Phoronix

Python 3.7.0 RC1 is available today as the last step prior to issuing this next feature release of Python 3 at month's end...

Since last year there has been more talk and early planning around the eventual Qt 6.0 milestone. It's looking now like Qt 6.0 might happen after Qt 5.14, or likely in 2020...

Intel Skylake Xeon Scalable servers may see greater performance when upgrading to the in-development Linux 4.18 kernel...

For FreeBSD 12.0-CURRENT in development there is now kernel support for pNFS while the user-space components are landing soon for this Parallel NFS support...

The past few months The Qt Company has been overhauled PySide2 as Qt For Python, a big improvement to the Python bindings to the Qt tool-kit. Out today is Qt For Python 5.11 as the first official release under the new branding...

With Intel's DRM kernel driver now supporting HDCP for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection with work done by Intel and Google developers, there is now work underway for allowing HDCP to work in a Wayland-based environment...

Following the recent discussions of moving Wayland's Weston compositor to a 4-month release schedule and possibly doing away with time-based Wayland releases itself, Weston 5.0 will now be coming out in August...

There is at least one interesting feature with the just-merged Device Mapper (DM) changes for the Linux 4.18 kernel...

Built off the Wine 3.10 bi-weekly development release from earlier this week, Wine-Staging 3.10 is now available as the more experimental version of Wine that carries over 900 patches atop the upstream code-base...

The VFIO framework that allows exposing direct device access to user-space in a secure, IOMMU-protected fashion is gaining some new sample drivers in Linux 4.18...

Last week was the main XFS file-system pull request for Linux 4.18 while submitted on Tuesday was a secondary batch of updates targeted for this next kernel version...

The MIPS architecture updates have been submitted for the Linux 4.18 kernel merge window...

We've been expecting Intel to get back into the discrete GPU game especially after Raja Koduri joined the company last year while today Intel tweeted they will be delivering their dGPU in 2020...

Last month Samsung introduced the 970 Series solid-state drives with the mainstream 970 EVO models and 970 PRO models for professionals/enthusiasts. The 970 Series moves to a 64-layer flash and uses a five-core Phoenix controller. For those curious about the Samsung 970 EVO performance under Linux, I have carried out some quick benchmarks to show off its potential under Ubuntu.

For those that prefer waiting until the first point release of a new kernel series before upgrading, Linux 4.17.1 is out today...

While the Linux 4.18 kernel merge window isn't even over until the end of the week followed by about eight weeks worth of testing before that kernel version will debut as stable, Intel open-source developers have already sent in their first pull request to DRM-Next of material they would like to begin staging for Linux 4.19...

It has already been three months since the release of systemd 238 and as such release preparations are now underway for systemd 239...

The much anticipated Plasma 5.13 is now available as the latest installment of the maturing KDE Plasma 5 desktop...

It appears Intel is launching a line of SoCs based on the MIPS architecture...

Keith Packard's patches for improving the Linux infrastructure around VR HMD devices have landed within the mainline Linux kernel as well as in X.Org Server 1.20, but for rounding out the work, there still are pending patches for the Mesa Vulkan drivers...

The ARM SoC/platform changes have been submitted and already pulled into the merge window for the Linux 4.18 kernel...

While the DragonFlyBSD kernel has already landed its mitigation for Spectre V1/V2 and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities, a fresh round of CPU bug hardening work was just merged into their kernel...

Published this weekend was a 25-way Linux graphics card comparison for the newest major Linux game release, A Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia, that was released natively for Linux days ago by Feral Interactive and ported from Direct3D to Vulkan in the process. As a result of premium requests, here are some additional tests for this Linux game when comparing the performance on Intel Core i7 8700K and Ryzen 7 2700X processors.

Wine's bi-weekly release cycle for new development releases is slightly off target with it surfacing today rather than last Friday, but the changes are worthwhile...

Neovim, the fork of Vim focused on offering better extensibility and usability, has issued their v0.3 release...

Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) maintainer Jaegeuk Kim has submitted the file-system updates intended for the Linux 4.18 kernel...

This month marks one year since AMD returned to delivering high-performance server CPUs with the debut of their EPYC 7000 series processor line-up. It's been a triumphant period for AMD with the successes over the past year of their EPYC family. Over the past year, the Linux support has continued to improve with several EPYC/Zen CPU optimizations, ongoing Zen compiler tuning, CPU temperature monitoring support within the k10temp driver, and general improvements to the Linux kernel that have also helped out EPYC. In this article is a comparison of a "2017" Linux software stack as was common last year to the performance now possible if using the bleeding-edge software components. These Linux benchmarks were done with the EPYC 7351P, 7401P, and 7601 processors.

For those making use of the Qt 5.9 long-term support series, Qt 5.9.6 was outed today by The Qt Company...

The MIPS P6600 processor was announced in 2015 as one of the Warrior Processors based upon MIPS64 Release 6. The P6600 is based on a 28nm process, clock speeds up to 2.0GHz, and is the fastest performing of the MIPS Warrior cores. Only now has MIPS posted an enablement patch for the MIPS P6600 with GCC...

Kicking off a new week is the Vulkan 1.1.77 specification update...

The VirGL stack for offering OpenGL hardware acceleration to guest virtual machines with KVM is now capable of utilizing OpenGL 4.1...

Released this week was the first alpha of PHP 7.3 and I decided to take it for a spin with some benchmarks. While not as dramatic as going from PHP5 to PHP 7.0, the performance of PHP7 continues getting better...

This week Mac/Linux game porting company released the Linux port of A Total War Saga: THRONES OF BRITANNIA, just two months after this game was released for Windows. With the Linux port of this strategy game the Vulkan API is being used for graphics rendering, which makes it interesting for benchmarking. Here is our extensive look at the performance of this major Linux game port when testing twenty-five different AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards to see how this game is performing on Ubuntu Linux.

The AMD Radeon driver developers maintaining the open-source AMDVLK Vulkan Linux driver have pushed out their latest week's worth of changes...

It's too late for the upcoming LibreOffice 6.1, but LibreOffice 6.2 will feature PDF importing improvements...

Linux 4.17 landed the initial Spectre V4 mitigation as "Speculative Store Bypass Disable" (SSBD) while primarily focused on Intel CPUs and for Linux 4.18 the SSBD code has been updated for AMD processors...

Adding to the list of new features for Linux 4.18 is the long-in-development work on the restartable sequences system call...

The second release candidate of FreeBSD 11.2 is now available for testing...

There are a lot of staging changes for the busy Linux 4.18 kernel merge window...

The latest monthly update is now available to the KDE Frameworks that complements the capabilities of the Qt5 tool-kit...

While there are the VIA/Centaur-based Zhaoxin desktop CPUs targeted for the Chinese market, it turns out there is another x86 Chinese CPU effort but this time is a collaboration with AMD...

For those relying upon DXVK for running Direct3D 11 games over Vulkan with Wine, the RADV Vulkan driver from Mesa Git should now be working out much better for this fast-developing graphics translation layer...

We are about half-way through the Linux 4.18 kernel merge window, so here is a look at the most interesting work that's been merged so far for this next kernel release that should debut as stable around mid-August...

Unrelated to this week's announcement of Microsoft acquiring GitHub, the X.Org code repositories will soon be managed on GitLab...

KDE developer Markus Slopianka has looked at the state of Flatpak and Snap application deployment/sandboxing technologies across the state of several Linux distributions...

Devuan 2.0 has now been released as stable, the downstream of Debian GNU/Linux that aims for "init freedom" by decoupling the packages from being dependent upon systemd...

As it stands right now the most competitive graphics card battle on the Linux gaming front is the Radeon RX 580 against the GeForce GTX 1060. NVIDIA continues with their first-rate performant drivers while the Polaris hardware on the open-source RADV/RadeonSI drivers is mature enough now that it's competing with the GTX 1060 like it should be and in some cases even performing much better than the NVIDIA Pascal part. With this week's release of Thrones of Britannia and powered by Vulkan, here is an extensive look at the two competing GPUs and their performance...

The ATI Rage 128 series was introduced in 1998 while now twenty years later a renewed DDX driver and potentially DRM/KMS kernel driver is going to be attempted for these AGP/PCI graphics cards from the days of OpenGL 1.2...

The latest feature plan for Fedora 29 is to finally have Wayland remote desktop support in place...

NVIDIA has rounded out their supported Linux drivers with X.Org Server 1.20 support...