NVIDIA GeForce vs. AMD Radeon Vulkan Neural Network Performance With NCNN With having added Tencent's NCNN tests to the Phoronix Test Suite with Vulkan acceleration, here is a look at the real-world impact by using RealSR-NCNN for scaling up with RealSR. Various NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards were tested for this initial NCNN / RealSR-NCNN Vulkan comparison. 6 Hours Ago - Display Drivers

Firefox Nightly Flips On New JIT "Warp" Code For Greater JavaScript Performance Mozilla's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine team have been working on a big update to their just-in-time compiler code. This big update called "Warp" is now enabled in the latest Firefox Nightly builds for offering big speed-ups. 7 Hours Ago - Mozilla - JIT WarpBuilder

Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org Now Has 600 Different Tests/Benchmarks Ahead of next month's Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 release and the new OpenBenchmarking.org, the milestone was met this week of having 600 different test profiles (benchmarks) available for automated execution via our open-source, cross-platform benchmarking software. 10 Hours Ago - Phoronix Test Suite - 600 And Counting

Trenchboot Secure Launch Support For Linux Sees New Patches For a while now Oracle engineers and others have been working on Trenchboot as a means of secure launch/boot support when paired with the likes of Intel TXT and AMD SKINIT for trusted execution and configuring each piece of the software boot chain for trusted/secure handling. The latest kernel patches have been sent out for review for secure launching of the kernel. 14 Hours Ago - Linux Security - Trenchboot

GraalPHP Is A PHP JIT Implementation Built On GraalVM Oracle's GraalVM has seen language support well outside of Java/OpenJDK from Ruby to WebAssembly to R and Python. The newest language seeing an experimental implementation built atop GraalVM is PHP. 14 Hours Ago - Programming - GraalPHP

Zink OpenGL-Over-Vulkan With Unigine Heaven Seeing Improved Performance Following word last week that the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan layer was seeing 50~100% performance gains, more details are now available. 17 Hours Ago - Vulkan - Zink + Heaven

Fedora 33 Beta To Be Released Next Week After missing the preferred target date of 15 September and the secondary beta target date of this week, Fedora 33 Beta is now on track to ship next week. 21 Hours Ago - Fedora - Fedora 33

24 September

Intel DG1 Sound Support Coming For Linux 5.10 Intel continues bringing up the DG1 discrete graphics card under Linux with continued refinements set to hit for Linux 5.10. 24 September 08:41 PM EDT - Intel - DG1 Audio With Linux 5.10

AMD Is Hiring To Work On New Radeon Driver Tooling Written In Rust It turns out AMD is at least exploring the possibilities around using the Rust programming language in their graphics driver tooling. 24 September 05:07 PM EDT - Radeon - Radeon Rust

AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT CPUFreq Governor Comparison With Linux 5.9 One of the most frequent questions received at Phoronix in recent times is whether the "schedutil" governor is ready for widespread use and if it can compare in performance to, well, the "performance" governor on AMD Linux systems. Here are some benchmarks of an AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT using the latest Linux 5.9 development kernel in looking at the performance differences between the CPUFreq governor options of Ondemand, Powersave, Performance, and Schedutil. 24 September 02:36 PM EDT - Software

Linux 5.10 To Support Nitro Enclaves For Security-Critical Applications The kernel support for Nitro Enclaves landed this week in char-misc-next ahead of the Linux 5.10 cycle kicking off next month. 24 September 01:42 PM EDT - Linux Security - Nitro Enclaves

Arm Begins Bringing Up Neoverse N2, Neoverse V1 Support In The GNU Toolchain It was just a few days ago that Arm outlined the Neoverse N2 "Perseus" design as a follow-on to the Neoverse N1 and coming concurrently to the next-generation Cortex-A. Now the company has already jumped on beginning their open-source/Linux enablement work around the Neoverse N2. 24 September 01:15 PM EDT - Arm - Neoverse N2 + GAS

PostgreSQL 13 Released With Performance Improvements PostgreSQL 13.0 is out this morning as the latest major update to this widely-used relational database server. 24 September 10:10 AM EDT - Free Software - PostgreSQL 13

DragonFlyBSD 5.8.2 Released With Numerous Fixes DragonFlyBSD 5.8.2 is out today as the latest stable version of this popular BSD operating system. 24 September 09:59 AM EDT - BSD - DragonFlyBSD 5.8.2

Intel Engineers Begin Landing Open-Source Support For TDX, Intel Key Locker Last month Intel published a whitepaper on TDX as Trust Domain Extensions as a means of better securing virtual machines. TDX allows for isolating VMs from the hypervisor and other non-VMM system software. Intel TDX builds off other recent work around MKTME memory encryption and other features. We are now beginning to see that software side support roll-out along with the also-new Key Locker instructions. 24 September 06:47 AM EDT - Intel - Trust Domain Extensions

HPE Preparing SGI UV5 Support For The Linux Kernel Recent hardware enablement work on the Linux kernel is HPE bringing up UV5 support. 24 September 03:50 AM EDT - Hardware - HPE UV5

Fedora 34 Aims To Further Enhance Security But Will Lose Runtime Disabling Of SELinux Currently on Fedora the Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) functionality that's there by default can be disabled at run-time via the /etc/selinux/config but moving forward with Fedora 34 they are looking at removing that support and focusing just on disabling via selinux=0 at the kernel boot time in order to provide greater security. 24 September 12:07 AM EDT - Fedora - Fedora 34 + SELinux Hardening

23 September

Disman Continues Taking Shape As Display Management Library For X11/Wayland Disman is the display management library forked from LibKScreen as part of KWinFT. Last week at XDC2020 an update was provided on this Qt/C++ library for display management. 23 September 08:31 PM EDT - KDE - Disman

Intel Announces Atom x6000E Series "Elkhart Lake", 11th Gen Core Tigerlake-UP3 After talking about Elkhart Lake for months in terms of the Linux patches bringing up this next-generation Intel processor, Intel is announcing it today in the form of the Atom x6000E series. Additionally, following the recent Tiger Lake client processor launch, 11th Gen Core Tigerlake-UP3 has also been announced. 23 September 09:00 AM EDT - Processors

Lenovo Announces 27 Systems To Ship With Ubuntu Pre-Installed Following Lenovo rolling out Fedora Linux options for their laptops and their other Linux-related announcements this year, Lenovo and Canonical are announcing today nearly thirty different laptops and desktops will begin shipping with the option for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS pre-installed. 23 September 09:00 AM EDT - Ubuntu - Lenovo + Canonical

Arch Linux Based EndeavourOS Begins Providing ARM Builds The Arch Linux based EndeavourOS that was born out of Antergos Linux has released new builds for September 2020 and also gotten into the ARM Linux game. 23 September 12:00 AM EDT - Operating Systems - EndeavourOS ARM

22 September

LLVM 11.0-RC3 Released For This Big LLVM/Clang Update LLVM 11.0 was originally scheduled to be released at the end of August while now it looks like that official milestone is coming in the next few days or week. 22 September 05:54 PM EDT - LLVM - LLVM 11.0-RC3

Microsoft Edge Is Coming Out For Linux Next Month As part of a host of announcements for kicking off the virtual Ignite 2020 conference, Microsoft just confirmed they will be releasing their Edge web browser for Linux next month. 22 September 12:01 PM EDT - Microsoft - Edge On Linux

Firefox 81 Released With Security Fixes, PDF Viewer Enhancements Firefox 81 is out this morning as the newest monthly update to the Mozilla web browser. 22 September 09:37 AM EDT - Mozilla - Firefox 81

AMD Announces Ryzen/Athlon 3000 C-Series For Chromebooks AMD today announced the Ryzen 3000 and Athlon 3000 C-Series processors for use in Google Chromebooks from multiple vendors. 22 September 09:16 AM EDT - AMD - AMD 3000 C-Series

ADRIConf Remains The Primary GUI Control Panel For Managing Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan Drivers While the Linux kernel graphics drivers and user-space OpenGL/Vulkan drivers expose a lot of options via sysfs on the kernel side and various environment variables and other tunables in user-space, when it comes to graphical control panels to manage these open-source graphics drivers on Linux there are several fragmented different options. For Mesa drivers, ADRIConf remains the leading option. 22 September 08:37 AM EDT - Mesa - ADRIConf

TURNIP Vulkan Driver Up And Running On Qualcomm's KGSL The TURNIP driver that is associated with the Freedreno driver effort for providing an open-source Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics hardware can now run atop Qualcomm's KGSL kernel driver. 22 September 07:16 AM EDT - Mesa - TURNIP + KGSL

Krita 4.4 Beta Released With Multi-Threading For Fill Layers The beta of the forthcoming Krita 4.4 is now available, which continues on as easily the leading open-source digital painting programs. 22 September 06:50 AM EDT - KDE - Krita 4.4

VKD3D 1.2 Is Ready To Offer Better Direct3D 12 To Vulkan Support Patches pending for VKD3D take this Direct3D 12 to Vulkan translation library up to version 1.2. This library continues advancing in pushing along the D3D12-over-Vulkan performance primarily for Windows games on Linux just as DXVK has done for D3D9 through D3D11. 22 September 02:55 AM EDT - Vulkan - VKD3D 1.2

Panfrost With Linux 5.10 To Support Mali GPU On Amlogic G12B SoCs Sent out on Monday were a last batch of drm-misc-next changes to queue for the Linux 5.10 merge window opening next month. 22 September 12:09 AM EDT - Arm - Panfrost + Amlogic

21 September

Radeon ROCm 3.8 Released With Hipfort For Fortran On GPUs, Data Center Tool Version 3.8 of ROCm, the Radeon Open eCosystem, is now available. This release continues making more progress on preparing the ROCm graphics compute stack for the upcoming large AMD supercomputer deployments and other data center usage. 21 September 08:34 PM EDT - Radeon - ROCm 3.8

Ubuntu Touch OTA-13 Released With More Phones Supported, UI Improvements The UBports community has announced the release of Ubuntu Touch OTA-13 as their newest over-the-air update to this Ubuntu mobile operating system. 21 September 06:28 PM EDT - Ubuntu - Ubuntu Touch OTA-13

openSUSE Tumbleweed vs. Leap 15.2 vs. Jump Alpha Benchmarks Following the recent alpha debut of the openSUSE Jump distribution for testing that is working to synchronize SUSE Linux Enterprise with openSUSE Leap, there was an inquiry made about the performance of it. So for addressing that premium member's question, here are some benchmarks carried out recently of the latest openSUSE Leap 15.2 against the openSUSE Jump in its early state against the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed. 21 September 03:27 PM EDT - Operating Systems

Oracle To Stick With Solaris "11.4" For Continuous Delivery SRU Releases With no new indications of Solaris 12 or Solaris 11.next and given the past layoffs and previous announcements from Oracle, today's statement that Solaris 11.4 will remain as their continuous delivery model with monthly SRU releases come as little surprise. 21 September 01:24 PM EDT - Oracle - Little Surprise

New OpenBenchmarking.org Features Enhance Discovering Popular + Reliable Tests As part of the new OpenBenchmarking.org being developed as part of Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 due out next quarter, some new features were deployed live on OpenBenchmarking.org this weekend. 21 September 12:04 PM EDT - Phoronix Test Suite - OpenBenchmarking.org

Vulkan Portability Extension 1.0 Now Shipping For Expanding Vulkan's Reach The Vulkan Portability Extension (VK_KHR_portability_subset) has been released as part of the effort by The Khronos Group in getting Vulkan running on as many platforms as possible, including the likes of Apple macOS/iOS. 21 September 09:25 AM EDT - Vulkan - Vulkan Portability

Intel Platform Monitoring Telemetry Appears Destined For Linux 5.10 As first outlined earlier this year, Intel has been working on the Linux support for Platform Monitoring Technology as a new hardware telemetry feature first introduced with new Tigerlake hardware. It's looking like the initial Intel PMT support will come with Linux 5.10 while further work is being prepared that builds off its foundation. 21 September 09:09 AM EDT - Intel - Intel PMT

Open-Source Vivante Driver In Some Cases Outperforming Proprietary Driver One of the less talked about open-source graphics drivers talked about is Etnaviv as the reverse-engineered, community-based driver providing OpenGL/GLES support for Vivante graphics IP. While it's still working towards OpenGL ES 3.0 compliance, its performance is currently in some cases competitive -- and even outperforming -- the Vivante proprietary driver. 21 September 08:48 AM EDT - Mesa - Etnaviv 2020

Unity 2020.2 Bringing Some Hefty Performance Optimizations Not only did Unity Software experience a successful IPO last week but they also rolled out the Unity 2020.2 engine into public beta and with that comes some "major speed-ups" for performance. 21 September 08:21 AM EDT - Linux Gaming - Unity 2020.2 Beta

Experiments Are Underway With Vulkan Powering The KDE Plasma Shell Well known KDE developer David Edmundson has been experimenting with a Vulkan-powered KDE Plasma Shell and did manage to get things working with Qt 5.15 using a few modifications. 21 September 06:42 AM EDT - KDE - Vulkan + Plasma Shell