Phoronix

With OpenSUSE now LTO'ing their Tumbleweed packages by default, SUSE's compiler team is looking at improving the compilation experience and one of those steps is via a proposed "-flto=auto" option...

It's arriving one week late, but GNOME 3.33.4 is now available as the latest snapshot in the trek towards GNOME 3.34 this September...

It was a year and a half ago that Red Hat acquired CoreOS while today they are announcing their first preview release of Fedora CoreOS...

The excitement over the open-source AMD Radeon Navi graphics driver support for Linux gamers/users continues. On Tuesday the RADV driver saw support land for binning to boost performance but while Bas was doing that, Samuel Pitoiset of Valve posted patches allowing GFX10/Navi to support Vulkan transform feedback...

Another late change proposal coming in for Fedora 31 is to allow update-alternatives to optionally point /usr/bin/ld as the default linker to /usr/bin/lld for the LLVM linker...

The latest change for Mesa 19.2 to better the new Radeon RX 5000 "Navi" series support is binning in the RADV driver...

Radeon Cauldron 1.0 is AMD's new graphics SDK framework for developing Vulkan and Direct3D 12 demos/prototypes/samples...

If you are sticking to stable versions of Mesa, the Mesa 19.1.3 point release is out today as the latest and greatest version of this collection of open-source graphics drivers...

While for Intel x86_64 with the latest compilers it's a very competitive race between LLVM Clang and GCC, how is that battle playing out on the IBM POWER9 front? Using the interesting Raptor Blackbird with IBM POWER9 4-core / 16-thread CPU, here are some recent benchmarks I did between GCC 9, GCC 10, and LLVM Clang 8.

While debating new CPU requirements for Fedora 32 potentially taking it all the way to AVX2 CPUs as a new base requirement, before that Fedora 31 still needs to get finished up and there is some late feature work happening for this current cycle...

While AMD developers published their "Znver2" compiler patches for Zen 2 originally back in November, months ahead of the recent Ryzen 3000 series launch, this compiler support was incomplete as it re-used the existing scheduler model and costs table of Znver1. Now though one of SUSE's compiler experts who often works in cooperation with AMD has published the new Znver2 scheduler model and costs table for Zen 2...

Linux sound maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE has posted a set of patches implementing HD audio component notifier support for the Radeon and Nouveau DRM kernel drivers...

Darling is the long-standing (albeit for some years idling) effort to allow macOS binaries to run on Linux that is akin to Wine but focused on an Apple macOS layer rather than Windows. This summer it's been moving along and seeing some new developer contributions...

An early change being talked about for Fedora 32, due out in the spring of next year, is raising the x86_64 CPU requirements for running Fedora Linux. When initially hearing of this plan, the goal is even more ambitious than I was initially thinking: AVX2...

Coreboot 4.10 was released today with some 2,500+ commits over the past eight months for this increasingly popular open-source alternative to proprietary BIOS implementations...

The GFX-RS high performance graphics API for the Rust programming language and based on Vulkan while mapping to Metal when on Apple systems is out with a new release...

Feral Interactive has just announced they've brought the Commander Update DLC for Company of Heroes 2 over to Linux (and macOS) as well...

As it's been a few weeks since last hosting any Linux distribution comparison and now with the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed enabling LTO by default, here are some fresh Linux distribution comparison results plus tossing the newly-released Debian 10.0 into the mix as well. This round of testing included Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Ubuntu 19.04, Fedora Workstation 30, openSUSE Leap 15.1, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Clear Linux 30450, and Debian 10.0.

The BFQ I/O scheduler is working out fairly well these days as shown in our benchmarks. The Budget Fair Queueing scheduler supports both throughput and low-latency modes while working particularly well for consumer-grade hardware. Should the Ubuntu desktop be using BFQ by default?..

GNOME developers continue to be hard at work on GTK4 and trying to ensure this major tool-kit update will be a great success...