Phoronix

Dell recently announced the XPS 9380 Developer Edition laptop as a minor refinement over the 9370: there's now Intel Whiskey Lake processors with minor performance boosts and the web camera is better positioned, while for the "Developer Edition" Sputnik models it means Ubuntu 18.04 LTS rather than Ubuntu 16.04 on the former model or Microsoft Windows 10. The testing so far of the Dell XPS 9380 Developer Edition has been going well and I will have my full benchmark review out soon, but for this weekend are some preliminary data points...

With Kodi 18.0 having been released earlier this week, the LibreELEC project is out with their 9.0 release as a lightweight Linux distribution built around this HTPC/multimedia software...

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver team has sent out another feature batch of changes for queuing in DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel cycle...

The fifth alpha of the Debian Installer for the upcoming Debian 10.0 "Buster" release is now available for testing. What makes this new release particularly important to test is that it features the initial UEFI Secure Boot support...

Since the notorious S3TC patent expired at the end of 2017, this common texture compression implementation for OpenGL has been supported by mainline Mesa. It's now been extended to also support sRGB non-linear color components...

The Haiku open-source operating system project inspired by BeOS is out with their newest monthly report on the happenings...

AMD's Linux graphics driver developers are preparing a set of Mesa patches that allow for compute shaders to be used for the video compositor render process within Gallium3D's video layer code...

In making it easier to persistently enable Weston's Pixman rendering code, the next Weston release offers up a configuration file option for flipping it on...

Valve has just published their monthly "Steam Survey" results that are always interesting for seeing the Linux usage metrics...

After hinting another major OEM was to join the LVFS, Richard Hughes of Red Hat announced today that HP is the latest company backing the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for distributing system firmware updates via this platform that is then applied on systems via Fwupd and conveniently exposed through the likes of GNOME Software...

For those using the Lutris open-source gaming platform that aims to enhance the experience of managing games and better integration from Wine to Steam games, the huge 0.5 release is now available for upgrades...

While Intel is finally poised to enable Fastboot by default for recent generations of their Iris/HD/UHD Graphics hardware, which could happen as soon as Linux 5.1, for now Fedora is comfortable enough enabling the support by default on their own...

AMD normally just does one code drop per week to their open-source "AMDVLK" Linux Vulkan driver code-base but now today marks the second time this week being greeted by new code. This latest release, v-2019.Q1.5, should provide for some fun weekend testing by Linux gamers preferring this driver over Mesa's RADV...

While we frequently compare the performance of many x86_64 Linux distributions, we haven't done one under IBM POWER9 since getting our hands on the Raptor Computing Systems' Talos II back in November. It's been very interesting to benchmark this libre hardware that's high performance with having 44 cores / 176 threads at 3.80GHz. But how much more performance can be tapped by using other Linux distributions? Here's a look with some of the current POWER9 Linux distribution options.

Kenneth Graunke of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center team is the developer who has been leading the charge for the past year on developing the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver that eventually should succeed their "i965" classic Mesa driver for Broadwell hardware and newer. Today he issued a pull request for some improvements to Gallium3D's Mesa state tracker itself...

Qt 5.12 was released in early December as the latest Long-Term Support release for the Qt5 tool-kit. Out today is the first point release that contains hundreds of fixes...

Last week AMD submitted their initial batch of feature changes slated for Linux 5.1 with their AMDGPU DRM graphics driver. Today that's been complemented by a second pull request of new material to come with this next version of the Linux kernel...

Qt Design Studio, the solution for rapidly prototyping and developing complex user-interfaces with the Qt5 tool-kit while being a bridge between designers and developers, has reached its public beta release for the inbound Qt Design Studio 1.1...

The Linux kernel's Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) code getting a "CRTC background color" property value may not seem exciting, but it can mean video memory bandwidth savings and thus better performance or power savings...

While many are looking forward to the day when WireGuard support is mainlined within the Linux kernel and declared as stable and widely supported as a next-gen secure VPN tunnel, for those making use of OpenVPN currently, the OpenVPN 3 Linux client has been taking shape as a big step forward on the OpenVPN front...

January was certainly an exciting month with the Linux 5.0 kernel taking shape, the GeForce RTX 2060 launch and other new hardware, approaching the exciting open-source Radeon VII launch, and other Linux/open-source events to help warm up those otherwise experiencing a frigid winter...

Mesa 18.3.3 was released today as the newest stable release for the current Mesa 18.3 series from Q4...

Ending out January is the version 2.29 release of the GNU C Library (glibc)...

OPNsense, the FreeBSD-based firewall/router platform forked from m0n0wall, is out with its first release of 2019 and it also marks four years since the original OS release...

If the folks at Purism weren't busy enough working on their Librem 5 Linux smartphone initiative and adjoining projects like creating a new software app store, they also are eyeing an entrance into offering "ethical" subscription services and ultimately expand into other areas...

Arm Holdings has been developing their next-generation "Komeda" Direct Rendering Manager driver and they believe it's ready for mainline integration with the upcoming Linux 5.1 cycle...

Unity Tech has put out their first public beta of the upcoming Unity 2019.1 game engine update. There's some notable work on both the Linux and Vulkan fronts...

GNOME 3.32 is shaping up to be a darn fine release especially with the performance improvements slated to be part of this six-month desktop environment update due out in March...

For the Linux kernel's Speculative Store Bypass Disable (SSBD) handling for Spectre Variant 4 protection is support for processes opting into force disabling of speculation via a prctl() interface. Currently when speculation is disabled, that is carried through to new processes started via the execve() system call. But a new bit will allow clearing that state when a new program is started by a process otherwise relying upon PR_SPEC_DISABLE, in what will help the performance in such cases...

Last month the Ubuntu/Debian-based Linux Mint distribution crew collected more than twenty-two thousand dollars in donations during the holiday period. With that record high in monthly donations for the project, they are as motivated as ever for delivering more improvements to their desktop-focused distro this year...

While Intel's Clear Linux is known to the most of you for its speed, it's also a distribution that is very easy to build off of for specific use-cases should you want your own pre-configured Linux OS...

Fresh on the Mesa 19.1 development cycle, the Virgl Gallium3D driver that is used as part of OpenGL acceleration for KVM guests with VirtIO-GPU is seeing some improvements...

Just in time for the Sway 1.0 release, support for the Wayland pointer constraints and relative pointer protocols has been merged, which is important for handling various games primarily first person shooters...

After its feature freeze and code branching yesterday, the first release candidate of Mesa 19.0 is now available...

As some other exciting Linux graphics news today alongside NVIDIA rolling out G-SYNC Compatible support for Linux, the Intel Mesa OpenGL driver could soon finally achieve OpenGL 4.6 compliance with the mainline code...

Taking many by surprise less than one month after NVIDIA announced "G-SYNC Compatible" in supporting FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync displays as an alternative to the more expensive dedicated G-SYNC monitors, the newest Linux beta graphics driver has support for this gamer-oriented feature. This comes just a matter of days after NVIDIA began shipping their Windows driver with this dynamic refresh rate feature that aims to eliminate or at least reduce tearing and stuttering.

Just a few days ago marked the systemd 241 release candidate while today Lennart Poettering opted for a second release candidate...

Richard Hughes of Red Hat continues on his conquest for improving the Linux firmware updating experience: his latest accomplishment is getting support for microcode updates on ATA/ATAPI drives into Fwupd...

While the initial "G-SYNC Compatible" (FreeSync) support is the big headlining feature of today's NVIDIA 418.30 Linux beta driver drop, there are also other changes to get excited about too...

Earlier this month at CES was the surprise announcement that NVIDIA would be effectively rolling out FreeSync display support for Pascal GPUs and newer with forthcoming driver updates. There's been that support on Windows while beginning today that tear-free, gaming-focused display tech will also be working on Linux...

With yesterday having posted fresh OpenGL/Vulkan Linux gaming benchmarks for the current NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards, in this article is the freshest OpenCL GPU compute data for that set of 14 graphics cards on the very latest Linux graphics driver stack. In the case of AMD Radeon open-source compute, it was tested using the new ROCm 2.0 atop the mainline Linux 5.0 kernel and Ubuntu 18.10.

Back in November is when NVIDIA announced they were developing an EGLStreams-based back-end for KDE's KWin so the KDE Wayland session could run with their proprietary graphics driver similar to GNOME's EGLStreams support. That latest code is now under review...

The open-source, reverse-engineered Panfrost Gallium3D driver is now under review in an early form for potentially merging into mainline Mesa in the near future. Panfrost is the current open-source driver community effort around Arm's Midgard and Bifrost graphics units...

Jerome Glisse of Red Hat has spent the past few years devoted to Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) that continues stepping towards taking on bigger roles within the Linux kernel. With the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel cycle there are slated to be more additions to this code, which is the backbone of allowing the mirroring of process address spaces, system memory to be transparently used by any device process, and other functionality for GPU computing and other modern PCIe devices...

This week's AMDVLK open-source Radeon Vulkan driver code drop brings support for the Vega 20 (Vega 7nm) graphics cards and Raven 2 APUs...

With the upcoming Linux 5.1 cycle we'll likely see Intel "Fastboot" enabled by default at least for Skylake hardware and newer, but Cherry Trail and Valleyview might also get this special treatment...

In addition to Alpine 3.9.0 seeing the light of day on Tuesday, another lightweight Linux distribution out with a new release is Slax 9.7.0...

A set of 28 patches posted today by Intel Linux developer Mika Westerberg would improve the kernel's Thunderbolt software connection manager and particularly help older Apple hardware...

The Alpine Linux distribution that is lightweight and security focused and based on Busybox and musl libc is out with their version 3.9.0 feature release. The latest improvements to this operating system continue with a focus of Alpine being used within containers and other lightweight use-cases...

As is always the case at Phoronix ahead of any major graphics card launch, it means re-testing the collection of past graphics cards for comparison in order to have the newest data on the entire line-up with the very latest GPU drivers, operating system updates, and any game updates. For those curious what the very latest Linux gaming performance is looking like at the end of January, here are benchmarks of the NVIDIA Pascal and Turing graphics cards on their 415.27 latest driver release up against the Linux 5.0 Git kernel paired with the near-feature-frozen Mesa 19.0 built with the AMDGPU LLVM 9.0 back-end. These 14 graphics cards on the latest software stack was put through more than three dozen gaming tests.