Phoronix

After Dell Canvas Totem support wasn't merged for libinput 1.13, the code for this nifty input device was merged last week and will be part of the upcoming Libinput 1.14...

Building off the initial Turing mode-setting bits that were in place since Linux 5.0 and have continued stepping along to support newer variants on successive kernel releases, the Linux 5.3 kernel is slated to add support for the TU116 graphics processor...

With the newly released DragonFlyBSD 5.6 there are improvements to its original HAMMER2 file-system to the extent that it's now selected by its installer as the default file-system choice for new installations. Curious how the performance now compares between HAMMER and HAMMER2, here are some initial benchmarks on an NVMe solid-state drive using DragonFlyBSD 5.6.0...

While PCI Express 4.0 up to this point has only been found in a few systems like Talos' POWER9 platforms and coming soon with the new AMD graphics cards and chipsets, the PCI SIG today announced PCI Express 6.0...

Panfrost only made its initial debut as part of the recent Mesa 19.1 release for providing open-source Arm Mali Bifrost/Midgard graphics driver support on Linux independent of Arm and their official binary driver. While the resources are limited, so far Panfrost is making stellar progress...

KDE developer Tomaz Canabrava is working on a set of improvements around their Konsole terminal emulator when running on Wayland...

Ubuntu and their downstream flavors all stopped shipping x86 32-bit images and now for the 19.10 cycle they have decided to stop their i386 support entirely. Beginning with Ubuntu 19.10, the archive/packages will not be built for x86 32-bit...

VKHR is an open-source, real-time hybrid hair renderer written in Vulkan and developed under the support of AMD/RTG...

While the AMDGPU kernel driver has shipped with the long-awaited FreeSync support since the Linux 5.0 release earlier this year and was quickly wired up for the RadeonSI Gallium3D OpenGL driver in Mesa 19.0 while the recent Mesa 19.1 update brought FreeSync for the RADV Vulkan driver, AMDVLK as AMD's official open-source Vulkan driver isn't yet supporting this variable rate refresh technology...

As Netflix's first security bulletin for 2019, they warned of TCP-based remote denial of service vulnerabilities affecting both Linux and FreeBSD. These vulnerabilities are rated "critical" but already being corrected within the latest Git code...

In addition to Clang-Scan-Deps being merged a few days ago, another new feature for LLVM's Clang is called the Clang Interface Stubs and brings a concept from Windows/macOS over to Linux/ELF systems...

Quietly released last week was Radeon Software for Linux 19.20, the latest quarterly update to AMD's packaged Linux driver that consists of their AMDGPU-PRO binary driver option as well as the AMDGPU-Open packaged components using a snapshot of Mesa...

DragonFlyBSD 5.6 is now available as the latest major update to this popular BSD operating system...

As we've been expecting, AMD's open-source developers today posted their set of patches enabling Navi (10) support within their AMDGPU DRM kernel driver. Bringing up the Navi support in kernel-space are 459 patches amounting to more than four-hundred thousand lines of code, not counting the work done to LLVM as part of their shader compiler back-end or the yet-to-be-published OpenGL/Vulkan driver patches...

For those eager to see CentOS 8.0 as the community open-source rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0, progress is being made but it looks like the release is still some weeks out...

Debian's Apt packaging system was tagged today as 1.9.0 experimental and is already in the process of being added to Ubuntu 19.10. Apt 1.9 is working towards the eventual Apt 2.0 release...

NVIDIA announced this morning for ISC 2019 that they are bringing CUDA to Arm beyond their work already for supporting GPU computing with lower-power Tegra SoCs...

With Debian 10 "Buster" due to be releasing in early July, I've begun testing the near-final Buster images on various systems. Here is a look at a common Intel Core i7 system comparing the current performance of Debian 10.0 to the current stable 9.9 release...

The FSGSBASE instruction set has been present on Intel processors going back to Ivy Bridge processors and while there have been Linux kernel patches for this feature going on for years, it looks like with the Linux 5.3 kernel cycle is this support for merging. Making us eager for this support is the prospect of better performance, especially for context switching workloads that already have been suffering as a result of recent CPU mitigations...

Debian's RISC-V support has been coming together but how's the state of affairs for the imminent Debian 10.0 "Buster" release?..