The previously mentioned work on improving ETC2 support for older generations of Intel graphics has now been mainlined for Mesa 19.1…

Source: Phoronix – Improved ETC2 Texture Compression Lands For Older Haswell/Ivybridge GPUs On Linux

While Ubuntu may no longer be using Compiz by default as the compositing window manager, the Compiz project is still alive as marked by today’s Compiz 0.9.14.0 release…

Source: Phoronix – Compiz 0.9.14 Released As First Update In Over Two Years

Debian 9.8 is available this weekend as the latest bug-fix / security fix update to Debian GNU/Linux “Stretch”…

Source: Phoronix – Debian 9.8 Released With Latest Security Fixes

Queued for mainlining with the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel cycle is initial support for Bitmain SoCs. Bitmain is the Chinese company that started out designing ASICs for Bitcoin mining with the Antminer and other products. The company has also been venturing into designs for artificial intelligence and deep learning…

Source: Phoronix – Bitmain SoC Support Coming To Linux 5.1 – Sophon ARMv8 + RISC-V Chip For Deep Learning

The latest addition to AMD’s open-source Linux kernel driver is supporting BACO on Vega 12…

Source: Phoronix – BACO Power Savings Support Comes To AMD’s Vega 12

A set of 38 patches have been sent out that wire in support for the VK_KHR_shader_float16_int8, VK_AMD_gpu_shader_half_float, VK_AMD_gpu_shader_int16, and VK_KHR_8bit_storage extensions to the RADV driver within Mesa…

Source: Phoronix – RADV Driver Gets Big Patch Series For 8-bit & 16-bit Arithmetic, 8-bit Storage

With Windows 10 Version 1903 inching closer as the “April 2019” Update, Microsoft published a blog post on Friday night outlining the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) changes they are making in this next installment of the operating system…

Source: Phoronix – Windows 10 Will Soon Let You Access WSL Linux Files From Explorer, Other Improvements

While the current Wayland/Weston release cycle is a bit behind schedule, it has allowed time for another addition to be made to the Weston 6.0 compositor…

Source: Phoronix – Wayland’s Weston 6.0 To Support XDG-Shell Stable, Helping Apps Like MPV Video Player

It’s been a while since Valve issued a new Proton update for their spin of Wine that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux. Fortunately, in time for any weekend gaming, a new Proton release is now available…

Source: Phoronix – Proton 3.16-7 Updates Against DXVK 0.96, New FAudio

It was just a few weeks ago that Intel open-sourced the SVT-AV1 project as a CPU-based AV1 video encoder. In the short time since publishing it, there’s already been some significant performance improvements…

Source: Phoronix – SVT-AV1 Already Seeing Nice Performance Improvements Since Open-Sourcing

The second bi-weekly development release following last month’s stable debut of Wine 4.0 is now available for testing…

Source: Phoronix – Wine 4.2 Released With Unicode String Normalization & ECC Crypto Key Support

Mir 1.1 was released back in December as the first post-1.0 feature update while now preparing for release is the Mir 1.1.1 maintenance milestone…

Source: Phoronix – Mir 1.1.1 RC1 Has Fixes For PostmarketOS, Demo Shells Using Wayland

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS), which serves up system BIOS/firmware files from many different vendors as well as various devices so that hardware can see firmware updates under Linux and be updated via Fwupd, has served up more than five million firmware images…

Source: Phoronix – The Linux Vendor Firmware Service Has Served Up More Than 5 Million Firmware Files

Announced at the end of January was the Samsung 970 EVO Plus as the first consumer-grade solid-state drive with 96-layer 3D NAND memory. The Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSDs are now shipping and in this review are the first Linux benchmarks of these new SSDs in the form of the Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500GB MZ-V7S500B/AM compared to several other SSDs on Linux.

Source: Phoronix – Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500GB NVMe Linux SSD Benchmarks

For those using the Virgl3D driver stack for having OpenGL acceleration within KVM guest VMs with VirtIO-GPU that is then accelerated by hosts, there are performance optimizations that have just landed in the Mesa 19.1 development code…

Source: Phoronix – Virgl Lands A Number Of Performance Optimizations In Mesa 19.1

The Nouveau kernel driver has queued patches for introducing Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support for this open-source NVIDIA driver as a step forward to its OpenCL/compute opportunities…

Source: Phoronix – Nouveau Driver Picks Up SVM Support Via HMM

The Linux 5.1 kernel is bringing a new driver_async_probe= option for specifying a list of drivers that can be probed asynchronously to speed-up the boot process…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 5.1 Kernel Bringing New Option For Drivers To Be Async Probed

There’s no shortage of quirky HID hardware out there. With the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel cycle will be more fixes/workarounds for such consumer devices…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 5.1 To Deal With More Quirky Hardware From The Lenovo X1 Tablet To ASUS Transbook

It’s sure been a busy week in the Intel open-source graphics driver space… The latest improvement is a patch series providing better context restoration in the case of GPU hangs…

Source: Phoronix – Intel’s OpenGL Mesa Driver To Better Handle Recovery In Case Of GPU Hangs

Under a late change proposal for Fedora 30, the DNF package manager’s “best” mode might be enabled by default…

Source: Phoronix – Fedora 30 Might Enable DNF’s “Best” Mode By Default