Phoronix

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...

Back in May I wrote about Intel working on Platform Monitoring Technology or hardware telemetry capabilities that are coming with Tiger Lake. The Linux support continues to be worked on for this "PMT" functionality although it looks like the work won't be ready in time for the imminent Linux 5.9 kernel merge window...

While there is already the Cage kiosk full-screen shell as well as the likes of Ubuntu's Mir Kiosk Shell, Wayland's Weston reference compositor now has its own implementation...

Systemd 246 is out today as the newest version of this dominant Linux init system and system/service manager. Systemd 246 has a lot of new functionality in time for making it into at least some of the autumn 2020 Linux distributions...

The popular "ACO" shader compiler back-end that recently was promoted to the default shader compiler for Mesa's open-source Radeon Vulkan driver (RADV) has long been testing with shaders and traces while now a proper unit testing framework is being introduced for verifying optimizations are correctly handled, ensuring no regressions, etc...

Following in the steps of their hand-crafted Thelio desktops manufactured in-house in Colorado, Linux PC vendor System76 is also working to not only manufacture their own laptops but also other components like their own keyboard...

OPNsense 20.7 "Legendary Lion" released today as "a major operating system jump forward on a sustainable firewall experience" powered by HardenedBSD...

While we have looked a lot at how the Core i9 10900K performs at the top-end of Intel's Comet Lake line-up as well as with the likes of the i5-10600K and i3-10100, here is our first look at the very bottom of the stack with the new Celeron and Pentium processors. Benchmarked today are the Celeron G5900 as a ~$40 processor and the Pentium Gold G6400 that retails for around $60 and compared against other low-end Intel and AMD processors as well as older Intel Core i3 CPUs.

Intel's open-source ISPC (the Intel SPMD Program Compiler) now has preliminary support for code generation targeting their GPUs...