Phoronix

We've known libinput 1.12 is going to be a significant release and that's still holding true in looking at the second release candidate for this Wayland/X.Org input handling library...

Details are still light but a new vulnerability is coming out called the L1 Terminal Fault. It's been described as a "train-wreck" and is another big deal in the security space as the latest speculative side-channel attack vector...

"The Speck [Spectre slang, not to be confused with the controversial NSA algo] brigade sadly provides yet another large set of patches destroying the perfomance which we carefully built and preserved," began the latest x86/pti pull request by kernel maintainer Thomas Gleixner...

An Intel engineer has published the "Intel FPGA Video and Image Processing Suite" DRM driver today for Linux. This Direct Rendering Manager is intended for use with their Arria 10 FPGA system when combined with Intel DisplayPort IP...

SUSE's Takashi Iwai sent in the pull request this morning of the sound subsystem updates for the Linux 4.19 kernel and it includes a lot of new hardware support and other improvements for Linux's audio capabilities...

Linus Torvalds has merged a rather significant set of patches for improving the CIFS/SMB3 support in the mainline kernel...

For helping out the RADV Vulkan driver in cases where no shader cache is available, this open-source Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver now supports the on-demand compilation of built-in shaders...

The pull requests updating the XFS and EXT4 file-system driver code have been sent in for the recently started Linux 4.19 kernel merge window...

NVIDIA is capitalizing upon SIGGRAPH 2018 as now in addition to launching the Quadro RTX GPUs and open-sourcing the MDL SDK they have announced their work on CUDA 10...

The first alpha release of FreeBSD 12.0 was quietly uploaded a few days ago to the project's download servers as the first step to shipping this next major update to the FreeBSD operating system...

As expected, Linux 4.19 is getting STACKLEAK as a GCC plug-in for the Linux kernel that will fend off various form of stack attacks...

In addition to announcing the Turing-based Quadro RTX GPUs with GDDR6 memory, NVIDIA used SIGGRAPH 2018 to announce their open-sourcing of the MDL SDK...

Mesa 18.1.6 is now available as the latest point release for Mesa 18.1 as the Q2'2018 release of this collection of open-source graphics drivers/infrastructure...

This morning AMD announced the Vega-based Radeon Pro WX 8200 graphics card as the "best workstation GPU under $1,000 USD" while tonight NVIDIA is trying to steal the thunder by announcing the Quadro RTX series as the "world's first ray-tracing GPU" that is also based on their new Turing architecture...

Matthew Wilcox who most recently has been employed by Microsoft is looking to get the new XArray data structure added to the Linux 4.19 kernel...

Complementing the extensive Linux benchmarks done earlier today of the AMD Threadripper 2990WX in our review (as well as on the Threadripper 2950X), in this article are our first Windows 10 vs. Linux benchmarks of this 32-core / 64-thread $1799 USD processor. Tests were done from Microsoft Windows 10 against Clear Linux, Ubuntu 18.04, the Arch-based Antergos 18.7-Rolling, and openSUSE Tumbleweed.

DaVinci Resolve 15 has been released by Blackmagic Design as the company's professional-grade video editing, visual effects, motion graphics, and audio post-production software...

David Sterba of SUSE sent in the Btrfs file-system updates today for the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window...

The Blender 3D modeling software is facing a slight set-back in their release schedule for the big Blender 2.80 release, but it's moving along and they intend to have it ready by early next year...

The Khronos Group has released Vulkan 1.1.83 as a routine maintenance update to the Vulkan 1.1 graphics/compute API to coincide with the start of ACM SIGGRAPH 2018 in Vancouver...

Separate from the "DXUP" initiative, the popular DXVK project for accelerating Direct3D 11 atop Vulkan now has support itself for Direct3D 10...

Whether you are compiling a lot of code, rendering models with Blender, or running various scientific workloads with OpenMP or MPI, the AMD Threadripper 2990WX is capable of delivering immersive Linux performance with its 32-cores and 64 total threads. While coming in at $1800 USD, the AMD Threadripper 2990WX can deliver better performance than the more expensive Intel Core i9 7980XE. Beyond being mesmerized about the performance today with this high-end desktop/workstation processor with the many thread-happy Linux workloads we encounter daily, this 32-core Zen+ processor has us even more eager to see AMD's next-generation Zen2-based EPYC CPUs next year.

The 32-core / 64-thread AMD Threadripper 2990WX carries a 250 Watt TDP rating, thus the cooling performance is quite important especially if you don't want to hit any thermal throttling with this $1799 USD processor. Fortunately, the 2990WX doesn't require water cooling but actually can work quite well with high-end air heatsinks too. For adding some perspective on the cooling requirements of the Threadripper 2990WX, here are benchmarks of five heatsinks and two all-in-one water cooling systems.

The embargo has expired now for talking about Threadripper 2 performance figures... First up are our initial Threadripper 2950X Linux benchmarks. In this article are the most interesting metrics for this 16-core / 32-thread processor while in the just-published AMD Threadripper 2990WX Linux Benchmarks are a lot more figures complemented by the 2950X and other CPUs plus power consumption numbers, etc. This article is most useful if specifically focused on the performance of the Threadripper 2950X that comes in at $899 USD.

It's a busy week folks as besides the AMD Threadripper 2 performance embargo expiring, it is also SIGGRAPH 2018 week in Vancouver and as well the start of the Linux 4.19 kernel cycle... No longer under wraps are the Khronos announcements from this annual graphics conference. Continue reading to learn about the latest happenings for the various Khronos industry-standard APIs and efforts like Vulkan and OpenCL-Next.

The Wine project once again participated in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) for furthering their open-source agenda of better support for Windows programs on Linux and other operating systems...

The IBM System/390 "s390" architecture code has seen a number of improvements for Linux 4.19...

As expected, the CPU temperature monitoring support within the "k10temp" hwmon driver has seen the patches sent in today to be updated for the AMD Threadripper 2900 series CPU support. These patches are going into the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window but slated to be back-ported to the currently supported stable kernel series...

Hot off the release of the upstream Linux 4.18 kernel, the GNU folks have released GNU Linux-libre 4.18-gnu that is their deblobbed version that strips out any "non-free" device driver support, removes the ability to load binary-only kernel modules and not being able to load firmware blobs either...

It's SIGGRAPH week and AMD has used this annual graphics conference to announce the Radeon Pro WX 8200, which they are saying is able to offer the best workstation graphics card performance in the sub-$1,000 USD category...

Following the one week setback, the Linux 4.18 kernel is now officially available just a little more than two months since the cycle officially began...

If you have been less than satisfied with the user-interface of the Pitivi non-linear open-source video editor for Linux, you may want to try out their next release...

Hardware support improvements coming for Linux 4.19 aren't limited to the x86 space but a lot of new ARM hardware support is also being introduced in this imminent kernel cycle...

Just over one month away is XDC2018 as the annual X.Org Developers' Conference where a variety of X.Org, Wayland, Mesa, Vulkan, and OpenGL talks will take place. This year's schedule is particularly packed and full of interesting information...

The Linux 4.19 kernel updates for the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) should bring much faster performance for multi-threaded sequential reads -- as much as multiple times faster...

With KDE Plasma 5 right now it turns out that if you have relied upon CPU-based software rendering, when hitting Plasma's lock-screen it would actually go CPU-wild -- as far as maxing out the CPU to 100% utilization, thereby consuming a lot of power and generating excess heat. That will be fixed for KDE Plasma 5.14.0...

For those weekend Linux gamers, DXVK 0.65 is available today as the newest feature update to this library for running Direct3D 11 games under Wine via Vulkan...

Back in Linux 4.16 the SoundWire subsystem was added to the staging area as the MIPI standard for a low-power, two-wire sound bus that can support multiple audio streams and primarily utilized by small audio peripherals like IoT and mobile devices. With the next Linux kernel cycle, the SoundWire support is being improved upon...

Patches have been revised for the Linux kernel to support the initial Hygon Dhyana server CPUs that are the licensed AMD Family 17h "Zen" technology, basically the EPYC server CPUs for the Chinese market...

The latest monthly update to the KDE Frameworks is now available that complement the offerings of the Qt5 tool-kit...

While a bit late, Freedreno lead developer Rob Clark is hoping to see the Qualcomm Adreno 600 series bring-up happen for the Linux 4.19 kernel cycle...

Flatpak now has access to an updated FreeDesktop SDK runtime that is built on their new BuildStream build system rather than Yocto and has other improvements...

Derek Foreman of Samsung's Open-Source Group put out the release candidates on Friday for the upcoming Wayland 1.16 release as well as the Weston 5.0 reference compositor...

While Mesa 18.2 is baking for release later this month, Mesa 18.1 remains the currently supported stable series. Final release preparations are underway for Mesa 18.1.6 as the latest bi-weekly point release...

Canonical developers continue working on advancing the Mir display server's support for Wayland...

While the Microsoft Xbox One S Controller has been supported under Linux for a while now, its rumble mode has not been supported by the mainline Linux kernel. That's now in the process of changing with the upstreaming of up until now out-of-tree patches...

Out today is a new version of IWD, the Intel-developed wireless daemon for Linux systems. IWD v0.6 is the latest version which is actually a quick follow-up release to address bugs from IWD v0.5 issued this morning...

The latest Linux kernel patch is for supporting ECC error detection via the Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) code with AMD's Great Horned Owl...

The Rust programming language's "GFX-RS" initiative that is backed by Mozilla continues working on exposing a universal "Vulkan-like" graphics API within Rust that in turn would have back-ends for Vulkan, OpenGL, Metal, and Direct3D 11/12 in order to reach all major platforms. Early benchmark results are quite promising for GFX-RS...

It's been a while since having any advancements to report on the live kernel patching front for being able to deploy primarily Linux kernel security fixes without having to reboot the system. There is some new progress on that front to report on now and that is the 64-bit ARM (ARM64/AArch64) support getting squared away...