Phoronix

While the Linux 5.5 cycle begins next week, looking ahead to early next year when the Linux 5.6 cycle will begin, there is expected to be another power management improvement coming for AMD Radeon graphics cards...

A few days ago 7 Days to Die saw a performance boost on Mesa Git from its "glthread" threading implementation while now a number of game emulators have seen similar whitelisting...

Ending out the week is an exciting development in the Intel open-source graphics driver space... Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support! This is another step towards their upcoming discrete Xe GPUs and ultimately their exciting oneAPI conquest...

The inaugural release of Glimpse is now available, the fork born out of calls for renaming The GIMP project to something not considered offensive...

It's been almost two months since last looking at the RADV ACO performance for this shader compiler back-end alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM code. ACO is making its debut in the upcoming Mesa 19.3 release while since the last round of testing have been more optimizations and fixes as well as getting the Navi/GFX10 support in place. In this article are some fresh benchmarks of the Vulkan RADV ACO support for not only Polaris and Vega but also the Radeon RX 5700 Navi graphics cards.

The Linux 5.4 kernel is to be released on Sunday and that will in turn kick-off the Linux 5.5 merge window. Here is a look at some of the changes on the table for what will in turn be the first major stable kernel release of 2020...

It looks like a big new systemd release will be out in time for Christmas...

Building off the NVIDIA 440 stable Linux driver release from earlier this month, the NVIDIA 440.36 Linux driver is out today as a small update...

With the big PHP 7.4.0 release due out next week, yesterday we published our PHP 7.4.0 benchmarks using the near-final build for this annual update to PHP. Those benchmarks compared previous releases as far back as PHP 5.6. But out of curiosity after that article I went to do some benchmarks going back to PHP 5.3 through PHP 7.4 and PHP 8.0-dev...

Arm engineers have been working to speed-up the open-source Chromium web browser on 64-bit ARM (AArch64) and ultimately to flow back into Google's Chrome releases. Their focus has been around Windows-on-Arm with the growing number of Windows Arm laptops coming to market, but the Chromium optimizations also benefit the browser on Linux too...

Released at the end of October to little fanfare was webOS Open Source Edition 2.0, the open-source Linux OS currently in development by LG for use on their Smart TVs and other digital products. With webOS Open Source Edition 2.0, they began setting their sights on automobiles and other potential use-cases. That was then extended by this week's release of webOS OSE 2.1...

Universal Bandwidth Compression is now enabled for the open-source "TURNIP" Mesa Vulkan driver...

Mesa 19.2.5 was just released earlier this week but now v19.2.6 has already been released due to the previous point release breaking IBM POWER builds...

Coming up this weekend with the Linux 5.4 kernel is emulation/spoofing of the SGDT/SIDT/SMSW instructions around UMIP for allowing newer 64-bit Windows games to run on Wine and Steam Play (Proton). With newer CPUs like the AMD Ryzen 3000 series that support UMIP, these instructions are not allowed to run in user-space with Wine due to UMIP. So while the first stable kernel release is about to land with this support, some Wine-based emulation not contingent on the kernel patches is also in the works...

Linux for years has supported monitoring NVMe drive temperatures when installing the nvme user-space utility and run as root, etc. But now finally with Linux 5.5 the kernel is supporting NVMe drive temperature reporting through the hardware monitoring "HWMON" infrastructure alongside other hardware sensors...

For those wondering if it's worthwhile for performance recompiling your key Linux binaries with the microarchitecture instruction set extensions and tuning for Ice Lake, here are some GCC compiler benchmarks looking at that impact for the Core i7 1065G7 on the Dell XPS 7390.

Blender 2.81 is now available as the latest minor yet significant update to this open-source 3D modeling software following the major Blender 2.80 release earlier this year...

While releasing the game on time might be more of a challenge, Valve did deliver in announcing Half-Life: Alyx as scheduled as their new flagship virtual-reality game...

The Khronos Group has officially confirmed Intel's new "Iris" Gallium3D driver as being a conformant OpenGL 4.6 implementation...

PHP 7.4 is due to be released next week as the annual major iteration to PHP7. Like we have seen through the PHP7 releases, while new features continue to be tacked on for this popular web-based programming language the performance has continued evolving. Here are the latest benchmarks of PHP 5.6 through PHP 7.4 while also looking at the PHP 8.0-dev performance that is in development on Git master.