Phoronix

The latest Firefox Nightly builds have the experimental WebGPU support working in early form. WebGPU is the W3C-backed web standard for modern graphics and compute that is based upon concepts from the likes of Vulkan and Direct3D 12...

After showing yesterday how the performance has changed from Fedora 31 to Fedora 32, you may be wondering about how Fedora 32 -- which is due to be released next week -- stacks up against the brand new Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release. Here are the results from dozens of benchmarks and with some areas seeing some clear performance differences.

While the future of Qt as an open-source project isn't too clear for now it's progressing as if all is well. One of the new items being discussed on the Qt 6 front is discussing a possible LLVM Clang based tool to help developers in automatically converting all of their Qt 5 syntax into a Qt 6 compatible manner...

Ubuntu 20.04 "Focal Fossa" is now available as the distribution's newest long-term support release...

Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux has made some inroads in the desktop space over the past two years with providing a nice desktop installer last year, enhancing their documentation, and making available more desktop packages. Clear Linux has offered some of the fastest performance even for desktop workloads like web browser performance and has worked out equally well on AMD hardware. But moving forward they are going to be shifting back to their roots on focusing on server and cloud workloads...

With the open-source Panfrost Gallium3D driver having its Arm Midgard graphics support in order, the developers involved have begun working more on the newer Bifrost architecture...

A few weeks ago the Samsung engineers responsible for the new Microsoft exFAT Linux kernel driver released exFAT-Utils as their user-space utilities for managing and creating exFAT file-systems under Linux. A new release is out and exFAT-Utils has been re-spun as exfatprogs...

A few weeks ahead of Qt 5.15, The Qt Company has released Qt Creator 4.12 as their Qt/C++ focused integrated development environment that also supports other languages via the Language Server Protocol...

Facebook engineer Roman Gushchin presented a new slab memory controller for Linux last September. The new memory controller has been very promising with the potential of using 30~40% less memory and less memory fragmentation, among other benefits. The third revision to that kernel work has now been sent out for evaluation...

Loongson, the Chinese MIPS64 CPUs that are becoming more common within China but not so much internationally, continues seeing better Linux kernel support. There has been a fair amount of Loongson Linux work in recent months including in the current 5.7 cycle while more should be on tap for Linux 5.8...

While Mesa 20.1 will soon be hitting its feature freeze with hopes of releasing as stable in May, for now the Mesa 20.0 series is the "latest and greatest" on the stable front. Mesa 20.0.5 rolled out today with three weeks worth of fixes...

While the C language committing is still evaluating adding N-bit integer support to the programming language, LLVM's Clang compiler has already added its experimental _ExtInt() implementation...

At the beginning of the month I wrote about the Dell XPS with Core i7 1065G7 Ice Lake running much slower when upgrading to the development release of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS from 19.10. It turns out the performance hit is due to an upstream kernel regression that's thrashing the performance...

Fedora 32 isn't making it out this week due to last minute blocker bugs but should hopefully surface next week. In any case, here are some initial benchmarks looking at the performance of Fedora 32 in its effectively final state compared to Fedora 31 for seeing how the performance has shifted with its plethora of updates.

Nginx 1.18 is out this week as their newest stable branch succeeding the Nginx 1.16 series for this versatile HTTP server and reverse proxy / load balancer / HTTP cache / mail proxy...

Mesa's DRM library (libdrm) that resides between the Mesa drivers and the Direct Rendering Manager kernel interfaces now has proper FreeBSD support upstream in this important library...

Valve has released a new beta version of Steam Audio, their featureful spatial audio solution for game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine. This new release brings expanded Android support and a number of new audio features...

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is due for release on Thursday and it's seen a last minute upgrade to its "Subiquity" server installer...

Two years ago Intel announced the open-source Deep Learning Reference Stack with providing an easy-to-use, performance-focused stack for exploiting deep learning capabilities on Intel x86_64 hardware. Today marks version 6.0 of this toolkit...

While a peculiar name for some expensive audio hardware, the Linux 5.8 kernel is set to properly support the RME Babyface Pro and RME Babyface Pro FS...