In the past few months a number of M.2 NVMe SSD to USB adapters have been appearing on the market. Curious about the performance potential on Linux of an NVMe SSD drive attached to a USB 3.1 connection, I recently picked up a QNINE NVMe solid-state drive enclosure for benchmarking.
Feral Interactive just announced they will be releasing their DiRT 4 racing game port this week for macOS and Linux.
Jolla has announced the release today of Sailfish OS "Oulanka" as their version 3.0.2 update.
It's just one week past the end of the Linux 5.1 merge window and the Intel open-source developers have already sent out their first pull request to DRM-Next of new graphics driver material they are planning for the Linux 5.2 release this summer.
GNU Compiler Collection 9 (GCC 9) will be formally released in the coming weeks as version 9.1. With GCC 9 are many big improvements as the annual update to this longest serving free software code compiler.
While Intel's Iris Gallium3D driver is not enabled by default and considered still experimental in its support of Broadwell graphics and newer, in all of our tests thus far it's been working out very well and haven't encountered any hangs so far in our tested OpenGL workloads. But with no OpenGL driver being immune from potential GPU hangs, a patch series is pending to improve the GPU recovery heuristics.
Valve Software has been backing work on Fossilize as an open-source project providing a serialization format for persistent Vulkan object types.
Since the short-lived Ubuntu 17.10 GNOME + Wayland experience, the Ubuntu desktop has still been using the trusted X.Org Server session by default. While Ubuntu 19.04 will soon be shipping and the Ubuntu 19.10 development cycle then getting underway, don't look for any Wayland-by-default change to be around the corner.
It's been just over one year since the previous release of Redox OS while today this Rust-written operating system has finally been succeeded by Redox OS 0.5.
Last month brought the release of PyPy 7.0 as the JIT-ed performance-optimized Python implementation. PyPy 7.0 brought alpha Python 3.6 support, an updated CFFI module, and other enhancements. Out now is PyPy 7.1 as its successor.
Linus Torvalds has announced the second weekly release candidate for Linux 5.1.
A few days ago I posted some Chrome vs. Firefox benchmarks using the latest Linux builds. Some readers suggested Firefox could be more competitive if forcing WebRender usage and/or moving to the latest nightly builds, so here are some complementary data sets looking at such combinations.
For fans of GNU's Nano text editor, version 4.0 was released this Sunday where overlong lines are no longer automatically hard-wrapped, smooth scrolling has been enabled by default, and other improvements made.
During this week's Game Developers Conference was the usual Khronos Dev Day where Vulkan, WebGL, glTF, and OpenXR took center stage. During the Vulkan State of the Union some details on their future endeavors were covered.
It's Sunday and that means KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his (great) weekly recap of the interesting improvements made over the past week in KDE land.
There still is no sign of Xfce 4.14, but this week marked the release of a big update to Xfce's screensaver component.
With existing Windows APIs being a nuisance, under NDA'ed documentation, and other problems, WireGuard developers have taken to developing a "good" TUN driver for Windows. This lets user-space programs serve as virtual network adapters to read/write directly into the network stack.
The OpenChrome driver is still inching towards the mainline kernel more than one decade after VIA x86 graphics were last somewhat common. The newest achievement for the OpenChrome DRM driver is the merging of the new TTM memory allocator code.
The MOTU 8Pre is a Firewire-connected device for digital audio workstations to be able to connect eight microphone inputs. The hardware itself is more than one decade old and in fact the manufacturer already discontinued the product, but with Linux 5.2 the kernel will be supporting this device.
Released for GDC/GTC week was Nsight Graphics 2019.2, the proprietary cross-platform, closed-source utility tool for debugging, profiling, and analyzing Direct3D, OpenGL, and other GPU-accelerated APIs.
For those with a PRIME style notebook or just making use of dual/multiple graphics processors in your system, Primus-VK allows for using a secondary/dedicated GPU for rendering while driving the display from the alternative (often integrated graphics) GPU. Primus-VK is implemented as a Vulkan layer as a clean approach for dealing with multiple GPUs in a Vulkan world.
A few weeks back I wrote about Xilinx looking at contributing their Alveo FPGA accelerator drivers to the mainline Linux kernel. They are continuing to work on that goal and pushed out their latest kernel driver patches this week for these Alveo PCIe accelerator cards.
While the Linux 5.0 kernel brought initial support for the long-awaited open-source FreeSync implementation, the Linux 5.2 kernel coming out this summer will likely have additional improvements.
Python 2 support will formally reach end-of-life on 1 January 2020 and Fedora 31 is preparing for that by working to drop packages (or parts of packages) that depend upon Python 2.
OpenArena, one of the most well known open-source games built atop the ioquake3 engine of what started out as id Tech 3, has now seen an independent port to the Vulkan graphics API.
Released at the start of February was the big Lutris 0.5 release with an enhanced GTK interface, GOG.com support, and much more for this open-source gaming platform. Lutris 0.5.1 is now available with some much needed fixes.
Google engineers are ending out their work week by issuing the beta of Chrome 74.
The Fedora 30 Beta was anticipated for release next Tuesday after having been under a beta freeze since 5 March, but that's not going to happen and now they are hoping to ship in early April.
Given the recent releases of Chrome 73 and Firefox 66, here are some fresh tests of these latest browsers on Linux under a variety of popular browser benchmarks.
With many AMD driver developers being over in San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference, this week AMDVLK saw rather small changes for this open-source AMD Vulkan Linux driver.
WireGuard lead developer Jason Donenfeld has sent out the ninth version of the WireGuard secure network tunnel patches for review. If this review goes well and lands in net-next in the weeks ahead, this long-awaited VPN improvement could make it into the mainline Linux 5.2 kernel.
Maxim Levitsky of Red Hat sent out a "request for comments" patch series this week introducing NVMe VFIO media storage device support for the Linux kernel.
GNU Parallel is a tool for carrying out multiple commands/jobs in parallel on one or more computers. Out today is the GNU Parallel 20190322 release with a few changes over last month's update.
The latest open-source game engine project working to re-implement a legendary commercial game is DevilutionX. This new effort is an open-source re-implementation of Blizzard's Diablo game from 1996 while now working on Linux and other operating systems nicely.
Peter Hutterer of Red Hat announced the release of libinput 1.13 Release Candidate 2 on Thursday as the newest test release for this input handling library used by both X.Org and Wayland Linux systems.
While the release of GCC 9 (v9.1) is just a few weeks away, a late addition to this annual compiler collection update is its C++ standard library now having a C++17 parallel algorithms implementation thanks to Intel developers.
The Free Software Foundation has announced the latest batch of hardware it has certified for "Respecting Your Freedom" as part of its RYF program.
Software releases are aplenty for GDC week and NVIDIA's latest release is their newest post-4.0 PhysX SDK.
CodeWeavers, the main sponsor/contributor to the Wine project, announced the release today of their commercial CrossOver 18.5 software for more easily running Windows games and applications on Linux and macOS.
If you live in the EU and have been wanting to explore IBM POWER hardware on Linux, a load of Tyan Habanero servers recently became available through a German retailer for 269 EUR (~$306 USD) that comes equipped with a 10-core POWER8 processor. While not POWER9, it's still an interesting Linux-capable beast and the price is unbeatable if you have been wanting to add POWER hardware to your collection. Phoronix reader Lauri Kasanen recently bought one of these IBM POWER servers at the 269 EUR price point and has shared thoughts on this server as well as some benchmarks. Here is Lauri's guest post checking out this low-cost 2U IBM server.
Merged this morning into the systemd code-base was a big feature addition that's been in the works for the better part of one year by Lennart Poettering and other developers.
While Intel was building up anticipation for their Xe Graphics dedicated hardware last night in San Francisco with their inaugural "Odyssey" event, quietly hitting the Intel servers is an architecture overview for their Icelake "Gen 11" graphics.
OpenShot 2.4.4 is the latest update to this long advancing open-source non-linear video editing solution that competes with the likes of Kdenlive and Shotcut.
Wayland release manager Derek Foreman has officially announced the release of Wayland 1.17, the first official update since last August.
Intel's Iris Gallium3D driver may now see slightly better performance in some scenarios thanks to fast color clears support having landed.