Phoronix

For those that had been interested in GNOME 3.34 for Intel's Clear Linux when running their developer-focused, performance-optimized desktop those packages have now landed...

It's coming one day late due to the last minute entropy/RNG patches to improve the random behavior during boot time (among other late patches), but Linus Torvalds has just tagged Linux 5.4-rc1 as what will be the last major stable kernel release of 2019...

Raspbian 2019-09-26 is out as the latest version of this Debian-based Linux distribution that leads the default OS experience for Raspberry Pi devices...

Following last month's release of Xfce 4.14 that transitioned from GTK2 to GTK3 as its tool-kit, old remnants of GTK2 support are now being nuked...

LuxCoreRender, the open-source physically based renderer for execution on CPUs as well as OpenCL accelerators / GPUs, is out with version 2.2 and now integrates Intel's open-source Open Image Denoise...

With Intel seemingly ramping up work on their open-source OSPray portable ray-tracing engine now that they have pulled it under their oneAPI umbrella as part of a forthcoming rendering tool-kit, I figured it would be the latest interesting candidate for benchmarking of AMD EPYC 7742 vs. Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 performance. In addition, the Embree ray-tracing kernels are also being benchmarked as part of this performance comparison.

Intel in cooperation with Facebook have announced they are releasing a Firmware Support Package (FSP) to allow Xeon Scalable "Skylake-SP" to boot with Coreboot...

Linux 5.4-rc1 didn't end up being released on Sunday night as is tradition but instead there were some last-minute critical patches that landed around the kernel's handling of the random number generator / entropy at boot-time...

Seven years after the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) developers began transitioning their codebase from C to C++, they are now discussing the prospects of adopting C++11 as their allowed C++ standard revision for developing this open-source compiler...

OpenMandriva is one of the few Linux distributions (and arguably the only prominent one) that uses LLVM Clang as its default compiler toolchain over GCC for building its packages and the preferred C/C++ compiler exposed to its users. One of the last hold outs for this Clang'ed Linux distribution has been the kernel build but that is now no longer a blocker...

The virtual GPU/display landscape particularly for having accelerated guest graphics was once non-existent and then suffering for the open-source Linux virtualization stack around QEMU, but that is no longer the case. There are options these days to rival the GPU/display offerings of VirtualBox and VMware albeit to newcomers may not be so clear...

It turns out Linux 5.3 shipped with potentially subpar performance for the allocation of hugepages but that should be rectified in the now open Linux 5.4 cycle for trying to provide a sane default allocation strategy on NUMA boxes...

Wine-Nine-Standalone is the project making it easier to make use of Gallium3D's Direct3D 9 state tracker within Wine. Wine-Nine-Standalone 0.5 is out as the first new release since March for this project making it easier to use the Direct3D 9 Gallium state tracker within Wine...

Joining DXVK 1.4.1 with a new release this weekend is D9VK 0.22 as the similar project achieving faster Direct3D 9 performance over Wine/Proton via translating the API calls to Vulkan...

The Linux 5.4 merge window is set to end today with the release of Linux 5.4-rc1. With the major pull requests in, here is a look at the prominent changes and new features coming with Linux 5.4. As is standard practice, there will be about eight weekly release candidates of Linux 5.4 prior to officially releasing this kernel as stable in late November or potentially early December depending upon how the cycle plays out.

A second batch of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes for the Linux 5.4 kernel have landed...

Intel's SNA "Sandybridge New Acceleration" for 2D acceleration via their deprecated xf86-video-intel X.Org driver has seen some improvements, which is rare these days considering the for this driver that has been in perpetual version 3.0 development for the past six years...

With all of the CPU security bugs over the past two years and heightened concerns about hardware vulnerabilities in general, the upstream Linux kernel has been working to create a formal process for dealing with the disclosure process and addressing said issues within the kernel code...

With Plasma 5.17 releasing soon, developers have begun pushing changes targeted for Plasma 5.18. The KDE Plasma 5.18 release isn't set to arrive until next February but if any of the recent releases are an indication, it should be another exciting and solid release...

While CPU speculative execution has caused a lot of frustrations over the past two years due to the likes of the Spectre vulnerabilities, it turns out CPU speculative execution can be exploited to be a viable source of random entropy for random number generators...