Phoronix

Another one of the hardware support additions for the now in-development Linux 4.18 kernel is finally the mainlining of the Chromebook Tablet Switch Driver...

A new version of the Jailhouse partitioning hypervisor for Linux systems is now available...

A Gentoo user has revised his kernel patch allowing the mainline Linux kernel to be built with the GCC "-march=native" compiler optimizations for targeting the kernel build against your particular CPU...

With today's announcement of macOS 10.14 Mojave, Apple quietly confirmed they are deprecating OpenGL and OpenCL within macOS...

KDE developer Alessandro Longo has penned a response about the KDE "Visual Design Group" with Martin Flöser announcing earlier today he is stepping away as KWin maintainer in part due to his frustrations with the VDG...

Apple today lifted the lid on macOS 10.14 "Mojave", the next installment of their operating system. If you are curious about what's coming to macOS 10.14 either due to being a multi-OS user or curious what the Linux desktop distributions will be going up against later this year, here's the quick overview...

For those making use of Btrfs' incremental send/receive functionality for efficient backups or other reasons for moving data between Btrfs volumes, the directory deletion performance for Btrfs send is now much faster...

The scheduler updates submitted today for the Linux 4.18 kernel merge window include a few notable changes...

Last week I posted benchmarks of a big Linux distribution and Windows 10 / WSL benchmark comparison while in this article for kicking off the Phoronix birthday benchmarking week are results when seeing how the various BSDs are comparing against the Linux distributions and Windows 10 Pro itself. The BSDs for this comparison were TrueOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and DragonFlyBSD.

For years Fedora has been demoting 32-bit x86 and there's been efforts to drop 32-bit kernel builds and related efforts while the latest x86 proposal causing some controversy is the "i686 is for x86-64" feature proposal...

As reported a few months ago, the new Chinese x86 CPU venture formed between the government of Shanghai and VIA has been working on Linux support for these new x86 CPUs and that onboarding has continued with Linux 4.18...

Microsoft has publicly announced their acquisition of GitHub and they paid billions more than anticipated...

Based on yesterday's upstream Linux 4.17 kernel release, the FSF-approved GNU Linux-libre 4.17-gnu kernel is now available for a fully free software kernel on capable hardware configurations...

Rafael Wysocki has submitted the ACPI and power management updates already for the newly-opened Linux 4.18 merge window...

For fans of the Linux Mint distribution, their 19 "Tara" release based upon Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is now available in beta form...

Martin Flöser (nee Gräßlin) who has been the maintainer of KDE's KWin since 2010 is leaving his post...

NVIDIA has used Computex 2018 for launching their latest Jetson developer platform. Over the Jetson TX2, the Jetson Xavier is a big upgrade but is also costing more money...

The hardware monitoring "hwmon" updates have been sent in for the just-opened Linux 4.18 kernel merge window while what's interesting this time around are the k10temp driver updates for AMD CPU temperature reporting...

The PPSSPP emulator project allowing Sony PSP games to be played on multiple platforms has now added Vulkan support on Linux...

Now that Vulkan's code licensing issue with Wine has been resolved, the Winevulkan code for supporting Vulkan within Wine to pass onto the host Linux system's Vulkan driver is being updated...

While there was a lot of last minute changes this week, Linus Torvalds has just gone ahead and officially released the Linux 4.17 kernel...

On Friday a news report suggested Microsoft and GitHub were furthering along talks to acquire the popular code hosting site and now a deal has reportedly been reached...

The first preview release of Ruby 2.6 is now available and its big change compared to its earlier releases is a just-in-time (JIT) compiler...

It's been a while since last having any Linux driver progress to report on for the DisplayLink hardware that is found in many of the USB-powered displays. Fortunately, Red Hat developer Mikulas Patocka has posted a set of improvements to the DisplayLink kernel drivers of the UDL-KMS DRM driver and the UDLFB frame-buffer driver...

Yesterday I posted some Radeon graphics benchmarks under Clear Linux now that Intel's performance-optimized Linux distribution ships with AMDGPU+RadeonSI/RADV support. While doing that comparison I also took the opportunity to run some fresh UHD Graphics "Coffeelake" benchmarks on Clear Linux against Ubuntu.

If all goes well, the Linux 4.17 kernel will debut as stable today. Linus Torvalds last week indicated that this next kernel stable release could be coming for this weekend, but there has been a lot of changes merged in recent days, so we'll see if Linus is still leaning towards releasing today or instead opts for Linux 4.17-rc8. Whatever he ends up deciding, there are a lot of great changes with Linux 4.17...

Mesa 18.0.5 is out as the latest point release for the Mesa 18.0 release from Q1'2018, but it also now marks the end of the series...

Derek Foreman at Samsung's Open-Source Group has initiated a formal discussion over the Wayland and Weston release schedules...

When using a GCN 1.1 CIK / Sea Islands GPU with the non-default AMDGPU DRM driver, it will soon begin defaulting to use PowerPlay for power management rather than the old DPM code...

Version 18.05 of the Genode operating system framework is now available along with the second revision to its Sculpt OS, what desires to become a general purpose OS based upon Genode...

Since the unveiling of Spectre Variant Four last month ARM has been publishing patches for their mitigation for the 64-bit ARM CPUs. While the Intel/AMD and POWER mitigation landed for Linux 4.17, the SSBD work on AArch64 is landing for Linux 4.18...

ReactOS, the "open-source Windows" operating system re-implementation, is now able to finally self-host itself in fully compile ReactOS from ReactOS...

Intel's Clear Linux distribution is quite performant as shown by our many Linux distribution benchmarks for delivering lightning-fast out-of-the-box Linux performance that is generally unmatched by other distributions. While the Clear Linux package (bundle) archive continues getting larger and more desktop packages are being included, one area that sadly had been left out up until recently was support for RadeonSI/RADV. Up until recently their Mesa build was just with the Intel OpenGL/Vulkan driver support as well as the software rasterizers, but now the open-source Radeon drivers are being included as well as Nouveau too for open-source NVIDIA driver support. I took Clear Linux's Radeon stack for a whirl to check out the performance capabilities.

The 2018 trend of migrating open-source project infrastructure to GitLab continues...

The AMD developers maintaining the PAL (Platform Abstraction Layer) and XGL components comprising the official AMDVLK Linux Vulkan driver have made public their latest code commits from the past week...

For those wondering what's been going on with the Ardour digital audio workstation cross-platform, open-source software, their developers have posted a status update about their ongoing progress to the project...

One of the most fascinating hobbyist projects of interest on Phoronix in recent years has been Arcan, the display server built off a game engine and that has been amassing an interesting feature set, and with it the project's Durden desktop environment. The project is celebrating its two year milestone since going public so they have recapped some of their recent work...

Nearly one year after the release of Opus 1.2, the Opus 1.3 release is happening quite soon with Friday marking the availability of the release candidate for this open-source and versatile audio codec implementation...

Ahead of its expected release by month's end, FreeBSD 11.2 is now in the release candidate phase of development...

Next week marks the 14th birthday of the founding of Phoronix.com as well as ten years since the initial stable release of the Phoronix Test Suite (v1.0) on 5 June. There is a lot of content queued up for the days ahead and more...

Following the Steam Survey corrections beginning with the April numbers that came following slightly inaccurate numbers due to cyber-cafe reporting and at a time when there has been large swings in users due to popular games like PUBG, the numbers for May 2018 have barely budged on the Linux front...

Yesterday Valve released Vulkan support for Dota 2 on macOS. Indeed, this first major game relying upon MoltenVK for mapping Vulkan over the Apple Metal drivers is delivering performance gains...

Ben Widawsky, one of the Linux graphics architects at Intel where he has been working on the Mesa driver stack for the past eight years, is now re-tasking to FreeBSD...

For those waiting until the first point release of a new Mesa series before updating, Mesa 18.1.1 is out to kick off June as the first update to Mesa 18.1...

Last week was a look at the latest Linux graphics drivers with current-generation graphics cards while for your viewing pleasure this Friday is a 29-way graphics card comparison. Using the very latest Linux graphics drivers, 29 distinct graphics cards were tested from current and recent generations of GPUs all the way back to the GeForce GTX 600 "Kepler" series on the NVIDIA side and on the AMD side was back to the Radeon HD 5800 "Cypress" hardware with a range of Linux games.

It's always great having more open-source graphics driver improvements to kick off a new month. Marek has started the day by volleying 14 new RadeonSI patches...

There are more AMDGPU improvements just sent in to DRM-Next for landing in the Linux 4.18 kernel...

The GCC 8.1 stable compiler release that debuted a few weeks ago is now available on OpenIndiana, the Illumos-based OpenSolaris-derived operating system...

For those still interested in Jolla's Sailfish OS Linux-based mobile device platform, version 2.2 has rolled out with a variety of enhancements...

Of our 23 featured articles and 310 original news articles this month on Phoronix, here is a look back at the most popular open-source/Linux news and reviews to happen this month with our original daily content happening each and every day on Phoronix. Next week is also marked by the 14th birthday of Phoronix...