Phoronix

The X.Org Foundation Board of Directors decided today that their next annual X.Org/Mesa/Wayland conference will be held in Montreal, Canada...

One of the few features not yet provided by the mainline open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver will soon be crossed off the list... FreeSync / Adaptive-Sync / HDMI Variable Refresh Rate support...

The Linux Foundation LTSI initiative has finished baking its first Linux 4.14-based kernel for longer-term support...

With the Librem 5 GNU/Linux smartphone not shipping now until at least April 2019, this will give them time to adopt GNOME 3.32 and they are hoping more GNOME applications will prepare for convergence...

One week from today will hopefully mark the release of the PostgreSQL 11 stable database server release...

Especially with Qualcomm's Centriq efforts going quiet in recent months, one of the most interesting ARM server efforts at the moment is Ampere Computing -- the company founded by former Intel president Renee James and with several other ex-Intel employees on staff. They started off with the acquired assets from what was AppliedMicro and their X-Gene ARMv8 IP and for the past year have been improving it into their recently announced eMAG processors.

Raspberry Pi's Debian-based Raspbian OS has been updated today with four months worth of improvements for this popular ARM SBC...

Published on Wednesday was the latest batch of AMDGPU DC display code changes for its eventual inclusion into the AMDGPU DRM driver for mainline past the 4.20~5.0 cycle with that feature merge window being over. The most notable change with this latest AMDGPU DC haul is a new "PERF_TRACE" addition...

Following several interesting and exciting feature pull requests for the next Linux kernel (to be released as either version 4.20 or 5.0), AMD developers have moved onto stabilizing this massive amount of new feature code...

Overnight Valve promoted their Proton 3.7-7 build with better alt-tab handling and full-screen behavior for many games. There is also fixed mouse behavior and DXVK 0.80 is now used for the Direct3D-11-over-Vulkan translation to yield better Steam Play gaming performance...

Following yesterday's rather landmark move of Microsoft joining the Open Invention Network and thus allowing much of its vast patent collection now being allowed to help off patent attacks within the Linux/open-source ecosystem, the Free Software Foundation applauded the move but wants Microsoft to do more...

With a few months having passed since Qt Creator 4.7, the beta is out today for the next installment as Qt Creator 4.8 for this Qt/C++ focused integrated development environment...

Days after Nouveau DRM maintainer Ben Skeggs began staging changes for this open-source NVIDIA driver ahead of the next kernel cycle, this evening Ben Skeggs submitted the DRM-Next pull request to queue this work for the Linux 4.20/5.0 kernel cycle...

Last month's Vulkan 1.1.85 release brought NVIDIA's experimental ray-tracing extension (VK_NVX_raytracing) while for those curious how this fits into the Vulkan workflow, NVIDIA today published a guide for getting started with ray-time ray-tracing in the Vulkan space...

Arriving last week in our Linux benchmarking lab was a dual EPYC server -- this Dell PowerEdge R7425 is a beast of a system with two AMD EPYC 7601 processors yielding a combined 64 cores / 128 threads, 512GB of RAM (16 x 32GB DDR4), and 20 x 500GB Samsung 860 EVO SSDs. There will be many interesting benchmarks from this server in the days and weeks ahead. For some initial measurements during the first few days of stress testing this 2U rack server, here is a look at how well various benchmarks/applications are scaling from two to 128 threads.

Microsoft has joined the Open Invention Network (OIN) to as they put it "protect Linux and open-source."..

Just months after the controversial Speck crypto code was added to the Linux kernel that raised various concerns due to its development by the NSA and potential backdoors, which was then removed from the kernel tree, there is now Russia's Streebog that could be mainlined...

The exciting X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC 2018) that took place two weeks back with talks ranging from open-source GPU drivers to continuous integration and more are now available for your viewing pleasure online...

Another visible change coming to the GNOME Shell environment is the removal of application menus "app menus" for what had been an early GNOME 3 feature...

Version 16.0 of the long-standing, open-source Asterisk VoIP/PSTN telephony software is now available for voice communication deployments...

NVIDIA has announced RAPIDS as their latest open-source project...

The latest news in the "it's about darn time" section is the Linux kernel's default i386/x86_64 kernel configurations will finally ship with USB 3.0 support enabled, a.k.a. CONFIG_USB_XHCI_HCD...

Even if you don't have a new NVIDIA RTX graphics card, the open-source vRt project aims to offer Vulkan-based ray-tracing for modern graphics cards...

A bulk of the Linux/open-source enablement we have seen taking place for ARM's new ARMv8.5 architecture revision is around its new Spectre defenses to help SoCs that will begin shipping later in 2019...

Epic Games announced the debut today of the Unreal Engine 4.21 public preview...

One of the areas within the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack that could benefit from some additional improvements/optimizations is the AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end. One of the easy ways to see that the AMDGPU LLVM code could be improved upon are the Vulkan benchmarks when compared to AMD's proprietary compiler and there still being some significant wins with that more mature but closed-source shader compilation code. Fortunately, some improvements may be on the way...

Linaro engineer Thara Gopinath sent out an experimental set of kernel patches today that introduces the concept of "thermal pressure" to the Linux kernel for helping assist Linux performance when the processor cores are running hot...

As a follow-up to the ROCm 1.9 release from a month ago that brought initial Vega 20 support, upstream kernel compatibility with the AMDKFD code, and other improvements, ROCm 1.9.1 was quietly released a few days ago...

Since the release of DragonFlyBSD 5.2 this past April there have been many improvements to this popular BSD operating system, including on the performance front. I recently wrapped up some fresh benchmarks of DragonFlyBSD 5.3-DEVELOPMENT for seeing what the performance is looking like in what will eventually be released as DragonFlyBSD 5.4.

KDE has announced the immediate availability of Plasma 5.14 as the latest quarterly feature update to this popular desktop...

Freedreno/MSM maintainer Rob Clark sent in his MSM-next pull request on Sunday of new feature material slated for the Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel...

Red Hat / Fedora developers have updated Firefox packages pending for F27 / F28 / F29 that bring a slew of improvements for the web-browser operating under Wayland...

As of last night Fedora 29 embarked upon its final freeze as the last step for reaching its official debut by month's end...

Earlier this year with Wine 3.9 its Direct3D code changed to default to OpenGL 4.4 core contexts rather than the legacy/compatibility context. NVIDIA GPUs ended up being left at the older value but now that has changed...

One of several KDE music/media player options is Elisa and its v0.3 release has just occurred...

Released at the end of September was GNOME 3.30.1 as the first and only point release collection to the GNOME 3.30 desktop environment feature update that debuted earlier in September. Finally out today are the v3.30.1 updates for Mutter and the GNOME Shell...

Prolific open-source developer Matthias Clasen at Red Hat has shared some of the post-1.0 plans for the Flatpak app sandboxing/distribution tech. As it stands now, Flatpak 1.2 will likely be out around the end of the calendar year with the next batch of features...

Making the rounds last week was a nasty power regression hitting Linux 4.18 stable and as we ended up bisecting was caused by a change to the AMDGPU kernel driver and affected select Radeon graphics cards. It looks like the goal this week is to get that patch reverted from Linux 4.18...

Happening now in New York City is the Intel "Fall Desktop Launch Event" where they are announcing their latest wares, much of which has already been leaked to date...

The upcoming Linux kernel that will be at either version 4.20 or 5.0 is going to fix a kernel issue that dates back at least a year where plugging-in or even unplugging recent Apple MacBook Pro laptops will lead to excessive CPU resources being consumed... Basically, the charging/uncharging event change for these recent MBP laptops was causing issues within the kernel -- adding to the list of problems Linux faces trying to run on recent Apple hardware...

For those curious about the TensorFlow performance on the newly-released GeForce RTX 2080 series, for your viewing pleasure to kick off this week of Linux benchmarking is a look at Maxwell, Pascal, and Turing graphics cards in my possession when testing the NGC TensorFlow instance on CUDA 10.0 with the 410.57 Linux driver atop Ubuntu and exploring the performance of various models. Besides the raw performance, the performance-per-Watt and performance-per-dollar is also provided.

The AMDGPU DC "Display Code" stack formerly known as DAL that's been in the mainline kernel the past several releases might soon see support for GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" GPUs. This is the big display code stack necessary for atomic mode-setting, FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync, HDMI/DP audio, and other modern display features. When AMD brought up this DC stack, they hadn't brought it back to GCN 1.0 since for those original GCN GPUs they by default still use the Radeon DRM driver. But now they might soon see AMDGPU DC support...

The latest rumors in the Radeon space is that AMD is in the final stages of preparing to release its third iteration of Polaris GPUs... We could be seeing a Radeon RX 670 and RX 680 very soon...

DDR4 memory has been around for several years already yet the mainline Linux kernel doesn't have a driver for reading the SPD EEPROMs abiding by the JEDEC EE1004 standard as used by DDR4 SDRAM memory modules...

The first development milestone release of the Phoronix Test Suite 8.4-Skiptvet series is now available for evaluation...

An independent open-source developer has started the VUDA project as an effort to provide a CUDA Runtime API interface based on Vulkan...

The Gentoo-based Calculate Linux distribution that offers versions ranging from desktop to server offerings is out with their newest release...

The Linux kernel's Code of Conduct that was abruptly dropped onto the Linux kernel, which happened as Linus Torvalds was announcing his empathy retreat last month, will likely see some revisions ahead of the upcoming Linux 4.19 stable debut...

Greg Kroah-Hartman continues managing the Linux 4.19 kernel cycle while Linus Torvalds remains off on his empathy retreat...

Vulkan 1.1.87 is another Sunday morning update to the Vulkan graphics/compute specification...