Phoronix

Vulkan 1.1.128 is out with various corrections and clarifications to this graphics/compute API specification but it also comes with one exciting new extension...

GCC 10 has moved to its next stage of development that shifts away from feature work to instead general bug fixing with hopes of shipping the GNU Compiler Collection 10 release in the months ahead...

SUSE developer Giovanni Gherdovich has sent out the latest patches on supporting frequency invariance within the kernel's scheduler code and ultimately making use of it for select Intel CPUs to yield not only better raw performance but also power efficiency...

The GNU Compiler Collection continues picking up new features aligned for the upcoming C++20 standard. The latest are patches pending on the mailing list for implementing coroutines in C++...

For those using Zswap as a compressed RAM cache for swapping on Linux systems, the performance could soon see a measurable improvement...

In addition to announcing the much anticipated oneAPI beta, Raja Koduri spent his time at Intel's event today also talking about "Ponte Vecchio" as their forthcoming general purpose GPU...

As expected, Linus Torvalds opted for doing a 5.4-rc8 kernel release today rather than going straight to Linux 5.4 stable. However, he says he could have just as well done the stable kernel release thanks to the cycle settling down...

Since Intel announced "oneAPI" last December we have been eagerly looking forward to its availability and today is finally that day! For SC19, Intel has made available the beta of the oneAPI Base Toolkit for developing speedy code that runs cross-architecture...

It's possible this afternoon Linus Torvalds will release Linux 5.4 stable but considering his communications in recent weeks and many changes still flowing in this week, it's more than likely he will divert and release Linux 5.4-rc8 today and then ship this next stable kernel update on the next Sunday...

Key stakeholders of the Arch Linux distribution quietly met in Berlin last month for their first conference...

With the upcoming Mesa 19.3 release one of the big new features is the "Zink" driver that provides a Mesa OpenGL implementation over Vulkan. This in theory allows for a generic OpenGL driver running over Vulkan hardware drivers, but there is a lot of work ahead before it's really a viable option.

DragonFlyBSD developer François Tigeot has continued doing a good job in continually updating their kernel's graphics driver code with a port of the AMD Radeon graphics source code from the Linux kernel along with related components like TTM memory management...

For KDE users often still running GNOME/GTK applications from the Plasma desktop, the experience is about to get a lot better with Plasma 5.18...

Clang's static analyzer has become quite popular with developers for C/C++ static analysis of code while now the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) might finally see a mainline option thanks to Red Hat...

A few days ago I wrote about the OpenMP / OpenACC offloading patches for Radeon "GCN" GPUs being posted and seeking inclusion in the GCC 10 compiler that will be released in a few months. Those patches were successfully merged meaning this next annual update to the GNU Compiler Collection will feature initial OpenMP/OpenACC code offloading support to supported AMD GPU targets...

The upcoming Linux 5.5 kernel cycle should bring an improvement for power management on Intel's latest-generation Ice Lake processors...

Released at the end of October was Intel's IWD 1.0 wireless daemon while hitting the web this week was version 1.1...

Following the decision by Debian Project Leader Sam Hartman to seek a general resolution over init system diversity and just how much Debian developers care about supporting systemd alternatives, the general resolution vote is moving closer...

GCC developers recently have been discussing a new proposal over an option for preserving the command-line flags/options used when building a binary as well as the associated compiler version...

Using Firefox 70 (including WebRender) and Google Chrome 78, here are our latest round of Linux web browser benchmarks tested on the Dell XPS Ice Lake laptop. Making this round of Linux browser benchmarking more interesting is also including power consumption and RAM usage metrics for the different browser benchmarks.