Phoronix

It's been almost one month since the Vulkan 1.1.74 debut but now that's been succeeded by Vulkan 1.1.75...

With the great shape that ROCm has been getting into recently for open-source Radeon GPU compute support on Linux including advancing OpenCL support, one might have rightfully assumed that was going to be their centralized compute stack moving forward. It turns out that their PAL-based compute stack will continue to be maintained too...

What was developed as the VC5 Gallium3D driver is now renamed to V3D and enabled by default in new Mesa 18.2 builds...

Usually X.Org DDX driver releases aren't too notable these days with most of the open-source Linux graphics innovations happening elsewhere in the stack, but for those using the VMware graphics virtualization support available through their different virtualization products, the xf86-video-vmware update out today is on the heavier side...

Last month we delivered launch-day Linux benchmarks of the Ryzen 5 2600X and Ryzen 7 2700X for these new "Zen+" processors while recently we received the non-X Ryzen 5 2600 and Ryzen 7 2700 processors for Linux testing as well. In this article are benchmarks of these new AMD Ryzen processors as well as other Intel/AMD CPUs for delivering a fresh nine-way Linux distribution comparison using the very latest software components.

For those that have been interested in the Talos II POWER-based system that is fully open-source down to the firmware but have been put off by its cost, Raptor Computer Systems today announced the Talos II Lite that is a slightly cut-down version of the Talos II Workstation...

For those that haven't yet upgraded to LLVM 6.0 stable, the long overdue LLVM 5.0.2 is now available...

Back in January was the news of Linspire (formerly known as "Lindows") making a comeback and this week marks the release of Linspire Server 2018...

While many Coreboot users just habitually ride the latest Git code, for those sticking to official stable releases, Coreboot 4.8 was released today...

For those using the long-lived NVIDIA 390 driver series rather than the latest NVIDIA 396 short-lived series (or happen to be stuck on 390 like for Fermi GPU support), the NVIDIA 390.59 Linux driver was released minutes ago...

Those running Intel Skylake servers may soon see better I/O performance if using the P-State powersave governor that is often the default on many Linux distributions...

Greg Kroah-Hartman has today released his latest slew of stable kernel release updates...

GNOME's 2018 Performance Hackfest is wrapping up today in Cambridge, UK after spending the past few days focusing on how to better optimize the desktop stack for RAM/CPU/GPU/power efficiency. The fruits of this hackfest will hopefully become apparent with the GNOME 3.30 release due out this September...

Qt 3D Studio, the 3D focused user-interface IDE born out of NVIDIA's big code contribution to Qt, is now in beta for its version 2.0 update...

The fourth development release of Phoronix Test Suite 8.0 is now available for evaluation ahead of the official stable release in the next few weeks...

The current Flatpak runtimes are based upon the 1.6 FreeDesktop.org runtime but a major new version is in the works...

In addition to being able to plot the frames per second, CPU usage, and many other possible sensor outputs, the Gallium3D Heads-Up Display (HUD) is now capable of showing the frametime while gaming...

Alex Deucher of AMD today submitted the initial batch of Radeon/AMDGPU DRM driver feature updates to DRM-Next that in turn are slated to land in the Linux 4.18 merge window in June. There's a fair amount of notable feature work this round for Radeon Linux users...

The folks working on the Endless OS as part of Endless Computer have just announced the latest release of their technologically innovative Linux distribution...

While waiting for Solaris 11.4 to be released, Oracle has today rolled out its thirty-second stable release update to Solaris 11.3...

With the Phoronix Test Suite 8.0 release this quarter on top of the rewritten Microsoft Windows 10 / Windows Server support and significantly better BSD support, Phoronix Test Suite 8.0 is also making it easier to create your own test profiles...

While Mesa 18.1 is expected for release this week, those riding the Mesa 18.0 stable series will also have an 18.0.4 point release coming in the next few days...

AMD today published their big set of patches bringing open-source Linux kernel support for the "Vega 20" graphics processor...

Intel's Clear Linux operating system has been among the first notable Linux distributions upgrading to the recently-released GCC 8.1 as the default system compiler and then proceeding to rebuild its packages against this annual update to the GNU Compiler Collection. Here are some before/after benchmarks of their GCC 8 deployment for those interested.

Longtime Linux users likely have many fond memories of the Knoppix Live CD Linux distribution and today a new release is now available...

Building off their first batch of DRM updates for Linux 4.18, the Intel open-source crew has submitted a second batch of new feature material to DRM-Next that in turn will land with this next kernel cycle...

The AMD developers working on their official Vulkan driver code updated the public source trees yesterday for XGL and PAL that form the AMDVLK open-source Linux driver...

Of the many new features coming to openSUSE Leap 15 that is built from the same sources as SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 is support for transactional updates...

The multimedia-focused Ubuntu Studio Linux distribution has used GNOME since its inception and while that is continuing for now, a sign of a possible shift is coming with Ubuntu Studio 18.10 to offer a KDE Plasma desktop option...

Following the long drawn out and feature-packed X.Org Server 1.20 cycle, the 1.21 window officially opened up today...

AMD's GPUOpen team has released Compressonator 3.0, the latest major update to this tools collection for dealing with texture and 3D model compression and optimizations for Linux, macOS, and Windows...

The Khronos Group has today announced a new maintenance release to OpenCL 2.2...

For those making use of AMD Kaveri APUs, the latest Linux graphics stack improvements will now yield much better performance -- up to twice as fast in some instances! Here are some benchmarks with Ubuntu 18.04 on the AMD A10-7870K.

A KDE Plasma development sprint recently happened in Berlin. One of the most interesting takeaways out of that event was the collaboration with the lead Sway developer, the increasingly popular i3-compatible Wayland compositor...

For those not riding the exciting bi-weekly development releases of Wine, the Wine 3.0.1 stable release is out today as the first bug-fix update over the Wine 3.0 debut that happened earlier this year...

Canonical has expressed interest in shipping Ubuntu 18.10 with GS Connect, the GNOME Shell implementation of KDE Connect that allows interfacing with your phone from the desktop. GS/KDE Connect allows receiving phone notifications on your desktop, viewing and responding to messages from your desktop, and to use your phone as a remote control to the desktop, among other features...

The AMDKFD kernel driver in the upcoming Linux 4.17 has the long-awaited discrete Radeon GPU support working so it can be used with the ROCm/OpenCL compute user-space, but Vega GPU support wasn't ready for this release. Fortunately, it's ready for Linux 4.18...

Over the past week, benchmarks of this first RISC-V development board have begun appearing on OpenBenchmarking.org by the Phoronix Test Suite. Here are some of those initial benchmark numbers...

Last week marked the release of IWD 0.2, the second public release of this WiFi daemon for Linux systems destined as a replacement for WPA Supplicant...

Linus Torvalds has done a Mother's Day release of the Linux 4.17-rc5 kernel...

DXVK 0.51 is now available as the latest version of this library for running Direct3D 11 games under Wine via the Vulkan graphics API...

It's been a while since last checking out any SilverStone power supplies, but the company recently introduced the ET750-HG "Essential Gold" series power supply and sent over one for our thoughts. The SilverStone ET750-HG ends up being an efficient, well-built power supply while not costing too much.

Thomas Gleixner this morning sent in the latest batch of x86/pti updates for containing the latest mitigation improvements around Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities...

While the rapidly maturing DXVK library has been capturing much of the limelight when it comes to piping Direct3D over Vulkan, the VK9 project targeting Direct3D 9 on top of Vulkan continues making progress...

In recent days there have been a number of inquiries about paying for Phoronix Premium or providing tips using Bitcoin or other crypto-currencies. Yes, we happily accept it to help support our continued Linux hardware benchmarking, driver analysis, news coverage, and benchmark development...

The RADV Vulkan driver within Mesa has landed its VK_PIPELINE_CREATE_DISABLE_OPTIMIZATION_BIT support so applications/games can opt to disable optimizations when compiling a Vulkan pipeline. This is notably what was just covered the other day for helping to reduce stuttering with DXVK...

Jason Ekstrand has spent some time away from the Intel ANV Vulkan driver to kill the hardware blitter usage within the i965 Mesa OpenGL driver...

Not only are developers talking about dropping Ubuntu 32-bit x86 support but the ARMHF support might also be cut as well for 32-bit ARM boards...

If you happen to have an HP Elitebook 8770w laying around from Intel's Ivy Bridge era, that Hewlett Packard laptop has now been freed by Coreboot...

For those looking to enjoy Windows-only games on Linux this weekend, Wine-Staging 3.8 has been released as the newest experimental build of Wine...