Phoronix

RDPRU is one of the new instruction set extensions of AMD "Zen 2" CPUs that is for reading a processor register that is typically limited to privilege level zero. RDPRU allows for reading select registers at any privilege level. With Linux 5.5, the RDPRU presence will be advertised by the CPU features...

With running some fresh cross-OS benchmarks now that Ubuntu 19.10 is imminent followed by Ubuntu 19.10, a new Windows 10 update coming in the days ahead, and also the release of macOS 10.15, a lot of fun benchmarks are ahead. In today's article is a quick look at the Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 19.10 vs. Clear Linux web browser performance for both Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.

Just one day after announcing the Radeon RX 5500 series as the first Navi 14 GPUs, AMD has submitted the firmware binaries to the linux-firmware.git tree that are required for usage with the open-source Linux graphics driver...

KDE developer Roman Gilg attended the X.Org Developer's Conference last week in Montreal. At XDC2019 he provided the X11/Wayland developers with an overview of KWin's architecture as both an X11 window manager and Wayland compositor along with talking of some of the future plans...

GNOME 3.34.1 is out as the first point release to last month's big GNOME 3.34 desktop debut...

Just last week marked the one year anniversary since shipping the Haiku R1 beta release for this BeOS-inspired open-source operating system. The developers remain though as busy as ever with advancing this interesting open-source project...

Firefox 71 is bringing another important Wayland improvement!..

While Fedora recently began spinning workstation/live images for POWER (PPC64LE) at least as a work-in-progress, it won't be made a formal feature of the upcoming Fedora 31...

NVIDIA is the latest high profile company now contributing significant funds for advancing the open-source Blender 3D modeling software...

After an incredible 25 year journey at Intel and having founded the Open-Source Technology Center, Imad Sousou announced today he is stepping away from Intel...

While just one week past the Linux 5.4 merge window cut-off and now with XDC 2019 out of the day, Intel's open-source graphics driver team sent in their first batch of new material they will be targeting for the Linux 5.5 cycle...

One of the areas of performance I had been meaning to look more at following the recent AMD EPYC 7002 series launch was for database servers. With the original EPYC 7000 series performance, the performance came up short in competing with Intel Xeon CPUs, but for the EPYC Rome processors it ends up being a very different story. Given the launch last week of PostgreSQL 12, I've been trying out this new database server release on both EPYC and Xeon processors.

In addition to The Cascadelake X-Series CPUs laqunching at a much lower price, Intel announced the Xeon W-2200 series today also at lower pricing while cutting prices on their existing Core 9000 F-series desktop CPUs too...

AMD today lifted the lid on the Radeon RX 5500 series as their first Nav 14 based graphics card. This is the soft launch with no units shipping yet but expected to starting in November...

For those wondering, NVIDIA is still pursuing a generic allocator / Unix device memory allocator that has been talked about for years and a potential successor to the likes of the Generic Buffer Manager (GBM). They now have an implementation of their proposed allocator working for the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver though there still is a lot of work ahead...

With RMS resigning as head of the FSF but ultimately is remaining as head of the GNU, the Free Software Foundation is now publicly re-evaluating its relationship with the GNU...

The GNU Debugger (GDB) now has support for the Compact C Type Format following support for this debugging information format having been added to the GCC compiler and Binutils...

While popularity in Solaris-based operating systems may be on the decline, for Meson to ultimately replace other build systems it will need good support for said operating systems where Automake, CMake, and others are well supported. As such, with this weekend's Meson 0.52 release comes with better support for Solaris and the OpenSolaris-derived Illumos platforms...

While Red Hat is pursuing Pipewire with plans to fill the use-cases provided by the JACK(2) low-latency audio server, JACK2 isn't letting up and Sunday marked version 1.9.13 for the project and their first release since December 2017...

Vulkan 1.1.124 is out this Sunday evening with two new extensions...