Open-source News

Linux 5.5-rc2 Kernel Released

Phoronix - Mon, 12/16/2019 - 07:44
On schedule with one week since the closure of the Linux 5.5 kernel merge window and subsequent release candidate, Linux 5.5-rc2 is out this evening for testing...

FreeDOS 1.3 RC2 Released With "Live CD" Support

Phoronix - Mon, 12/16/2019 - 04:05
On Christmas it will mark three years since the release of FreeDOS 1.2 while it appears FreeDOS 1.3 is right around the corner and could potentially be released around that same time. FreeDOS continues going strong as a complete DOS-compatible open-source environment and with this next release can even function as a DOS Live CD...

Benchmarking 11 Linux Distributions Across Dozens Of Workloads On The Intel Core i9 10980XE

Phoronix - Mon, 12/16/2019 - 01:01
If opting for a high-end desktop/workstation like the Intel Core i9 10980XE and even for smaller systems, your choice of Linux distribution can be a big factor in the performance potential out of the system. In benchmarking eleven modern Linux distributions across dozens of benchmarks, the performance difference can be more than 30% for the out-of-the-box Linux performance. Benchmarked this round on the i9-10980XE were multiple versions of CentOS, Clear Linux, Debian, Fedora Workstation, Manjaro, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Solus, and Ubuntu.

Firefox 71 + WebRender vs. Chrome 79 Browser Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux

Phoronix - Mon, 12/16/2019 - 00:00
On Friday I published two years worth of Mozilla Firefox benchmarks in re-testing every browser release from Firefox 57 through Firefox 71 stable as well as the latest beta/alpha releases. One of the questions that came out of that was seeing the current Chrome performance on Linux against Firefox, so here are some fresh numbers there...

Raspberry Pi 4 BCM43455 NVRAM Addition Hits Linux-Firmware Git

Phoronix - Sun, 12/15/2019 - 23:00
The Raspberry Pi 4 continues seeing better mainline kernel/software support as we approach 2020...

Rav1e Achieves Another ~20% Speed-Up For Rust-Based AV1 Video Encoding

Phoronix - Sun, 12/15/2019 - 20:27
Rav1e's weekly-ish pre-releases for this Rust-written AV1 encoder have been focusing a lot on better performance via hand-written x86 Assembly, making use of SIMD extensions, and other fine tuning of their encoder. With this newest pre-release, another ~20% speed-up was obtained...

Intel Revises The Shared Virtual Memory Support For Their Linux Graphics Driver

Phoronix - Sun, 12/15/2019 - 17:00
In their journey towards the Intel Xe GPUs expected to launch initially next year in the form of Ponte Vecchio, just about one month ago Intel posted patches implementing Shared Virtual Memory support for their Linux graphics driver. Those SVM patches have now been revised for further review in potentially making it for Linux 5.6 should everything look good...

Customize your Linux desktop with the Trinity Desktop Environment

opensource.com - Sun, 12/15/2019 - 16:02

When KDE 4 was released in 2008, KDE 3 went into support mode until support was dropped entirely. That's the usual lifecycle of software, desktops included, but the KDE 3 fanbase wasn't universally pleased with KDE 4, and some of them decided a fork was in order.


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Organizing open source for cities

opensource.com - Sun, 12/15/2019 - 16:00

Cities and municipalities around the world are facing serious problems that are affecting citizens' safety and access to government services. Take Baltimore, for example, the home of Mosslabs.io and its founder/organizer Jacob Green, which experienced a ransomware attack that shut down the city's digital services for most of the summer, preventing people from buying real estate and doing other everyday business with the local government.


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AMD's GPU Performance API Library 3.5 Drops ROCm/HSA Support

Phoronix - Sun, 12/15/2019 - 15:13
Released on Friday was a new version of AMD's GPU Performance API "GPUPerfAPI" project under the GPUOpen umbrella. This is the AMD library used by CodeXL, Radeon Compute Profiler, and others for tapping GPU performance counters and to help in analyzing performance/execution characteristics for Radeon hardware. But this new GPUPerfAPI 3.5 release comes with a rather surprising change...

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