Phoronix

Firmware developer Michał Żygowski of embedded consulting firm 3mdeb has provided a convenient overview over the current state of AMD Coreboot support for booting with this open-source alternative to conventional proprietary BIOS...

Intel's Linux graphics stack has seen a lot of major changes in recent years besides the addition of their "ANV" Vulkan driver. The Intel Linux OpenGL driver saw their new Gallium3D driver, NIR has come about as the new intermediate representation used across their drivers, and other fundamental changes and improvements. The latest underlying work is introducing a pattern-based code generator for their graphics compiler...

Last week we published benchmarks of the Motile M141, Walmart's private-label tech branch, and the M141 being a Ryzen 3 3200U powered laptop that has been retailing for just $199 USD. In those initial benchmarks was an extensive look at the Windows vs. Linux performance while this article today is looking at the performance of this AMD Ryzen 3 laptop against a number of old and new Intel laptops, all tested using a daily snapshot of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

Codeplay announced last year they were working on an open-source layer for running Intel's oneAPI and Data Parallel C++ on NVIDIA GPUs and as part of that supporting Khronos' SYCL on NVIDIA hardware. Today they revealed more details on this achievement and new software layer...

NVIDIA has kicked off February by releasing the 440.59 Linux driver as their newest stable driver...

Landing in the LLVM compiler infrastructure code-base in January was finally an AMD Zen 2 scheduler model optimized for the latest-generation AMD processors when compiling code with Clang using the -march=znver2 targeting. However, now some important fixes to this scheduler model have landed...

Oracle's Daniel Kiper provided an update on the GRUB boot-loader efforts and their hopes on sticking to a yearly release cadence...

Hikari is a stacking window manager with tiling support that has also work-in-progress code for serving as a Wayland compositor. However, unlike most X11 window managers and Wayland compositors being focused on Linux systems, Hikari is BSD-focused...

Over the past week have been two patch series in working to enable BACO (Bus Active, Chip Off) support and in turn power management capabilities when using AMDKFD (Kernel Fusion Driver) for compute workloads...

The BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system that has been in development since 2001 saw its long-awaited beta release in late 2018 while it looks like a second beta release could be on approach for this open-source operating system...

The second release candidate of NetBSD 9.0 is now available for testing of what should be the last test candidate before the stable NetBSD 9 unveiling in the very near future...

Version 5.5 of KDevelop, the KDE-focused integrated development environment, is now available with various language integration improvements...

Following the release of Wine 5.0 about two weeks ago as the annual stable feature release of Wine, Wine 5.1 is out today in kicking off the next bi-weekly development series in the path towards Wine 6.0 due out next January...

Out this weekend is Lumina 1.6 as the latest release of this Qt-powered desktop environment originally developed by iXsystems as part of PC-BSD / TrueOS...

FS-VERITY came in Linux 5.4 as a means of transparent integrity and authenticity support for read-only files. This Google creation is seeing better performance with Linux 5.6...

Longtime X11 developer Keith Packard who has been working on various infrastructure improvements to the Linux desktop in recent years under contract for Valve has been eyeing the creation of a new Vulkan extension for dealing with frame timing behavior for Vulkan apps/games...

Towards the end of last year Intel quietly released an "ignition firmware" for the Management Engine (ME) on their Cascade Lake platform that is also their first ME firmware release to be under a license permitting redistribution...

The vkBasalt open-source project began as just providing Contrast Adaptive Sharpening support for Linux/Vulkan games similar to Radeon Image Sharpening. This Vulkan post-processing layer then added an option for applying FXAA anti-aliasing and then SMAA and other effects. Now vkBasalt 0.3 is out today with even more post-processing features...

While KDE Plasma 5.18 is dropping soon, feature work is already underway on Plasma 5.19 and other areas of the KDE desktop stack...

Lightworks 2020.1 is on the way as this professional-grade video editing system's first release of the year and a change in their versioning scheme. Out this week is the first public beta of the still-proprietary video editing system for Windows, macOS, and Linux...