Phoronix

A Phoronix Premium reader recently inquired about the performance impact of LUKS LVM-based disk encryption that continues to be offered by Ubuntu's Ubiquity installer on new installations and if it's worthwhile. As I've said for many years, it's certainly recommended for production systems -- particularly laptops where there are greater chances of theft -- and the performance impact isn't generally all that bad with modern CPUs and the likes of AES-NI...

Back in October 2018 came the initial patches for providing per-process GPU usage reporting to be exposed to user-space for interesting metrics akin to the top command or other system monitoring utilities but for detailed GPU statistics. In October that interesting work finally saw a revision but went dark after that and didn't make it into the recent Linux 5.5 merge window. Now a new spin of that code has been sent out for review...

Huawei isn't known as much of an upstream contributor to the GNU toolchain and as far as GNU C Library (glibc) commits go prior to Thursday had just authored three patches from a Huawei emailing address. But that count more than doubled thanks to some optimizations they have successfully landed upstream...

Under the continued guidance of Satya Nadella, Microsoft made more interesting open-source / Linux moves in 2019 most notably with allowing exFAT support to be introduced into the mainline Linux kernel and also introducing Windows Subsystem for Linux 2...

While much of the lure to Gentoo Linux is on being a source-based distribution and assembling your system packages from source, some Gentoo developers are toying with the idea of providing some new kernel binary options similar to that of the more conventional binary Linux distributions...

Following last week's release of Chrome 79, the Chrome 80 web browser has been promoted to beta,..

Just in time for those taking advantage of Valve's annual Steam Winter Sale, a new release of the Wine-based Proton software is now available that powers Steam Play for running Windows games generally very well on Linux...

Alpine Linux is a distribution that prides itself on being "small, simple and secure" with being a lightweight distribution built off Musl libc and Busybox and popular for use within containers. But with today's Alpine Linux 3.11 release they are seemingly pursuing desktop Linux support...

The Mesa RADV Vulkan driver paired with the Valve-funded ACO compiler back-end is yielding an incredibly power competitor to AMD's own AMDVLK Vulkan driver that is derived from the source-code of their shared Windows Vulkan driver code-base. Here are some year-end benchmarks looking at the RADV vs. RADV ACO vs. AMDVLK Vulkan driver Linux gaming performance on Ubuntu with several generations of Radeon graphics hardware.

NVIDIA's PhysX SDK physics implementation, which NVIDIA has been providing open-source code drops on, will soon see a 5.0 release...

As expected, Feral Interactive this morning released the complete season of Life Is Strange 2 for Linux and macoS...

Compared to the inaugural Rav1e 0.1 release just over one month ago, Rav1e 0.2 was released on Wednesday with 40~70% better performance depending upon the encode settings...

With 2019 quickly drawing to a close, similar to yesterday's look at the most viewed Radeon Linux/open-source stories from 2010 through 2019, here is a similar look at NVIDIA's open-source/Linux news highlights...

GTK 4.0 isn't expected until autumn 2020 but a lot of work remains for that to happen as the next big update to GNOME's toolkit...

CERN, The European Organization for Nuclear Research that is home to the Large Hadron Collider and much more, has been working on alternatives to Microsoft software and recently some of their recommended options for various tasks / application replacements was published...

While Mesa 19.3 was just released last week, Mesa 19.3.1 is now available rather than on its bi-weekly release cadence in order to avoid the Christmas and New Year's holidays...

Coinciding with the release of Linux Mint 19.3 is the debut of the MintBox3 Linux Mint pre-loaded small form factor desktop computer that is fan-less...

It was just last week that Canonical released Multipass 0.9 as their means of easily spinning up Ubuntu virtual machines across Linux / Windows / macOS. Today Multipass 1.0.0 made the surprisingly fast debut and marks their first stable release...

After recently taking some time off of work, Canonical's Daniel van Vugt has been back on the GNOME bug hunt in the continuing quest of optimizing its performance. This GNOME 3.36 cycle is particularly important considering the upcoming Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release...

New AMD Family 17h (Zen) CPU family microcode was merged today into linux-firmware.git...