Phoronix

One week past the end of Linux 5.7 feature development that is marked by the first release candidate, out today like clockwork is the Linux 5.7-rc2 kernel update for testing...

System76 has released the 20.04 beta of their Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS Linux distribution. This release comes with various improvements and in this article are some initial benchmarks of Pop!_OS 20.04 beta compared to their prior 19.10 release when testing on the System76 Thelio Major with AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X.

The results of the 2020 Debian Project Leader election are in...

If it weren't bad enough having to deal with the pressure applied by ad-blockers over the years, as a result of uncertainty around the novel coronavirus, ad-rates have been depressed further. This impact was outlined at the end of a recent article while there was an inquiry about any Phoronix Premium special during this time, so here is the COVID-19 deal for Phoronix Premium for $19...

Currently being tested ahead of the Linux 5.8 kernel cycle is a change so the Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver will begin defaulting to its passive mode for systems without hardware-managed P-States...

Just weeks after the first Ardour 6.0 pre-release, the release candidate is now available for this big digital audio workstation software update...

The Rust language focused Redox OS open-source operating system is now able to boot the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X 64-core/128-thread processor and run with full multi-threading capabilities...

NVIDIA today issued new beta builds of their Vulkan drivers for Linux and Windows...

For those using AMD Radeon "Navi" GPUs, the in-development Linux 5.7 kernel is delivering some minor performance improvements compared to prior kernels.

While waiting to see NVIDIA's new open-source play and ultimately how the re-clocking situation will get addressed for Nouveau so modern GeForce GPUs can work at their intended frequencies on this open-source Linux graphics driver stack, at least the display support has been getting into a more reliable state with CRC support on the horizon as a result of NVIDIA's already published documentation...

FreeBSD may be running great on servers at the likes of Netflix, but when it comes to running the BSD operating system on laptops it still is largely a giant mess...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development recap one day early in highlighting the most recent improvements and new capabilities to this open-source desktop environment...

Intel engineers have outed a new version of oneDNN, the library formerly known as DNNL and before that MKL-DNN for providing a deep neural network library geared for high performance deep learning applications. In aiming to live up to its name, oneDNN 1.4 has more performance optimizations...

Queued up as one of the early changes in the cryptographic subsystem ahead of the Linux 5.8 kernel cycle this summer is an Arm CryptoCell driver...

While there exists DXVK offering great Direct3D 9/10/11 support atop Vulkan that is used by Steam Play / Proton and others, Wine developers continue working on their Vulkan back-end to WineD3D as a similar Direct3D-over-Vulkan approach for pre-D3D12...

FreeBSD developers have been working on transitioning to using OpenZFS as their ZFS file-system upstream code rather than the dormant Illumos base. That initial FreeBSD support has been mainlined this week into the OpenZFS repository, now providing a common code-base between for the open-source ZFS file-system code between Illumos, FreeBSD, Linux, and work-in-progress macOS...

AMD has finally released their first "Radeon Software for Linux" packaged driver release to succeed their Radeon Software for Linux 19.50 driver series that saw its last update in December. Radeon Software for Linux 20.10 is available today as their first packaged Linux driver update of 2020 for AND Radeon Linux owners as the packaged solution intended for easy installation of their All-Open and "PRO" driver components...

Following the release of Chrome 81 earlier this month, Chrome 83 is now in beta with Google having skipped Chrome 82 due to delays / internal issues...

With Linux 5.7 the kernel is preparing to use the Schedutil governor more often on Intel systems. That change affects the CPUfreq default as well as the Intel P-State driver when in passive mode. While Schedutil holds a lot of hope, at least on Linux 5.7 with the testing I've done thus far the results show the raw performance slipping while testing on more platforms is forthcoming.

Less than one week since the release of Linux 5.7-rc1, Intel's large open-source graphics team has already submitted their first pull request to DRM-Next of changes for Linux 5.8...