Phoronix

xf86-video-sis 0.12.0 is available this week as a new version of the SiS display driver for X.Org systems in supporting Silicon Integrated Systems' display hardware...

Following last week's big batch of DRM graphics driver updates for the Linux 5.5 merge window, AMD and the community engaging in Linux 5.5 testing have now sent in their first round of fixes for this next version of the Linux kernel...

The beta release of Linux Mint 19.3 "Tricia" is now available for testing in the default Cinnamon desktop flavor as well as MATE and Xfce spins...

The GNOME developers were particularly busy last month with various improvements to GNOME Shell and Mutter for increasing the usability of the desktop and optimizing its performance / power-savings...

Mir 1.6 is out today with the latest batch of features for this Ubuntu-focused display server that offers Wayland client compatibility...

We weren't too enthusiastic about the performance of Amazon's initial Graviton ARM-based CPU cores offered via their Elastic Compute Cloud, but their next-gen Gravin2 CPUs that are "coming soon" should be much more capable for good ARM Linux performance...

DXVK 1.4.6 is out this morning as the first update in two weeks for this widely-used project allowing Direct3D 10/11 games to run atop Vulkan on Linux systems with Wine/Proton...

Phoronix Test Suite 9.2-Hurdal is available today as the newest quarterly feature release to the Phoronix Test Suite for automated, cross-platform and open-source benchmarking...

AMD today announced the Ryzen V1000 and Ryzen R1000 series embedded processors intended for mini PCs and other small form factor PCs...

Today marks the last Mozilla Firefox feature update of 2019 with the release of Firefox 71.0...

The Panfrost Gallium3D driver that is the open-source OpenGL community-led driver for supporting Arm Mali Midgard/Bifrost architectures now has stable support for the T720 GPU...

OmniOS, the Illumos/OpenSolaris-derived platform focused on delivering an enterprise-quality open-source OS, is out with a new update today...

The kernel livepatching infrastructure that allows applying kernel patches (primarily security fixes) to a running kernel without the need to reboot in order to avoid downtime is seeing a big improvement with Linux 5.5...

The XFS file-system is seeing a large number of changes for the in-development Linux 5.5 kernel...

Imagination today announced the IMG A-Series as their next-generation GPU cores and architecture that deliver 2.5x faster performance for the same area and same power to their current-generation PowerVR graphics processors...

While originally Intel planned to transition their OpenGL driver default to the modern "Iris" Gallium3D driver rather than the longstanding "i965" DRI driver for Mesa 19.3, that was pushed back to Mesa 20.0 for introduction in Q1'2020. In aiming to make that revised milestone a reality, a new option has been added to Mesa 20.0 with the Meson build system for being able to indicate the Intel OpenGL driver preference...

While there has been the Libre RISC-V community-driven effort to create a RISC-V graphics processor that basically amounts to a RISC-V core with vector extensions/improvements and running a Vulkan software implementation (though they are now reportedly eyeing POWER instead of RISC-V), Think Silicon has announced the first actual RISC-V ISA based 3D graphics processor...

For those of you interested in AMD's new Ryzen Threadripper 3960X/3970X processors with TRX40 motherboards for running FreeBSD, the experience in our initial testing has been surprisingly pleasant. In fact, it works out-of-the-box which one could argue is better than the current Linux support that needs the MCE workaround for booting. Here are some benchmarks of FreeBSD 12.1 on the Threadripper 3970X compared to Linux and Windows for this new HEDT platform.

NetBSD 9.0 is around the corner and finally presenting 64-bit Arm (AArch64) support as well as other long overdue hardware support like Intel Kabylake graphics...

While there is the KDE Frameworks that offers a wonderful set of complementary extensions/add-ons to the Qt5 tool-kit, for those looking for more Qt5 extensions, The Qt Company has launched "The Qt Marketplace" as a source for both free and paid extensions...