Phoronix

KDE developers were busy as always this week working to polish up the forthcoming KDE Plasma 5.18 and other areas of their open-source desktop stack...

The widely-used SQLite embedded database library saw its first major release of 2020 this week...

Earlier this month I wrote about Intel SST Core-Power patches as part of Intel's Speed Select's functionality for more control over per-core power/frequency behavior based upon the software running on each core. The "core-power" profile support appears ready now for Linux 5.6...

As shown yesterday the new video BIOS of the Radeon RX 5600 XT paired with the corrected SMC firmware on Linux yields impressive performance improvements that -- similar to Windows -- allows the card to compete better with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2060. For Linux users, activating the Valve-funded ACO compiler back-end for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver helps turn up the competition even more...

It's already been over nine months since the release of Solus 4 while now this popular Linux desktop distribution has been succeeded by Solus 4.1..

Patches written two months ago for Intel's ANV open-source Vulkan driver have now been merged ahead of the imminent Mesa 20.0 feature freeze and branching...

Some exciting news this week for Firefox users running on Wayland.....

In addition to the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver's on-disk shader cache and in-memory shader cache there is now a "live shader cache" to help with deduplication of compiled shader objects...

The release candidate of OPNsense 20.1 is available this weekend, the FreeBSD/HardenedBSD-based networking/firewall OS that forked from pfSense now a half-decade ago...

One of the features that didn't materialize in time for Wine 5.0 as the annual stable Wine release was the work-in-progress Vulkan back-end to WineD3D. Rather than going from Direct3D to OpenGL as WineD3D currently does, there has been efforts to introduce a Vulkan back-end similar to the likes of DXVK...

Coming a few weeks past DXVK 1.5.1 is now version 1.5.2 and it brings with it quite a number of improvements...

Weston 8.0 was released today as the newest version of this reference Wayland compositor...

Yesterday I put together some statistics on the AMD vs. Intel contributions to the upstream Linux kernel during the 2010s, but a request coming in off that was how do NVIDIA's contributions compare. Here is a look at the NVIDIA contributions to the Linux kernel over the past decade...

Earlier this week AMD launched the Radeon RX 5600 XT and as shown in our Linux launch-day review it offers nice performance up against the GTX 1660 and RTX 2060 graphics cards on Linux with various OpenGL and Vulkan games. Complicating the launch was the last-minute change to the video BIOS to offer better performance, but unfortunately that led to an issue with the Linux driver as well as confusing the public due to the change at launch and some board vendors already shipping the new vBIOS release while others are not yet. Fortunately, a Linux solution is forthcoming and in our tests it is working out and offering better performance.

Everything is aligning that the Linux 5.5 kernel is likely to be released this coming Sunday rather than being pushed off for another week of testing...

As more last minute work for the upcoming Mesa 20.0 is initial OpenGL tessellation support for Intel's OpenSWR driver...

NVIDIA on Thursday introduced Nsight Graphics 2020.1 that to its profiling support can now handle OpenGL + Vulkan interoperability for games/applications making use of both APIs. While not many game engines / apps are yet using the likes of OpenGL 4.6 ARB_gl_spirv, Nsight is ready...

While the Linux 5.5 kernel isn't even released yet, it's ideally coming out on Sunday should there not be a one week delay. But in any event Arm's Will Deacon has already sent in the pull request of the ARM architecture changes for Linux 5.6...

The MIPS-based SGI Octane IRIX workstations were first introduced in the late 90's while recently there has been a resurgence in the work on getting these vintage PCs running off a mainline Linux kernel...

After missing their original target of transitioning to Intel Gallium3D by default for Mesa 19.3 as the preferred OpenGL Linux driver on Intel graphics hardware, this milestone has now been reached for Mesa 20.0!..