Phoronix

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...

AMD's Vulkan driver team has today volleyed their third open-source "AMDVLK" code drop of the quarter. This AMDVLK 2019.Q4.3 driver comes with new extensions as well as Navi 14 enablement...

It's been a wild past few weeks for WireGuard as the secure VPN tunnel destined for the mainline Linux kernel and also supported on all other major platforms. It turns out WireGuard could quite well end up in the Linux 5.5 kernel rather than having to wait until Linux 5.6...

Complementing our launch-day Intel Core i9 10980XE and AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X/3970X Linux benchmarks, here is much more data now that we've had the additional time for carrying out more tests... For your viewing pleasure this US holiday week are more than 330 benchmarks carried out on both the Core i9 10980XE and Threadripper 3960X in the same configuration while running Ubuntu Linux.

Recently the CentOS Board met for the first time since the recent CentOS 8.0 and CentOS Stream releases. It was an interesting outcome...

While the release of Linux 5.3-ck1 with MuQSS was quite tardy and only arrived a few weeks ago, Con Kolivas has returned to his punctuality in releasing Linux 5.4-ck1 with the updated MuQSS scheduler intended to improve the responsiveness of desktop/mobile class Linux systems...

Simon Ser has stepped up again to manage the upcoming release of the Weston 8.0 Wayland reference compositor. No Wayland update itself is planned with nothing real to release at this point, but Weston 8.0 should arrive before the end of January...

The RISC-V kernel code has some interesting changes ready for Linux 5.5...

As covered earlier this month, the next version of the Linux kernel is finally offering mainline support for SGI's Octane / Octane II MIPS workstations from the SGI IRIX days about two decades ago. Not only is the vintage SGI IP30 hardware seeing mainline kernel support, but there is other new MIPS hardware support too...

The X.Org Server and its integrated "modesetting" DDX driver that is most commonly used on modern Linux systems in place of hardware-specific DDX drivers is finally getting more robust with xorg-server 1.21... It will no longer rely upon the server's PCI ID driver mapping for figuring out the DRI driver to load as needed for GLAMOR 2D acceleration over OpenGL...

Just under three months past Lutris 0.5.3 as this open-source game manager/platform tool particularly for Wine-based gaming outside of Steam, Lutris 0.5.4 is now available in getting Linux gamers ready for any extra holiday-time gaming...