Phoronix

Philip Rebohle has released DXVK 1.5 as the newest version of this Direct3D-over-Vulkan implementation and is a big release considering last night's merging of D9VK / Direct3D 9 support...

As part of Fedora 32's bleeding-edge compiler toolchain with the likes of GCC 10 and LLVM 10, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has approved making use of GNU C Library 2.31. Glibc 2.31 will be out early next year with more features in tow...

The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X/3970X are incredibly fast and trounce the competition, but as noted on launch-day most (all?) Linux distributions have a boot issue with them over a machine check exception. There is an easy workaround to let these core-happy CPUs boot and run Linux while the proper fix was queued last week in ras/core in what looks like it will wait until Linux 5.6 for merging...

The Broadcom V3D Gallium3D driver within Mesa 20.0 now has initial support for geometry shaders as needed by OpenGL ES 3.2...

D9VK, the frog-themed Direct3D 9 over Vulkan translation layer originally based on DXVK, has now been merged into the upstream DXVK Direct3D 10/11 over Vulkan layer. In other words, a single project is now providing support from Direct3D 9 through Direct3D 11 for Vulkan acceleration in speeding up the Windows gaming on Linux experience...

Oracle's had quite the file-system history and looking ahead to 2020 they appear committed to the XFS boat on the Linux front. Oracle retains control over the upstream ZFS file-system and could push for better Linux integration of that file-system plus they formerly employed Btrfs creator Chris Mason during its infancy. But they also employ lead XFS maintainer Darrick Wong and in keeping in-line with Red Hat Enterprise Linux defaults embrace that as their primary file-system for Oracle Linux...

On schedule with one week since the closure of the Linux 5.5 kernel merge window and subsequent release candidate, Linux 5.5-rc2 is out this evening for testing...

On Christmas it will mark three years since the release of FreeDOS 1.2 while it appears FreeDOS 1.3 is right around the corner and could potentially be released around that same time. FreeDOS continues going strong as a complete DOS-compatible open-source environment and with this next release can even function as a DOS Live CD...

If opting for a high-end desktop/workstation like the Intel Core i9 10980XE and even for smaller systems, your choice of Linux distribution can be a big factor in the performance potential out of the system. In benchmarking eleven modern Linux distributions across dozens of benchmarks, the performance difference can be more than 30% for the out-of-the-box Linux performance. Benchmarked this round on the i9-10980XE were multiple versions of CentOS, Clear Linux, Debian, Fedora Workstation, Manjaro, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Solus, and Ubuntu.

On Friday I published two years worth of Mozilla Firefox benchmarks in re-testing every browser release from Firefox 57 through Firefox 71 stable as well as the latest beta/alpha releases. One of the questions that came out of that was seeing the current Chrome performance on Linux against Firefox, so here are some fresh numbers there...

The Raspberry Pi 4 continues seeing better mainline kernel/software support as we approach 2020...

Rav1e's weekly-ish pre-releases for this Rust-written AV1 encoder have been focusing a lot on better performance via hand-written x86 Assembly, making use of SIMD extensions, and other fine tuning of their encoder. With this newest pre-release, another ~20% speed-up was obtained...

In their journey towards the Intel Xe GPUs expected to launch initially next year in the form of Ponte Vecchio, just about one month ago Intel posted patches implementing Shared Virtual Memory support for their Linux graphics driver. Those SVM patches have now been revised for further review in potentially making it for Linux 5.6 should everything look good...

Released on Friday was a new version of AMD's GPU Performance API "GPUPerfAPI" project under the GPUOpen umbrella. This is the AMD library used by CodeXL, Radeon Compute Profiler, and others for tapping GPU performance counters and to help in analyzing performance/execution characteristics for Radeon hardware. But this new GPUPerfAPI 3.5 release comes with a rather surprising change...

KDE developers are working on "something big" but this week in pre-holiday mode still managed to land a lot of improvements to the wide spectrum of KDE software...

D9VK 0.40 is out today as the latest feature update to this Direct3D 9 over Vulkan translation layer based on DXVK...

While the Mesa 20.0 cycle is quite young and still over one month to go until the feature freeze for this next quarterly installment of these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan Linux drivers, it's quite exciting already with the changes building up. In particular, on the Intel side they are still positioning for the Intel Gallium3D driver to become the new default on hardware of generations Broadwell and newer. Here is a quick look at how the Intel Gallium3D performance is looking compared to their legacy "i965" classic OpenGL driver that is the current default...

When it comes to PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs, the drives we have been using are the Corsair Force MP600 that have been working out great for pairing with the newest AMD Ryzen systems. But a Black Friday deal had the Sabrent 1TB Rocket NVMe 4.0 Gen4 PCIe M.2 SSD on sale, so I decided to pick one up to see how it was performing on Ubuntu Linux. Here are benchmarks of the Sabrent Gen4 NVMe SSD, which in the 1TB capacity can be found for $150~170 USD.

Way back in 2005 the GNOME "10x10 Goal" was formed to "own 10% of the global desktop market by 2010." Now approaching ten years past that failed goal, GNOME or even the broader Linux desktop marketshare is still well off from seeing a 10% market-share...

KDE Frameworks 5.65 is out this Saturday as the last monthly update to this collection of Qt5 add-on libraries for 2019...