Phoronix

Linus Torvalds put out the second weekly test release of the Linux 4.20 kernel and all-around it's been a normal week past the merge window...

Over the past year we have looked extensively at the performance impact of Spectre mitigations on x86_64 CPUs but now with having the Raptor Talos II in our labs, here are some benchmarks to see the performance impact of IBM's varying levels of Spectre mitigation for POWER9.

With just two weeks to go until Valve unleashes their latest original game, Artifact, it's now up for pre-order and there are also the system requirements published...

A new release of DXVK is out this weekend for running Direct3D 10/11 games on top of Vulkan...

While we haven't had much to talk about the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver in development as the future Mesa OpenGL driver for the company's graphics hardware, it has continued progressing nicely since its formal unveiling back in September...

Among the work queuing in the AMDGPU DRM-Next branch for what will in turn appear with the next kernel cycle (Linux 4.21) is support for Vega 20 A1 ASICs...

Last month I reported on a number of fixes for really old bugs in the EXT4 code with some of the issues dating back to the Linux 2.6 days in the EXT3 file-system code that was carried over to the EXT4 driver. Those fixes are now working their way into the Linux 4.20 stable kernel...

While most Linux gamers these days are mesmerized by DXVK for mapping Direct3D 10/11 to Vulkan for better handling Windows games on Linux, for those with older Direct3D 9 era games there is still the Gallium Nine initiative for D3D9 implemented as a Mesa Gallium state tracker. A new patch series posted this weekend will make that Gallium Nine experience even better...

The WireGuard secure VPN tunnel is not in the mainline kernel yet but the KDE Plasma desktop is the latest project already adding support for it, which can be useful today if making use of WireGuard's DKMS kernel modules...

Building off Friday's release of Wine 3.20 is now Wine-Staging 3.20 with minor work added into this testing/experimental blend of Wine that tends to particularly suit gamers better than the upstream code-base...

As what could spell bad news for seeing native Linux game ports of future Pillars and Wasteland titles, among others, Microsoft announced they are acquiring Obsidian Entertainment and inXile Entertainment...

That extra FreeBSD 12 beta release causing the minor setback to the FreeBSD 12.0 release is now available for testing. There is a fair number of last minute changes in FreeBSD 12.0 Beta 4 release ahead of the imminent branching...

Debian 9.6 is out this weekend as the latest stable update to the Debian GNU/Linux "Stretch" series...

The Linux 4.20 kernel has just received a new post-merge-window new driver: i2c-nvidia-gpu that is being contributed by the NVIDIA crew for their newest Turing graphics cards...

KDE Frameworks 5.52 is now the latest monthly update to this collection of KDE add-on libraries complementing the functionality of Qt5...

The IBM POWER On-Chip Controller (OCC) driver is queued for inclusion in the next version of the Linux kernel. This on-chip controller driver collects sensor data from the system and processor, including temperature and power metrics, and exposes that to the user as well as handling thermal/power management tasks...

In an interesting flurry of commits since yesterday, a new custom widgets theme is landing inside this open-source office suite...

If you are looking for some Phoronix shirts this holiday season, there are some new options available from HELLOTUX, the clothing vendor where everything is "Made on Linux, powered by Linux, for us, Linux fans."..

It's been a long journey for the OpenRISC CPU instruction set architecture not to be confused with RISC-V, but with the GCC 9.1 compiler release due out in early 2019 will finally be initial mainline support for this ISA...

For more than a year it's been talked about adding an option to support Zstd-compressed Linux kernel images while it looks like that Facebook-backed high performance compression algorithm for kernel images could soon finally be mainlined...

Wine 3.20 is now the latest bi-weekly development release for this increasingly popular code-base for running Windows programs/games on Linux and other operating systems...

It doesn't look like GIMP 3.0 will be under the tree this Christmas, but at least GIMP 2.10 continues progressing with new stable releases to provide new optimizations and enhancements...

With Mesa 18.3 feature development having wrapped up at the end of October, here are some benchmarks showing how the updated RadeonSI and RADV drivers are performing for this code that is now under a feature freeze before its official release around the end of November. AMD Radeon Vega and Polaris graphics cards were tested with a slew of NVIDIA graphics cards also tested on their respective driver to show where the Linux gaming GPU performance is at as we head into the 2018 holiday shopping season.

The Librem 5 GNU/Linux smartphone was originally slated to launch in January 2019 and its developer kits were supposed to ship this past summer. Now it's looking like the Librem 5 Developer Kits will hopefully arrive in December...

Landing in the GRUB boot-loader minutes ago is a new "verifiers" framework providing core verification functionality for the likes of UEFI Secure Boot, Trusted Platform Modules, and PGP...

The second weekly release candidate of Mesa 18.3 is now available for testing of these open-source OpenGL / Vulkan drivers...

There has been a flurry of activity recently for the GCC 9 compiler due to feature development ending soon. The latest work hitting their mainline tree this morning is support for the Intel PTWRITE instruction...

While VirtualBox 6.0 is in beta, VirtualBox 5.2.22 was released today as the latest stable release for this Oracle virtualization software...

In addition to this week bringing KDE Connect 1.10 for the communication/integration between the KDE desktop and Android smartphones/tablets, GSConnect as the GNOME Shell port of this open-source software also received a new feature release...

Some support improvements are on the way for Huawei's MateBook X, a lightweight ultrabook/laptop that aims to compete with the likes of Apple's MacBook Pro...

In October of 2017 Samsung announced convergence and traditional Linux distributions for Samsung Galaxy smartphones as the "Samsung DeX." Since then we hadn't heard anything more about this initiative while this week they appear to be ready with a beta...

For those curious about the performance of IBM's POWER9 processors against the likes of today's AMD Threadripper and Intel Core i9 HEDT processors, here are some interesting benchmarks as we begin looking closer at the POWER9 performance on the fully open-source Raptor Talos II Secure Workstation. This open-source, secure system arrived for Linux testing with dual 22-core POWER9 CPUs to yield 176 total threads of power.

The OpenMP ARB has announced the release today of the major OpenMP 5.0 specification. OpenMP 5.0 has been three years in the making and is a big update to this parallel programming specification relative to past updates...

The big FreeBSD 12.0 release still is expected to happen in December but will be a bit later than originally planned...

NVIDIA today released their first beta release for Linux/Solaris/BSD users in the 415 release stream...

PostgreSQL 11.1 is out today with fixes over last month's PostgreSQL 11 introduction but there are also updates to the 10.6, 9.6, 9.4, 9.4, and 9.3 release streams due to a new security issue...

Published back in September was some Mesa RadeonSI tuning for AMD Zen CPUs. That tuning to pin the application thread and driver execution thread to the same L3 cache benefits the Zen micro-architecture with its multiple core complexes (CCX). That code was merged a short time later unconditionally but it looks like that behavior needs to be refined for delivering maximum performance...

With this week's announcement of the Radeon Instinct MI60 and MI50 as what we previously knew as Vega 20, here's a look at what is likely required from the Linux software side for making use of these professional GPUs that will begin shipping in early 2019...

Linux Mint's Cinnamon desktop environment derived from GNOME/GTK components has tagged its v4.0.0 release in source and is already beginning to appear in distribution repositories from the likes of Manjaro...

The Qt Company has announced the release of Qt 5.12 Beta 4 as the final beta release for this upcoming LTS tool-kit update...

As it had been two weeks since AMD developers last pushed out new source updates to their AMDVLK Vulkan Linux driver, rather than their normal weekly release cadence, today's driver updates are a bit on the heavier side than some of their past light updates...

Of the announcements from yesterday's AMD Next Horizon event, one that came as a surprise was the rolling out of current-generation EPYC processors to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Available so far are the AMD-powered M5a and R5a instance types to offer Amazon cloud customers more choice as well as being priced 10% lower than comparable instances. Here are some initial benchmarks of the AMD performance in the Amazon cloud.

Unreal Engine 4.21 is out today as the last feature release for Epic Games' engine of 2018. This is an exciting game engine update for Linux and Vulkan fans...

A new patch-set proposed by one of the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver developers would allow power-savings under load of roughly up to 3%...

With the Linux 4.20 merge window having ended this past weekend, the first big batch of new feature material to DRM-Next from the "DRM-Misc" area has been submitted for the follow-on Linux 4.21 cycle...

While Clear Linux augments their package/bundle archive with Flatpak support on the desktop, they are currently deciding whether to also support Snaps that are commonly associated with Ubuntu Linux...

It's been a few years since "Ares" first appeared on the ARM road-map and it looks like this high performance core might be close to finally shipping...

The GCC steering committee decided earlier this year they will accept the OpenRISC port for this processor ISA while the patches for it are still being prepped...

Wayland founder Kristian Høgsberg Kristensen who has been on Google's Chrome OS graphics team the past few years is continuing to help advance the open-source Qualcomm Adreno graphics support...

Ahead of the GCC 9 feature freeze later this month, support for several newer Loongson processors have been picked up by this leading open-source compiler...