Phoronix

Godot lead developer Juan Linietsky has been spending much of his time working on porting their open-source game engine to Vulkan for the Godot 4.0 release to follow Godot 3.2. Good progress is being made in getting this increasingly popular game engine rendering with Vulkan...

The 2019 X.Org Developers Conference for "all-things open-source graphics" is coming up at the start of October. But if you've been wanting to talk about something related to the Linux kernel, Mesa, Wayland, or related components, this week is your last chance to apply...

The second preview release of the long-awaited Xfce 4.14 is now available for testing ahead of its official debut later this summer...

Keith Packard has joined RISC-V company SiFive. Yes, the same Keith Packard that is the longest still active (though somewhat more dormant these days) X Window System developer who for many years had led much of the X11/X.Org efforts and worked for nearly a decade at Intel on their open-source Linux graphics driver stack before working for HP Labs and also a side-gig for Valve improving the Linux stack for VR...

A few weeks ago we received a POWER9 Raptor Blackbird for testing that features an IBM POWER9 4-core (16 thread) processor clocked at 3.80GHz. For those curious about the performance potential for low-end POWER9 parts compared to the more common high-core/thread count POWER processors we have benchmarked before like in the Talos II server, here are some initial tests of that petite POWER9 processor.

GNU Rush 2.0 is out today as the latest major update to this restricted user shell that allows administrators greater control over the command line support exposed to users as well as system resource control and running remote programs within a chroot...

Packit-as-a-Service has been announced as a GitHub integration app and leveraging the Packit project to provide for upstream CI testing to ensure different software projects continue to build and function fine on Fedora Linux...

With Debian 10.0 aiming to release next weekend, the near-final release images have been uploaded with enthusiasts encouraged to test out these builds for spotting any lingering bugs...

The KaOS Linux distribution remains one of the best options for those wanting to check out a polished and bleeding-edge KDE desktop experience. Out today is KaOS 2019.07 as the newest stable ISO succeeding their earlier 2019.04 build...

Prolific GNOME contributor Daniel Van Vugt of Canonical working to optimize the desktop stack for Ubuntu continues his great upstream-focused work on enhancing the performance of various key components. This past week he posted a new merge request that seeks to lower the input latency further for the Mutter compositor / window manager...

June was a very interesting month with the varying statements out of Canonical about the future of Ubuntu 32-bit support, AMD's Zen 2 processors and Navi product announcements (benchmarks next week!), Microsoft pushing out the new Windows Terminal and WSL2, Clear Linux continuing to further enhance their offering, and more Linux performance happenings in general...

The Mageia Linux distribution of Mandriva/Mandrake descent is kicking off July by shipping Mageia 7, two years after the debut of Mageia 6...

There have been Linux reports of problems pertaining to "8254 Clock Gating" going back a while but more so recently. This problem is some newer Intel Skylake~Apollolake derived systems particularly with Intel SoCs where certain systems ship with the 8254 PIT to be gated via a special register and up until now that has caused Linux to fail to boot...

One of the interesting Google Summer of Code projects on the BSD front this year is porting Wine to run on AMD64 (x86_64) under NetBSD...

Linus Torvalds is off in "the middle of nowhere" on one of his well known scuba diving adventures but that didn't stop him from being able to release Linux 5.2-rc7 today like clock-work thanks to tethering of a smartphone...

It's been just one week since the release of Vulkan 1.1.112 but it's now been succeeded by Vulkan 1.1.113 and two new extensions are in tow...

KDE developer Nate Graham has posted another one of his usability/productivity summaries of the KDE improvements over the past week. There's been another busy week of work on KDE Plasma 5.17, KDE Applications 19.08, and KDE Frameworks 5.60...

With the Linux 5.2 kernel due to be released in a few weeks and that marking the opening of the Linux 5.3 merge window, here is a look at some of the likely features coming to this next version of the Linux kernel...

Systemd now allows loading of custom BPF programs for network traffic filtering that are applied to all sockets created by processes of a given systemd unit...

Waypipe is a transparent Wayland proxy and the latest of several different projects aiming to make it easy running Wayland clients over a network similar to X11's capabilities...