Phoronix

The Valve-backed "ACO" compiler back-end for the open-source Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver has added support now for AMD GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" graphics cards...

Outreachy recently kicked off their winter (December to March) round of internships for diversity in tech with 49 individuals tackling a range of open-source tasks...

Weston release manager Simon Ser on Friday released the Wayland's Weston 8.0 reference compositor in alpha form...

IBM's work from over a year ago in working towards secure virtual machines on POWER hardware is finally coming to fruition with Linux 5.5 due out early next year...

As part of the ongoing effort for Intel's plans to use their new Gallium3D OpenGL Linux driver by default on next quarter's Mesa 20.0 for Broadwell "Gen8" graphics and newer, another step in that direction was achieved on Friday...

With NFSv4.2 is the server-side copy (SSC) functionality with the Linux 5.5 kernel's NFS client-side support for that support in allowing "inter" copy offloads between different NFS servers...

When it comes to the storage/file-system changes with the in-development Linux 5.5 kernel one of the most prominent end-user-facing changes is more robust RAID1 for Btrfs with the ability to have three or four copies of the data rather than just two copies, should data safety be of utmost importance and concerned over the possibility of two disks in an array failing...

It's been five years already since the vote to transition to systemd in Debian over Upstart while now there is the new vote that has just commenced for judging the interest in "init system diversity" and just how much Debian developers care (or not) in supporting alternatives to systemd...

As expected by Wine's annual release cadence, next week Wine 5.0 will enter its code freeze followed by release candidates until this next stable Wine release is ready to ship around early 2020...

The Kotlin programming language on Android has become very popular and Google announced today nearly 60% of the top 1,000 Android applications are using Kotlin code in some capacity. Beyond their announcement earlier this year of Android development being Kotlin-first, as they look forward to 2020 will be more Kotlin + Android action...

While lossy compression audio formats like MP3 are not recommended for use within professional audio tasks, for those using the open-source Ardour digital audio workstation (DAW) software as of today there is finally native MP3 import support...

Announced back in September at the All Systems Go event in Berlin was systemd-homed as a new effort to improve home directory handling. Systemd-homed wants to make it easier to migrate home directories, ensure all user data is self-contained, unify user-password and encryption handling, and provide other modern takes on home/user directory functionality. That code is expected to soon land in systemd...

With AMD last week having enabled OpenGL 4.6 for their RadeonSI OpenGL Linux driver when enabling the NIR intermediate representation support, you may be wondering how using NIR is stacking up these days compared to the default TGSI route. Here are some benchmarks on Polaris, Vega, and Navi for comparing this driver option that ultimately allows OpenGL 4.6 to be flipped on.

Red Hat has been working on a "general notification queue" that is built off the Linux kernel's pipe code and will notify the user-space of events like key/keyring changes, block layer events like disk errors, USB attach/remove events, and other notifications without user-space having to continually poll kernel interfaces. This general notification queue was proposed for Linux 5.5 but has been pushed back to at least 5.6...

Opportunistic Wireless Encryption (OWE) provides a means of encrypting wireless data transfers without having any secret/key. Opportunistic Wireless Encryption is advertised as Wi-Fi Certified Enhanced Open...

One of the prominent additions coming with the C++20 programming language is the consistent comparison operator, or "spaceship operator" as it's commonly referred to. The support was merged for GCC 10 last month ahead of entering stage three development while this week some more improvements were made to the implementation...

Following last week's Arm architecture updates for Linux 5.5, sent in via four pull requests on Thursday was all the new and improved hardware enablement for the SoCs and single-board computer platforms...

While we aren't even half-way through the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS development cycle yet, Ubuntu's Trello board provides a look at some of the changes and new features being at least considered for this next Ubuntu long-term support release...

Debian 11 "Bullseye" isn't expected to be released until well into 2021 but out today is the first alpha release of the Debian Installer that will ultimately power that next major Debian GNU/Linux release...

Start looking forward to March when NVIDIA looks to have some sort of open-source driver initiative to announce -- likely contributing more to Nouveau and we're crossing our fingers they will have sorted out the signed firmware situation to unblock those developers from delivering re-clocking support to yield better driver performance...