Phoronix

The KDE community has released the first beta of the forthcoming Plasma 5.19 desktop release...

Originally slated for the NVIDIA GTC event but then delayed due to the coronavirus, the Jetson Xavier NX Developer Kit is launching today for "cloud native computing" on edge/AI devices.

While yesterday GFX10/Navi soft recovery support was sent in to DRM-Next for Linux 5.8, today that material was sent in as a "fix" for Linux 5.7 along with a number of other AMDGPU driver alterations...

AMDVLK 2020.Q2.3 was released today as the newest version of this official open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems...

Announced back in March were the Marvell ThunderX3 Arm server processors with up to 96 cores per SoC and support for 4-way SMT to yield up to 384 threads per socket. These 7nm Arm server processors also support eight channels of DDR4-3200 memory, 64 lanes of PCIe 4.0, and other competitive features for a 2020 server CPU. While we await to see how the ThunderX3 processors perform, the compiler support and other Linux software features are getting all buttoned up...

While already various changes are building up for Mesa 20.2, the Mesa 20.1 release process is still progressing with hopes of shipping this quarter's stable release later in the month...

A year after the transition started to import Unity 8 into Ubuntu Touch, the work is now ready for users with the newly released Ubuntu Touch OTA-12 by the UBports crew...

Mesa 20.2-devel has a new cache in place for TTN...

FSGSBASE patches for the Linux kernel have been available for years albeit not mainlined to date. However, thankfully, a Microsoft Linux developer has taken up the cause to get them upstreamed given the performance benefits they are even seeing. Here are some benchmarks of the Linux kernel patches for FSGSBASE on both Intel and AMD CPUs.

Epic Games today offered the first glimpse at Unreal Engine 5, their next-generation game engine they hope to have out in preview form in early 2021 and for its official release before the end of next year...

Continuing with AMD's relaunch of GPUOpen and introducing new software releases all week, out this morning is Radeon Rays 4.0. It takes another step forward while taking a step back in terms of no longer being open-source...

AMD announced today the Radeon Pro VII workstation graphics card for $1899 USD and will begin shipping in June...

The upstream Linux kernel developers have come out against a proposal to begin using the "-O3" optimization level when compiling the open-source code-base with the GCC 10 compiler or newer...

The LLVM compiler stack is about to merge its support for the BFloat16 floating-point format, including the BF16 C language support...

A lot is building up for Linux 5.8 and there already being a few rounds of AMDGPU feature improvements. Another batch of feature material for the AMD Radeon graphics driver was sent in this week to DRM-Next destined for Linux 5.8...

While many hoped that with the adoption of Vulkan it would lead to avoiding driver-specific checks/workarounds, that's still not been the case to workaround various driver bugs and other issues. The RADV ACO compiler back-end has resorted to altering its version string in order to obtain 2~5% higher performance in Feral's latest Linux game release...

For those on the hunt for another lightweight Wayland compositor option, TAIWINS is the newest option...

OpenZFS / ZFS On Linux 0.8.4 is out as the latest update to this leading open-source ZFS file-system base for Linux and FreeBSD and coming together as well for macOS...

Coreboot 4.12 is out today as the latest version of this open-source BIOS / system firmware implementation that saw more than 2,600 commits since the previous release...

Since AMD Renoir laptops began shipping some weeks ago, I've been on the hunt for an interesting laptop to pick up for Linux testing and to potentially even use as my next main production laptop. Given the successes of AMD Zen 2 on the desktop and server front, I've been very eager to try out a Renoir laptop and last week picked up a Lenovo IdeaPad with Ryzen 7 4700U and the experience so far has been very good and with captivating Linux performance.