Phoronix: news regarding free and open-source software

Important Patches Land To Improve GNOME's Multi-Monitor Experience With High Refresh Rates

([GNOME] 2 July 06:07 PM EDT 144Hz + 60Hz)

If you have say a 144Hz gaming monitor as well as a conventional 60Hz secondary display or any other multi-monitor configuration with different refresh rates, there is now another reason to get excited for GNOME 3.38.

JEDEC Publishes DDR5 Standard - Launching At 4.8 Gbps, Better Power Efficiency

([Hardware] 7 Hours Ago DDR5)

JEDEC today published their long-awaited JESD79-5 DDR5 SDRAM standard.

AMD Launches The Ryzen Threadripper PRO For Workstations

([Processors] 8 Hours Ago 17 Comments)

Building off last year's successful Ryzen Threadripper 3000 series and the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X that launched back in February, today AMD is announcing the Zen 2 based Ryzen Threadripper PRO processors targeted for workstation usage.

Mesa 20.2's Nouveau Enables HMM, OpenCL SVM Now Supported

([Mesa] 9 Hours Ago Nouveau HMM)

The open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver stack reached a new milestone today with the user-space code in Mesa 20.2 finally flipping on the Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) support.

ReactOS Hires Developer To Work On Their Open-Source Windows Storage Stack

([Operating Systems] 9 Hours Ago ReactOS Storage)

The storage capabilities for ReactOS as the "open-source Windows" project has long been in poor shape relative to the other subsystems, but ReactOS Deutschland has hired a developer to work full-time on making improvements in storage and related areas.

AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT Memory Scaling Performance Under 100 Different Tests

([AMD] 10 Hours Ago Ryzen 9 3900XT + DDR4 Memory Frequency)

For those thinking of picking up one of the new AMD Ryzen 3000XT series processors and weighing whether it's worthwhile on your budget picking up DDR4-3600 memory or other higher frequency DDR4 modules, here are some fresh benchmark results with the Ryzen 9 3900XT looking at 100 different tests on Linux and showing how the performance changes from DDR4-2133 through DDR4-3800.

Linux 5.9 To Allow For Toggling Energy Efficiency Mode On Kaby Lake CPUs

([Intel] 11 Hours Ago Kaby Lake Energy Efficiency)

The patches talked about last month for a new "energy efficiency" tunable for the Intel P-State driver for Kabylake / Coffeelake CPUs is set to go into Linux 5.9 for those wanting to increase the energy efficiency of these CPUs on Linux albeit with reduced performance.

F2FS Preparing To Introduce New "Secure Erase" Functionality

([Linux Storage] 13 Hours Ago F2FS_IOC_SEC_TRIM_FILE)

A new feature that's been in development for a while with the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) looks set to land with the forthcoming Linux 5.9 cycle.

Linux 5.9 Set To Bring ARMv8 TTL Support

([Arm] 13 Hours Ago Translation Table Level)

In addition to Linux 5.9 poised to bring ARMv8 Memory Tagging Extension support (MTE), another ARM architectural feature now queued up for introduction in this next kernel cycle is Translation Table Level support.

RADV Driver Lands Support For Vulkan Extended Dynamic State

([Radeon] 13 July 09:08 PM EDT VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state)

The newest addition to Mesa's RADV Radeon Vulkan driver is support for the recently published VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state extension.

Radeon RADV+ACO Vulkan Performance Is In Great Shape For Mesa 20.2

([Display Drivers] 13 July 10:10 AM EDT 23 Comments)

With the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" recently switching its default to the ACO shader compiler back-end that is developed with the support of Valve rather than the existing AMDGPU LLVM back-end that is the official open-source AMD shader compiler solution, here are some fresh Linux gaming benchmarks of the RADV driver on the in-development Mesa 20.2 comparing the now-default RADV+ACO configuration against that of the RADV AMDGPU LLVM back-end.

systemd-oomd Looks Like It Will Come Together For systemd 247

([systemd] 13 July 09:39 AM EDT systemd 247)

With systemd 246 releasing soon, it looks like the new out-of-memory daemon will be merged shortly afterwards in allowing sufficient time for testing ahead of systemd 247.

Early Work On KDE Frameworks 6 Continues

([KDE] 13 July 09:04 AM EDT KDE Frameworks 6)

Several months have passed since there was any news to report on KDE Frameworks 6 but the coronavirus pandemic as well as Qt uncertainties have not caused KF6 development to slow down for this next-generation set of KDE add-on libraries complementing Qt.

GNOME Optimizations Continue In Striving For Faster 4K Experience

([GNOME] 13 July 06:45 AM EDT GNOME 4K)

Canonical's Daniel Van Vugt has been engaged in several weeks now in optimizing GNOME for a faster 4K experience particularly when using Intel graphics but many of these optimizations pan out for other GPUs and resolutions too. Over the past week he's been working on yet more optimizations.

Qt Creator 4.13 Beta Released - Finally Offers Meson Build System Integration

([Qt] 13 July 06:34 AM EDT Qt Creator 4.13)

The first public beta of the forthcoming Qt Creator 4.13 integrated development environment is available for testing.

Linux 5.8-rc5 Released As A Big Kernel For This Late In The Cycle

([Linux Kernel] 12 July 08:45 PM EDT Linux 5.8-rc5)

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.8-rc5 and he is not particularly enthusiastic about its size with this being the largest RC5 release candidate of any of the Linux 5.x series.

Intel AMX Support Lands In The GNU Assembler

([Intel] 12 July 09:14 AM EDT Intel AMX)

Intel's open-source compiler engineers have been quite timely in getting the Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) support out in the relevant components since Intel formally outlined AMX in last month's programming reference manual.

Linux 5.9 Will Finally Offer Proper Support For The ThinkPad 10 Ultrabook Keyboard

([Hardware] 12 July 06:01 AM EDT Lenovo Keyboard Support)

While Lenovo recently committed to certifying more systems for Linux use and upstreaming drivers / hardware support for Linux moving forward, there remains a backlog of existing Lenovo devices that still have less than desire Linux support. But thanks to Red Hat and others, the hardware support does continue advancing.

Intel DG1 Graphics Card Bring-Up On Linux Continues - Latest Bits For Local Memory

([Intel] 12 July 08:38 AM EDT DG1 LMEM)

Recently there have been a lot of open-source Linux patches flowing concerning Intel's bring-up of their DG1 discrete graphics card for developers. That work continued this week with the latest patches in wiring up LMEM support.

Fedora Approves Of Making Nano The Default Terminal Text Editor, Other Features Accepted

([Fedora] 12 July 07:04 AM EDT Fedora 33)

At this week's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) meeting, more features were approved for the Fedora 33 release due out this fall.

Canonical Is Using Mir To Bring Flutter To Wayland

([Ubuntu] 12 July 06:48 AM EDT Flutter Wayland)

This week Canonical and Google announced they were working together to bring the Flutter application toolkit to Ubuntu/Linux. Flutter is the cross-platform, open-source UI toolkit developed by Google for use from Android to Linux and iOS and Fuschia as well as for web interfaces.