Phoronix

It was just last month that DragonFlyBSD pulled in Radeon's Linux 4.4 kernel driver code as an upgrade from the Linux 3.19 era code they had been using for their open-source AMD graphics support. This week that's now up to a Linux 4.7 era port...

VMware engineer Nadav Amit who previously pursued "Optpolines" and other possible performance optimizations in light of Spectre / Meltdown vulnerabilities is now proposing patches for deferring PTI flushes to help with addressing the performance overhead caused by Meltdown...

Robert Foss of Collabora was back at the Linux Foundation's Open-Source Summit this week to present the latest state of open-source graphics drivers in the embedded space...

Hardware vendor Ampere Computing with their impressive ARM servers is doing a great job on closely following their hardware's Linux performance as part of a rigorous continuous testing regiment or ensuring quality, compatibility, and stability while being fully-automated...

Mesa's RADV Radeon Vulkan driver just saw a big performance optimization land to benefit APUs like Raven Ridge and Picasso, simply systems with no dedicated video memory...

LG Electronics has been exploring improvements around hibernation/suspend-to-disk to speed-up the Linux boot process for consumer electronics rather than performing cold boots and as part of that is working towards upstream optimizations...

This week saw OpenGL 4.6 support finally merged for Intel's i965 Mesa driver and will be part of the upcoming Mesa 19.2 release. Not landed yet but coming soon is the newer Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver also seeing OpenGL 4.6 support...

While called the Open-Source Summit, the event is primarily about Linux as after all it's hosted by the Linux Foundation. But at this week's Open-Source Summit in San Diego, Deb Goodkin as the executive director of the FreeBSD Foundation presented. Deb's talk was of course on FreeBSD but also why FreeBSD and Linux developers should work together...

It has been almost two years since the release of Enlightenment 0.23 while surprising E23 has now surfaced...

Taking place back in May at the beautiful Skamania Lodge in Washington was Intel's OSTS 2019 for their annual Open-Source Technology Summit that traditionally was internal-only but has begun opening up including allowing external participants this year. I was at OSTS 2019 and it's by far my highlight of the year with many really great sessions and a lot of useful networking at the event. Intel's open-source team has now shared some video recordings from this open-source/Linux event...

Wayland's Weston 7.0 was released on Friday with the newest features for this reference compositor implementation...

Wine 4.0.2 is out today as the second stable point release to this year's Wine 4.0 cycle...

AMD Raven Ridge APUs were a rough launch particularly on Linux where even with the latest motherboard BIOS updates and Linux kernel I am still hitting occasional stability issues, so when the opportunity arose recently to try out the Ryzen 5 3400G as the successor in the Picasso family, I was interested. Fortunately, AMD Picasso APUs have proven to be in better shape on Linux so here is the initial round of performance tests for those interested in the AMD Linux performance on Ubuntu.

After having been submitting various feature updates to DRM-Next the past few weeks of new graphics driver feature code to introduce in Linux 5.4, a final pull request was sent in today with the remaining feature work slated for this next version of the Linux kernel...

Following Spectre/Meltdown, the Linux CPU microcode updating was made serial while now a new patch pending for the Linux kernel would restore the behavior to be parallelized in order to speed-up the process for large core count servers...

While NVIDIA recently began publishing more hardware documentation, don't expect it to make an immediate difference in the quality of the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver. Today the pull request was sent to DRM-Next of the Nouveau kernel driver changes for the upcoming Linux 5.4 cycle and there isn't much to get excited about...

While VKD3D continues to be under heavy development, Valve already appears pleased with it enough that it's now being built as part of their Wine-based Proton software for powering Steam Play on Linux...

Currently the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver doesn't automatically adjust the video memory clock speeds when running a multi-monitor setup since it's more complicated to gracefully handle when scanning out to two or more displays. But a set of currently experimental patches will allow memory clock switching support on multi-monitor setups with the AMDGPU DC code...

With Qt 6 becoming an increasing development focus and Qt 5 already seven years old, Ubuntu developers are looking at finally removing Qt 4 ahead of their 20.04 Long-Term Support release...

Google's Simon Glass who is part of the Chromium / Chrome OS team presented at this week's Embedded Linux Conference in San Diego on U-Boot...