Phoronix

While 4K displays are great for now, 5K displays are on the horizon and Intel is hard at work preparing their open-source Linux graphics driver for supporting 5K displays and beyond...

With the two main set of AMDGPU DRM driver updates merged (one and two) to DRM-Next ahead of the next Linux kernel cycle, I decided to run some benchmarks on this code using Vega and Polaris hardware for seeing how the performance compares to that of the Linux 4.18 stable and Linux 4.19 Git kernels.

Last week at Kernel Recipes 2018 in Paris, WireGuard lead developer Jason Donenfeld presented on the Zinc crypto API that he has been developing for the Linux kernel to suit his in-kernel secure VPN tunnel needs but also to potentially replace the existing Linux crypto code in the future...

The Freedreno-aligned MSM DRM driver for supporting Qualcomm Snapdragon hardware is preparing to make use of what was the AMDGPU DRM scheduler...

If you want to experiment with using the libc++ standard library alternative to libstdc++ on Ubuntu/Debian or also the LLVM OpenMP library (libomp), the LLVM project is now producing binaries for these sub-projects...

Stratis has been the Red Hat play two years in development for delivering next-gen Linux storage following their decision to abandon Btrfs support. Stratis offers ZFS and Btrfs like functionality and a lot of other new capabilities while this past week marked its first stable release...

Building off last Friday's release of Wine 3.17 is an updated staging release that consists of 882 extra patches on top of the upstream Wine build...

The Virtual Kernel Mode-Setting (VKMS) driver may soon work with Wayland compositors and see other capabilities for this recently-merged DRM code...

There was an increase in the Steam Linux gaming marketshare over last month, likely thanks to the late August announcement of Steam Play and the Wine-based Proton...

In marking twenty years since the first official release of this KDE integrated development environment, KDevelop 5.3 Beta 1 is available today as the first step towards this next feature release...

The VideoLAN/VLC developers in conjunction with the FFmpeg crew while being sponsored by the Alliance of Open Media have announced a new AV1 video decoder...

While there are no signs of an imminent "Turing" signed firmware release as a prerequisite for open-source driver support on the new GeForce RTX 2070/2080 series, NVIDIA has finally let loose the signed firmware images for Volta "GV100" hardware...

The Khronos working group responsible for Vulkan is working to drop Mir support, a.k.a. VK_KHR_mir_surface...

With BUS1 still appearing out in the distant for the mainline Linux kernel as an in-kernel IPC mechanism, dbus-broker is the year-and-a-half long effort so far at making a faster D-Bus compliant implementation in user-space...

Nuitka version 0.6 was quietly released last week as the Python 2/3 compiler that converts the Python code into optimized C code...

After optimizing the Linux laptop battery life last cycle, Hans de Goede of Red Hat has been working on Fedora 29 to provide a "flicker-free" boot experience. A Linux desktop flicker-free boot has been talked about for a decade or longer but with Fedora 29 and using Intel graphics that is finally becoming a reality...

After last month's beta, The Qt Company is marking the start of October by officially releasing Qt 3D Studio 2.1...

Last week at XDC2018 in Spain, Elie Tournier of Collabora presented on the current state of the Virgl effort for allowing OpenGL acceleration provided by a host's system within a QEMU/VirtIO-GPU virtual machine environment...

Over the course of September on Phoronix were 308 original news articles and 22 featured Linux hardware reviews and benchmarking articles. There was a lot of interesting activity on the hardware side from continued Threadripper tests to the GeForce RTX 2080 series launch as well as interesting news from the Linux code of conduct to the controversial Speck crypto code being removed...

Just days after announcing Total War: Three Kingdoms for Linux and releasing Life is Strange: Before The Storm, Feral Interactive has announced they will be bringing Life is Strange 2 to Linux (and macOS) in 2019...

One of the XDC2018 talks I was most looking forward to was the presentation by Red Hat's Karol Herbst and Rob Clark on their work with SPIR-V/NIR support inside Mesa for the context of OpenCL/compute support, which includes getting GPGPU computing on the Nouveau and Freedreno drivers...

The AMD developers uploaded their public Git trees making up the "AMDVLK" open-source AMD Vulkan driver stack prior to ending out September...

As perhaps a sign of where Intel is heading for their GPU computing strategy with their in-development discrete GPUs, they are developing a Vulkan compute back-end for the widely-used OpenCV library. This Vulkan back-end is for handling GPU-based compute for neural networks with this Open Computer Vision library as an alternative to the CUDA and OpenCL GPU compute support...

Feral's GameMode open-source project for dynamically optimizing a Linux system for gaming with automatically adjusting tunables like the CPU frequency scaling governor and real-time kernel optimizations may soon see another feature added...

Debian developers have been discussing what to many seems like a rather unorthodox idea of not allowing questions/answers following presentations at their annual DebConf conference. This idea of banning questions and answers follows a policy by a Python conference that forbids questions/answers following presentations and is meant to help ease newcomers...

The PS3OFMINIPAD is a low-cost wired gamepad controller manufactured by UK-based BigBen Interactive and marketed for use with the PlayStation 3 and being a "kid friendly" controller...

Continuing to serve as the release manager in the absence of Linus Torvalds, Greg Kroah-Hartman today released Linux 4.19-rc6 as the latest test release for the Linux 4.19 kernel that will debut as stable in October...

Apple announced the Magic Trackpad 2 almost three years ago to the day while the mainline Linux kernel will finally be supporting this multi-touch device soon...

Intel developers this week sent out their final set of feature updates for the "i915" Direct Rendering Manager driver for the upcoming Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel cycle...

A set of five patches were sent out on Sunday by AMD's Rex Zhu that enable RPM fan settings to be viewed and manually toggled via the sysfs interface...

It has been a long time since last having anything new to report on the Unvanquished open-source game project that is powered by the "Daemon Engine" as a long ago fork from ioquake3 and has seen countless improvements since. At least when the project started out several years back, the visual quality was great and they had been doing great alpha releases. However, in the past two years they haven't succeeded in putting out new alphas or their long-awaited beta, but fortunately the project is still alive...

After getting the Linux support squared away for Creative's Sound BlasterX AE-5 and Sound Blaster Recon3D, Connor McAdams latest challenge was getting the Sound Blaster ZxR support working on Linux. Overnight a set of 11 patches were sent out to get this ZxR sound card working on the mainline Linux kernel...

The KDE developers remain very busy improving their desktop environment...

Dragora is one of the lesser known Linux distributions that is focused on shipping "entirely free software" to the standards of the FSF/GNU...

While DXVK captures much of the limelight these days when it comes to accelerating Windows gaming on Linux by mapping Direct3D 11 (and D3D10) over Vulkan, the VK9 project and its main developer continue advancing D3D9-over-Vulkan for those preferring to relive over Direct3D Windows games...

While the maintained Linux 4.x kernel branches have all seen a lot of work on L1TF/Foreshadow and other x86/x86_64 speculation execution mitigation work, the Linux 3.16.59 kernel is bringing a load of work for those still riding this old kernel base...

Earlier this week I published some initial Windows vs. Ubuntu graphics tests with a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and other NVIDIA graphics cards. While having that Windows 10 install around, I also did some comparison tests with a Radeon RX 580 and RX Vega 64 on this same system and using the latest AMD drivers.

The Kyber I/O scheduler added back in Linux 4.12 and backed by Facebook engineers is seeing some improvements come the Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel cycle...

The Khronos Working Group maintaining Vulkan have released their 1.1.86 specification update to end out September. This is one of the more interesting Vulkan updates in recent times...

StepSync 1.0 is yet another option for those looking towards open-source options for file/folder synchronization and backups...

Arcan is that display server built originally off a game engine code base and has been building up a feature-set close to that of X11/Wayland. Durden is its accompanying desktop while the project has also been pursuing a virtual reality desktop and trying to work on other innovations in this space...

Veteran systemd and BUS1 developers are David Herrmann and Tom Gundersen have been working on "nettools" as a new network configuration libraries project for Linux...

The Haiku operating system after sixteen years in development and six years since their last alpha release, this BeOS-inspired open-source operating system has reached its beta milestone...

Last week Canonical developers released Mir 1.0 for the "next-generation of graphical solutions" particularly for IoT device makers. Mir lead developer Alan Griffiths published a bit of a redux today now with the 1.0 release out the door...

Four years ago Microsoft made public the source-code to MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 to the Computer History Museum. Today though they're making it much more accessible and friendly to modern developers by pushing it onto GitHub...

Wine 3.17 is out today as the latest bi-weekly development update to this increasingly popular way of running Windows games and applications on Linux...

Here is a fresh look at the current Linux OpenGL/Vulkan performance of various new and old Intel/AMD systems with integrated graphics using Ubuntu 18.10.

It's easy to get confused by the Radeon GPU compute stack / OpenCL driver support as there has been multiple offerings over the years from the no longer supported Clover Gallium3D OpenCL driver to a still-maintained PAL-based OpenCL driver to their modern ROCm compute stack. When it comes to ROCm though, besides OpenCL there is also their HCC and HIP approaches and from there support for a variety of frameworks, libraries, etc. Here are some overviews of the current ROCm compute stack those interested...

There have been rumors going on in recent days about Intel hitting supply challenges with their current-generation 14nm products. Intel CFO and Interim CEO, Bob Swan, wrote a public letter today outlining those challenges...

Not to be confused with the also new Zinc crypto code working its way to the mainline kernel as part of WireGuard, Zink is a new effort led by a developer at Collabora for implementing OpenGL on top of Vulkan drivers via Gallium3D...