...

Wayland's Weston compositor for the past year has provided a remoting plug-in for virtual output streaming that was built atop RTP/GStreamer. Now though a new plug-in has landed in the Weston code-base making use of Red Hat's promising PipeWire project...

Linux input expert Peter Hutterer of Red Hat shipped the much anticipated release candidate today for libinput 1.14, the open-source input handling library used by both X.Org and Wayland systems...