LinuxBoot is approaching two years of age as the effort led by Facebook and others for replacing some elements of the system firmware with the Linux kernel.

For about three years now GNOME's SVG rendering library has been transitioning to Rust. This library, librsvg, now makes further use of Rust around its CSS parsing code and Mozilla's Servo is doing some of that heavy lifting.

In making it more easy to update Coreboot system firmware, the ability to update Coreboot via the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) with Fwupd is finally being worked out.

The Adreno 640 GPU that is used by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855/855+ SoCs is now working with the open-source Freedreno Gallium3D OpenGL and "TURNIP" Vulkan drivers with the newest Mesa 20.0 development code.

A change to look forward to with Mesa 20.0 due out next quarter is Vulkan timeline semaphore support (VK_KHR_timeline_semaphore) for Intel's "ANV" open-source driver.

Taking place at the end of October during the Linux Foundation events in Lyon, France was the GStreamer Conference to align with the annual developer festivities.

Sunday marked the release of KDE Frameworks 5.64 as the latest monthly update to this collection of libraries complementing Qt5.

Chrome has successfully shamed web-sites not supporting HTTPS and now they are looking to call-out websites that do not typically load fast.

SUSE and other companies like DigitalOcean have been working on Linux core scheduling to make virtualization safer particularly in light of security vulnerabilities like L1TF and MDS. The core scheduling work is about ensuring different VMs don't share a HT sibling but rather only the same VM / trusted applications run on siblings of a core.

From System76 setting up their own manufacturing facility for Linux desktops to Dell offering more Linux laptop options, the demand for pre-loaded Linux PCs continues to increase. One of the smaller Linux PC vendors also now expanding is German-based TUXEDO Computers.

Shortwave is a new Internet radio player built for GNOME with GTK3 and has been in development the past year.

The goal for Ubuntu 20.04 is to ship with Python 2 removed since Py2 will be end-of-life after the start of the year and this next Ubuntu Linux release is a Long-Term Support release, but there still are many Python 2 depending packages left currently in Debian unstable and Ubuntu's "Focal Fossa" archive.

Arch Linux has updated the behavior when installing the linux, linux-lts, linux-zen, and linux-hardened kernel options on this popular distribution.

Linux 5.4-rc7 was just released as the newest test candidate of the maturing Linux 5.4 kernel. At this stage it's looking like an eighth weekly RC will be warranted next weekend before officially releasing Linux 5.4.0 on 24 November.

Longtime Linux game developer Timothee Besset has outlined the support introduced by Valve this week in their latest Steam Linux client beta for supporting Linux namespaces / containers. This experimental functionality may in the end provide better support for 32-bit compatibility as more Linux distributions focus solely on x86_64 packages, reducing some of the fragmentation/library conflicts between some Linux distributions and Steam, and other headaches currently plaguing the Steam Linux space.

While Linux 5.4 is rolling out in about two weeks, the out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system has just been updated for Linux 5.3 support.

Over the past year and a half the VKMS Linux DRM driver has come together as the "virtual kernel mode-setting" implementation for headless systems and other environments not backed by a physical display. Interestingly being tacked on their TODO list now is VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) support. Separately, the prominent VKMS developer is now employed by AMD.

Pardon for the rather slow pace of new Phoronix content over the past week (in particular, the lack of big benchmark articles) due to my wife giving birth early and being in the hospital for a few days, but the remainder of November is set to be quite exciting on the Linux/open-source performance front. Here is some of what else is on tap for November.

Taking place 4 and 5 November in San Francisco was the OpenZFS Developer Summit. This two-day open-source ZFS developer summit made possible by Intel, Delphix, Datto, and OSNexus had a lot of interesting presentations from the state of ZFS TRIM/Discard to debugging topics.

The Thunderbolt changes have been merged to char-misc ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.5 merge window.

The first alpha release of the forthcoming OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 is now available for testing with this Clang-built Linux distribution that originates back to the days of Mandrake.

It's been another busy week in KDE land with developers working through the massive code-bases comprising the KDE desktop environment on a variety of features and fixes.

Besides X-Plane being one of the most realistic PC-based flight simulators, this flight simulator from Laminar Research has long supported Linux. Out this weekend is X-Plane 11.40 as the latest update and the last major release before they roll-out their long-awaited Vulkan graphics API support.

With Ubuntu 19.10 bringing some CPU/system performance changes compared to earlier Ubuntu releases as a result of compiler/toolchain upgrades, the newer kernel, and more, here is a quick weekend look at how the Ubuntu 19.10 performance compares across ten different AMD Ryzen and Intel Core systems.

As an alternative to PulseAudio's existing RTP implementation, a new GStreamer-based Real-Time Transport Protocol has been introduced.

Taking place this past week in San Francisco was the annual OpenZFS Developer Summit. As usual, Matthew Ahrens as the co-founder of Sun ZFS and current OpenZFS contributor at Delphix talked about the state of the open-source ZFS efforts in his keynote.

Among other EXT4 file-system changes en route for the upcoming Linux 5.5 kernel is a new direct I/O read implementation.

Coming out Friday night was a series to address a "critical" scheduler issue with the Linux kernel.

While the Linux 5.4 cycle is quickly winding down and with DRM-Next's cut-off crossing, AMD has sent in a last minute batch of changes it's targeting for the upcoming Linux 5.5 merge window.

Intel's HMEM DAX driver is being added to Linux 5.5 for use-cases like their Optane DC Persistent Memory.

Rav1e has been in development for more than one year now as the "safest and fastest AV1 encoder" thanks to being written in Rust while now their first official release is available.

Radeon Software for Linux 19.30 has been the driver release branch since July for the AMD Linux packaged driver stack. That 19.30 driver was introduced with the AMD Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" support while now a slightly updated stack was released.

Valve earlier today pushed out Proton 4.11-8 as the newest update to their Wine-based software powering Steam Play for handling Windows games on Linux.

Not nearly as exciting as the recent NVIDIA 440 Linux driver series going stable but for those with older Fermi graphics cards and wanting to use the latest NVIDIA binary driver experience, their 390 series legacy driver series has been updated.

AMDVLK 2019.Q4.2 is out today as AMD's second open-source Radeon Vulkan Linux driver update for the fourth quarter.

Project Trident made some waves last month when this lesser-known BSD distribution derived from TrueOS/FreeBSD decided to switch to becoming a Linux distribution that they decided would be based upon Void Linux. Now the very preliminary alpha images of Project Trident as a Linux operating system are available for testing.

The initial release candidate for the upcoming QEMU 4.2 is now available as a sizable update to this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

Last year it was decided that FreeBSD's ZFS code would be re-based on OpenZFS (ZFS On Linux) code for ultimately better support and functionality as well as largely unifying the open-source ZFS ecosystem. While still transitioning towards the OpenZFS code-base, for FreeBSD it's still looking to be a positive move and one that will pay off for all parties involved.