Phoronix

For those of you that have been waiting for a big update to the Thunderbird mail/RSS client, Thunderbird 60.0 is now available with plenty of changes...

SUSE developer Martin Liška has published a patch wiring in support for AMD PMU events on the AMD Family 17h "Zen" processors...

Lenovo is making it easier for their customers running Linux to update their firmware now on ThinkPad, ThinkStation, and ThinkCenter hardware...

Just over one month since crossing 32 million test/suite downloads, our OpenBenchmarking.org cloud-based component to the Phoronix Test Suite has now crossed 33 million test profile and test suite downloads...

Last Sunday Linus Torvalds released 4.18-rc7 and expected that to be the last release candidate followed by the stable debut one week later, which would have been today. But by Tuesday this past week he had already decided he would need to delay the release over recent notable regressions and an uptick in merge activity. As a result, out today is Linux 4.18-rc8...

The latest Linux wireless driver code was sent in today for queueing in the net-next tree ahead of the Linux 4.19 kernel...

Netrunner, one of the Linux distributions delivering a great KDE Plasma desktop experience, is out today with version 2018.08 that ships several enhancements on top of the very latest KDE packages...

A few days ago we wrote about GLOVE being open-sourced as OpenGL ES over Vulkan and we were then pointed out to another project: VKGL...

At this past week's DebConf18 Debian conference was an update on running Debian GNU/Linux on various mobile / ultra-portable devices...

With the OpenChrome DRM/KMS driver for vintage VIA x86 graphics likely to be mainlined in its current code state, the sole developer left working on this driver is going to next rewrite the TTM/GEM memory management code that he also hopes will help in his new ATI RAGE 128 driver initiative...

Last month AMD's Marek Olšák sent out a new extension for the OpenGL registry, AMD_framebuffer_multisample_advanced, and with the latest Mesa patches he has published this week the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver wires in support for this GL extension...

Linux's Pstore "persistent store" functionality, which is most often used for preserving kernel panics and related information across reboots when the system runs into a show-stopping problem, will soon be supporting Zstd compression for storing greater amounts of data...

X.Org Server 1.20 was released back in May while now the "server-1.20-branch" was created at last to allow for X.Org Server 1.21 development to happen on master while letting the point releases to be worked out on the branched code...

Linux kernel patches are in the works for LoRa for various chipsets/modules and the new networking subsystem itself along with a new socket interface. LoRa allows for long-range, low-power wireless with minimal infrastructure...

With no Wine 3.14 release having shipped on their usual bi-weekly release cadence due to summer holidays, the Wine-Staging crew has opted to create a v3.13.1 release to ship their latest testing/experimental patches in the absence of a new Wine upstream Wine development release...

If by chance you happen to have an ASUS P8H61-M LX motherboard from the Sandy/Ivy Bridge days or are able to locate one of the boards through used/refurbished channels, this motherboard can now be freed down to the BIOS with Coreboot...

It's been a while since having anything to report on ADriConf but fortunately this graphical utility for configuring some open-source Linux graphics driver features is progressing...

Another weekly code drop has occurred for the "AMDVLK" open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan Linux driver with its XGL/PAL/LLPC...

Emil Velikov's latest Mesa work is on implementing support for EGL Device extensions for enumerating and using EGLDevices...

For the past number of months there's been Adreno A600 series support coming together within the MSM DRM kernel driver in large part thanks to Qualcomm / Code Aurora contributing code themselves. Quietly coming together as well is the A6xx Gallium3D support for allowing OpenGL acceleration...

Last month Wine introduced support for Vulkan-using Windows programs on macOS via the MoltenVK library for mapping Vulkan API calls to the Apple Metal API. Now the next logical step is available in patch form: getting VKD3D supported on macOS for allowing Direct3D 12 to begin working on Mac for Windows games/applications...

For those making use of DXVK to enjoy greater performance of Direct3D 11 games under Wine thanks to this D3D11-to-Vulkan translation layer, DXVK 0.64 is now available as the latest update...

While the NVIDIA 396 Linux driver series should soon be succeeded by a new driver branch, for now the NVIDIA 396.51 Linux driver was outed today as the latest and greatest driver release...

Purism has shared another routine status update on their software and hardware efforts around the Librem 5 smartphone efforts...

Xenko, a promising game engine that was one of the early adopters of Vulkan and does support Linux, is now open-source and freely available...

AutoDeb is a long-standing effort to try to automate the creation of Debian packages as much as possible for trying to determine necessary dependencies of a program, will configure/build the program for Autotools-based projects, and end up generating a Debian binary package. AutoDeb was worked on as part of this year's Google Summer of Code for automatic Debian packaging...

After being available for the past few months in patch form, ARM's work on "-mtrack-speculation" to provide speculation tracking is now within the mainline GCC 9.0 compiler code-base...

It looks like that by the time Debian 10.0 "Buster" rolls about in roughly one year, the UEFI SecureBoot support should be in good shape...

Besides the Linux 4.19 kernel slated to introduce initial SpectreRSB protection, this next kernel version should also introduce support for Enhanced IBRS as a better means of Spectre Variant Two mitigation to be supported by future Intel CPUs...

Intel has landed initial support for Coreboot on their current-generation Coffeelake processors...

While the WireGuard secure VPN tunnel was just sent out this week for review as the first formal step towards getting it mainlined in the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds is already looking forward to it...

With development wrapping up soon on the Linux 4.18 kernel (although it looks like the official release will likely be delayed one week), I've been carrying out some fresh benchmarks of this near-final kernel in the latest Linux Git state on various Intel and AMD desktop CPUs -- mostly the higher-end desktop systems. Here are those 100+ benchmark results across six different systems...

Given our fascination with Intel's Clear Linux performance in the plethora of performance benchmarks we frequently run at Phoronix and this open-source operating system being maintained in a rolling-release style, here's a look at how the performance for this x86_64 Linux distribution evolved over the past month...

Google has rolled out the Chrome 69 beta web-browser update today for Linux, Android, and other supported platforms...

The GNOME 3.30 Release Candidate (v3.29.90) is now available that also marks the UI, API, and feature freezes for this next desktop environment update debuting in September...

As expected, the Mesa 18.2 feature development is now over with the code having branched. Now open on Git master is Mesa 18.3-devel...

For those still on the Ubuntu 16.04 "Xenial Xerus" Long Term Support series and not yet ready to make the transition to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver", Ubuntu 16.04.5 is now available as the last planned Xenial point release...

Given that it was only earlier this summer when UBports' Ubuntu Touch OTA-4 upgraded to an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS base, you might be wondering when they intend to transition to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS... But don't hold your breath...

The end of July marked the code branching and feature freeze for PHP 7.3 followed by the creation of the first beta...

Following AMD staging numerous AMDGPU DRM improvements in DRM-Next for Linux 4.19, they have moved onto further testing this code and providing various fixes for some of the early fallout to these changes ahead of the next kernel cycle...

In addition to Keith Packard talking about the state of the Debian GNU/Linux stack for gaming in 2018, during this week's DebConf 18 was a talk by Debian developer Markus Koschany on the state of games for the Linux distribution...

Robert Foss at Collabora has recently been working on supporting the "kms_swrast" code under Android...

The lead developer of the Sway Wayland compositor, Drew DeVault, has for the past year also been working on the "wlroots" Wayland compositor library that is modular and can perform a lot of the "heavy lifting" when it comes to writing new Wayland compositors. Way-Cooler, Purism's Phosh, and other projects have also been investigating wlroots for their own use-cases...

As part of this week's volleying of WireGuard onto the Linux kernel mailing list included as part of that is Zinc, a new cryptography API for the Linux kernel...

While back in May the reported Steam Linux use by Valve was at 0.57% and then dropped to 0.52% for June, over the course of July it took another step lower...

Hong Jen Yee, the developer of the PCMan File Manager that has long served as the default file manager on the LXDE desktop environment, presented at this week's Debian DebConf 18 event about the LXDE/LXQt desktop efforts...

Arch Linux developer Jelle van der Waa has provided an update concerning recent Arch updates...

The GNOME 3.30 beta is being prepped for release and the UI/API/ABI freezes are now in place ahead of this desktop environment update to ship as stable in September. GNOME Shell and Mutter have staged their latest development releases for testing...

Valve has just sent out a press release about allowing attendees at PAX West in a few weeks will be able to play their forthcoming Artifact game, but more exciting is they plan to publicly release the game at the end of November...

Not only is Mesa 18.2 ending feature development today to begin their release candidates, but LLVM 7.0 and its sub-projects like Clang 7.0 also happens to have aligned with a similar release schedule...