Phoronix

The open-source Haiku operating system project working off inspirations from BeOS continued to be quite active over the past two months in adding various modern features and fixes to their platform...

Even with the holidays fast approaching Mesa developers continue to be quite busy in landing new features ahead of next quarter's Mesa 20.0 release. The Lima Gallium3D driver and Turnip Vulkan driver are the latest benefiting from the Git code...

Peter Hutterer has been preparing libinput 1.15 as the next update to this open-source input handling library used by Linux systems both on X.Org and Wayland...

In addition to the discussion over potentially dropping non-Gallium3D drivers from Mesa or otherwise potentially forking a portion of the code, AMD's Marek Olšák made a separate proposal about renaming the Gallium3D "state tracker" concept to being "API" implementations...

The Flash-Friendly File-System continues to be refined and with the forthcoming Linux 5.5 kernel are more improvements albeit largely bug fixes...

For years there has been work on a Wayland back-end to Ozone, the Google component for abstracting user-interface elements and input/window handling among other tasks across platforms. It looks like in 2020 the Ozone Wayland support will be in good standing and promoted out of beta...

With each new release of Firefox we set out to see how the performance is looking on the Linux desktop. One discovery we've made is that when using Intel's Clear Linux the Firefox performance is a lot more competitive to Google Chrome than we traditionally see on Ubuntu Linux. But with Firefox 71 we're seeing the performance trending lower compared to Firefox 69 and 70...

Mesa 19.3 continues running behind schedule but stands chances for releasing next week if the lingering blocker bugs are closed...

For those looking to spend less than $200 USD on a graphics card, the recently launched NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER offers great value starting at $159 USD and working well with the NVIDIA Linux driver for providing decent 1080p Linux gaming performance as well as OpenCL / CUDA support. Here are benchmarks of the GTX 1650 SUPER alongside a total of 18 lower-end/mid-range AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on Ubuntu Linux.

While missing the original release target of the end of November, The Qt Company is buttoning up Qt 5.14 for debut next week. Today, however, marks the release candidate availability for those wanting to test out this forthcoming Qt5 release prior to more of the development efforts shifting to Qt 6.0...

AMD's GPUOpen team has released their first official update to the open-source Vulkan Memory Allocator project in nearly one year...

Looking to further capitalize upon the popularity of Ubuntu in the cloud, Canonical today announced Ubuntu Pro premium images for Amazon's EC2 cloud...

Longtime open-source AMD graphics driver developer Marek Olšák has kicked off a discussion over the possibility in the not too distant future of either dropping non-Gallium3D drivers from Mesa (and moving them off to a maintenance branch or the like) or forking some of Mesa's existing code to allow it to be better optimized for Gallium3D use-cases. Due to raised concerns, other possibilities are also being expressed like simply moving ahead with optimizing the Mesa code-base for Gallium3D at a cost of potentially hitting dead code more often with the classic drivers...

The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has finally landed SDMA copy support for Vega/GFX9 graphics hardware, which should principally benefit compute shaders and other cases...

With the PowerPC changes for the Linux 5.5 kernel comes the initial infrastructure work on preparing to be able to handle a Secure Boot implementation for POWER9 hardware...

ASPM can be a big boost to help power-savings on Linux laptops and desktops as shown by a prominent kernel regression a number of years ago. However, a number of Linux drivers are forced to disable Active State Power Management (ASPM) due to quirky/buggy hardware where it ends up not being sane to enable that power-saving feature by default. But with the Linux 5.5 kernel is support for toggling ASPM link states via sysfs as an easy-to-perform manner for achieving better power-savings with friendly devices...

Taking place back in September at Google and Facebook facilities was the Open-Source Firmware Conference (OSFC 2019). For those not able to attend, video recordings of those talks are now freely available online...

xf86-video-sis 0.12.0 is available this week as a new version of the SiS display driver for X.Org systems in supporting Silicon Integrated Systems' display hardware...

Following last week's big batch of DRM graphics driver updates for the Linux 5.5 merge window, AMD and the community engaging in Linux 5.5 testing have now sent in their first round of fixes for this next version of the Linux kernel...

The beta release of Linux Mint 19.3 "Tricia" is now available for testing in the default Cinnamon desktop flavor as well as MATE and Xfce spins...