Phoronix

Valve along with their comrades at CodeWeavers are preparing Proton 5.0-7 as the newest version of their Wine-based software powering Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

Last month we provided some early benchmarks looking at the Ubuntu 20.04 X.Org vs. Wayland gaming performance under GNOME 3.36, but now that Ubuntu 20.04 LTS has been officially released, here is a look at the AMD Radeon Linux gaming performance across a wide variety of desktops on both X.Org and Wayland where supported.

Fedora 32 has officially been released as the latest installment of this Red Hat supported community Linux distribution known for its bleeding-edge features and packages...

The Intel P-State driver has been going through a number of improvements recently including transitioning to the "Schedutil" governor by default on some systems so far in this governor making use of scheduler utilization data. But Intel's graphics team meanwhile has been working on P-State changes to improve the GPU-bound energy efficiency and that is now spun as a new "adaptive" governor...

One of the many new features coming in Mesa 20.1 is experimental NIR support for the vintage Radeon "R600g" driver. That NIR back-end isn't yet to feature parity but is now one step closer with tesselation support now being available along this code path...

Con Kolivas is out with his Linux 5.6-ck1 optimization patch-set and version 0.199 of the MuQSS scheduler. This re-base against the Linux 5.6 stable kernel is coming late due to Kolivas leading a team making 3D printed COVID-19 equipment in Australia...

After the merge request was open for more than a half-year, Mesa 20.1 has landed a Vulkan device selection layer for choosing between multiple Vulkan-enabled GPUs on a given system as the default device...

Those running the RADV Vulkan driver on AMD APUs could soon find themselves having even better performance in select games...

Announced back on 14 April were AMD's newest members of the EPYC 7002 "Rome" family, the 7Fx2 high frequency processors. Back on launch day we posted the AMD EPYC 7F52 Linux benchmarks for that 16-core/32-thread CPU with a staggering 256MB cache and clocking up to 3.9GHz. In this article today are our initial benchmarks of the EPYC 7F32 as the 8-core/16-thread processor yielding a 128MB L3 cache and clock speeds up to 3.9GHz.

Micron announced today the "World’s First Open-Source Storage Engine Designed for SSDs and Storage Class Memory"... Or simply put, yet another key-value store database and this time designed for high performance SSDs and persistent memory...

For the past five months there has been a bug report affecting the likes of Pop OS 19.10 and Fedora 31 over the GNOME Shell Calendar server using "20~25% CPU all the time" and "every 2-3 seconds or so there is a CPU usage spike where the calendar processes eat something like 20-25% of the CPU." That is significant on modern CPUs as well as on battery life for laptops while finally the issue has been fixed...

While the Open Sound System (OSS) usage hasn't been prevalent on Linux systems in many years, on NetBSD there still is some software making use of the OSS interfaces in not supporting the native NetBSD audio interfaces. Better OSS compatibility via a translation layer is available while ultimately they are working on transitioning more open-source software to support the native interfaces...

The Qt Company has published an initial release schedule for Qt 6.0...

The new spi-amd driver looks like it could make its debut in Linux 5.8...

Following the release a few weeks back of the Intel Media Driver Q1-2020 update for this open-source Linux video encode/decode driver for Intel graphics, their first pre-release of the Q2-2020 driver update is now out for testing...

Just days after Canonical shipped the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS "Focal Fossa" release, Ubuntu 20.10 "Groovy Gorilla" is now open for development...

OpenCL 3.0 is being released today in provisional form. OpenCL 3.0 is making OpenCL 2.x functionality now optional to make it better suited for a range of devices plus there is new functionality introduced like subgroups, extensions for asynchronous data copies, and more.

The routine Vulkan 1.2.139 maintenance update brings with it two new extensions...

Linus Torvalds just released the third weekly release candidate of the forthcoming Linux 5.7 kernel...

Manjaro 20.0 "Lysia" is out today with its flagship Xfce spin as well as its GNOME and KDE editions for this popular, desktop-minded, Arch-based Linux distribution...