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.
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.
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.
The Raspberry Pi 4 continues seeing better mainline kernel/software support as we approach 2020.
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.
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.
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.
KDE developers are working on "something big" but this week in pre-holiday mode still managed to land a lot of improvements to the wide spectrum of KDE software.
D9VK 0.40 is out today as the latest feature update to this Direct3D 9 over Vulkan translation layer based on DXVK.
While the Mesa 20.0 cycle is quite young and still over one month to go until the feature freeze for this next quarterly installment of these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan Linux drivers, it's quite exciting already with the changes building up. In particular, on the Intel side they are still positioning for the Intel Gallium3D driver to become the new default on hardware of generations Broadwell and newer. Here is a quick look at how the Intel Gallium3D performance is looking compared to their legacy "i965" classic OpenGL driver that is the current default.
When it comes to PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs, the drives we have been using are the Corsair Force MP600 that have been working out great for pairing with the newest AMD Ryzen systems. But a Black Friday deal had the Sabrent 1TB Rocket NVMe 4.0 Gen4 PCIe M.2 SSD on sale, so I decided to pick one up to see how it was performing on Ubuntu Linux. Here are benchmarks of the Sabrent Gen4 NVMe SSD, which in the 1TB capacity can be found for $150~170 USD.
Way back in 2005 the GNOME "10x10 Goal" was formed to "own 10% of the global desktop market by 2010." Now approaching ten years past that failed goal, GNOME or even the broader Linux desktop marketshare is still well off from seeing a 10% market-share.
KDE Frameworks 5.65 is out this Saturday as the last monthly update to this collection of Qt5 add-on libraries for 2019.
It was back in April 2017 that Canonical decided they would abandon Unity 8 and switch back to GNOME. While Mir played a big role together with Unity 8, they continued working on Mir with staffing changes and a shifted focus of adding Wayland support and tailoring it for primarily IoT use-cases and tightly integrated with their Snap packaging concept. Two years later, Mir is still alive and earlier this month marked the release of Mir 1.6. Here's a look back at the Mir highlights for 2019.
With yesterday's release of Wine 5.0-RC1 as the last feature release prior to the code freeze for this forthcoming annual Wine stable release, a number of the patches merged came via way of Wine-Staging.
Following yesterday's release of QEMU 4.2, the next version of this open-source processor emulator for hardware virtualization entering development is QEMU 5.0.
Back in August was the release of the very big CUPS 2.3 update that shifted the source code license, added support for IPP Printer presets, added a new utility, and other improvements for this Apple-controlled Unix/Linux printing system. Available now is CUPS 2.3.1 with various fixes.
Friday marked not only the release of QEMU 4.2 for Linux virtualization but Intel's open-source crew developing the Cloud-Hypervisor as the Rustlang-based VMM built around Linux's KVM and VirtIO interfaces is out with a big feature release.
As was expected, today marks the first release candidate of Wine 5.0 that ushers in the code freeze ahead of this annual stable update for running Windows programs and games on Linux and other platforms.
Fedora will continue producing ISO images of their distribution that can be installed to a DVD (or CD in the case of some lightweight spins) or more commonly these days copied to USB flash drives, but they are debating whether any CD/DVD optical media issues should still be considered blocker bugs in 2020 and beyond.
Valve has released Proton 4.11-10 and with this update to their blend of Wine that powers Steam Play is support for Halo: The Master Chief Collection among other Windows game improvements.
For a few years GNOME has supported a "launch on discrete GPU" option for applications within the Shell's menu while for GNOME 3.36 that support is being cleaned up and extended to also handle NVIDIA GPU configurations.
With 2019 quickly drawing to an end, I figured it would be interesting to see how the performance of Mozilla Firefox has been trending over the longer term. So for this article today is a look at the Firefox 57 through Firefox 71 stable performance plus tests of Firefox 72 beta and Firefox 73 alpha all from the same system and using a variety of browser benchmarks.
Last year one of Feral's top Linux developers left the company and now another top developer has sadly left the game porting firm.
Introduced last month was the Flatpak 1.5.1 development build that provided initial support for protected/authenticated downloads of Flatpaks as the fundamental infrastructure work towards allowing paid or donation-based applications within Flathub or other Flatpak-based "app stores" on Linux.
As anticipated, AMD has now formally released a new version of their AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver following this week's Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Windows driver release.
QEMU 4.2 is out this morning as a key piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.
While LibreOffice 6.4 isn't even coming out until the end of January, we are already stoked about the follow-on release to this open-source office suite... Currently the development builds are towards LibreOffice 6.5 (though given the big impact we wouldn't be surprised if it morphed into LibreOffice 7.0) and one of the features that landed at the end of November is the Cairo drawing being replaced by Skia and with that Vulkan-based rendering support for this free office suite.
Fedora Linux is on track to deliver another bleeding-edge compiler toolchain stack with Fedora 32 due out this spring.
Released earlier this month was Phoronix Test Suite 9.2 while now available is a point release with a couple of fixes.
Earlier this week AMD unveiled the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition driver and we await a Radeon Software for Linux / AMDGPU-PRO driver update for Linux users on supported distributions. But AMD has begun pushing some updated AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver code ahead of a possible tagged release in the next few days.
After a few weeks worth of delays due to blocker bugs the release of Mesa 19.3 is out today as a big end-of-year upgrade to the open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux systems. Intel and AMD Radeon driver changes largely dominate the work as always but there is a growing number of embedded driver changes and other enhancements for this crucial piece to the open-source 3D ecosystem.
For those preferring the Vim text editor, Vim 8.2 is out today and its primary new feature is support for "popup windows" and for demonstrating those new capabilities is even a new Vim-based game called Killer Sheep.
Oracle has released VM VirtualBox 6.1 with better integration around the public Oracle Cloud, continued work on their new 3D support brought forward in VirtualBox 6.0, user-interface improvements, and much more.
AMD today is shipping the Radeon RX 5500 XT as the new sub-$200 Navi graphics card. This 7nm graphics card offers 22 compute units, 1408 stream processors, up to 5.6 TFLOPS of compute power, 4GB or 8GB GDDR6 video memory options, and built atop their modern RDNA architecture and supporting features in common with the RX 5700 series like PCIe 4.0 support. Here is a look at the initial Linux gaming performance of the AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT with various gaming benchmarks and Steam Play tests as well.
KDE Applications 19.12 is out today as the collection of 120+ KDE applications tailored around the Plasma desktop and largely built using Qt and KDE Frameworks.
After being delayed from last month, Qt 5.14 is shipping today as the newest Qt5 tool-kit release while developers become increasingly focused on next year's Qt 6.0 end-of-year release and Qt 5.15 in the spring that will serve as an LTS release and the last hurrah for Qt5.
Beyond AMD's open-source graphics driver stack of the past decade, part of their original open-source plans have also involved providing public (NDA-free) GPU hardware documentation. That has come with time though the documentation drops are not coordinated in-step with code drops. Out today, for example, is the ISA documentation on Vega 7nm.
There are early discussions going on over the possibility of shipping WireGuard support in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS that could be done either using the existing DKMS kernel module or patching their Linux 5.5-based kernel with WireGuard now that the necessary crypto API changes made it into that release.
With the current Mesa 19.3 there is the Intel Gallium3D driver generally performing much better than their "classic" i965 driver and for Mesa 20.0 it looks to only make more ground as it switches over to this driver by default.
Yesterday was a look at the most popular open-source/Linux news of the decade with 2019 quickly drawing to an end. That was an interesting look at more than 27,840 original news items published on Phoronix since the start of 2010. Today meanwhile is a look at the most popular Phoronix featured articles / Linux hardware reviews / extensive benchmark pieces for the decade of which there were more than 2,820 this decade.
Intel's MKL-DNN Deep Neural Network Library (DNNL) that is open-source and catering to deep learning applications like Tensorflow, PyTorch, DeepLearning4J, and others is nearing its version 2.0 release. With DNNL 2.0 is now support for Data Parallel C++ as Intel's new language as part of their oneAPI initiative.
While the Linux 5.5 merge window has just been over for less than one week, AMD has already submitted their first batch of feature updates to DRM-Next of new graphics driver material aiming for Linux 5.6 early next year.
Out today is a new development release of GNOME Shell on the road to GNOME 3.36 in March.
Intel's OpenSWR software rasterizer for OpenGL as an alternative to the likes of LLVMpipe could soon have OpenGL 4.0 and is a step closer to that code thanks to... Microsoft code.
Out today is NVIDIA 440.44 as the latest stable Linux driver update in their new long-lived driver series.
Recently I wrapped up some benchmarks looking at the performance of Ubuntu on Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux comparing WSL on Windows 10 Build 18362 (May 2019 Update) and then both WSL and WSL2 performance using the Windows 10 Build 19008 Insider's Preview (what will come as Windows 10 20H1 update) for looking at where the WSL performance is heading. Additionally, looking at the bare metal performance of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS for which the WSL instances were based plus Ubuntu 19.10. As well, for the Windows-compatible tests also looking at how the Windows performance itself was outside of WSL/WSL2.
While DXVK tends to be much-loved by Linux gamers for allowing more Direct3D 10/11 Windows games to run nicely on Linux with Wine or Proton (Steam Play) thanks to its fairly complete translation of D3D10/D3D11 API calls to Vulkan, it looks like Philip Rebohle is at least contemplating shifting it just into maintenance-mode.
With 2019 and in turn this decade quickly drawing to a close, here is a look back at the most popular open-source/Linux news on Phoronix from 2010 to present. So far this decade on Phoronix has been 27,840 original news articles pertaining to Linux/open-source/hardware.
Along similar aims to GhostBSD and MidnightBSD, GhostBSD is another one of the BSD distributions focused on providing a nice out-of-the-box experience. NomadBSD 1.3 is now available that is in turn based on the recent FreeBSD 12.1.
Introduced back in Ubuntu Server 17.10 and improved upon since has been "Subiquity" as a new Ubuntu Server install option rather than their classic installer derived from Debian. But with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, they will be dropping that Debian Installer based option and focusing solely on their modern "Subiquity" server installer option.
The currently-experimental Qt Shader Tools allows for graphics/compute shader conditioning and used by the in-development Qt graphics abstraction layer for supporting Vulkan / Metal / Direct3D / OpenGL APIs.