Phoronix

Red Hat developer Bastien Nocera has announced Low-Memory-Monitor as a new project he's been tackling to try to help with the Linux desktop use-cases when responsiveness issues due to low RAM / memory pressure problems. Low-Memory-Monitor paired with complementary solutions could help improve the Linux desktop's handling on low-end systems and other desktops/laptops when simply running short on RAM...

With Xfce 4.14 having finally been released last week following a four year development cycle, prominent Xfce developer Simon Steinbeiß has begun talking about the now-started Xfce 4.16 development cycle...

AMD has been publishing a lot of documentation recently covering their RDNA architecture used initially by the "Navi" graphics processors. They have published ISA documentation and a slide deck, among other material, while now they have published a higher-level whitepaper covering the architecture...

As a change that will affect Debian 11 "Bullseye" but not the current Debian 10 "Buster" or older is the distribution's decision to remove the old MIPS architecture...

Thanks to Sony using LLVM Clang as their default compiler toolchain for their PlayStation game console, they continue making improvements to the AMD Btver2/Jaguar code for optimized performance. The Jaguar APU is what's in the current PlayStation 4 while we've already seen contributions from Sony to improve the Zen CPU support ahead of their next-generation console...

Blender 2.80 made its hugely anticipated debut just under one month ago while already Blender 2.81 is looking interesting and will hopefully be out in November...

Netrunner 19.08 "Indigo" was released on Tuesday as the newest version of this KDE-focused desktop Linux distribution...

Yesterday we shared that Mesa 19.2's release process would finally be getting underway with the first release candidate expected today following the code branching. Sure enough, that process began but now prominent Intel open-source graphics developer Jason Ekstrand is looking to get the OpenGL 4.6 support into this release...

In addition to the news out of the OpenPOWER Summit in San Diego that the POWER ISA is going open-source and the OpenPOWER Foundation becoming part of the Linux Foundation, Raptor Computing Systems shared they plan to launch a new standard ATX motherboard next year that will feature OpenCAPI connectivity...

This week marks one year since Valve rolled out their Proton beta for Steam Play to allow Windows games to gracefully run on Linux via this Wine downstream catered for Steam Linux gaming. It's been crazy since then with all of Valve's continued work on open-source graphics drivers, adding the likes of FAudio and D9VK to Proton, continuing to fund DXVK development for faster Direct3D-over-Vulkan, and many other infrastructure improvements and more to allow more Windows games to run on Linux and to do so well and speedy...

While we haven't heard anything yet about Oracle's plans for Solaris post-11.4 whether that means Solaris 11.4 or the reportedly killed Solaris 12, Oracle today did release Solaris 11.4 Stable Release Update 12 as their newest installment for their supported Solaris operating system release...

The big POWER announcement appears to be that the POWER instruction set architecture is being contributed to the open-source community and the OpenPOWER Foundation is becoming part of the Linux Foundation...

The long-running Linux "Lockdown" patches were sent out again overnight for their 40th time but it remains to be seen if these security-oriented patches will be pulled in for the upcoming Linux 5.4 cycle...

The GNU toolchain has already been preparing for Cooperlake CPUs as the successor to Cascadelake as well as supporting the new instruction set extensions, but finally today the support for -march=cooperlake was merged to GCC 10 for conveniently exposing the new CPU target in the GNU Compiler Collection. At the same time, -march=tigerlake was also added...

On Chromebooks when moving to the latest Chrome OS that switches over to a Linux 4.19 based kernel, BFQ has become the default I/O scheduler...

GNOME 3.34 continues to look like an incredibly great release in the performance department as well as for Wayland users...

Just hours ahead of the Mesa 19.2 feature freeze and days after the RadeonSI OpenGL driver added Renoir support, the RADV Vulkan driver has picked up support for this next-gen Zen 2 + Vega APU...

Adding to another creation being worked on by DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon, DSynth is a C rewrite of the FreeBSD originating Synth program that serves as a custom package repository builder...

Mesa 19.2 was supposed to be branched marking its feature freeze two weeks ago on 6 August along with the issuing of the first release candidate. That milestone has yet to be crossed but should happen tomorrow...

For those using OBS Studio for cross-platform live-streaming and screen recording needs, OBS Studio 24.0 is on the way but out first is their release candidate to vet the new features coming into this big update...