Phoronix

Ubuntu's Mir display server that has been chasing Wayland support and earlier this year introduced EGMDE as the example Mir desktop environment has picked up some extra functionality on its "edge" channel...

One of the features sadly not making it into the in-development Linux 4.19 kernel is the support for Intel's SGX -- the Software Guard Extensions...

AMD's GPUOpen group has released their first beta of the Vulkan Memory Allocator 2.1 release after "many months of development" and as such comes with many new features...

It has been a while since last delivering some OpenCL GPU compute benchmarks across several different graphics cards on the latest Linux drivers, so here is a fresh look...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has signed off on plans to drop packages with consistently bad security records...

After being in alpha since March, today the first beta of the upcoming Kodi 18 "Leia" release is now available for your open-source HTPC needs...

With all of the confusion last week over Intel's short-lived CPU microcode license change that forbid benchmarking only for them to change it a short time later -- to a much nicer license in that the microcode files can be easily redistributed and don't curtail it in other manners (and also re-licensing their FSP too), here are some performance benchmarks when trying out this latest Intel microcode on Linux.

NVIDIA has today shipped the 390.87 Linux driver as their latest update to the 390 "long-lived" driver series..

Mes is the newest project under the GNU umbrella and this package is intended to help bootstrap GNU/Linux distributions like GuixSD...

X.Org/X11 veteran Keith Packard has started working on better support for independent window scaling with the X.Org stack that would also allow for input handling with the scaled windows...

AMD used VMworld 2018 to announce the Radeon Pro V340 graphics card, which features two Vega GPUs...

The newest OpenGL extension being sought for inclusion into the graphics API's registry is the NV_memory_attachment...

Independent Linux kernel hacker Con Kolivas has announced his 4.18-ck1 kernel as well as the latest release of his MuQSS scheduler...

As expected, Linus Torvalds has closed the merge window for 4.19 and released Linux 4.19-rc1...

For those still having the desire to run Ubuntu on mobile devices, the UBports community today shipped their Ubuntu Touch OTA-4 release that migrates their base system from Ubuntu 15.04 to 16.04...

The Linux 4.19-rc1 kernel is expected to be released today and with that marks the end of feature development on this next kernel version. Here is a look at the new and improved features to be found in Linux 4.19.

KDE developers remain on their spree of various usability enhancements and polishing. KDE contributor Nate Graham also continues doing a great job summarizing these enhancements on a weekly basis...

DRM is causing a lot of vibrant discussions this week on the FreeBSD mailing list... And no, it's not even Digital Rights Management but rather colorful commentary about their Direct Rendering Manager code and plans for FreeBSD 12...

Earlier this year MIPS rolled out the I7200 processor core built on the new "nanoMIPS" architecture. The open-source enablement of this new CPU ISA continues to settle down while the latest accomplishment is support for this new architecture in QEMU...

Following Friday's release of Go 1.11, a Phoronix reader pointed out a new open-source Internet router software package written entirely in Go...

Systemd will now resort to using Intel's RdRand hardware random number generator directly if the Linux kernel is unable to provide the init system with sufficient entropy...

Longtime Red Hat developer Jerome Glisse has published his latest patches concerning the Heterogeneous Memory Management support, a.k.a. HMM...

The popular Solus Linux distribution has experienced a busy week of updates but more changes are on the way to this desktop-focused OS...

With many of the FreeDesktop.org projects having already transitioned from their CGit and hodgepodge of services over to Gitlab, the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) trees appear to be up next...

Something I have seen asked in our forums and elsewhere -- most recently on the kernel mailing list -- is whether there is a single kernel option that can be used for disabling all of the Spectre/Meltdown workarounds and any other performance-hurting CPU vulnerability workarounds...

Jason Donenfeld who has now spent years working on WireGuard as an in-kernel, secure network tunnel sent out a second version of his kernel patches on Friday...

IBM developers on Friday posted their initial Linux kernel patches for enabling Secure Virtual Machine (SVM) support with POWER hardware...

There's been a number of recent Linux/open-source conferences but more are right on the horizon, including some with video streams for those interested...

LLVM release manager Hans Wennborg tagged the second release candidate this week of LLVM and its associated sub-projects like Clang...

Just in time for the weekend Linux gamers, Valve has made available a Proton beta update channel for testing out the latest enhancements for their fork of Wine that also bundles in DXVK for accelerated D3D11-over-Vulkan and other performance/compatibility enhancements to optimize the Linux gaming experience...

Version 1.11 of the Go programming language is out this Friday as the newest feature update...

Current Wayland/Weston release manager Derek Foreman of Samsung OSG today announced the release of Wayland 1.16 as well as the Weston 5.0 reference compositor...

It's a busy week for Linux gaming with the Wine/Proton-based Steam Play from Valve, continued graphics driver improvements, and some activity in the Feral camp...

Ubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish" is now under a feature freeze to focus on bug-fixing ahead of the October debut of this next Ubuntu Linux installment...

Mesa 18.1.7 ships with the last two weeks worth of fixes in the Mesa stable space. But overall this isn't nearly as big as past Mesa 18.1 point releases. Mesa 18.1.7 has some minor fixes to R600 Gallium3D, Intel i965, RADV Vulkan driver fixes, the Doom workaround has been back-ported to RADV, and a variety of other fixes.'..

Last week I offered a look at the Btrfs RAID performance on 4 x Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSDs housed within the interesting MSI XPANDER-AERO. In this article are some EXT4 and XFS file-system benchmark results on the four-drive SSD RAID array by making use of the Linux MD RAID infrastructure compared to the previous Btrfs native-RAID benchmarks. Tests were done on the Linux 4.18 kernel to provide the latest stable look at the XFS/EXT4 MD RAID performance with these four powerful Samsung 970 EVO 250GB NVMe solid-state drives.

Valve open-source Linux GPU driver developer Timothy Arceri has spent a lot of time in recent months improving the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver's OpenGL compatibility profile support. Now there are patches taking it up to par with the core profile context support...

Making the Phoronix Test Suite even easier to use for container benchmarking, on Docker Hub now is the phoronix/pts image for easily carrying out Docker tests with a fully-standardized, performance-optimized user-space stack with many of the popular test profiles pre-seeded on the disk and is ready to begin benchmarking out-of-the-box.

AMD developers have done their weekly code drop to their official open-source Linux Vulkan driver code. This week there are fixes while most interesting is initial support for the yet-to-launch Vega 12 graphics processor...

There's some good news beyond Intel's CPU microcode re-licensing to clear up the confusion among users and developers this week: Intel is also re-licensing their FSP binaries to this same shorter and much more concise license...

Prolific Mesa contributor Marek Olšák has landed support for more OpenGL / OpenGL ES extensions into the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

The Magic Keyboard that was introduced by Apple in 2015 is seeing improved Linux support with a new kernel patch that's pending...

While OpenRISC has been around longer than RISC-V as an open-source processor ISA, with not having as many commercial stakeholders involved, it hasn't been off to the races as quickly, but it's still marching to the beat of its own drum...

Over the past day online there has been lots of controversy following some high-profile sites reporting about Intel's "un-friendly microcode license update" and its "ban on benchmarking", among other catch phrases. It's now been officially cleared up by Intel with a simpler license that doesn't forbid benchmarking, allows distribution vendors to re-distributed these binary files to their users, and doesn't have any other nastiness integrated into the legal text...

Last week AMD released the AMDGPU-PRO 18.30 hybrid driver featuring their latest optional proprietary Linux driver components as well as the "all-open" driver stack option. Here are some initial benchmarks of that driver stack compared to what's shipped by default in Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS as well as the latest upstream Mesa/AMDGPU support.

The plans talked about in early July for merging the AMDKFD driver into the AMDGPU DRM driver are moving ahead and out today are the initial patches working towards this merger...

Codeplay, the company behind tools like clspv for running OpenCL C code on Vulkan, today released ComputeCpp 1.0...

Back in March was the discussion about Ubuntu 18.10 considering an LZ4-compressed kernel image (initamfs) by default while now action has been taken on this support and coming up with a new default...

While FBDEV has been on its last leg for years with some calling for its deprecation and encouraging instead DRM/KMS drivers rather than (mostly embedded vendors) focusing on FBDEV frame-buffer drivers, with Linux 4.19 the FBDEV subsystem is bringing a useful addition to the kernel...

The past two weeks I have been delivering a great deal of AMD Threadripper 2990WX benchmarks on Linux as well as some against Windows and Windows Server. But recently I got around to trying out some of the BSD operating systems on this 32-core / 64-thread processor to see how they would run and to see whether they would have similar scaling issues or not like we've seen on the Windows side against Linux. In this article are FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD benchmarks with the X399 + 2990WX compared to a few Linux distributions.