Phoronix

Patches are pending that can sharply speed-up mount times of large EXT4 file-systems...

While Radeon graphics cards can work with various external GPU (eGPU) solutions, currently on Linux if trying to hot unplug such a setup can lead to various problems. An experimental patch series out this weekend is seeking to address that problem...

A Phoronix Premium reader recently asked about whether Pop!_OS 20.04 performance differs from Ubuntu 20.04 given some underlying changes made by System76 to their distribution, besides the plethora of higher-level desktop improvements. Well, here are some benchmarks.

You may recall towards the end of last year when the Pango layout engine library dropped support for bitmap fonts, causing frustrations among some users. There now appears to be another Linux font debacle brewing...

Debian 10.4 is out this weekend as their fourth stable update to Debian Buster...

Last week Intel open-source developers sent out their initial kernel driver patches for Rocket Lake graphics support and now the Rocket Lake platform support has been merged for Mesa 20.2 on the OpenGL/Vulkan driver side...

Ubuntu Studio, the spin of Ubuntu focused on multimedia production, announced last month that for their 20.10 release due out later this year they would be transitioning from their long-standing Xfce desktop environment over to using KDE Plasma. While still in early form, the transition is going ahead quite well...

Wine 5.8 was released on Friday with a GIF encoder, more WIneD3D Vulkan progress, and other changes while out today is Wine-Staging 5.8 for this experimental blend...

It's been another busy week for KDE developers even with everything happening globally around the coronavirus there are a lot of open-source desktop innovations continuing...

The FreeType library that is used by many open-source projects for font rendering and other font operations, is out with their first release of the year...

Last month Crucial introduced their P2 NVMe SSD series as their new low-cost successor to their prior P1 series. The Crucial P2 500GB NVMe solid-state drive retails for $60~65 USD which offers good value and yields better performance than their prior low-cost P1 SSDs.

Wine 5.8 has been uncorked for the weekend as the newest bi-weekly development release for running Windows programs and games on Linux and other platforms...

Xrdesktop, the Valve-funded Linux desktop support for VR headsets and making the likes of GNOME and KDE window managers VR-aware, is out with a new release...

Last month we reported on LibreOffice now preferring its new rendering code be built with LLVM Clang over alternative compilers. When falling back to CPU-based software rasterization, the Clang-generated code performs much better than alternative compilers given Google's own emphasis with Skia on being Clang-focused. LibreOffice 7.0 is now beginning a hard requirement on Clang when building for Windows...

Con Kolivas known for his longtime work on improving Linux desktop responsiveness with largely working on the kernel and the likes of MuQSS has now seen his first Mesa patch merged for fixing unexpected GUI-related stalls...

Last month marked the release of FreeRDP 2.0 for implementing the Microsoft Remote Assistant Protocol v2. FreeRDP 2.0 also brought RDP proxy support, font smoothing by default, Flatpak packaging support, better scaling for Wayland, and other improvements. Today now marks the release of FreeRDP 2.1...

A new set of kernel patches out this morning are for implementing software boost support within the ACPI CPPC CPUFreq driver...

Oracle's Anthony Yznaga has sent out a proposal for "PKRAM" as a new means of being able to preserve memory pages of the currently running kernel so that they can be restored after launching a new kernel via kexec...

The Lima kernel driver providing reverse-engineered, open-source driver support for aging Arm Mali 4xx graphics processors is finally seeing run-time power management capabilities come Linux 5.8...

IBM engineers have been working on improvements to the Linux kernel's power savings while running latency-sensitive tasks but still delivering comparable performance. Their own numbers for a patched kernel are showing significant power saving benefits as much as ~20%...