Phoronix

Linus Torvalds just issued the Linux 5.3-rc5 kernel test release as we are now just a few weeks out from the official Linux 5.3 kernel debut...

Now that the new AMD Ryzen 3000 series are running great with the latest Linux distributions following prominent motherboard vendors issuing BIOS updates that correct the "RdRand" issue, we're moving on with looking at the performance of the rest of the Ryzen 3000 series line-up while having freshly re-tested the processors under Ubuntu 19.04. Up for exploration today is the AMD Ryzen 5 3600X, the six-core / 12-thread processor retailing for about $250 USD.

Intel previously tried auto-enabling GuC and HuC functionality within their Linux kernel graphics driver but ended up reverting the support since the driver didn't gracefully handle the scenarios of missing/corrupt firmware files. The driver should now be more robust in such situations so they will try again for turning on the automatic behavior, possibly for the upcoming Linux 5.4 cycle...

Following the feature freeze and code branching for Qt 5.14, the Qt "Dev" branch will likely be shifting immediately to Qt 6 development. A Qt 5.15 release is still expected to happen before Qt 6.0, but that 5.15 milestone will likely just be a polished release derived from Qt 5.14...

Going back a decade one of the interesting open-source FPS games of its time was Warsow. Development on Warsow has seemingly been tremulous over the past few years (edit: though the core developer has recently released a new beta) for this Qfusion (Quake 2 code base) engine powered game that started in 2005, but now there is Warfork as a fork of Warsow that is being developed and also available via Steam...

The KDE Usability and Productivity Initiative to solve various problems in the KDE software stack to make it easier to use to more individuals and to do so more efficient will be coming to an end. But other KDE goals are being envisioned and the usability and productivity elements will continue to be worked on outside of this initiative...

Knoppix 8.6 is out this weekend as the newest version for this one of the original Linux distributions supporting Live CD/DVD booting...

Vulkan 1.1.120 is out as the newest weekly update to the Vulkan graphics API...

Among many different Linux/open-source benchmarks being worked on for the AMD EPYC "Rome" processors now that our initial launch benchmarks are out of the way are Linux distribution comparisons, checking out the BSD compatibility, and more. Some tests I wrapped up this weekend were seeing how recent Linux kernel releases perform on the AMD EPYC 7742 64-core / 128-thread processors...

While most major hardware vendors have been adopting LVFS+Fwupd for firmware updating on Linux, Linux PC vendor System76 has notably been absent from the party for a variety of reasons. Today they announced their new Firmware Manager project that bridges the gap between their lack of LVFS support and their own hosted firmware service...

Git 2.23 was released on Friday with more than 500 changes on top of the previous release...

Re-based against yesterday's Wine 4.14 release, Wine-Staging 4.14 is now available with nearly 850 extra patches...

Back in May we wrote about Oracle's initial plans for introducing an eBPF back-end to GCC 10 to allow this GNU compiler to target this general purpose in-kernel virtual machine. Up to this point LLVM Clang has been the focused compiler for eBPF but those days are numbered with Oracle on Friday pushing out the newest GCC patches...

The next Linux kernel version will expose the real-time sources of what's keeping the system awake via Sysfs compared to existing source information that previously was only available via DebugFS...

It's a pity there doesn't seem to be any new adoption of Unigine as a game engine, but this visually impressive platform does continue seeing much success in the area of industrial simulations, professional VR platforms, and related areas. With Unigine 2.9 this Linux-friendly graphics engine is even more stunning...

Wine 4.14 was released earlier today as the newest bi-weekly point release for running Windows games and applications on Linux and other operating systems...

Linux 5.4 is set to remove the Intel IOP33X and IOP13XX series of processors that are part of the company's former XScale product line for ARM-based CPUs...

In addition to AMD releasing the Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 19.Q3 Linux driver, they also quietly released a new Radeon Software Linux driver release for consumer GPUs...

While it remains to be seen if Tiger Lake will be able to ship on time in 2020 as the Icelake successor, the "Gen 12" Xe Graphics continue to be worked on with the company's open-source Linux graphics driver...

QEMU 4.1 is now out as one of the important pieces to the open-source Linux virtualization stack...