Phoronix

While LLVM 8.0 embarked on its feature freeze and subsequent code branching last week, tagged today the first release candidate was tagged for this upcoming compiler stack release...

While the LLVM Clang compiler has a -Weverything switch to enable every possible warning, it's unlikely the GNU Compiler Collection will offer a similar option...

Debian 9.7 is out today as an emergency release for the project...

Dell is now shipping their new XPS 13 8th gen (9380) laptop in a developer edition that comes preloaded with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS...

While it was not too long ago that Microsoft Windows Server 2019 began shipping and that we conducted some end-of-year benchmarks between Windows and Linux, with being in the process of running a number of Windows and Linux benchmarks as part of our ongoing 10GbE OS performance testing, I also took the opportunity to run some other benchmarks on Windows Server 2016 and 2019 as well as a set of Linux distributions.

In addition to the many big ticket changes being worked on for GNOME 3.32 like better performance and Wayland improvements, it also marks the project embarking on a big overhaul of their application icons...

While Allwinner Technology isn't known as one of the most gracious contributors to the Linux kernel, their continued work on the "pstore_block" kernel patches will be of interest to many especially in the ARM/embedded space and just not for those using Allwinner SoCs...

TressFX, the library backed by AMD GPUOpen for advanced hair/fur/grass rendering and used by games like Tomb Raider, is seeing some improvements with its inclusion in The-Forge rendering framework...

As was discussed in 2018 and has largely reached consensus, the LLVM code-base and its sub-projects like Clang will move past being bound by C++11 and will moving to a newer C++ standard so they can begin making use of newer language features in the development of this compiler stack...

While we are most often focused on the Radeon and Intel drivers within Mesa as being the most commonly used Mesa-based drivers on Linux systems, Freedreno and friends have also been seeing some nice improvements for Mesa 19.0 with its feature freeze quickly coming upon us...

The once notorious AMDGPU "DC" code (formerly known as DAL) saw a fresh round of patches on Tuesday further improving this display stack shared between the Windows and Linux drivers for advanced functionality from FreeSync to HDMI/DP audio and much more...

Habana Labs is one of the companies working on an "AI" processor for speeding up deep learning inference and training workloads. Their initial product is the Goya processor that is already production-qualified. Today they published initial open-source Linux kernel driver patches for review to potentially include in the mainline kernel moving forward...

Wine 4.0 is now officially available as the new annual stable release to Wine for running Windows programs and games on Linux and other operating systems...

Libdrm 2.4.97 was released today by AMD's Marek Olšák as the newest version of this Mesa DRM library. The main feature of this list is a newer, faster buffer object list API for the AMDGPU code...

Aside from some out-of-tree experiments last year by one of Valve's developers on a RADV Vulkan HUD of similar nature to the popular Gallium HUD option, it turns out an Intel developer has recently been working on a Vulkan overlay layer to provide "Gallium HUD" inspired information...

Ahead of the Mesa 19.0 feature freeze coming up at month's end for this next quarterly feature release, Intel's open-source developers today merged support for the VK_EXT_transform_feedback extension that is important for Linux gamers with DXVK for mapping Direct3D 11 atop Vulkan and similar graphics API translation libraries...

Boutique Linux PC vendor Star Labs Systems out of the United Kingdom is the latest hardware vendor seeing their products supported by the Linux Vendor Firmware System (LVFS) with Fwupd for handling firmware updates...

Canonical this morning announced Ubuntu Core 18, its operating system based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and destined for IoT and embedded appliances and other low-power devices...

The Qt 5.12 release at the end of last year brought the Qt for WebAssembly Tech Preview to allow for Qt-based applications to run within web browsers via the sandboxed WASM technology. With the Qt 5.13 release coming out this spring, the WebAssembly support should be in much better shape...

Last week I started running some fresh 10GbE Linux networking performance benchmarks across a few different Linux distributions. That testing has now been extended to cover nine Linux distributions plus FreeBSD 12.0 to compare the out-of-the-box networking performance.

While no measurable performance changes for either Polaris or Vega, the AMDGPU kernel driver in Linux 5.0 appears to be in largely good shape now mid-way through the cycle...

In helping to build better defenses against this side channel vulnerability, Julian Stecklina of Amazon Germany (who previously co-discovered the "LazyFP" vulnerability last year) has posted demonstrator code for the Level 1 Terminal Fault (L1TF) vulnerability against the Linux kernel...

The past few years Apple has been developing APFS as the successor to the long-used HFS+ file-system. The Apple File-System is in use with macOS 10.13+ iOS 10.3, and their other platforms for offering a lot of features not found in HFS+ including much better performance. There is an open-source APFS kernel driver now under development for Linux in supporting this file-system...

For Ubuntu users running the Chromium web browser and wanting to enjoy better video acceleration with Gallium3D or Intel hardware, there is now a Chromium Snap for testing that features VA-API video acceleration support for GPU-based decoding...

Should you be assembling a recording studio or have another purpose for some high-end audio kit, the RME Fireface UCX is the latest sound device seeing support in the upstream Linux kernel...

With each new Fedora release you can pretty much be guaranteed it will be using the latest and greatest releases of the GNOME desktop, the most recent stable kernel, and it's also been very punctual in switching over to new major releases of the GCC compiler -- generally being the first of the major Linux distributions adopting the annual major GNU compiler releases. With Fedora 30 due out in May, it should ship with GCC 9.1 as would be standard practice. It's not guaranteed though as FESCo hasn't signed off on it with this change request coming in past the deadline...

CVE-2016-10739 has been around since April 2016 as implied by the number and finally today this security issue has been fixed in the Git development code for the upcoming Glibc 2.29 GNU C Library...

For those trying to understand their system's performance on a macro level will enjoy a new feature being introduced with Phoronix Test Suite 8.6-Spydeberg for seeing how your CPU/system/GPU/storage/network performance compares at scale to the massive data sets amassed by OpenBenchmarking.org and the Phoronix Test Suite over the past decade...

Adding to the growing Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) ecosystem alongside Ubuntu, openSUSE, Debian, and others is now Fedora Remix. But this spin of Fedora catered for WSL isn't free and not officially sanctioned or supported by Red Hat nor the Fedora project...

With Mesa 19.0 entering its feature freeze before the month is through, here are fresh benchmarks of the very latest RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan performance on Polaris and Vega graphics cards compared to the current stable Mesa 18.3 series and the former 18.2 release. This testing is complementary to last week's Mesa 19.0 RADV vs. AMDVLK vs. AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan tests.

The first release candidate is now available for testing of the OPNsense 19.1 FreeBSD-based firewall operating system forked from m0n0wall when it closed up shop four years ago...

With the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel cycle, discrete Radeon graphics cards based on Vega 10 and newer will have fine-grained controls over what PowerPlay power management features are enabled and the ability to toggle them at run-time...

While Wayland was designed on and for Linux systems, the BSD support for Wayland and the various compositors has continued improving particularly over the past year or so but it's still a lengthy journey...

The big Wine 4.0 release will be out in just a few days while Wine-Staging 4.0 is following close behind for those wanting a bit more exciting and bleeding-edge experience...

Earlier this month was word that Fedora developers were looking at packaging Radeon Open Compute (ROCm) to make it easier for their distribution users to enjoy this open-source Radeon GPU computing software from OpenCL to a TensorFlow port. Some of the early packages of ROCm are now under review for Fedora...

Within the networking subsystem of the Linux kernel one of the changes we are most looking forward to hopefully seeing for Linux 5.1 would be the long-awaited WireGuard, but another interesting feature was queued this past week into net-next...

Linus Torvalds has released the third weekly release candidate for the upcoming Linux 5.0 kernel release...

Z-Wave is the incredibly common wireless communication protocol at the backbone of many home automation systems. To date there hasn't been any in-kernel Z-Wave Linux kernel drivers for this low-energy mesh network standard, but a SUSE developer has prototyped an initial driver and currently exploring the in-kernel possibilities, including what could end up being a Z-Wave subsystem...

The new "Timer Events Oriented" (TEO) governor in development over recent months by Intel developer Rafael Wysocki is poised to land with the Linux 5.1 kernel cycle...

Klibc has seen some new activity recently and that has resulted in the first new release to this minimal standard C library subset in a half-decade...

When it comes to being able to run OpenCL kernels on CPUs, the main option at this point for Linux systems is POCL as the Portable Computing Language. While POCL 1.2 was released just this past September, we're still very much looking forward to the upcoming POCL 1.3 release with more improvements for this portable OpenCL 1.2~2.0 implementation...

Two weeks since the initial Phoronix Test Suite 8.6 development release, the second milestone release is now available for your open-source, cross-platform benchmarking evaluation...

Thanks to a new dedicated protocol for KWayland/KWin around virtual desktops, that support is finally in place. This stems from a two and a half year old bug report for said support...

Longtime Wayland developer Derek Foreman is working on coordinating the next release of the Weston reference compositor. Here are those early details and his hope to ship this next feature release in March...

With the Linux 5.1 kernel cycle that should get underway in just over one month's time, there will now be the long in development work (it's been through 15+ rounds of public code review!) for supporting atomic replace and cumulative patches...

Libhandy is the library backed by Purism for use on their Librem 5 among other potential use-cases for allowing adaptive GTK+ widgets depending upon screen real estate. It's still a ways out from version 1.0, but libhandy 0.0.7 was released this weekend as the latest achievement...

With yesterday's release of Wine 4.0-RC7, the regression/bug count is low enough and the situation looking good that the stable Wine 4.0.0 release should be tagged in the next few days...

When recently publishing the PlaidML deep learning benchmarks and lczero chess neural network OpenCL tests, some Phoronix readers mentioned they were seeing vastly different results with using the PAL OpenCL driver in AMDGPU-PRO (Radeon Software) compared to using the ROCm compute stack. So for seeing how those two separate AMD OpenCL drivers compare, here are some benchmark results with a Vega GPU while testing ROCm 2.0 and AMDGPU-PRO 18.50.

A new release of the GNU Binutils programming tools will soon be available. The upcoming Binutils 2.32 release is primarily made up of new CPU ports...

Timothy Arceri of Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team has landed patches in Mesa 19.0 that drastically reduce the amount of system memory used when firing up the Team Fortress 2 game...