On the LLVM/Clang front one of the milestones we are looking forward to hopefully see happen in 2019 is the merging of Intel's SYCL back-end. The first baby step in that direction has now been merged to Clang albeit it's not the actual back-end and just preparatory work...
Over the course of the GNOME 3.32 that is nearly complete as well as GNOME 3.30 there was a lot of measurable performance fixes and enhancements to improve the fluidity of the GNOME desktop as well as addressing various latency issues. While in some areas these performance improvements make a night and day difference, work isn't done on enhancing GNOME's performance...
While the "Panfrost" open-source, reverse-engineered Gallium3D driver for Arm's Mali Midgard/Bifrost graphics architectures were only merged to Mesa weeks ago, with a performance optimization added this weekend, the performance for this community-driven driver already makes it competitive to the official Arm binary driver at least for some OpenGL workloads...
With Linux 5.0 that is coming out next weekend, one of the features worth talking up on the Arm side is the long in development work on Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS)...
Linus Torvalds opted for issuing an eighth weekly release candidate tonight for the Linux 5.0 kernel rather than going straight to the official/stable release...
It shouldn't come as a surprise with X11R7.7 being the last "katamari" release and it having debuted back in 2012, but no further "bundled" releases of X.Org are planned...
Git maintainer Junio Hamano has just announced the release of Git v2.21.0 with more than 500 commits since the previous release from more than six dozen developers...
A year and a half ago shortly after the ASUS ZenScreen MB16AC USB-C Portable Monitor launched, we checked it out under Linux. This lightweight, 1080p 15-inch portable display could be made to work with the binary DisplayLink driver, but in trying it out now with Ubuntu 18.10, it's now a pleasant out-of-the-box experience...
A change for Google's Chrome OS is working its way into the upstream Linux 5.1 codebase that adds a new mode to the kernel's USB authorization mechanism. This opt-in change will allow users/administrators to only authorize internal USB devices by default...
While the GNU Gold linker has been quite promising especially in being faster than the conventional GNU linker, Google developers are no longer actively advancing this linker and thus raising concerns it could begin to suffer from bit-rot...
One of the latest feature additions for the Xfce desktop is support for the colord system service for managing/using color profiles for output devices (displays)...
The ISO C++ committee has wrapped up its winter meeting in Hawaii that also served as the last meeting for approving new features for the upcoming C++20 revision to the C++ programming language...
It's been a while since last having anything significant to report on Redox OS, the Unix-like operating system written in the Rust programming language and pursuing a micro-kernel design, but fortunately this open-source OS is still moving along and they have some interesting plans moving forward...
Gentoo's Linux kernel build has long offered various CPU options in allowing those building their distribution to optimize their kernel build to the CPU being used. Every so often the patch is suggested for upstreaming to the mainline Linux kernel before being quickly rejected by the upstream maintainers...
With openSUSE Leap 15.1 reaching beta this week I decided to take it for a quick spin of this Linux distribution derived from the same sources as SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP1. Here are some quick benchmarks compared to Leap 15.0 as well as the latest rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed.
Published back in January were initial open-source kernel driver patches for Habana Labs' Goya processor intended for accelerating deep learning workloads. This new Habana Labs kernel driver will debut with the mainline Linux 5.1 kernel...
A change made courtesy of Google engineers to the Linux kernel will make it so exploits on Linux have a tougher time trying to disable SMAP and SMEP protections as part of their exploit path...
No further point releases to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS had been planned, but in light of the recent APT vulnerability, Canonical has decided to issue an Ubuntu 16.04.6 update that will be hitting the mirrors soon...
With the Linux 5.0 kernel performance approaching the finish line, the past few days I've been ramping up my tests of this new kernel in our benchmarking farm. Unfortunately, when looking at the results at a macro level it's pointing towards Linux 5.0 yielding lower performance than previous kernel releases.
In addition to NVIDIA christening the 418 driver series as stable today with the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti release, they also issued updates for their 390 legacy driver series as well as the 410 long-lived driver release series...
As expected given today's GeForce GTX 1660 Ti launch, NVIDIA has released a new Linux graphics driver supporting the 1660 Ti as well as the RTX 2070 with Max-Q Design and RTX 2080 with Max-Q Design, among other changes...
While the GCC 9 stable compiler release is a few weeks away in the form of GCC 9.1, the GNU Compiler Collection is up to version 8.3.0 today as their newest point release to last year's GCC 8 series...
With the Linux 5.1 kernel cycle soon to kick-off, an early batch of fixes for the AMDGPU DRM driver and other fixes were sent in on Thursday to queue along with all of the new functionality being staged in DRM-Next...
After weeks of leaks, the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is expected to be formally announced in just a few hours. This is a ~$300 Turing graphics card but without any ray-tracing support as so far has been common to all Turing graphics cards. The GTX 1600 series family is expected to expand as well in the weeks ahead...
Earlier this week Arm announced their next-generation Neoverse N1 and E1 platforms with big performance potential and power efficiency improvements over current generation Cortex-A72 processor cores. The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) ahead of the upcoming GCC9 release has picked up support for the Neoverse N1/E1...
With the Linux 5.0 kernel due out within the next week or two, here's a look back at the biggest end-user facing changes for this kernel release that started out as Linux 4.21...
The Raspberry Pi folks have been working the past few months on upgrading their kernel in moving from Linux 4.14 to 4.19. That roll-out has now begun...
With yesterday's somewhat of a surprise announcement that Intel is ready to mainline their experimental Iris Gallium3D driver as their "modern" Linux OpenGL driver with numerous design advantages over their long-standing "classic" i965 Mesa driver, here are some fresh benchmarks of that latest driver compared to the current state of their OpenGL driver in Mesa 19.1.
Well that sure didn't take long... Less than 24 hours after the merge request to mainline the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver was sent out, it's now been merged into the mainline code-base! The Intel Gallium3D driver is now in Mesa Git for easy testing of their next-generation OpenGL Linux driver...
As some more exciting open-source Intel Linux graphics news this week besides their new merge request to mainline the Iris Gallium3D driver, over in the Vulkan space they have merged today their overlay layer that provides a heads-up display of sorts for their Linux "ANV" driver...
The Librem 5 Linux-powered smartphone originally planned to ship in January 2019 but last year was delayed to April to allow for more time to finish up work on the hardware and software. Today Purism is announcing that the Librem 5 is being delayed to "Q3" but they have been making progress particularly on the hardware side...
For those concerned that running Clear Linux means less available packages/bundles than the likes of Debian, Arch Linux, and Fedora with their immense collection of packaged software, Clear has a goal this year of increasing their upstream components available on the distribution by three times...
Released earlier this month was the GNOME 3.32 beta which also marked the feature/UI/API freeze. Out today is the second beta for the upcoming GNOME 3.32 and now the string freeze is also in effect...
The work led by Red Hat's Hans de Goede the past few Fedora release cycles has culminated with a great out-of-the-box boot experience for the upcoming Fedora 30...
For those interested in distributed 3D rendering, the developers at BMW recently received clearance to open-source RAMSES, a 3D rendering system optimized for bandwidth and resource efficiency...
Since being added to Mesa 19.1 at the start of this month, the Panfrost driver has continued speeding along with bringing up this ARM Mali T600/T700/T860 open-source graphics driver support. The latest batch of code was merged overnight, including support for some reverse-engineering helpers...
As one of the most interesting patch series sent over by an Oracle developer in quite a while at least on the virtualization front, a "request for comments" series was sent out on Wednesday that would enable the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to be able to boot Xen HVM guests...
Version 18 of D-Bus Broker has been released, the D-Bus message bus implementation designed for high performance and better reliability compared to the D-Bus reference implementation while sticking to compatibility with the original specification...
For just over the past year Intel open-source driver developers have been developing a new Gallium3D-based OpenGL driver for Linux systems as the eventual replacement to their long-standing "i965 classic" Mesa driver. The Intel developers are now confident enough in the state of this new driver dubbed Iris that they are looking to merge the driver into mainline Mesa proper...
The Kernel Address Sanitizer (KASAN) that detects dynamic memory errors within the Linux kernel code has just picked up another win with uncovering a use-after-free vulnerability that's been around since the early Linux 2.6 kernels...
If you are passionate about Linux/open-source and experienced with the 3D graphics programming and/or compute shaders, AMD is looking to expand their open-source/Linux driver team by about ten people...
With the GCC 9 compiler due to be officially released as stable in the next month or two, we've been running benchmarks of this near-final state to the GNU Compiler Collection on a diverse range of processors. In recent weeks that has included extensive compiler benchmarks on a dozen x86_64 systems, POWER9 compiler testing on the Talos II, and also the AArch64 compiler performance on recent releases of GCC and LLVM Clang. In this latest installment of our GCC 9 compiler benchmarking is an extensive look at the AMD EPYC Znver1 performance on various releases of the GCC compiler as well as looking at various optimization levels under this new compiler on the Znver1 processor.
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