Phoronix

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...

The month-old proposal for the upcoming Fedora 31 Linux distribution release to stop with their i686 repositories for Everything and Modules was voted on today by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee...

One of the kernel-side features not yet in place for AMD's newest Navi graphics processors on Linux has been Display Stream Compression support but that is being squared away with a new patch series...

For those wondering how ARM and IBM POWER hardware stack up against AMD's new EPYC "Rome" processors and that of Intel's existing Xeon "Cascade Lake" processors, here is a round of tests from the POWER9 Talos II, Ampere eMAG, and Cavium ThunderX in looking at the cross-architecture Linux CPU performance currently in the server space.

Adding to the interesting objectives for Qt 6 are further enhancements to "Qt for Python" for enhancing the programming language's support for this tool-kit...

Intel Icelake laptops will soon be hitting store shelves and a vast majority of the Linux support has been squared away for many months. Unfortunately one bit still not mainlined is the Thunderbolt support...

For those interested in IBM's POWER architecture and/or open-source hardware prospects, an industry-shaking announcement is expected to happen Tuesday morning...

System76 continues doing much more work on software these days as well as expanding their own hardware manufacturing capabilities. This is much more than they did a decade or even several years ago when they were just selling PCs/laptops pre-loaded with Ubuntu. As summed up by System76 founder and CEO, Carl Richell, their end game is much more Apple-esque...

Wayland support is inching ahead on NetBSD for this secure, modern next-generation successor to running an X.Org Server...

Linus Torvalds just issued the Linux 5.3-rc5 kernel test release as we are now just a few weeks out from the official Linux 5.3 kernel debut...

Now that the new AMD Ryzen 3000 series are running great with the latest Linux distributions following prominent motherboard vendors issuing BIOS updates that correct the "RdRand" issue, we're moving on with looking at the performance of the rest of the Ryzen 3000 series line-up while having freshly re-tested the processors under Ubuntu 19.04. Up for exploration today is the AMD Ryzen 5 3600X, the six-core / 12-thread processor retailing for about $250 USD.

Intel previously tried auto-enabling GuC and HuC functionality within their Linux kernel graphics driver but ended up reverting the support since the driver didn't gracefully handle the scenarios of missing/corrupt firmware files. The driver should now be more robust in such situations so they will try again for turning on the automatic behavior, possibly for the upcoming Linux 5.4 cycle...

Following the feature freeze and code branching for Qt 5.14, the Qt "Dev" branch will likely be shifting immediately to Qt 6 development. A Qt 5.15 release is still expected to happen before Qt 6.0, but that 5.15 milestone will likely just be a polished release derived from Qt 5.14...

Going back a decade one of the interesting open-source FPS games of its time was Warsow. Development on Warsow has seemingly been tremulous over the past few years (edit: though the core developer has recently released a new beta) for this Qfusion (Quake 2 code base) engine powered game that started in 2005, but now there is Warfork as a fork of Warsow that is being developed and also available via Steam...

The KDE Usability and Productivity Initiative to solve various problems in the KDE software stack to make it easier to use to more individuals and to do so more efficient will be coming to an end. But other KDE goals are being envisioned and the usability and productivity elements will continue to be worked on outside of this initiative...

Knoppix 8.6 is out this weekend as the newest version for this one of the original Linux distributions supporting Live CD/DVD booting...

Vulkan 1.1.120 is out as the newest weekly update to the Vulkan graphics API...

Among many different Linux/open-source benchmarks being worked on for the AMD EPYC "Rome" processors now that our initial launch benchmarks are out of the way are Linux distribution comparisons, checking out the BSD compatibility, and more. Some tests I wrapped up this weekend were seeing how recent Linux kernel releases perform on the AMD EPYC 7742 64-core / 128-thread processors...

While most major hardware vendors have been adopting LVFS+Fwupd for firmware updating on Linux, Linux PC vendor System76 has notably been absent from the party for a variety of reasons. Today they announced their new Firmware Manager project that bridges the gap between their lack of LVFS support and their own hosted firmware service...