Phoronix

The 2010s were great for the long-standing Wine project that allows Windows games/applications to run near effortlessly on Linux, macOS, and similar platforms. CodeWeavers' investments into Wine continue turning out very well for the continued success and now with Valve's Steam Play built upon the Wine-based Proton, more Linux gamers are happier than ever...

WireGuard is to be merged for Linux 5.6 and is already staged in the net-next tree while for those on pre-5.6 kernels going as far back as Linux 3.10, a new out-of-tree module release is now available...

Git maintainer Junio Hamano released Git 2.25-rc0 on Christmas as the first test release en route to this next feature update for this widely-used distributed revision control system...

One of the engine upgrades to Vulkan we have been looking forward to the most has been usage by the X-Plane flight simulator to ultimately succeed their long-standing OpenGL pipeline. Laminar Research shared on Christmas day that the X-Plane 11.50 release with Vulkan support is currently in private beta and will soon be available publicly...

Unigine developers have delivered a nice Christmas present in delivering Unigine 2.10 as the latest version of their 3D engine used by few games but an increasing number of simulation systems...

The digiKam photo management software is closing in on its v7.0 release and over the weekend issued their first beta...

With Mesa 20.0 expected to ship the "Iris" Gallium3D driver as the default Intel OpenGL Linux driver for Broadwell hardware and newer, I've been ramping up my testing of this open-source driver in recent weeks. For adding to the various generations of CPUs tested, here are some numbers of the latest code when using the UHD Graphics 630 off the high-end Core i9 9900KS processor...

Most KDE users are probably happy with the current state of the Plasma desktop and the state of the KDE applications. There's certainly less bugs in recent releases, KWin and the overall desktop is in better standing (though still improvements to be made such as showcased by the likes of KWin low-latency) with reliable Wayland support, and most would probably agree that the work out of this open-source project matured rather well in recent years with their focus on enhancing usability and other areas...

First of all, Merry Christmas for those of you celebrating today or Happy Holidays regardless...

While the GNU Hurd microkernel is still woefully behind in hardware support and hasn't even seen a new release in three years, at least a lot of the other GNU projects experienced a great decade -- especially with the likes of the GNU Compiler Collection, GNU Octave, GRUB, and other components critical to modern Linux systems...

While the open-source Radeon Linux graphics stack has made some remarkable improvements this year not only from AMD but also the likes of Valve, unfortunately not as much can be said about the state of the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver. The Nouveau Linux graphics driver remains much slower than the proprietary driver, the hardware with the best support is several generations old, and due to the lack of signed firmware images there still isn't yet any open-source 3D for the Turing GPUs that have been shipping for months. But there may be hope in 2020.

Western Digital has been contributing a lot more to the Linux kernel in recent years from RISC-V architecture bits to storage enhancements. The most recent code they have been working on in recent weeks is a brand new Linux file-system...

Since March of this year I began benchmarking various open-source video encoders every other day in our lab. Here is a look at how Intel's SVT encoders and other popular options saw their performance evolve over the course of the year...

In going through the AMDGPU kernel driver changes currently queuing ahead of the Linux 5.6 cycle, "virtual DCN" support is coming in working on SR-IOV display support...

While not attracting as much interest as Linux in the cloud, AI, and other growing markets, the BSDs have seen their share of adoption in many of these areas too as well as the likes of powering some of today's video game consoles. FreeBSD is also well known for powering much of the networking infrastructure of Netflix and other large enterprises. The BSDs advanced a lot from hardware support to new security features and other capabilities this decade setting them on a good trajectory as we get into the 2020s...

Not only has LLVM's Clang compiler proven to become a viable alternative to C/C++ and is now widely used by many different vendors for building production software and nearly at parity for performance to GCC, but the LLVM compiler infrastructure has proven to be a huge success. Beyond Apple as one of the original stakeholders, LLVM is also used by multiple software projects within Intel, AMD is making extensive use of it for their graphics compiler and other purposes, and many other companies leveraging the LLVM projects for various often innovative purposes -- Microsoft is even using it within select projects...

After many delays, and seemingly as a Christmas miracle, Eric S Raymond now believes his Reposurgeon utility is officially ready to convert GCC's SVN repository over to Git...

Announced last month was the Athlon 3000G as a ~$49 processor based on Zen and featuring two cores / four threads and Vega 3 graphics. This 35 Watt TDP processor has finally begun appearing at more Internet retailers in stock last week and I was able to pick up one of these budget CPUs for $55 USD. Here are benchmarks of the Athlon 3000G on Ubuntu Linux compared to other low-end and older processors.

Purism has shared an update on their software work for the Librem 5 Linux smartphone over the course of last month...

For those looking for some fresh reference numbers on the impact of using GCC's Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO), here are some benchmark runs looking at the GCC 10 PGO performance on an Ubuntu 19.10 workstation built around the Ryzen Threadripper 3960X...