Phoronix

If you have held off on switching over to NVMe solid-state storage due to the associated costs, times are certainly changing. This week Intel introduced their 660p SSD series that yields 512GB of NVMe storage for $99 USD or 1TB for $200 USD.

At the end of July I outlined some of the changes queued for Linux 4.19 while since then several more notable additions have become aligned for this next kernel cycle following the one week delay of Linux 4.18...

Unigine, the beautiful and Linux-friendly engine for games as well as VR and industrial training/simulation applications, has outed their latest engine update...

The Solus Project has shared some of the work they've been engaged in this summer with their Linux distribution as well as their GTK3-based Budgie Desktop Environment...

Sam Lantinga of Valve has contributed better support for some popular game controllers to the SDL2 library...

Windows Subsystem for Linux, a.k.a. WSL or "Bash for Windows", has been an interesting creature out of Microsoft for running Linux binaries on Windows 10 and more recently Windows Server. In our benchmarks WSL has generally been quite performant but the area where it struggles is I/O / storage performance...

If you have already pre-ordered your AMD Threadripper 2990WX processor or just planning to be an early customer of that high-end desktop processor or the Threadripper 2950X, you may be wondering about Linux requirements from these new high-end AMD CPU offerings. Here's the gist of the Linux support state of AMD Zen+ CPUs for those wanting to get ready for Threadripper 2...

When it came to settling on the latest-generation Dell XPS 13 as my main production workhorse with Fedora Workstation 28, besides the laptop's own traits like its build quality, specs relative to price, and other factors, another important requirement was the ability to drive two 4K displays when at my desk. The Dell XPS 13 has no issue driving dual 4K screens via the Dell Thunderbolt TB16 dock.

One of the interesting GNU projects that doesn't receive as much attention as others is GNU Ring that is a decentralized communication platform vying to be like Skype and WhatsApp but for open-source and privacy-minded users. The related Ring-KDE project put out their version 3.0 release that is a significant rewrite to this KDE/Qt interface to Ring...

The latest high profile open-source project bitten by some fresh CVE security vulnerabilities is the PostgreSQL database server...

Julia, the LLVM-based, speed-focused, dynamic and optional typing, full-featured programming language focused on numerical computing has reached the version 1.0 milestone...

DXVK has been doing great with its Direct3D 11 support mapped to Vulkan and running a variety of games at performant speeds under Wine while now patches have emerged that would add Direct3D 9 support too...

Marek Olšák has continued his busy work on the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver by implementing more extensions and adjusting various limits/constants to match the behavior of their proprietary driver...

While DXVK is capable of running a great deal of Direct3D 11 games via Vulkan within Wine, a number of games have required various workarounds for either getting the game to properly work in the first place or to run efficiently. Those per-game settings are now being punted off into a per-game configuration system...

OpenSUSE's Kubic project that has been home to their container-related technologies as well as the atomicly-updated openSUSE "MicroOS" will be making some changes...

Shortly after writing about the Sound Blaster Recon3D finally getting Linux support yesterday, a Phoronix reader pointed out another frustrating Linux sound problem with a resolution on its way to the mainline Linux kernel...

It's not nearly as far along as DXVK that is allowing D3D11-over-Vulkan and already running great numbers of games in a performant manner under Wine, but the VK9 project for implementing Direct3D 9 over Vulkan has now hit its twenty-seventh milestone...

One week after branching Mesa 18.2 and issuing the first release candidate, the second weekly RC is now available for testing...

It looks like Valve could be prepping to finally ship a 64-bit Steam client, possibly coinciding with their long talked about Steam UI/UX overhaul...

The GNOME Software center for installing and updating of programs will begin automatically installing updates with the upcoming GNOME 3.30 release albeit limited to sandboxed Flatpak programs...

Creative Labs launched the Recon3D sound card the better part of a decade ago and finally patches have emerged providing for better Linux driver support...

The x86 platform drivers area of the Linux kernel is ready for the 4.19 kernel cycle to get underway next week...

AMD has released their Radeon Pro 18.Q3 enterprise driver update, including for supported Linux distributions, as their QA-tested professional-grade driver update for the quarter...

Back in June Toshiba introduced the RC100 NVMe solid-state drive as a new low-end offering. The RC100 is now a bit blindsided by Intel's just-launched 660p SSD that delivers incredible storage capacities per dollar, and I'll have some Intel 660p Linux benchmarks in a few days, but for those curious about the RC100 here are some Ubuntu Linux benchmark results for this low-cost NVMe SSD.

Google Summer of Code 2018 is quickly reaching an end. We'll be featuring some of the interesting and successful work accomplished this summer by these students engaging in hundreds of different open-source projects. One of the open-source projects slotted with a lot of participants this year was KDE...

AMD's Huang Rui and Christian Konig are working on LRU bulk move functionality that can yield performance improvements for Vulkan and OpenCL workloads...

Fans of KDE Neon relying upon this OS/package-set for experiencing the latest and greatest KDE innovations can now enjoy it paired with an Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" base...

LibreOffice 6.1 will officially be hitting the web in a short time as the latest major feature release to this newest cross-platform, open-source office suite...

While the EXT_gpu_shader4 extension was written for the OpenGL 2.0 days a decade ago when the GeForce 8 series was NVIDIA's flagship products, AMD's Marek Olšák is now adding support for this extension to the Gallium3D drivers...

Fedora's Engineering and Steering Committee is mulling over the idea of dropping software packages from the distribution that have notoriously bad security track records...

Taking shape on a branched version of the Linux kernel is the initial "IGC" driver providing support for Intel 2.5G Ethernet controllers...

While Chrome 69 was released last week, today Google has shipped their latest "dev" release of Chrome 70 for interested testers...

NVIDIA has just published their latest Vulkan beta driver release for Windows and Linux...

While Mir has long been focused on its Snap support, now available via the Snap Store is offering EGMDE...

As the first point release to X.Org Server 1.20 that debuted in May, xorg-server 1.20.1 is available today with dozens of fixes...

The latest high profile Linux kernel vulnerability has been dubbed "SegmentSmack" and could result in a remote denial of service attack...

Google developers spearheading the Dart programming language that is intended for general purpose programming, including web applications and can be trans-piled to JavaScript, have issued their second major stable release...

Following a one week delay, the Linux 4.18 kernel is set to be released this coming weekend. In case you forgot about the new features and improvements since the Linux 4.18 cycle kicked off back in June, here's a look back at some of the most prominent additions for this latest kernel version...

Now that Google will not be using the Speck crypto code for disk encryption on low-end Android devices but instead developing "HPolyC" as outlined in the aforelinked article, a plea has already been submitted to remove the current Speck code from the mainline Linux kernel...

Following last week's PHP 7.3 beta release, which also marks the feature freeze for this next PHP7 update, I've been running some performance benchmarks on a couple different Linux systems...

While the sources have been tagged in Git for several days now, the binaries are now available too with LLVM 7.0 RC1 now officially being announced...

Another security hardening measure coming to the Linux kernel is STACKLEAK...

While GNOME Software has long offered integration with Fwupd for offering firmware upgrades on supported devices, KDE Discover has now received similar functionality...

While the controversial Speck crypto support was added to Linux 4.17 and with Linux 4.18 it's being exposed via fscrypt for a disk encryption option, which Google intended to be used on low-end "Android Go" devices that don't have CPUs with capable native encryption extensions, instead Google is backtracking...

Filament is a physically-based rendering engine that has now been open-sourced by Google for Android, Linux, macOS, and Windows systems...

The i3-inspired Sway Wayland compositor had already introduced many features ahead of Sway 1.0 while with today's fifth alpha release are yet more new features to advertise...

Google has formally unveiled "Android P" today as Android 9.0 "Pie" in continuing the trend of Android codenames being named after tasty desserts...

One of the interesting patch series in the works is the "PSI" work by Johannes Weiner of Facebook...

GraphicsFuzz is the company that started out via university research into fuzzing GPU drivers and finding many graphics driver bugs along the way. After forming the company GraphicsFuzz, the researchers took to fuzzing from the web browser with WebGL. That company has now been acquired by Google...

AMD's Threadripper 2990WX 32-core / 64-thread processor is real and launching next week. At the end of July we were in Maranello, Italy for AMD's Threadripper "2nd Gen" Tech Day, and while there have been leaks in recent days/weeks, today the embargo expires for being able to talk about this high-end desktop platform update.