Phoronix

A feature proposal for Fedora 29 would hide the GRUB boot menu by default on installations where Fedora is the only installed operating system. Surprisingly this has spun into a lot of discussion and debate over the matter...

Back when Vulkan for macOS/iOS was announced at the end of February thanks to the opening up of MoltenVK for mapping Vulkan atop Apple's Metal graphics API, Valve announced they would be bringing Dota 2 on Vulkan to Mac. Today that milestone has finally been reached...

ARM has announced their next-generation wares...

NetworkManager 1.11.4 is out today as the newest development release for this widely-used Linux network management user-space utility...

While Kevin Brace of the OpenChrome project as the lead and only developer left working on this open-source VIA driver stack has restarted the discussion towards mainlining the OpenChrome DRM/KMS driver, he has decided to take a break from that for a few weeks and to focus on developing a "reusable DRM module" to help other vintage/obscure graphics hardware...

As part of the large Linux performance tests we have begun and continuing through June with Phoronix celebrating its 14th birthday next week along with the 10th anniversary of the Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 release, for your viewing pleasure today is a 15-way Linux distribution / operating system comparison testing not only the leading and latest Linux distributions but also Windows 10 April 2018 Update and Linux on Windows WSL.

Huawei's Gao Xiang has announced the EROFS open-source Linux file-system intended for Android devices, but still at its very early stages of development...

Mesa 18.0.5 is the last planned point release for the Mesa 18.0 series that debuted at the end of March as the Q1'2018 release for Mesa3D...

Support for AMD K8 "Hammer" processors including the original Athlon 64 processors and original AMD64 Opterons has been dropped from Coreboot...

Rumors have been circulating that NVIDIA's "Turing" mainstream GPUs will launch this summer while it seems to be a bit more solidified now with a conference schedule pointing out NVIDIA's next-gen mainstream GPU...

If you try running the GNOME Shell today on the Raspberry Pi, it's a frustratingly slow experience. While some work is being done in addressing GNOME's GPU, CPU, and memory consumption, it might not ever be in a state to run smoothly on Raspberry Pi hardware...

While the recently released X.Org Server 1.20 has initial EGLStreams for XWayland support to allow X11 on Wayland client application support for use with the NVIDIA proprietary driver, the support isn't automatically available when needed. Fortunately, that's being corrected for a future point release...

Adding to the list of new features coming for Linux 4.18 is BPFILTER...

AMD's Boyuan Zhang has sent out an initial set of 18 patches adding JPEG handling to the AMDGPU kernel driver for VCN "Video Core Next" as the new media encode/decode block found with Raven Ridge APUs for media decode/encode...

Earlier this month Feral's Linux team lead left the company after a triumphant five years at the company leading the Linux game porting team through titles such as HITMAN, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and Rise of the Tomb Raider. It turns out he's now working for Unity Technologies...

The fifth and final development/test release of Phoronix Test Suite 8.0 is now available ahead of its official release planned for next week to further advance open-source Linux / macOS / BSD / Windows automated benchmarking...

With Bcachefs on its trek towards the mainline Linux kernel, this week I conducted some benchmarks using the very latest Bcachefs file-system code and compared its performance to the mainline Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS file-system competitors on both rotating and solid-state storage.

If you want a laptop or convertible tablet that "respects your freedoms" at all costs with the hardware freed down to the BIOS and don't mind running on outdated hardware to accomplish that goal, the Free Software Foundation has now certified the Minifree X200 that is a refurbished model of the decade-old Lenovo X200 as being "RYF" compliant...

Google has rolled out Chrome 67 to its stable channel for all major platforms, including Linux...

With the Linux 4.17 kernel soon to be released, I've been running some fresh file-system and I/O scheduler tests -- among other benchmarks -- of this late stage kernel code. For your viewing pleasure today are tests of a high performance Intel Optane 900p NVMe SSD with different I/O scheduler options available with Linux 4.17.

Longtime GNU toolchain developer at Red Hat, David Malcolm, has announced the work he is pursuing on compiler-assisted performance analysis with GCC...

Wayland's Weston reference has now received its new touchscreen calibrator within Weston Git...

Marek Olšák of AMD has landed the recently noted updates to the OpenGL compatibility profile support in Mesa 18.2...

The latest project making use of the recently open-sourced MoltenVK that maps Vulkan atop Apple's Metal graphics API for execution on macOS/iOS is now the Qt5 tool-kit...

The HGX-2 is an impressive beast, but will cost an incredible amount too...

ARM has updated their set of Linux kernel patches providing mitigation for last week's disclosure of Spectre Variant Four...

Last Friday the openSUSE community released openSUSE Leap 15 as their newest stable release of openSUSE built from the same sources as SUSE Linux Enterprise 15. Back when this non-rolling-release openSUSE update entered beta at the start of the year we rolled out some preliminary test figures while for your viewing pleasure today are some initial benchmarks with openSUSE Leap 15.0 compared to the former Leap 42.3 and the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed too.

Git 2.13.7, 2.14.4, 2.15.2, 2.16.4, and 2.17.1 were all released today in order to fix two new CVE security disclosures...

For users of the Redis in-memory key-value database, the Redis 5.0 release candidate is out today for testing...

For those of you that have experienced crashes with the Vulkan-powered F1 2017 racing game port on Linux by Feral Interactive, the game porters have released a new beta to deal with the crashes that stem from video RAM pressure when running on NVIDIA hardware...

The only developer from Imagination Technologies that was active in contributing to Mesa has left the company and is now working for Intel's open-source graphics team...

While the id Tech 4 game engine that powered Doom 3 has been open-source now since 2011, there are few notable users of this open-source engine that is a step above the still popular id Tech 3 / ioquake3 engine. But The Dark Mod is one of the few notable successes off this id Tech 4 open-source engine and this weekend they put out a big update...

A major rewrite of the Linux kernel's HID multi-touch input code has been announced in order to support newer input devices and other improvements...

Released one week ago was the big Qt 5.11 tool-kit update. While there is a lot of new and improved functionality, not receiving much attention until now are all of the Wayland platform support improvements in this latest half-year Qt5 update...

LG Electronics is rolling out a 3840 x 1600, 38-inch "UltraWide Thin Client Monitor" that is basically an all-in-one system and features support for Windows 10 and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS...

Fedora 28 was just released at the start of May but there is already a great deal of activity happening for Fedora 29, which is expected to be released by the end of October and with a beta release expected a month prior while feature development is ending around the middle of August...

Peter Hutterer at Red Hat remains quite busy near single-handedly improving the Linux desktop input stack...

In addition to the Vulkan Virgl project another one of the interesting projects for Google Summer of Code 2018 is the development of VKMS, a Virtual KMS DRM driver...

The many year effort on the open-source VIA "OpenChrome" DRM/KMS driver might culminate with getting into the mainline Linux kernel within the next few kernel cycles, but there is still a lot of work for that to happen...

In my recent 12-way Linux GPU tests with the very newest Radeon/NVIDIA drivers the RX 580 in particular was performing great on the open-source RADV driver against the NVIDIA competition while the latest Vega GPUs were a bit lagging still. Fortunately, RADV co-founder Bas Nieuwenhuizen has landed another performance optimization...

For fans of the GNU Emacs feature-packed text editor, Emacs 26.1 is out this US Memorial Day...

As potentially a big game changer for those needing performant Linux access from a Windows 10 / Windows Server installation, Intel's Clear Linux will be exploring support for running on Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)...

While ReactOS 0.4.8 came out just a month ago, ReactOS 0.4.9 is approaching and currently at the release candidate phase...

Less than one week after releasing DXVK 0.52, the DXVK 0.53 release is now available for running Direct3D 11 games/applications over Vulkan...

While this past week for kernel development has been busier than in prior weeks, Linus Torvalds today released Linux 4.17-rc7 and feels the official/stable release might be ready next week...

The Jade Desktop Environment is a new effort at delivering another Linux desktop option...

Of the hundreds of projects for this year's Google Summer of Code, there are many interesting GSoC 2018 projects but one of those that I am most excited for is Vulkan-Virgl for getting this modern API supported with hardware acceleration by guest virtual machines...

The current VR landscape is fragmented and quite a mess with the lack of standardization and wide variety of hardware capabilities at this point, though fortunately the forthcoming OpenXR standard coming out of The Khronos Group for a standard API for application developers as well as a standard device layer / abstraction interface will clear this up when released later in 2018. But for now we have some interesting remarks from an open-source developer that has been engaging in this area and doing his best with the current VR scene...

There's been another weekly-ish public code push to the AMDVLK open-source AMD Vulkan Linux driver stack and this time around it's heavy on feature work...

We have been covering the Linux driver upbringing of "Vega M" for the Vega/Polaris graphics found in select newer Intel "Kabylake G" processors. The code is still in flight before it will work in all released versions of the Linux driver components, but for those willing to build the code or rely upon third party repositories, Vega M is now working on Linux...