Phoronix

Prolific GNOME contributor Daniel Van Vugt of Canonical working to optimize the desktop stack for Ubuntu continues his great upstream-focused work on enhancing the performance of various key components. This past week he posted a new merge request that seeks to lower the input latency further for the Mutter compositor / window manager...

June was a very interesting month with the varying statements out of Canonical about the future of Ubuntu 32-bit support, AMD's Zen 2 processors and Navi product announcements (benchmarks next week!), Microsoft pushing out the new Windows Terminal and WSL2, Clear Linux continuing to further enhance their offering, and more Linux performance happenings in general...

The Mageia Linux distribution of Mandriva/Mandrake descent is kicking off July by shipping Mageia 7, two years after the debut of Mageia 6...

There have been Linux reports of problems pertaining to "8254 Clock Gating" going back a while but more so recently. This problem is some newer Intel Skylake~Apollolake derived systems particularly with Intel SoCs where certain systems ship with the 8254 PIT to be gated via a special register and up until now that has caused Linux to fail to boot...

One of the interesting Google Summer of Code projects on the BSD front this year is porting Wine to run on AMD64 (x86_64) under NetBSD...

Linus Torvalds is off in "the middle of nowhere" on one of his well known scuba diving adventures but that didn't stop him from being able to release Linux 5.2-rc7 today like clock-work thanks to tethering of a smartphone...

It's been just one week since the release of Vulkan 1.1.112 but it's now been succeeded by Vulkan 1.1.113 and two new extensions are in tow...

KDE developer Nate Graham has posted another one of his usability/productivity summaries of the KDE improvements over the past week. There's been another busy week of work on KDE Plasma 5.17, KDE Applications 19.08, and KDE Frameworks 5.60...

With the Linux 5.2 kernel due to be released in a few weeks and that marking the opening of the Linux 5.3 merge window, here is a look at some of the likely features coming to this next version of the Linux kernel...

Systemd now allows loading of custom BPF programs for network traffic filtering that are applied to all sockets created by processes of a given systemd unit...

Waypipe is a transparent Wayland proxy and the latest of several different projects aiming to make it easy running Wayland clients over a network similar to X11's capabilities...

In addition to the latest Wacom Intuos Pro Small drawing tablet to be supported by the Linux 5.3 kernel, the high-end (circa $1,500 USD) Wacom MobileStudio Pro tablet is also set to now be supported by this next kernel cycle...

The Mir 1.2 release was aiming to make it easier to develop Mir servers with custom Wayland extensions easier, but in dog feeding the work, Canonical's long-time Mir developer Alan Griffiths realized some shortcomings in the experience...

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...