Phoronix

It's been over one year since the introduction of the Mozilla Thunderbird 60.0 series while today Thunderbird 68.0 was made as the next official update...

After learning of the UP-Squared SBC maker board this summer when this Intel Apollolake single board computer was added to Coreboot, the company sent over a review sample and for the past number of weeks have been putting this mini board through its paces and performance tests.

Intel open-source developer Kenneth Graunke who is the lead developer on their "Iris" Gallium3D driver has landed a new performance optimization in Mesa to help their Gen11/Icelake graphics performance...

The FFmpeg library up to this point has supported AMD's Advanced Media Framework (AMF) library just on Windows for H.264/HEVC encoding on GPUs. The Windows code-path makes use of DirectX while now AMD AMF support for Linux via Vulkan is now exposed by the latest FFmpeg code...

After mentoring a Dell student intern over the summer, Red Hat's Richard Hughes has announced their work today on the GNOME Firmware Updater...

Facebook's HHVM implementation that started off as a high performance PHP5 implementation but is now just focused on powering their own Hack programming language is beginning to see some of its code rewritten in Rust...

SwiftShader. Google's CPU-based implementation that originally was focused on OpenGL ES and Direct3D 9, now has Vulkan 1.1 support in tow...

The GNOME Foundation has kicked off their Coding Education Challenge for promoting programming around free/open-source software and with Endless Computers providing the $500,000 USD for prize money...

Total War: Three Kingdoms is the newest Linux game port from Feral Interactive and saw a same-day release back in May. While back then it was said there weren't benchmarking capabilities for this game, there now is a test profile. For those wondering how Three Kingdoms performs on Linux, here is a twenty way graphics card comparison using the newest AMD Radeon and NVIDIA drivers.

The beta release of Unity 2019.3 is out today for this wildly popular cross-platform game engine...

Earlier this summer we checked out the Logic Supply Karbon 300 as a well-built and very durable Linux-friendly PC for low-power environments. That Karbon 300 came equipped with a low-power Apollo Lake Atom processor while today the company announced the Karbon 700 with higher-wattage Core and Xeon CPU options for high performance IoT / edge computing...

As a possible sign that AMD Navi 14 graphics cards could be coming sooner rather than later, support for Navi 14 is slated to be back-ported to the Mesa 19.2 release due out in a few weeks rather that entered its feature freeze earlier this month rather than waiting for next quarter's Mesa 19.3...

Valve's Wine-based Proton for powering Steam Play to run Windows games on Linux is seeing more exciting work in their 4.11 branch...

For those wondering how Google manages the Linux kernel sources they use for shipping on the dozens of different Chromebooks and maintaining the support for the respective cycles, Douglas Anderson of Google presented at last week's Embedded Linux Conference in San Diego on the matter...

A number of months have passed since having anything new to report on the progress of the LLVMpipe software driver, but David Airlie now has landed a number of improvements to this LLVM-leveraging "soft" OpenGL driver for Mesa 19.3...

Drew DeVault released Sway 1.2 overnight as the newest feature update for this popular Wayland compositor inspired by the i3 window manager...

Just prior to yesterday's Linux 5.3-rc6 kernel release, a change was pulled into the code-base that disables the advertising of RdRand support on older AMD CPUs/APUs...

Stemming from recent discussions over Intel's Linux enablement for Intel's Lightning Mountain SoC that characterized it as a "AIRMONT_NP" for a "network processor" even though it's not limited to networking use-cases, and with Intel's proliferation of different CPU cores in general, the Linux kernel is seeing some cleaning up of their different Intel CPU names...

With Debian 10 "Buster" out the door and Python 2 hitting end-of-life at the end of the year, Debian is working on their process of removing Python 2 packages that don't get ported to Python 3 and Ubuntu is working on similar action for their Python 2 packages not found in upstream Debian...

Joshua Ashton has released D9VK 0.20 "Frog Cookie" as the newest version of this project mapping Direct3D 9 over Vulkan to help improve the Windows gaming on Linux experience...