Phoronix

We are used to seeing tier-one Linux distributions outperforming Microsoft Windows on hardware ranging from $199 laptops to HEDT and server processors and everything in between. Thus it came as a large surprise to us when finding Windows 10 outperforming multiple Linux distributions on a new Intel laptop. Not only was Windows 10 leading, but the performance paradigm shifted that Ubuntu was even outperforming Clear Linux, which normally is the fastest of Linux distributions out-of-the-box.

It has been just under one month since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 9.4 while available this morning is the first development snapshot/milestone on the road to next quarter's Phoronix Test Suite 9.6-Nittedal feature release...

Habana Labs, the AI accelerator start-up being acquired by Intel, has more driver improvements on tap for Linux 5.7...

Intel is working to enable OpenGL 4.x functionality for their OpenSWR software rasterizer within Mesa...

The latest LLVM 11 development code has enabled support for NVIDIA CUDA GPU device offloading from 64-bit ARM...

One of the interesting innovations for the eBPF in-kernel virtual machine in recent times is the work by Google on supporting MAC and audit policy handling by it. This stems from currently custom real-time security data collection and analysis of Google servers internally for real-time threat protection and this patch-set is part of their work on allowing similar functionality in the upstream Linux kernel...

Being introduced by Linux 5.6 is optional F2FS transparent data compression support that was implemented with LZO and LZ4. Now for the Linux 5.7 kernel there is Zstd compression support on the way...

As part of the ZFS improvements for Ubuntu 20.04 with Canonical's Zsys initiative is the ability to automatically take snapshots on APT operations for being able to do a system rollback/revert if necessary following package management changes. I've begun trying out the ZFS/Zsys changes for Ubuntu 20.04 and so far is working well...

Valve today released their Half-Life: Alyx virtual reality first-person shooter game and built atop their Source 2 engine...

NVIDIA has released a new feature update to their Nsight Graphics standalone developer tool for debugging and profiling applications/games built atop a variety of 3D APIs...

For those stuck in home isolation amid the coronavirus pandemic, MythTV 31 has been released for any open-source DVR and HTPC needs...

The second beta of the forthcoming Qt 5.15 tool-kit is now available for testing...

Richard Hughes of Fwupd/LVFS, PackageKit, and Colord notoriety last month announced Jcat as a new open-source project he initiated to serve as an alternative to Microsoft's Catalog files proprietary format...

While we have been seeing Ubuntu 20.04 LTS offer better performance with newer hardware platforms, how does the performance compare to Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux? Here are some benchmarks on both AMD Ryzen 9 3900X and Intel Core i9 9900KS systems.

More improvements were queued in recent days to sched/core of CPU scheduler improvements on the table for the forthcoming Linux 5.7 kernel cycle...

Linus Torvalds commented that while Linux 5.6-rc7 may be going through strange times, the Linux 5.6 kernel development is looking normal...

Git 2.26 is out as the newest feature release for this distributed revision control system...

VMware's VMWGFX open-source Linux graphics driver stack for interfacing with their virtualization software to offer guest VM 3D acceleration that is in turn handled by the host's drivers will soon be offering OpenGL 4.x support...

While Ubuntu is based on Debian, for those wondering how the performance of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is looking not only compared to the previous 19.10 and 18.04.4 LTS releases but also Debian 10.3 stable and Debian Testing, here are some benchmark results on an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X system.

For longtime Linux users who were fans of the XMMS audio player in the early 2000's, Audacious 4.0 has been released as the newest version of this XMMS-inspired audio player...