Phoronix

A few days back we wrote of Intel's ISPC compiler landing GPU code generation support for their UHD/Iris/Xe Graphics from Gen9 Skylake and beyond. Following that code being merged, ISPC 1.14.0 was quickly tagged...

Even with the coronavirus pandemic, the distributed open-source and Linux communities continue advancing with great new features and improvements. During the course of July on Phoronix were 266 original news articles and another 15 featured Linux hardware reviews / benchmark featured articles...

While some platforms like Netmarketshare have reported increases month-over-month for Linux desktop usage, that doesn't appear to be translating similarly to the Linux gaming market-share, or at least not at the rate Steam is growing on Windows and macOS. Valve has just published their July 2020 numbers that are part of the Steam Survey...

Primarily driven currently by Arm big.LITTLE use-cases like high-end smartphones where you may be running on battery and not want to boost the CPU performance too high for real-time (RT) tasks, Linux 5.9 is adding new capabilities around setting the default boost value...

Linux game porter Ethan Lee who also develops FNA-XNA today released FAudio 20.08 as the open-source XAudio re-implementation...

Debian 10.5 is out today as the latest point releasr to "Buster" in shipping the latest security and bug fixes...

Even with everything going on in the world around the coronavirus and warm summer temperatures, KDE developers continue making improvements on their desktop stack, including around Wayland support...

Wine 5.14 debuted late on Friday night as the newest bi-weekly development release with being less than a half-year to go now until the debut of Wine 6.0 stable...

In addition to the Weston 9.0 Alpha compositor, this week also brought Wayland-Utils 1.0 as the inaugural release for this collection of Wayland utilities/tools...

The Unigine Engine appears to be having great success in the engineering and simulation space more so than for the competitive game engine space, but in any case Unigine 2.12 is now out with this visually stunning engine delivering even more life-like visuals while continuing to be Linux-friendly...

The open-source MoltenVK portability layer has already been providing Vulkan support on Apple iOS and macOS by re-mapping the Vulkan API to Apple's Metal graphics framework. With today's upate, Vulkan has now come to tvOS as well...

Besides the code itself to Intel's oneAPI being open-source, the company is being surprisingly open about its support even for areas of usage outside of x86_64 CPUs...

Samsung engineers responsible for the modern exFAT file-system driver for Linux have updated the adjoining "exfatprogs" user-space programs around this file-system. Notable to exfatprogs-1.0.4 is much faster "fsck" file-system checking support...

If all goes well the Linux 5.8 kernel will be released as stable this weekend. Linus Torvalds last weekend expressed some uncertainty whether an extra release candidate would be required, but so far this week the kernel Git activity is light, thus for the moment at least is looking like 5.8 will be christened on Sunday...

The Speakup screen reader that is built into the kernel and allows for speaking all text printed to the text console from boot-up to shutdown for assisting blind individuals is now being promoted out of staging with Linux 5.9...

The X.Org/X11 Server has been hit by many security vulnerabilities over the past decade as security researchers eye more open-source software. Some of these vulnerabilities date back to even the 80's and 90's given how X11 has built up over time. The X.Org Server security was previously characterized as being even worse than it looks while today the latest vulnerabilities have been made public...

The developers working long on the GTK4 toolkit are finally close to declaring version 4.0...

Red Hat's input expert Peter Hutterer has started writing another library to help the Linux input ecosystem: LIBEI. This new library is focused on offering emulated input device support for Wayland in order to support use-cases like xdotool for automating input events...

This month the Raspberry Pi Foundation funded "V3DV" open-source Vulkan driver for the Raspberry Pi 4 began being able to run vkQuake. In ending out July, the developers at consulting firm Igalia who are working on this driver for the Raspberry Pi Foundation shared some of their latest driver activity...

Weston 9.0 release preparations are getting underway. At least compared to the original Weston 9.0 release plans, this Wayland compositor is running about a month behind those plans but in any case the release is now making its way to reality...