Phoronix

The open-source MoltenVK is out with another new update based against the Vulkan 1.1.126 specification and allowing the Vulkan API to be used on Apple's macOS and iOS by mapping those calls to the underlying Metal graphics drivers...

Cleaning up of the Pango layout engine library as some much needed housekeeping by GNOME developers resulted in shifting to the Harfbuzz library for font loading. That quietly meant dropping support for bitmap fonts from Pango, which is now reaching Linux desktop users when upgrading to the Pango 1.44 stable release...

Debian Project Leader Sam Hartman has determined it's necessary to pursue a general resolution among Debian developers over their init system policy and whether to still care about init system diversity outside of systemd...

Fedora 31 is now officially available as the latest update for this prominent Linux distribution backed by Red Hat and continuing uninterrupted under IBM's ownership of Red Hat...

For those curious about the performance of AMD Radeon open-source Linux gaming out-of-the-box on the newly released Ubuntu 19.10, here are those benchmarks compared to the Radeon driver state on Ubuntu 19.04. Additionally, there are benchmark results if manually upgrading your Ubuntu 19.10 installation to using the in-development Linux 5.4 kernel and Mesa 19.3 for the very newest AMD Linux driver support.

After weeks of information leaking on these new ~$200 GTX SUPER graphics cards, NVIDIA today officially announced the GTX 1660 SUPER that is shipping today and the GTX 1650 SUPER that will hit store shelves in late November...

Happening this week over in Lyon, France is the Embedded Linux Conference Europe and Open-Source Summit Europe events. Developer Chris Simmonds spoke today about systemd and boot time optimizations around it...

AMD open-source developer Marek Olšák is landing the last of his changes for the Mesa 19.3 imminent feature freeze...

The "AST" DRM/KMS display driver that can be used with the many servers supporting ASpeed display hardware now has work pending for atomic mode-setting...

With Mesa 19.3 embarking on its feature freeze this week unless the period is extended, Intel developers have been working on landing more of their Gen12 graphics code into this release for future Tiger Lake CPUs as well as the basis for their first Xe discrete graphics card...

With Ubuntu 19.10 it's the first time we have seen the Radeon gaming performance under a GNOME Wayland session match or exceed the performance found under the default GNOME X.Org session...

While we have seen a lot of open-source AMD Linux graphics driver patches for Renoir and that initial support within the 5.4 kernel, support for this 2020 APU platform is still maturing. The newest work on the Linux upbringing for Renoir is enabling the "DMCUB" support...

Building off yesterday's DXVK 1.4.4 release, D9VK 0.30 is out as the similar project that implements the Direct3D 9 API atop Vulkan...

In addition to this month bringing the release of the Ubuntu 19.10 "Eoan Ermine", Apple also shipped macOS 10.15 "Catalina" as the sixteenth major release of their macOS operating system. So with that it makes for an interesting time seeing how macOS 10.15 competes against both Ubuntu 19.10 and Windows 10 on an Apple MacBook Pro. Here are those results from dozens of benchmarks.

The Intel Core i9 9900KS is still on track for shipping this month as the revived Coffeelake CPU that is capable of hitting an all-core turbo frequency of 5.0GHz. Linux benchmarks of the Core i9 9900KS are coming...

The Zink Gallium3D code for running OpenGL / OpenGL ES over Vulkan has now been merged into the Mesa 19.3 development code...

Canonical's Chris Halse Rogers has shared a road-map for Mir (or terrain map as he prefers calling it) about their future plans for this open-source display server that remains focused now on providing Wayland support...

Following last week's release of Firefox 70 and Chrome 78 I posted some fresh Linux web browser benchmarks where the Mozilla browser continued to get beat severely by Google on Linux. But is the situation any better with Firefox 71 in beta? Not really...

The Ubuntu 20.04 cycle is now officially underway. Following the recent release of Ubuntu 19.10, the "Focal" archive has been created and back to syncing against the latest Debian unstable packages...

While marketed as a point release, the dav1d 0.5.1 "Asiatic Cheetah" release is quite significant for those needing to perform AV1 video decoding on older processors...