Phoronix

Longtime open-source AMD graphics driver developer Marek Olšák has kicked off a discussion over the possibility in the not too distant future of either dropping non-Gallium3D drivers from Mesa (and moving them off to a maintenance branch or the like) or forking some of Mesa's existing code to allow it to be better optimized for Gallium3D use-cases. Due to raised concerns, other possibilities are also being expressed like simply moving ahead with optimizing the Mesa code-base for Gallium3D at a cost of potentially hitting dead code more often with the classic drivers...

The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has finally landed SDMA copy support for Vega/GFX9 graphics hardware, which should principally benefit compute shaders and other cases...

With the PowerPC changes for the Linux 5.5 kernel comes the initial infrastructure work on preparing to be able to handle a Secure Boot implementation for POWER9 hardware...

ASPM can be a big boost to help power-savings on Linux laptops and desktops as shown by a prominent kernel regression a number of years ago. However, a number of Linux drivers are forced to disable Active State Power Management (ASPM) due to quirky/buggy hardware where it ends up not being sane to enable that power-saving feature by default. But with the Linux 5.5 kernel is support for toggling ASPM link states via sysfs as an easy-to-perform manner for achieving better power-savings with friendly devices...

Taking place back in September at Google and Facebook facilities was the Open-Source Firmware Conference (OSFC 2019). For those not able to attend, video recordings of those talks are now freely available online...

xf86-video-sis 0.12.0 is available this week as a new version of the SiS display driver for X.Org systems in supporting Silicon Integrated Systems' display hardware...

Following last week's big batch of DRM graphics driver updates for the Linux 5.5 merge window, AMD and the community engaging in Linux 5.5 testing have now sent in their first round of fixes for this next version of the Linux kernel...

The beta release of Linux Mint 19.3 "Tricia" is now available for testing in the default Cinnamon desktop flavor as well as MATE and Xfce spins...

The GNOME developers were particularly busy last month with various improvements to GNOME Shell and Mutter for increasing the usability of the desktop and optimizing its performance / power-savings...

Mir 1.6 is out today with the latest batch of features for this Ubuntu-focused display server that offers Wayland client compatibility...

We weren't too enthusiastic about the performance of Amazon's initial Graviton ARM-based CPU cores offered via their Elastic Compute Cloud, but their next-gen Gravin2 CPUs that are "coming soon" should be much more capable for good ARM Linux performance...

DXVK 1.4.6 is out this morning as the first update in two weeks for this widely-used project allowing Direct3D 10/11 games to run atop Vulkan on Linux systems with Wine/Proton...

Phoronix Test Suite 9.2-Hurdal is available today as the newest quarterly feature release to the Phoronix Test Suite for automated, cross-platform and open-source benchmarking...

AMD today announced the Ryzen V1000 and Ryzen R1000 series embedded processors intended for mini PCs and other small form factor PCs...

Today marks the last Mozilla Firefox feature update of 2019 with the release of Firefox 71.0...

The Panfrost Gallium3D driver that is the open-source OpenGL community-led driver for supporting Arm Mali Midgard/Bifrost architectures now has stable support for the T720 GPU...

OmniOS, the Illumos/OpenSolaris-derived platform focused on delivering an enterprise-quality open-source OS, is out with a new update today...

The kernel livepatching infrastructure that allows applying kernel patches (primarily security fixes) to a running kernel without the need to reboot in order to avoid downtime is seeing a big improvement with Linux 5.5...

The XFS file-system is seeing a large number of changes for the in-development Linux 5.5 kernel...

Imagination today announced the IMG A-Series as their next-generation GPU cores and architecture that deliver 2.5x faster performance for the same area and same power to their current-generation PowerVR graphics processors...