Phoronix

Steam Survey Points To Tiny Uptick In Linux Percentage For March

Sat, 04/04/2020 - 13:17

With Steam and other online gaming platforms seeing record usage in recent weeks as a result of home isolation around the world as a result of the coronavirus, one of the matters of curiosity has been how this will impact the Linux gaming percentage...

Linux 5.7's Char/Misc Brings MHI Bus, Habana Labs AI Accelerator Code Additions

Sat, 04/04/2020 - 12:10

Greg Kroah-Hartman on Friday sent in his "char/misc" updates for the Linux 5.7 kernel several days later than normal...

Proton 5.0-6 To Allow Out-Of-The-Box DOOM Eternal On Linux

Sat, 04/04/2020 - 06:00

Valve is finishing up work on Proton 5.0-6 as the next version of their Wine downstream that powers Steam Play. With Proton 5.0-6 are some promising improvements...

NIR Vectorization Lands In Mesa 20.1 For Big Intel Graphics Performance Boost

Sat, 04/04/2020 - 05:20

The recently covered NIR vectorization pass ported from AMD's ACO back-end for improving the open-source Intel Linux graphics performance has landed now in Mesa 20.1...

Ada++ Wants To Make The Ada Programming Language More Accessible

Sat, 04/04/2020 - 03:02

Ada is a beautiful programming language when it comes to code safety with it continuing to be used by aircraft and other safety critical systems. There is now Ada++ as an unofficial fork of the language focused on making the language more accessible and friendlier in an era of the likes of Rust and Golang attracting much interest...

PCI Changes For Linux 5.7 Bring Error Disconnect Recover, P2P DMA For Skylake-E

Sat, 04/04/2020 - 02:17

The PCI subsystem changes were sent out today for the ongoing Linux 5.7 kernel merge window...

LLVM Lands Performance-Hitting Mitigation For Intel LVI Vulnerability

Fri, 04/03/2020 - 21:24

Made public in March was the Load Value Injection (LVI) attack affecting Intel CPUs with SGX capabilities. LVI combines Spectre-style code gadgets with Meltdown-type illegal data flows to bypass existing defenses and allow injecting data into a victim's transient execution. While mitigations on the GNU side quickly landed, the LLVM compiler mitigations were just merged today.

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Beta Released

Fri, 04/03/2020 - 21:18

For those with extra time on their hands due to being at home and social distancing, Canonical released the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS beta today for testing...

Linus Torvalds Questions The Not So Glorious Driver For That Funky Looking RGB Mouse

Fri, 04/03/2020 - 19:40

Last month I noted a new Linux driver for a buggy and funky looking mouse. A special driver was created by a community developer due to not all the mice button working otherwise due to not abiding by HID specifications. Now that the driver was merged for Linux 5.7, Linus Torvalds had words to share on this open-source driver...

POCL 1.5 Released With Performance Improvements, Fixes For OpenCL On CPUs

Fri, 04/03/2020 - 17:57

POCL 1.5 has been released as the "Portable CL" implementation for running OpenCL on CPUs and other devices with LLVM back-ends...

Intel MKL-DNN / DNNL 1.3 Released With Cooper Lake Optimizations

Fri, 04/03/2020 - 16:41

Intel on Thursday released version 1.3 of their Deep Neural Network Library (DNNL) formerly known as MKL-DNN in offering a open-source performance library for deep learning applications...

Plenty Of New Sound Hardware Support, Continued Sound Open Firmware Work For Linux 5.7

Fri, 04/03/2020 - 14:32

SUSE's Takashi Iwai who oversees the sound subsystem for the Linux kernel sent in his changes on Thursday that are ready for the 5.7 kernel...

Chrome, Skype, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, VSCode Now Unofficially Available For Clear Linux

Fri, 04/03/2020 - 12:00

One of the common criticisms for those trying to use Clear Linux on the desktop is that it lacks easy access to proprietary packages like Google Chrome and Steam. There has been plumbing within its swupd package/bundle management system to support third-party repositories to expand the ecosystem and now we're finally seeing that happen...

NetBSD 8.2 Released With Fix For Ryzen USB Issues, Fix For Booting Single Core CPUs

Fri, 04/03/2020 - 07:07

While NetBSD 9.0 has been out since mid-February, for those still on the NetBSD 8 series the NetBSD 8.2 milestone is now available with various fixes. As a result of the coronavirus, the NetBSD 7 series is also being extended...

Linux 5.7 Seeing Updates For Intel SpeedSelect Technology, Jasper Lake PMC

Fri, 04/03/2020 - 06:51

Andy Shevchenko submitted on Tuesday the x86 platform driver updates targeting the Linux 5.7 kernel merge window...

System76 Thelio Major Proves To Be A Major Player For Linux Workstations

Fri, 04/03/2020 - 01:20

For the past two months we have been testing the System76 Thelio Major and it's been working out extremely well with performance and reliability. The Thelio Major offering with options for Intel Core X-Series or AMD Ryzen Threadripper and resides between their standard Thelio desktop with Ryzen/Core CPUs and the Thelio Massive that sports dual Intel Xeon CPUs.

X-Plane 11.50 Flight Simulator Beta Released With Vulkan API Support

Fri, 04/03/2020 - 01:05

For years we have been looking forward to X-Plane with a new Vulkan renderer to replace its aging OpenGL renderer. Finally today the X-Plane 11.50 Beta has been made public for this realistic flight simulator that supports Metal on Apple platforms and Vulkan everywhere else...