Phoronix

There's already a new framework coming to Linux 4.19 in the form of Google's Gasket while queued this week is now another new framework: the FPGA Device Feature List...

While Ubuntu and most of its derivatives have stopped producing 32-bit x86 images with the number of devices out there dwindling that can't run x86_64, Lubuntu is among the few still offering i686 images to help those who may be running on outdated hardware but still interested in running the latest Linux software...

Landing yesterday in Glibc for Intel's Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) were the instructions for Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) and Shadow Stack (SHSTK)...

Purism has offered a status update on their software/hardware efforts around the Librem 5 smart-phone they have been working on that is security-minded, open-source, and that they plan to begin shipping in January of 2019...

NVIDIA released today the 390.77 Linux driver, the latest in the 390 "long-lived" driver branch, for those not using the short-lived 396 bleeding-edge driver series...

There had been plans drafted to finish dropping Yum 3 in Fedora now that DNF is quite mature as the next-generation package manager, but that isn't happening now until at least Fedora 30...

Igalia developers have been very involved with the Intel open-source developers on getting the long-awaited OpenGL 4.6 support into the "i965" Mesa driver. As has been the case for a while, out-of-tree patches can allow this to happen but with the Mesa 18.2 branching soon, it doesn't look like this will materialize ahead of this next release...

One of the exciting additions to look forward to with the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel cycle is the virtual "VKMS" kernel mode-setting driver. The driver is still a work-in-progress, but multiple developers are working on it...

ReactOS 0.4.9 release candidates have been available for weeks while now the official v0.4.9 release images are now spun...

The GCC 8 compiler brought the Synopsys ARC CPU target while for the GCC 9 release is going to be support for the company's HS4x processors...

While the RadeonSI and Intel i965 Mesa drivers have been at OpenGL 4.5 compliance for a while now, the Nouveau "NVC0" Gallium3D driver has been bound to OpenGL 4.3 officially...

While GTK4 likely isn't coming out until next spring, the Nautilus file manager port to this updated tool-kit is well underway...

Taking place last month at Berlin's C-Base was the sixteenth Linux Audio Conference. The 2018 Linux Audio Conference focused on everything from different open-source sound projects to different multimedia tools and more...

The fifth weekly release candidate for the Linux 4.18 kernel is now available for testing...

Latte Dock 0.8 is now available as the latest feature update for this open-source, KDE-aligned desktop dock...

The Catfish search utility now officially lives under the Xfce umbrella...

Alfred Chen announced this week the release of PDS-mq 0.98s, his latest patch-set of this CPU scheduler against the Linux 4.17 upstream code-base and includes minor optimization work and bug fixes...

Longtime Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst who joined Red Hat several months ago has been working on Nouveau NIR support as stepping towards SPIR-V/compute support and this summer the work very much remains an active target...

Following the news about VP9 and AV1 having more room to improve particularly for alternative architectures like POWER and ARM, a Phoronix reader pointed out an effort that Mozilla is behind on developing the "rav1e" encoder...

Presented at this past week's 2018 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC18) was TxFS, the Texas Transactional File System for Linux...

At the recent GUADEC 2018 conference in Spain, GNOME developers plotted the imminent Flatpak 1.0 release as well as what's coming after the big 1.0 milestone...

A new release of the Binutils collection of important tools is now available with a number of new features and improvements...

It has been a while since last publishing some Linux GPU driver benchmarks focused explicitly on the OpenGL vs. Vulkan performance, but that changed today with a fresh look at the performance between these two Khronos graphics APIs when tested with AMD and NVIDIA hardware on the latest RadeonSI/RADV and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers.

Debian GNU/Linux 9.5 is out today as the latest stable update to the "Stretch" series...

KDE Frameworks 5.48 is now the latest monthly update to this collection of add-on libraries complementing Qt5...

AMD's leading open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D developer, Marek Olšák, sent out a new patch series this week aiming to benefit this Radeon OpenGL driver's performance in CPU-bound scenarios...

Pairing nicely with Wine 3.12 or Wine-Staging 3.12 is now DXVK 0.62, the library for accelerating the Direct3D 11 API using Vulkan to allow for faster D3D11 Windows games running under Wine...

The other day we reported on a GCC 8 regression where Skylake and newer CPUs with "-march=native" haven't been performance as optimally as they should be. Fortunately, that patch was quickly landed into the GCC SVN/Git code for GCC 9 as well as back-ported to GCC 8...

After several big feature pull requests of new "i915" Intel DRM driver features landing in DRM-Next for Linux 4.19, the Intel open-source developers have sent in what they believe to be their last batch of feature changes for queuing this next kernel cycle...

If you have been part of the group of Radeon RX Vega Linux users trying out Linux 4.18 and finding your display no longer lights up, heading to Linux 4.18 Git should be a fix for at least some of the users...

DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has provided an update on the open-source operating system project's infrastructure and acknowledging the SSD upgrades that are noticeably beneficial over HDDs...

CodeWeavers' Andrew Eikum has added support to Wine for using Vulkan on macOS via the open-source MoltenVK...

For those abiding by Mesa stable releases, Mesa 18.1.4 is now available -- in time for updating prior to any weekend Linux gaming or other activities -- for these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan driver components...

Samsung's Derek Foreman has announced the alpha release of Wayland 1.16 as well as the Weston 5.0 reference compositor...

Canonical developers working on Mir have prepared the release of Mir 0.32.1 with a few fixes and improvements off the recent release of Mir 0.32...

Given the recent releases of FreeBSD 11.2, Scientific Linux 6.10, openSUSE Leap 15, and other distribution updates in the past quarter, here are some fresh benchmarks of eight different Linux distributions compared to FreeBSD 11.2 and Microsoft Windows Server 2016. The tested Linux platforms for this go-around were CentOS 7.5, Clear Linux 23610, Debian 9.4, Fedora Server 28, openSUSE leap 15.0, Scientific Linux 6.10, Scientific Linux 7.5, and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

GNOME 3.30 is looking like Mutter will be quite fit with the ability to remove its dependence on X11 code and various performance tuning optimizations. On top of already landed performance work in recent months, more optimizations have just landed and it looks like more could still be on the way...

The Speculative Load Hardening (SLH) effort that has been in development for months as a compiler-based automated Spectre Variant One mitigation technique has landed within LLVM trunk...

Peter Hutterer at Red Hat is trying again to get trackpoint acceleration performing nicely under the libinput library so trackpoints behave nicely across Wayland, X.Org, and Mir systems...

Felix Kuehling of AMD sent out the remaining six patches for getting the AMD Raven Ridge (Ryzen APUs) working with the AMDKFD kernel compute driver so that the ROCm/OpenCL user-space compute stack can be run on these new APUs...

Developers behind the GNU Compiler Collection intend to get release preparations underway soon for the GCC 8.2 compiler...

With the upcoming Linux 4.18 kernel release due out in August there is the AMDGPU kernel driver support for Vega 20, the yet-to-be-released Vega GPU said to be the 7nm part launching later this year in Radeon Instinct products and featuring 32GB of HBM2 and adding some new deep learning instructions. Now the RadeonSI Gallium3D user-space driver for OpenGL within Mesa has Vega 20 support...

It turns out that when using GCC 8 since April (or GCC 9 development code) if running on Intel Skylake (or newer architectures like the yet-to-be-out Cannonlake or Icelake) and compile your code with the "-march=native" flag for what should tune for your CPU microarchitecture's full capabilities, that hasn't entirely been the case. A fix is en route that can correct the performance by as much as 60%...

For those looking to pick up a new Linux game this weekend, Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War was released today with same-day native Linux support...

Intel rolled out today the Xeon E-2100 processors as the successor to the Xeon E3 CPUs. The Xeon E-2100 series is intended for entry-level workstations and based upon the Coffeelake CPU microarchitecture...

NVIDIA developers today released the 396.24.10 driver, their latest beta driver for Linux focused on the latest Vulkan innovations and improvements and is joined by the Windows 398.58 driver...

In part with GPU demand by crypto-currency miners waning a bit, NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics card availability at retailers has been improving in recent weeks as well as seeing less inflated prices than just recently had been the case. Given the better availability and stabilizing prices, here is a fresh look of the current line-up of GeForce and Radeon graphics cards under Ubuntu Linux using the newest AMD/NVIDIA drivers and also providing performance-per-dollar metrics given current retail prices.

Granted OpenBSD isn't the most desktop focused BSD out there and that WiFi isn't therefore the highest priority for this security-focused operating system, but with the latest code it can now finally auto-join WiFi networks...

While the GTK+ 4.0 tool-kit was previously talked about for release by the end of 2018, that's now looking more like spring of 2019 when this next major version will be released...

The AMDVLK open-source Radeon Vulkan Linux driver has seen its latest weekly code drop that brings with it some of the extensions needed for supporting the Steam VR experience...