Phoronix

Another drm-misc-next pull request was sent in Wednesday with new feature material slated for the Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel release by way of DRM-Next...

With Chrome 69 out the door and that having marked Chrome's 10th birthday, Google developers have Chrome 70 in their dev channel fresh out of the oven...

There was some NVIDIA signed firmware activity today in the linux-firmware.git tree for Pascal GPUs... Sadly, it's not the long sought after PMU firmware or any breakthrough in allowing the open-source Nouveau driver to properly support re-clocking or other long missing functionality from this open-source NVIDIA driver. Rather, it's just to help out newer laptops with Pascal discrete graphics...

It's been open-source since its inception but is only being promoted now by Google: their Tink cryptography library that aims to be easy-to-use...

Mesa 18.2 as the third-quarter feature update for this collection of primarily Vulkan/OpenGL drivers is expected to make its official debut on Friday...

With Firefox 62.0 having shipped, Mozilla promoted Firefox 63.0 to beta as part of their usual release cadence...

GNOME 3.30 has been officially released as the latest major feature release for the GNOME Shell desktop and associated components...

The GNOME Foundation received a $400k donation of which $100k is heading to the GIMP developers for helping to improve their open-source image manipulation program that for some can compete with Adobe's Photoshop functionality...

Intel's Open-Source Technology Center is launching a new initiative... a podcast. Through their new show Open-Source Voices they will be focusing upon their many open-source software projects and other efforts they are engaged in through the OTC. On their premiere episode happens to be Kelly Hammond (Software Engineering Director) and your's truly talking about the work Intel's been doing on Linux distribution development via Clear Linux...

It has been expected that Vega 20 would feature XGMI as a high-speed GPU interconnect alternative to PCI Express and that was firmed up today thanks to a new set of AMDGPU Linux driver patches...

Greg Kroah-Hartman has rolled out a batch of stable kernel updates today including Linux 3.18.121, 4.4.154, 4.9.125, 4.14.68, and 4.18.6...

GDB 8.2 is out today as the latest feature update for this GNU source-level debugger for many languages, architectures, and operating systems...

There's been AMD Radeon code in the works for the GCC compiler as a new back-end going back years but never really seems to takeoff in comparison to the AMD support on LLVM. SUSE formerly worked on a lot of Radeon + GCC code for GPU offloading while more recent Code Sourcery has been working on a new AMD GCN back-end. The newest AMD GCN code was posted today for the GNU Compiler Collection...

With the start of a new month comes fresh benchmarks of some of the leading rolling-release Linux distributions. For kicking off September are benchmarks of the Arch-based Antergos, Intel's Clear Linux, and openSUSE Tumbleweed when testing on four distinctly different systems.

Continuing on from the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 expectations on Linux shared earlier this week, here's a list of ten reasons why Linux gamers might want to pass on these soon-to-launch graphics cards from NVIDIA...

While yesterday we looked at the Renegade ROK-RK3328-CC Libre Computer Board, they already have the successor well in the works. The Renegade was interesting as for just dollars more than the Raspberry Pi it offers better performance, Gigabit Ethernet makes the networking potential a lot more than the slow Ethernet on the Pi, there is USB 3.0 connectivity, and its using DDR4 memory, among other technical advantages. But the new Renegade Elite even puts that to shame...

With GNOME 3.30 releasing today, the GNOME release team has already finalized the release schedule for the next development cycle...

GNOME 3.30 is releasing today as the newest feature release for this open-source desktop environment on its usual six-month release cadence...

Merged today into systemd is basic keydev support for cryptsetup-generator to allow unlocking an encrypted drive by using a key file that is stored on an external drive...

MoltenVK continues getting better for offering Vulkan graphics/compute support on macOS by leveraging it on top of Apple's Metal drivers...

The folks at the Linux-friendly CompuLab hardware vendor have introduced WILD, the first WiFi RTT access point to allow for WiFi indoor location detection/tracking with supported Android 9 smartphones. CompuLab WILD is able to deliver under 0.5 meter accuracy...

While Firefox is hitting version 62 this week, Google has introduced Chrome 69 as the newest version of their cross-platform web-browser that recently celebrated its tenth birthday...

While Mozilla isn't expected to officially announce Firefox 62.0 until tomorrow, as usual the binaries are available for wanting this web browser update right now...

We knew it was pretty much inevitable, but Purism's embargo has just expired confirming the news that the Librem 5 smartphone will not be released in January as originally planned...

While Google got the NSA-developed Speck into the Linux kernel on the basis of wanting to use Speck for file-system encryption on very low-end Android (Go) devices, last month they decided to abandon those plans and instead work out a new "HPolyC" algorithm for use on these bottom-tier devices due to all the concerns over Speck potentially being back-doored by the US National Security Agency...

The folks from LoverPi.com have sent out some of their newest ARM SBCs. What we're taking a look and benchmarking first is the Libre Computer Board ROC-RK3328-CC. Pricing on this board, which was developed between the Libre Computer Project and Firefly, starts at $35 USD with 1GB of DDR4 but at $80 USD a 4GB version can be acquired. This quad-core 64-bit ARM board has modern features like Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0, and other interfaces over what is found with current generation Raspberry Pi hardware.

One of the few longtime independent contributors to the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver, Ilia Mirkin, sent out a set of patches today working on basic HDMI 2.0 functionality for this Linux DRM driver...

Peter Hutterer of Red Hat today announced the third and expected final release candidate of the long-baking libinput 1.12 cycle...

Patches currently under review for the Linux kernel's "Sun4i" Direct Rendering Manager driver provide support for the Display Engine 3.0 hardware found on newer Allwinner SoCs and most notably HDMI 2.0a support...

With many of our other initially planned Threadripper 2 Linux benchmarks out of the way, recently I carried out a compiler benchmarking comparison on the Zen+ Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX between GCC and Clang.

Besides the Linux "k10temp" AMD CPU temperature reporting driver recently seeing support for Threadripper 2 temperature monitoring, much older Excavator (Bulldozer 4th Gen) processors will now see working CPU temperature reporting for select models...

A compiler engineer working for Loongson Technology Co is looking to land a number of improvements to these newer MIPS64 processors into the mainline GCC code-base...

While NetBSD 8.0 was released in July with new features like initial USB 3.0 support and UEFI boot-loader support for x86 64-bit hardware, for those not wanting to jump to 8.0 from the 7 series can now enjoy NetBSD 7.2...

One of the exciting events to look forward to this month is the actual launch of the GeForce RTX 2080 series with these graphics cards slated to begin shipping on 20 September. While NVIDIA has talked up the RTX 2080 series performance it has exclusively been under Windows. NVIDIA hasn't provided any official comments about the RTX 2080 series on Linux, but here is my pre-launch analysis and commentary...

Alyssa Rosenzweig and others working on the "Panfrost" out-of-tree Gallium3D driver for ARM Mali graphics hardware have now succeeded in bringing up the newer ARM Mali T860 graphics processor on this open-source driver...

Released on Friday was Wine 3.15 while available now is the newest Wine-Staging release that re-bases against this upstream version of Wine to run Windows programs/games on Linux while adding close to 900 patches on top for various testing/experimental functionality...

Valve's latest monthly Steam Survey results are in for August 2018...

The Vega 20 open-source driver enablement march continues with Bas Nieuwenhuizen, the RADV independent Radeon Vulkan driver co-founder, introducing an initial patch series this weekend adding support for the unreleased graphics processor...

With GNOME 3.30 due to be released this week, GNOME-Tweaks 3.30 has been released as being ready to tweak this latest flagship open-source desktop environment...

One week past the merge window of Linux 4.19 and the 4.19-rc1 release to close that off, Linux 4.19-rc2 is now available for testing...

Thomas Gleixner has submitted a batch of x86 fixes today to the Linux 4.19 kernel, which include several changes around the speculative execution vulnerability mitigations...

Those of you dealing with files stored on Samba shares while accessing them from the KDE desktop will soon see a variety of improvements to that experience...

DXVK is out with a new release, the Direct3D 10/11 to Vulkan API translation layer used by a growing number of Wine gamers and now by Steam Play's Proton with Valve funding the developer behind this open-source project...

While Red Hat and several other Linux vendors have either deprecated Btrfs support or at least not embraced it like they originally talked up this "next-gen file-system" years ago, SUSE has continued supporting Btrfs both with openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise...

In addition to Google's Summer of Code recently having wrapped up, so have the Outreachy projects that also engaged in various open-source activities over the summer months...

In addition to the embedded Linux experts at Bootlin having worked on the Allwinner VPU open-source support this summer they have also been developing an Amlogic video decode driver for the Linux kernel...

Back in April was a discussion about dropping MPX support from the Linux kernel but no action taken. Now though an Intel developer is preparing to see this Memory Protection Extensions functionality removed from the mainline Linux kernel...

Georgia Tech tends to be home to a lot of interesting open-source projects and incubating long-term FLOSS/Linux developers. This university's latest interesting open-source project is "ExtFUSE" for making user-space FUSE file-systems faster by making use of the in-kernel eBPF framework...

The AMD developers responsible for maintaining the "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver that shares common code with their Windows driver have done another weekly code push of their newest bits...

While there is already Cannonlake and Icelake support within Intel's Mesa drivers, the Amberlake support has just been merged...