Phoronix

Alongside this week's announcement of the Raspberry Pi 4, the Raspberry Pi Foundation also released a new Raspbian operating system release that is re-based from Debian 9 Stretch to the soon-to-be-released Debian 10 Buster. In benchmarking of these new and old Raspbian releases on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Plus, there are performance gains to find even if not jumping to the Raspberry Pi 4.

Intel's tradition of delivering punctual open-source graphics driver support for their hardware continues. While Icelake hardware isn't even hitting the masses yet, Intel developers this week began sending out their initial driver patches for bringing up the graphics on Tiger Lake...

The Linux 5.2 kernel brings optional per-directory case-insensitive filenames/folders while with the Linux 5.3 kernel that new EXT4 feature will see better performance...

Huawei's EROFS Linux read-only file-system continues to be improved upon and with the upcoming Linux 5.3 kernel cycle will see yet more improvements...

With the Fedora Workstation 31 feature outlook covered earlier this week, there was an interesting comment in that article by Red Hat's Christian Schaller that deserves special coverage...

Newer AMD GPUs are capable of offering hardware accelerated decoding for 10-bit VP9 content, but that wasn't the case with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. Fortunately, a simple patch is pending to expose this support...

While it doesn't appear to be an official part of Xfce at least at this time, Xfway is a Wayland compositor inspired by Xfce's Xfwm4 window manager...

For fans of the Kodi project for providing the flagship open-source HTPC experience, Kodi 18.3 is out today as the newest maintenance update...

Considering how resource intensive modern Linux desktops are particularly on OpenGL for compositing, it's quite an achievement that the Panfrost open-source Gallium3D driver for Arm Mali Bifrost/Midgard hardware can now run the GNOME Shell...

We've known that Linux PC vendor System76 has been investing engineering resources into Coreboot support and while not yet ready for end-users, they are making progress. For once it's ready for their customers, they have also begun crafting a graphical user-interface for these firmware upgrades to Coreboot...

At least for the newest Intel Xeon "Cascade Lake" processors, the LLVM Clang compiler is running incredibly well compared to the long-standing GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). Overall, LLVM clang is now nearly at performance parity to GCC 9 and the in-development GCC 10 compilers. Here are some Linux compiler benchmarks using the dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 server built around the Gigabyte S3461-3R0.

With the Linux kernel driver support for the upcoming "Navi" graphics cards only having been sent out last week for AMDGPU/AMDKFD, given it was more than 450 patches and more than 400 thousand lines of code (granted much of that automated header files), there was some risk it could be postponed given the imminent cut-off of new material to DRM-Next for Linux 5.3 given the rigid release cycle. Fortunately, that pull request has been honored...

The Qt Company has released Qt 3D Studio 2.4 as the latest release of its 3D user-interface creation suite...

The GNOME Foundation has issued their 2018 annual report that is particularly notable due to a massive rise in their income following two large donations...

Thanks to longtime open-source Linux graphics developer Daniel Stone, Wayland's Weston reference compositor now has support for the EGL_KHR_partial_update extension to provide for potentially better performance...

The second alpha release for this year's PHP 7.4 release is now available for testing...

Last week AMD posted more than 400 patches providing the AMD Navi support within their AMDGPU DRM kernel driver while this week has brought dozens of patches amounting to 4,293 lines as a patch for their RadeonSI Gallium3D driver in order to provide OpenGL support on these next-gen GPUs being introduced next month as the Radeon RX 5700 series...

Following all the drama caused by Canonical announcing last week they'd stop their 32-bit archive with Ubuntu 19.10 and that leading to a mess of concerns including Valve saying they would not be officially supporting Ubuntu 19.10 and later, today they issued a statement reaffirming their commitment to Linux...

With Debian 10 "Buster" aiming to be released in early July, a second release candidate of the Debian Installer has been made available...

VESA announced their first major update to the DisplayPort interface in three years...