Phoronix

Mesa 20.0.2 is out this evening as the latest stable bug-fix update for the Mesa Q1'2020 driver series...

Systems making use of NVMe solid-state storage may see slightly faster boot times with the Linux 5.7 kernel this summer...

With the in-development LibreOffice 7.0 one of the headlining changes is making use of Google's Skia library and with that is Vulkan rendering support. That initial implementation was using Skia to draw the UI while now it's also picking up text rendering responsibilities...

Linux 5.7 continues the trend of the community taking up new drivers being created to support different peripherals under Linux that amount to dealing with quirky/buggy behavior of the hardware...

Particularly for those on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS or derivative distributions based on the current long-term support base, moving to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS due out next month will yield some nice improvements particularly for those on newer platforms like the AMD Ryzen 3000 series. Here are some benchmarks at how the Ryzen 9 3900X performance is looking between Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS, Ubuntu 19.10, and the current Ubuntu 20.04 LTS development snapshot.

It looks like in the next one or two kernel releases we could see Intel transitioning their CPU frequency scaling governor default from the long-standing powersave to the modern schedutil governor. It's now believed schedutil should be at least as good as powersave...

A user experimenting with Clear Linux had an opinion to share on their mailing list and referred to it as a "toy" distribution and some of our readers have expressed similar opinions on it. Here is the response by one of the Intel developers central to Clear Linux's development...

Devuan 3.0 "Beowulf" has finally reached beta as a spin of Debian 10 "Buster" created without a dependence on systemd...

Since its introduction in Linux 5.1, IO_uring has been coming together quite nicely and getting better with each new kernel release. IO_uring is the effort for delivering faster and more efficient I/O by avoiding excess copies and other efficiency improvements over the existing Linux AIO code. Here are some comparison benchmarks off Linux 5.6 Git...

With new feature work beyond the scope now of Fedora 32, we're beginning to get a better idea for some of the feature plans for Fedora 33 due out this autumn...

The GrSecurity patches to the Linux kernel have long focused on security enhancements but this year they are said to be taking on a larger focus of performance optimizations...

Java 14 has reached general availability today with numerous updates to the JDK...

Unity Tech has released the Unity 2020.1 game engine beta as their first quarterly update of the year...

While the most prominent addition to today's Vulkan 1.2.135 update is the provisional ray-tracing support, there are also other new extensions with this update...

The beta of the highly anticipated Fedora 32 Linux distribution update is now available...

While Vulkan has had NVIDIA's ray-tracing extension (VK_NV_ray_tracing) extension, coming out today is Vulkan's first formal ray-tracing extension for cross-vendor/driver adoption.

A set of kernel patches to Intel's graphics driver helps improve the GPU power consumption to the extent of on Chrome OS seeing about 45 minutes extra battery life and several percent under the likes of Ubuntu Linux...

Oracle continues releasing new updates to Solaris 11.4 but there still aren't any public signs of life past v11.4. Out now is Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU19 with one interesting addition...

For the Fedora 33 release later this year, Red Hat is looking at further enhancing and strengthening the cryptography settings/configuration of the OS...

The GNU Debugger (GDB) is seeing the start of improvements to enhance its Microsoft Windows debugging experience...