Phoronix

The first development snapshot of Phoronix Test Suite 8.2 is now available as what will be the next quarterly feature update to our open-source Linux / BSD / macOS / Windows automated benchmarking software and framework...

For those planning to enjoy their favorite Direct3D 11 games under Wine this weekend and utilizing the DXVK D3D11-over-Vulkan layer for greater performance, DXVK 0.63 is now available...

While developers have begun discussing plans for Qt 6.0 with plans to ship this upgraded tool-kit in 2020, one of the unanswered questions is over what build system should Qt 6 be using...

GNOME 3.29.4 was released on Friday night as another step towards this September's stable release of GNOME 3.30...

For what just started out as a tool to ensure you are using the "performance" frequency scaling governor when running Linux games, Feral's open-source GameMode system tool has slowly been picking up some extra functionality...

The feature list for Fedora 29 continues growing and the latest is about shipping GnuTLS with TLS 1.3 support enabled...

Following the recent rounds of Linux distribution benchmarking with Windows Server vs. FreeBSD vs. Linux, Windows vs. Linux laptop benchmarks, and other recent comparisons, one of the latest requests was a fresh look at the performance of different Linux distributions deployed within Docker containers.

Wine 3.13 was released today as just another bi-weekly development release towards Wine 4.0, but this time around it's a pretty darn exciting update!..

The AMD folks maintaining their official Vulkan driver code have done their common end-of-week code dump into the open-source AMDVLK Linux Vulkan driver repository across the PAL, XGL, LLVM, and SPVGEN code-bases...

Canonical and Microsoft have just announced that PowerShell Core is now available for Ubuntu users in Snap format...

The Linux Mint team has shared a routine status update about the work they have been engaged in over the past month, including dealing with some nasty package updates and readying the beta of Linux Mint Debian Edition 3 (LMDE 3)...

In last month's round of IBM POWER9 benchmarking on the Talos II systems compared to various Intel/AMD x86_64 CPUs, one of the areas where POWER was struggling especially was with multimedia encoding performance. Fortunately, since those POWER9 Phoronix benchmarks this year, various developers have been working on optimizations...

Google in cooperation with Microsoft, Twitter, and Facebook have announced the open-source Data Transfer Project to promote universal data portability...

Last month I wrote about a new attempt at improving the ATI RAGE 128 X.Org driver... Yes, for the for the Rage graphics cards from the late 90's in the days of AGP and PCI where core/memory clock speeds were commonly in the double digits... If you are a hobbyist fond of these vintage graphics cards and are still running with these OpenGL 1.1~1.2 capable GPUs, there is a new X.Org driver update...

The long overdue NetBSD 8.0 operating system update appears ready now to ship...

Those still relying upon x86 32-bit Linux kernels for aging hardware and continuing to update to the latest software will find mitigation for the Meltdown CPU vulnerability with the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel cycle. You'll find this mitigation but at the cost of performance...

On top of AMDGPU improvements/features already staged for Linux 4.19, the AMD folks on Thursday sent in their seemingly last set of feature updates to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window...

It's been a while since we last ran some GCC PGO benchmarks, the Profile Guided Optimizations or feedback-directed optimization technique that makes use of profiling data at run-time to improve performance of re-compiled binaries. Here are some fresh benchmarks of GCC PGO impact on a Xeon Scalable server while using the newly-released GCC 8.2 release candidate.

The NVIDIA Unix developers have released the 396.45 binary display driver today with just two listed bug-fixes...

Last week Intel sent in a "final" batch of i915 DRM driver feature updates to DRM-Next for the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel cycle but it turns out there is one more batch of changes now focused on landing...

While waiting for the big ROCm 1.9 update, another point release to the ROCm 1.8 series is available for this Radeon Open Compute stack...

GCC 8.2 as the first point release to the stable GCC 8 compiler is tentatively set to debut next Thursday, 26 July, but available now for testing is the release candidate...

Just in case you have your hands still on the Samsung Galaxy S or Galaxy S 4G that were released back in 2010 as once high-end Android smartphones, they have DeviceTree support with the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel cycle...

The Raven Ridge Linux support continues to maturing. The latest on these Zen+Vega APUs using the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver stack should be slightly better performance when using the RADV Vulkan driver...

A rather late self-contained feature proposal for the in-development Fedora 29 is to better support FPGAs...

Linux 4.19 is going to be another exciting kernel on the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) front with a lot of good stuff included while hours ago we finally got a look at what's in store for the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver...

It's been a while since last having any news to report on Freedrenon, the open-source, community-driven Gallium3D driver for providing accelerated 3D support for Qualcomm Adreno graphics hardware. But ahead of the upcoming Mesa 18.2 feature freeze, Freedreno founder Rob Clark has been landing a number of improvements...

The Sway Wayland compositor continues maturing like a fine wine and as it nears the big 1.0 milestone new features continue to be introduced...

Adding to the big batch of feature additions and improvements queuing in DRM-Next for the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel merge window is another round of drm-misc-next improvements...

GNOME 3.29.4 is coming out this week as the latest development release building up to GNOME 3.30 this September. GNOME Shell and Mutter have put out their latest releases for this development milestone...

Epic Games has today rolled out Unreal Engine 4.20 as the latest version of their Linux-friendly, cross-platform game engine while also promoting Unreal Studio 4.20 to beta...

Red Hat's Christian Schaller has provided an update regarding some of the new feature work and improvements that the Red Hat developers have been working on this summer for Fedora Workstation...

The great folks at Red Hat have open-sourced a new security checker that is able to scan compiled Linux x86_64 binaries to look for potential Spectre Variant One vulnerabilities...

With the April release of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on the server front was a brand new, in-house developed server installer created by Canonical to differentiate it from Debian's long-used text installer for the Ubuntu Server images. While it offered a fresh look and some new features, it shipped without many features common to Linux server installers. Fortunately, that is changing with the upcoming Ubuntu Server 18.04.1 release...

While Page Table Isolation (PTI/KPTI) has been available since the Meltdown CPU vulnerability was disclosed at the start of the year, that's been for x86_64 Linux while the x86 32-bit support has remained a work-in-progress and only relatively recently has come together...

The Qt Company has officially released Qt Creator 4.7 as the newest feature release to this open-source, cross-platform Qt/C++ focused integrated development environment...

Since 2016 we have been looking forward to the REAPER digital audio workstation software for Linux while with this week's v5.93 release, the experimental Linux-native builds are now officially available...

Fedora has begun utilizing a user-space jitter entropy daemon for feeding entropy to the kernel at boot time in case not enough is available for the kernel's random needs. But with that approach not being from a true hardware random number generator, a patch worked out by veteran Linux kernel developer Ted Ts'o will mix in RdRand entropy...

Serving as the Mesa 18.2 release manager is Andres Gomez of Igalia. He's now pushed back the release plan by two weeks, although Mesa 18.2.0 still should end up shipping in August...

The Linux 4.19 kernel will be introducing a new "raspberrypi-hwmon" driver capable of reporting under-voltage conditions for Raspberry Pi boards...

While the kernel configuration is just one part of Intel's Clear Linux optimizations for their performance-oriented distribution, a Fedora user has taken the liberty of spinning a Fedora kernel build based upon Clear Linux's kernel configuration...

Back in April 2017 was the announcement that System76 would begin designing and manufacturing their own systems beginning with desktops and to be followed at a later date by their own laptops, rather than relying upon whitebox designs that they currently retail with their Ubuntu/Pop!_OS-loaded PCs. The Colorado-based company is inching closer to fully realizing their goal...

In addition to sending down a new SRU for Solaris 11.3, the Oracle developers left maintaining Solaris have issued their second beta of the upcoming Solaris 11.4...

While Linux hardware support for desktop PCs has advanced a great deal over the years, one area that continues to struggle is support for fan/thermal/power sensors on many of today's motherboards. This area has struggled with not enough public documentation / data-sheets from ASIC vendors as well as not enough upstream Linux kernel developers being interested in the hwmon subsystem. The IT87 Linux driver for many common Super I/O chips found on countless motherboards is unfortunately facing a downfall...

The public draft of the OpenMP 5.0 SMP programming standard is now available for review ahead of the specification's expected stable release before the end of 2018...

While Solaris 11.4 is still in the oven being baked at Oracle, the thirty-fourth stable release update of Solaris 11.3 is now available...

Recently I have published benchmarks looking at Windows Server and FreeBSD against eight Linux distributions as well as a 9-way Linux desktop OS benchmark comparison while the latest in this string of fresh Linux distribution benchmarks is looking at the Linux laptop performance impact, if any, between these operating systems. Up for this benchmarking dance was Microsoft Windows 10, Windows 10 when running Ubuntu 18.04 via WSL, Ubuntu 18.04 itself, Fedora Workstation 28, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Clear Linux.

A SUSE developer is seeking feedback and interest on the possibility of allowing a scripting language -- most likely Python -- to be used within the GCC compiler code-base. This would primarily be used for replacing existing AWK scripts...

Another one of the new frameworks slated for the Linux 4.19 kernel cycle kicking off in August is for idle injection...

The latest AMDGPU firmware/microcode binary images for Radeon GPUs have landed in the Linux-Firmware Git tree...