Phoronix

It was just shy of four years that SUSE was effectively acquired by Micro Focus as yet another changing of the guard for this long-standing German enterprise Linux distribution. Now today it's been announced that a Swedish private equity fund will be acquiring SUSE...

Fedora 29 continues looking like a rather ambitious release with a growing number of changes, including at some of the lowest levels of the system. The latest feature proposal is on changing the compression scheme used by the DNF package manager's repository metadata...

Sean Davis of the Xubuntu project has provided a status update about the ongoing work by this Xfce-focused spin of Ubuntu Linux...

Vulkan 1.1.79 is now the latest revision to this graphics/compute API...

The Steam Survey numbers are now available for June 2018 and indicate at least on a percentage basis a small decline in the Linux gaming market-share...

Linus Torvalds is back to his regular release timing for new Linux 4.18 kernel release candidates...

Being squared away for the NetBSD 8.1 release are audio improvements within the kernel...

Three years after Kolab Systems raised more than $100k USD to develop "RoundCube Next" as a next-generation mail and communication platform, there is little to show for it and no active development...

Last week we noted how some of the code to boot the RISC-V SiFive HiFive Unleashed development board was closed-source. That upset some in the Coreboot community with hoping for a more open development board built around the RISC-V open-source processor ISA. The good news is that SiFive will soon be releasing the necessary code for initialization as open-source...

June was another extremely busy month on Phoronix covering the Linux and open-source landscape with 311 original news articles and 24 featured hardware articles/reviews written by your's truly. June brought with it the start of the Linux 4.18 kernel cycle, a lot of interesting summer-time benchmarks, and more...

The latest USB Type-C work for the Linux kernel adds support for alternate modes in order to begin offering USB Type-C DisplayPort alternate mode support...

HarfBuzz is the open-source text shaping library that supports various font technologies and is used by a variety of toolkits and more. The latest addition for HarfBuzz is supporting Dfonts, as is common to macOS systems...

KDE finally has an on-by-default easy way global shortcut for launching the Konsole terminal application...

After a relatively long period of silence, OpenShot 2.4.2 was released today as the latest version of this open-source, non-linear video editing software...

A few days back I wrote about workarounds for getting FreeBSD running stable on AMD Ryzen via a script to adjust some of the CPU's MSRs based upon a recently-updated AMD revision guide. That script, which was making use of FreeBSD's cpucontrol utility for adjusting the bits, has now morphed into a kernel patch...

Earlier this month the Laminar Research crew responsible for the realistic, cross-platform X-Plane flight simulator presented at the FlightSimExpo about their work on porting the flight simulator to Vulkan and other ongoing improvements...

One of the additions we have been looking forward to seeing in the mainline Linux kernel in 2018 is WireGuard. WireGuard is the open-source, performance-minded, and secure VPN tunnel. WireGuard is designed to be run within the Linux kernel but has also been ported to other platforms...

While the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has supported a shader cache going back to early 2017 for helping out Linux game load times and performance, OpenGL compute shaders up to now were not handled by this shader cache...

With the first half of the year just about in the books, here is a recap of the most popular open-source/Linux news, benchmarks, and Linux hardware reviews so far for H1'2018...

Intel open-source graphics driver developer Jason Ekstrand has published a set of patches that help with playing Skyrim Special Edition with Intel graphics hardware under Linux when using the DXVK layer...

While Intel's Clear Linux platform has already been making use of GCC 8.1 since shortly after its release in early May, one of their developers has now published a blog post highlighting three performance and security features enjoyed and that helps benefit their performance-oriented Linux distribution...

It was just four days ago that Valve Linux GPU driver developer Timothy Arceri was thinking it could take a while before having OpenGL 4.4 compatibility profile support for RadeonSI, but tonight that milestone is checked off the list...

It has been a while since last having anything to report on the Nouveau Gallium3D driver's effort to support the NIR intermediate representation as part of their effort to re-use existing code-paths for helping to bring-up SPIR-V compute support for this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver and ultimately working towards Vulkan support. But the latest version of these Nouveau NIR patches are now available and almost ready to be mainlined...

A few weeks back I posted benchmarks of EXT4 fscrypt vs. eCryptfs vs. LUKS dm-crypt benchmarks for showing the EXT4 file-system performance encryption performance for these kernel-based approaches. That testing was done with a SATA 3.0 SSD while in this article is a look at the performance in another popular choice: if using a USB 3.0 external enclosure with a hard drive.

For those planning to enjoy some Linux games this weekend while using the RadeonSI / RADV / Intel / Nouveau drivers, Mesa 18.1.3 is now out as the newest stable point release...

NetworkManager 1.12 is now available as the latest stable release of this widely-used Linux network management software...

Given Clear Linux is a "rolling release" Linux distribution with new releases often being put out multiple times per day, and a lot of the emphasis by Intel on their open-source Linux distribution being performance, I decided it would be fun to start providing a monthly look at how their performance has been evolving...

The Linux Mint crew has delivered on their goal of shipping Linux Mint 19 "Tara" in June...

Last week I posted a number of Wine vs. Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux benchmarks focusing mostly on the CPU/system performance for various cross-platform applications/programs. For those interested in the graphics/gaming performance, here are a number of Direct3D and OpenGL benchmarks...

Canonical's Alan Griffiths has just announced the release of the huge Mir 0.32 update...

One of the advantages of the LLVM Clang compiler has been better integration with Bash completion support, but now the GCC compiler supports a --completion argument for feeding into the Bash completion script with better matching of supported options/values when typing into a supported terminal...

If you are looking for a new Linux-native game to enjoy this weekend, the Croteam Incubator project I Hate Running Backwards is now available...

The Raspberry Pi folks have released a new version of their Debian-based Raspbian Linux distribution to end out June...

It's been another busy week in compiler land for ARM...

One month has passed since PostgreSQL 11 Beta 1 while today the second beta has succeeded it...

Unknown individuals were able to gain access to the Gentoo repositories on GitHub, including the modification of said repositories...

Here are our latest benchmark numbers for looking at the performance of Windows 10 vs. Linux for OpenGL/Vulkan graphics driver performance for both NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon hardware using the latest drivers as of June 2018 for OpenGL and Vulkan.

DXVK 0.61 is out today as the newest version of this Direct3D 11 over Vulkan translation layer to help with running Windows D3D11 games on Wine...

On GNOME 3.26~3.28, if attaching a monitor to the system while suspended -- such as when setting up for a presentation with a laptop and projector/monitor -- when resuming the system, GNOME Shell would likely crash. That rather glaring bug has now been fixed in the newest Mutter code...

ARM Linux developer Quentin Perret has sent out the latest set of kernel patches for implementing Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS)...

Timothy Arceri at Valve has been working a lot lately on improving the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver's OpenGL compatibility profile support. While he just posted GL 4.0 compatibility profile patches when he thought it would take a while before getting OpenGL 4.4 compatibility support in order, it turns out it wasn't as bad as anticipated...

Two interesting mainboards are now supported by mainline Coreboot Git...

For those sticking to the Mesa stable releases, Mesa 18.1.3 is expected to be out by this weekend and features a few dozen changes...

KDE e.V. has published their annual report for 2017 to cover the software advancements made for this open-source desktop environment, highlight their financial health, etc...

For those still holding out hope for the Reiser4 file-system, it's now been ported to work with the Linux 4.17 kernel...

Python 3.7 is now available as the latest major release to Python 3 with new features, performance optimizations, and other enhancements...

With last week's release of systemd 239 one of the key new features is the introduction of Portable Services. Systemd Portable Services is a new concept that is akin to Linux containers while at this stage is considered still a preview/experimental feature...

Collabora has announced their latest project as Debos, a new way for building Debian operating system images...

Announced back in March was the MintBox Mini 2 as a collaboration project by CompuLab and Linux Mint. That tiny Linux PC is now available for order given the imminent release of Linux Mint 19 "Tara"...

Following yesterday's release of Firefox 61, Mozilla pumped Firefox 62 into the beta channel...