Phoronix

With the big GNOME 3.34 release coming out this week, the GNOME 3.36 release schedule has now been published...

Intel engineer Feng Tang spoke at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference in Lisbon, Portugal on how the Clear Linux team managed to boot their kernel faster. They started out with around a three second kernel boot time but cut it down to just 300 ms...

The EXT4 case-insensitive lookup optimization added to the file-system with the current Linux 5.3 cycle has been ported to the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) for the upcoming Linux 5.4...

A new release of MoltenVK is now available that is updated against Vulkan 1.1.121 for allowing much of this graphics/compute API to function under Apple's macOS and iOS platforms by remapping the Vulkan calls to Metal...

Just a few weeks after Intel's i965 OpenGL driver in Mesa added GL 4.6 support, the "Iris" Gallium3D driver is now exposing OpenGL 4.6 support too...

While Fedora 31 isn't even out yet, looking ahead to the Fedora 32 release next spring is a plan to switch firewalld as Fedora's default network firewall from its existing iptables back-end to the more modern nftables back-end...

Intel's open-source crew has released version 0.2 of its primarily Rust-developed Cloud Hypervisor and associated firmware also in Rust...

Sadly too late for the upcoming Linux 5.4 merge window, but for Linux 5.5 it looks like there will be a FreeSync improvement around low-frame-rate compensation...

As a follow-up from this weekend's article about Intel's SVT-VP9 video encoder running much faster on AVX2 CPUs from both Intel and AMD, here are the results now before/after for ten different systems with this open-source CPU-based VP9 video encoder...

The LLVM 9.0 release is running a few weeks behind schedule but should be out in the days ahead along with other LLVM sub-project releases like Clang 9.0. Here's a look at what's on tap for this half-year update to the LLVM compiler infrastructure...

Ubuntu's kernel team has decided to switch to LZ4 kernel image compression beginning with Ubuntu 19.10 in order to speed-up the boot times...

Yesterday we reported on two Navi 14 device IDs being added for "workstation SKUs" while today a third has appeared...

In our recent Mesa 19.2 benchmarks of Intel's old and new (Gallium3D) OpenGL Linux drivers one of the rare areas where the new "Iris" driver performed behind the classic driver was with "j2dbench" that stresses the Java OpenGL pipeline. At the time it was unknown why the new driver was performing subpar for this Java graphics test, but now at least there's one optimization so far in addressing that shortcoming...

During this week's KDE Akademy 2019 conference there was some planning discussions around improving the Kate text editor...

Back in April we wrote about MLIR as Google's new IR designed for machine learning. This intermediate representation was designed for use by any machine learning framework and now this common format is being contributed to LLVM...

The past month and a half we have been putting CompuLab's Airtop 3 computer through some demanding benchmarks and a variety of endurance workloads. With the Airtop 3 under test loaded with an 8-core / 16-thread Xeon processor, NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 graphics, and 64GB of RAM with NVMe SSD storage there were some concerns over thermal throttling and if this fan-less industrial PC design could really deal with the generated heat. But after all of this testing, the Airtop 3 continues running strong and another shining example of CompuLab's engineering strength.

Microsoft Teams, the communication platform for chat / video messaging / collaborative file storage and other features, is in the process of being brought to Linux...

In addition to AMD's open-source Linux driver developers being busy in recent weeks bringing up the Renoir APU support, today we've seen the first baby steps towards bringing up "Dali" as another upcoming AMD APU...

Linux/open-source fans don't at least have to hear "Imagination Technologies" or PowerVR as often as in the past, but today's Vulkan 1.1.122 specification update does publicly document Imagination's VK_IMG_format_pvrtc extension that remains "Imagination Technologies Proprietary" licensed...

The next-generation AMD "Renoir" APU is turning into being an interesting successor over the existing Picasso APUs. While at first it was a letdown finding out that the APU is based on Vega and not their newer Navi architecture, follow-on open-source Linux patches have continued to show that it's more than a facsimile and in some areas like display and multimedia has blocks in common with Navi...