Phoronix

Linus Torvalds is back on his Sunday release regiment with having just declared the Linux 5.4-rc2 test release and also took the opportunity to have some fun by shifting the kernel's codename to be the Nesting Opossum, replacing the Bobtail Squid...

With the bit of a surprise this past week of AMD flipping LRU bulk moves back on as a "fix" for Linux 5.4 and this now having landed in Linux 5.4 Git, here are some preliminary benchmarks of this feature being enabled on the newest 5.4 kernel builds since Friday.

While we are eager to see Godot 4.0 with its new Vulkan renderer and other improvements, Godot 3.2 is coming out first and this weekend marks the alpha release for this latest update to this leading open-source, cross-platform game engine...

WFX is a new WiFi driver being added to the staging area with the Linux 5.5 cycle coming up in a few months...

While the GNAT Ada front-end for GCC is in quite good shape, AdaCore has been experimenting with bringing their GNAT front-end to LLVM for allowing Ada code compilation with the LLVM compiler stack...

In addition to the Tigerlake support being plumbed within the Linux kernel and other areas of the open-source Linux software stack, this week they pushed out their initial Gen12 Tiger Lake support into the NEO compute run-time that is for providing OpenCL support as well as the ongoing SYCL enablement and other work around their forthcoming oneAPI model...

The Qt Company this week released the public beta of the forthcoming Qt 3D Studio for this development tool focused on creating rich 3D user interfaces with the Qt tool-kit...

This week Intel released MKL-DNN 1.1 as their open-source deep learning library. They also rebranded the software project as the "Deep Neural Network Library" (DNNL) though its focus remains the same. I ran some initial benchmarks on MKL-DNN/DNNL 1.1 on AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon hardware for reference...

KDE developers spent the first week of October working on improvements to their Dolphin file manager, seemingly never-ending work on HiDPI support, and a variety of other enhancements for this leading open-source desktop...

This week the GTK 4.0 development code picked up support for making use of the VK_KHR_incremental_present extension with its Vulkan renderer in order to allow much more efficient behavior...

With the ACO shader compiler back-end merged for Mesa 19.3 as of mid-September and more improvements merged since then, it's now very easy to try out this alternative to AMD's longstanding AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end. ACO, which is developed by Valve and their contractors outside of AMD, is looking quite good not only for quicker shader compilation (more punctual game load times) but also helping the performance of some Vulkan-powered games. Here are our latest ACO benchmarks.

With the surprise code drop of Google developing a new open-source AV1 video decoder as "libgav1", I set out this Saturday to run benchmarks on various systems for seeing how the performance is looking for this CPU-based decoder in relation to the more well known DAV1D decoder...

Coming out of informal discussions from this week's X.Org Developers Conference in Montreal, a "liboutput" library has been proposed as a theoretical new library for helping to bring up Wayland compositors, X11 window managers, and anything else wanting to interface with DRM/KMS kernel interfaces...

We were alerted this morning to a CPU bug resulting in crashes for Intel Geminilake processors. At least Chrome and Firefox are affected but sounds like other software may be affected too, just that Google has enough engineering resources for investigating the issue...

Just one week after the release of Radeon Open Compute 2.8, AMD has now released ROCm 2.9 as the newest feature release for this open-source GPU Linux compute stack for Radeon hardware...

Just one week after the release of Radeon Open Compute 2.8, AMD has now released ROCm 2.9 as the newest feature release for this open-source GPU Linux compute stack for Radeon hardware...

With less than two weeks to go until the Ubuntu 19.10 release, on Friday the experimental ZFS root file-system install support was merged into the Ubuntu desktop "Ubiquity" installer...

With less than two weeks to go until the Ubuntu 19.10 release, on Friday the experimental ZFS root file-system install support was merged into the Ubuntu desktop "Ubiquity" installer...

Intel's open-source crew on Friday released version 19.39.14278 of their compute/OpenCL runtime...

Intel's open-source crew on Friday released version 19.39.14278 of their compute/OpenCL runtime...