Phoronix

Recently on Phoronix you have likely heard a lot about the LRU "bulk moves" functionality for the AMDGPU driver after it was talked up by a Valve Linux developer for the performance help to Linux games and then the change landing in Linux 5.4 as a "fix"...

The "VIRTME" project was started years ago as a set of simple tools for running a virtualized Linux kernel that uses the host distribution or basic root file-system rather than a complete Linux distribution image. There hasn't been a new release of VIRTME in years but that changed on Thursday...

Mesa's DRM library could soon be shifting to a date-based versioning scheme similar to what is already employed by Mesa itself (year.release) and the X.Org Server is also looking at similar versioning...

While Intel's SVT-VP9 video encode has been public since February and receiving frequent Git commits for advancing this very fast open-source VP9 video encoder, finally today it saw its first tagged release, being called the SVT-VP9 0.1 pre-release...

While not exactly a big surprise with System76 having done an "OSFC Edition" Coreboot laptop at small scale at the end of the summer, but System76 is now formally announcing two Linux laptops shipping with Coreboot as an alternative to their proprietary BIOS...

Earlier this week I provided some fresh Windows vs. Linux web browser benchmarks for both Firefox and Chrome. For those curious how the current Windows 10 vs. Linux performance is for other workloads, here is a fresh look across a variety of software applications and while testing the near-final Ubuntu 19.10, Intel's rolling-release Clear Linux, and Debian 10.1 while running off an Intel Core i9 HEDT platform.

The promising ACO compiler back-end for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver now has support for GFX10/Navi graphics!..

In addition to Intel this week sending out their first big batch of graphics driver changes for the Linux 5.5 kernel cycle kicking off at year's end, today AMD developers sent in their first batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver changes targeting this next version of the Linux kernel...

There hasn't been a major release of the X.Org Server now in 17 months... Not because there haven't been any changes (in fact, a lot of GLAMOR and XWayland work among other fixing) but because no one has stepped up as release manager to get the next version out the door. But to workaround that, developers are looking at moving the X.Org Server to purely time-based releases and letting their continuous integration testing be the deciding factor on if a release is ready to ship...

While Ubuntu developers are busy adding experimental ZFS support to their installer, the SUSE developers working on their YaST installer are working on offering better security options for their platform by beefing up the encryption capabilities at install-time...

RenderDoc has already been the leading open-source graphics debugging tool for OpenGL / Vulkan / Direct3D across multiple platforms and it continues only getting more useful with each new feature release...

Google's newest open-source contribution for benefiting the Linux kernel is SchedViz...

Valve has released Proton 4.11-7 as the newest version of their Wine downstream that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

We are hitting the autumn Linux distribution update season and out today is NixOS 19.09 as the latest installment for this operating system built around the functional Nix package manager...

With Stallman sticking around as head of the GNU and with that the Free Software Foundation re-evaluating their GNU relationship, Richard Stallman is already saying there will be no major changes to the project he founded...

Last week I shared benchmark results of the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X vs. Intel Core i9 9900K in 400+ benchmarks in the largest comparison ever for these two competing ~$500 USD processors. If that wasn't enough, I repeated the hundreds of CPU/system benchmarks again but without any of the recent CPU security mitigations in place to see how the situation would have played out pre-2018.

The Qt Company has shipped Qt 5.14 beta as the newest version of the Qt5 tool-kit and their last real feature update as Qt 5.15 will focus more on bug fixes as development is shifting towards Qt 6.0 due out in one year's time...

Currently when resuming from systemd suspend or switching back to the KDE desktop from an alternate VT, it's possible with the NVIDIA proprietary driver to see screen corruption or leakage of previous screen contents to areas of the lock screen / desktop. This annoying issue is now being better addressed with Qt 5.14...

As we reported this weekend, the Ubuntu desktop installer "Ubiquity" has landed the much anticipated ZFS install support. That's now propagated through to the Ubuntu 19.10 daily ISOs and does indeed make for a quick and easy setup of Ubuntu Eoan running off a root ZFS file-system...

Intel engineers have contributed GPU-accelerated memory copy support to FFmpeg when making use of their preferred video decode implementation...