Phoronix

Early on in the Linux 5.5 cycle during the merge window we saw some wild swings in performance including some positive gains but also performance regressions. Given last weekend's Linux 5.5-rc3 release having merged some scheduler fixes and other fallout from early on in Linux 5.5, I was curious to see if those regressions have been addressed... Sadly, they are not...

Mesa's LLVMpipe Gallium3D driver has long been about running OpenGL on GPUs as a software fallback / debug path but as of this morning in Mesa 20.0-devel there is now the experimental ability of having OpenCL support making use of OpenCL "Clover" with NIR for CPU-based execution...

Following Richard Stallman being ousted from the Free Software Foundation, the FSF was said to be re-evaluating its relationship with the GNU while R.M.S. said no radical changes are expected. Now a group of GNU maintainers have laid out some of their desires for improving the interactions between the GNU and FSF...

The Linux 4.8 series is over three years old while now the DragonFlyBSD crew has pulled in the Linux 4.8.17 sources of the Intel "i915" DRM driver into their kernel for providing updated graphics driver coverage...

One of the few still maintained Linux distributions derived from Gentoo is Calculate Linux, which saw a new release today in preparing for the new year...

As we enter 2020, Debian remains one of the oldest Linux distributions out there and over the 2010s continued advancing quite well for being volunteer-led and competing with the corporate heavyweights like Ubuntu, Red Hat, and SUSE. Debian in the 2010s found itself being used as the basis for Valve's SteamOS, continuing to be integral to the success of Ubuntu, it ultimately decided to make use of systemd, there were various desktop changes, and multiple successful releases of Debian GNU/Linux to celebrate...

One of the new open-source compiler IR advancements of 2019 has been the Google/Tensorflow MLIR as the Multi-Level Intermediate Representation designed for machine learning models/frameworks. With Google's "IREE" project, MLIR can be accelerated by Vulkan and thus allowing machine learning via this high-performance graphics/compute API...

The 2010s were great for the long-standing Wine project that allows Windows games/applications to run near effortlessly on Linux, macOS, and similar platforms. CodeWeavers' investments into Wine continue turning out very well for the continued success and now with Valve's Steam Play built upon the Wine-based Proton, more Linux gamers are happier than ever...

WireGuard is to be merged for Linux 5.6 and is already staged in the net-next tree while for those on pre-5.6 kernels going as far back as Linux 3.10, a new out-of-tree module release is now available...

Git maintainer Junio Hamano released Git 2.25-rc0 on Christmas as the first test release en route to this next feature update for this widely-used distributed revision control system...

One of the engine upgrades to Vulkan we have been looking forward to the most has been usage by the X-Plane flight simulator to ultimately succeed their long-standing OpenGL pipeline. Laminar Research shared on Christmas day that the X-Plane 11.50 release with Vulkan support is currently in private beta and will soon be available publicly...

Unigine developers have delivered a nice Christmas present in delivering Unigine 2.10 as the latest version of their 3D engine used by few games but an increasing number of simulation systems...

The digiKam photo management software is closing in on its v7.0 release and over the weekend issued their first beta...

With Mesa 20.0 expected to ship the "Iris" Gallium3D driver as the default Intel OpenGL Linux driver for Broadwell hardware and newer, I've been ramping up my testing of this open-source driver in recent weeks. For adding to the various generations of CPUs tested, here are some numbers of the latest code when using the UHD Graphics 630 off the high-end Core i9 9900KS processor...

Most KDE users are probably happy with the current state of the Plasma desktop and the state of the KDE applications. There's certainly less bugs in recent releases, KWin and the overall desktop is in better standing (though still improvements to be made such as showcased by the likes of KWin low-latency) with reliable Wayland support, and most would probably agree that the work out of this open-source project matured rather well in recent years with their focus on enhancing usability and other areas...

First of all, Merry Christmas for those of you celebrating today or Happy Holidays regardless...

While the GNU Hurd microkernel is still woefully behind in hardware support and hasn't even seen a new release in three years, at least a lot of the other GNU projects experienced a great decade -- especially with the likes of the GNU Compiler Collection, GNU Octave, GRUB, and other components critical to modern Linux systems...

While the open-source Radeon Linux graphics stack has made some remarkable improvements this year not only from AMD but also the likes of Valve, unfortunately not as much can be said about the state of the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver. The Nouveau Linux graphics driver remains much slower than the proprietary driver, the hardware with the best support is several generations old, and due to the lack of signed firmware images there still isn't yet any open-source 3D for the Turing GPUs that have been shipping for months. But there may be hope in 2020.

Western Digital has been contributing a lot more to the Linux kernel in recent years from RISC-V architecture bits to storage enhancements. The most recent code they have been working on in recent weeks is a brand new Linux file-system...

Since March of this year I began benchmarking various open-source video encoders every other day in our lab. Here is a look at how Intel's SVT encoders and other popular options saw their performance evolve over the course of the year...