Phoronix

While normally the Linux kernel sees its stable releases after about seven weeks worth of release candidates, today Linux 5.9-rc8 was issued in allowing an extra week of testing...

It's been eight years already since the launch of the OUYA game console built atop Android and initially driven up by hype as a new low-cost gaming platform only to turn out to be a commercial failure. Razer bought out OUYA's software assets in 2015 and last year finally shutdown all of the console services. But if you still have the OUYA hardware it soon may start running off the mainline Linux kernel...

With the new OpenBenchmarking.org that's been out in public form since last month and being developed as part of the soon-to-be-released Phoronix Test Suite 10.0, here is the latest feature now enabled in making it much easier for quickly carrying out high-level processor (CPU) and graphics card (GPU) component comparisons along with other improvements...

The Linux 5.9 kernel could be released as soon as today but more than likely will be pushed back to next Sunday given Torvalds' comments last week and continuing to see plenty of merge requests in recent days. But in any case when Linux 5.9 does ship very soon it comes with an abundance of new features and improvements...

While the wiesn (Oktoberfest) was cancelled this year, a few Phoronix readers inquired whether I was going to offer the traditional "Oktoberfest special" sale for Phoronix Premium to help support our daily Linux/open-source news, hardware reviews, and benchmarking during this turbulent year. So, yes, here is our annual Oktoberfest special if you would like to show your support during these COVID times...

SHADERed as the open-source, cross-platform shader integrated development environment now has a compute shader debugger built-in...

Linux 5.10 will bring a new driver for the Intel MAX10 BMC...

If you frequently put your system(s) through hibernation cycles, the performance should be much better beginning with the soon-to-start Linux 5.10 cycle...

The EXT4 file-system with the upcoming Linux 5.10 kernel has an optimization yielding big benefits for file overwrites in some circumstances...

The first patchwork is building up for Intel's "Meteor Lake" on Linux...

Intel updated their programming reference manual this week with some interesting new additions, primarily around user interrupts and the enhanced hardware feedback interface...

KDE developers for more than one year have been working to evolve the default Breeze theme and the work by the KDE Visual Design Group is finally paying off with the initial "Breeze Evolution" changes landing...

The first release candidate of TVM 0.7, the Apache incubator project providing a deep learning compiler stack, is now available...

XCP-ng as the open-source hypervisor built atop XenServer is preparing for its 8.2 LTS release while this week marked the availability of the first beta...

Intel engineers today sent out their initial Linux kernel patches for bringing up the company's forthcoming hybrid architecture processors...

AMD has been sending out a lot of new Linux graphics driver enablement code recently for the Linux with the newest being the "Green Sardine" platform...

Given that Ubuntu 20.10 will be shipping with Linux 5.8 out-of-the-box along with other autumn 2020 Linux distributions where Linux 5.9 is landing too late, here is a fresh comparison of several different AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" and Intel Xeon "Cascade Lake" processors on this current stable kernel release for seeing how the performance is standing up as we approach this next round of Linux distribution releases.

Following the announcement this summer of Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) as an exciting feature coming to Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs next year, Intel's open-source engineers quickly began with patches to LLVM and GNU toolchain support for AMX. Now Intel engineers have sent out their patches in preparing the Linux kernel for AMX...

A proposal is being discussed over the possibility of beginning to make use of the Rust programming language within Mesa 3D for this open-source OpenGL/Vulkan driver stack along with the likes of Gallium3D video acceleration...

While the Mesa "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver's "ACO" back-end was developed and funded by Valve with gaming in mind to optimize game load times and help with delivering optimal performance, it turns out ACO works damn well for some Vulkan compute workloads too...