Phoronix

Just a friendly reminder that our Black Friday / US Thanksgiving / Cyber Monday promotion ends on Tuesday. Show your support for Linux hardware benchmarking and daily open-source news coverage...

This week Microsoft released Windows Terminal Preview 0.7 with some groundbreaking features... Well compared to Command Prompt and the existing PowerShell terminal, but capabilities many Linux terminal emulators have offered for years...

While EXT4 is the most common Linux file-system among distributions and is quite mature at this stage, it does continue seeing noteworthy improvements every so often with new kernel releases. With Linux 5.5 there are more notable improvements on deck...

Even with all the light shed on Spectre over the past nearly two years, with the Spectre RSB (Return Stack Buffer) disclosure that did affect IBM POWER processors it turns out the mitigations applied didn't cover all of the CPUs that should have been in place until this week...

Canonical's Ubuntu engineers in cooperation with community members have figured out their 32-bit support adjustments for the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release...

The W3C put out an interesting status update this week on web games technologies and the various standardization efforts at play...

More Mesa drivers continue to be embracing NIR as the modern intermediate representation shared between these OpenGL and Vulkan open-source implementations...

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics/display driver updates were sent out last night for the Linux 5.5 kernel and quickly landed into the mainline tree...

Over a decade ago all the Linux desktop rage was over the likes of Compiz, Beryl, Compiz Fusion, and the like... Ah the memories. But to much surprise, Compiz saw a new release today. Compiz 0.9.14.1 isn't the most exciting update, but the project is still alive...

PHP 7.4 is out this US Thanksgiving day as the newest feature release for the PHP scripting language. PHP 7.4 comes with a number of prominent language additions while, yes, also having even better performance on the PHP series...

The ACPI and power management updates were sent in back on Tuesday for the Linux 5.5 kernel and punctually landed in the mainline tree...

While Mesa 19.3.0 was supposed to be out last week, it didn't happen nor is it happening this week due to blocker bugs. Given the US holiday week, it's looking like Mesa 19.3's blocker bugs might not be cleared in time for releasing next week either, but in any case the Mesa 19.3 Release Candidate 5 is now available for testing...

Coming together just over a day ago was the Google folks working on Golang figuring out many Go issues stemmed from a bug on the Linux 5.2 kernel and newer that was worked out to be some sort of a register corruption issue. That issue is now sorted out and fortunately it's a one-line kernel fix and boils down to being a caching issue...

The Linux 5.5 kernel is set to finally eliminate the code backing the sysctl system call, which has been deprecated for about a decade and should have no impact on modern systems of any architecture...

The OpenGL 4.6 extension is nearly two and a half years old while finally the open-source Mesa OpenGL drivers are catching up to this latest OpenGL revision that offers Vulkan/SPIR-V interoperability and other additions...

The SDL2 library has been seeing a number of additions in recent days to its game controller database by Valve's Sam Lantinga. The latest game controller to be added is for Google's now-shipping Stadia Controller...

Greg Kroah-Hartman mailed in the staging area changes today for the Linux 5.5 kernel and they have already been pulled into mainline...

As part of the exciting benchmark week and our ongoing tests of Intel Ice Lake on Linux, this next piece has been driven out of curiosity... While recently I posted new benchmark results of Intel Haswell to Ice Lake laptop performance, what about going further back like to the days of Nehalem? Here is that comparison of Core i7 Nehalem to Core i7 Ice Lake including power / performance-per-Watt data, thermal, and performance-per-MHz data too. Enjoy this fun comparison for how the Intel mobile performance on Ubuntu has evolved over the past decade.

While coming a few weeks later and two months after the original "shipping" of Librem 5 smartphones, the Librem 5 Birch batch has begun shipping to actual consumers who pre-ordered the privacy-minded Linux smartphone...

Flatpak 1.5.1 was released today as a new development release for this Linux application sandboxing technology. With Flatpak 1.5.1 it also begins laying the groundwork for a future payments system around Flathub as what's starting off for allowing donation-based software acquisition but could ultimately turn into a paid app store...