Phoronix

While Linux distributions are still migrating to Glibc 2.27, in the two months since the release changes have continued building up for what will eventually become the GNU C Library 2.28...

The GNU Guix transactional package manager can be made to run on Android smartphones/tablets, but not without lots of hoops to jump through first...

Eric Anholt of Broadcom has sent out his revised patches for the "V3D" DRM driver, which up until last week was known as the VC5 DRM driver...

The upcoming release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 is offering an HPC (High Performance Computing) module for development, control, and compute nodes. Today that SLE15-HPC module is now available in beta...

The BUS1 in-kernel IPC mechanism born out of the ashes of KDBUS still hasn't been mainlined in the Linux kernel, but its code is still improved upon from time to time. At least though DBus-Broker as a new performance-oriented D-Bus implementation continues gaining ground in user-space...

While in recent months there have been some improvements to FreeBSD that have helped yield greater reliability in running AMD Ryzen processors on this BSD operating system, some users are still reporting hard to diagnose stability problems on FreeBSD...

Red Hat developers have managed to deliver on their goals around improving Thunderbolt support on the Linux desktop with the upcoming Fedora 28 distribution update...

As part of next month's Qt 5.11 tool-kit update, a new technology preview module will be WebAssembly support for running Qt5 user-interfaces within your web-browser...

Wayland's Weston reference compositor with its Pixman software-based renderer back-end has received a number of performance optimizations...

ThreadStack is yet another C++ project trying to make it easier dealing with multiple CPU threads...

The Panfrost open-source driver project previously known as "Chai" for creating an open-source 3D driver stack for ARM's Mali Midgard hardware now has a working shaded cube being rendered using the open-source code as part of its new "half-way" driver based on Gallium3D...

Linus Torvalds has announced the availability of the second weekly test release for what is becoming the Linux 4.17 kernel...

While still hoping to see their new Artifact game this year, it seems Valve is serious after all about getting back into the gaming spirit. News coming out this weekend is that Valve has acquired the Campo Santo game studio and its developers will be joining Valve...

With this week's Ryzen 5 2600X + Ryzen 7 2700X benchmarks some thought the CPUFreq scaling driver or rather its governors may have been limiting the performance of these Zen+ CPUs, so I ran some additional benchmarks this weekend...

MenuLibre is the advanced menu editor that supports most Linux desktop environments including GNOME, KDE Plasma, Budgie, Cinnamon, EDE, LXQt, MATE, and Pantheon. MenuLibre 2.2 is the first major release for the project in over two years...

It looks like the DragonFlyBSD 5.4 release will be delivering at least a few kernel-level performance improvements...

A Phoronix reader recently pointed out that LibJPEG 2.0 Beta quietly shipped last month as working towards the next big update for this speed-focused JPEG library...

Last week Intel's Open-Source Technology Center released their latest quarterly "graphics stack recipe" for the Linux desktop...

In addition to the Xfce Settings update this weekend there is also a new release of the Xfce PluseAudio Plugin providing better support for this sound server on the Xfce desktop...

KDE Plasma 5.13 that is due for release in June will have a great number of improvements to its Wayland support for allowing the KDE Plasma desktop to work much better on this alternative to the X.Org Server...

Seemingly flying under our radar is that Mesa 18.1 has already been branched and the first release candidate issued...

AMD developers maintaining their official Vulkan cross-platform driver code have pushed their end-of-week updates to their external source repositories for those wanting to build the AMDVLK driver on Linux from source...

This week I posted some benchmarks looking at the Meltdown mitigation impact on BSD vs. Linux as well as some tests of DragonFly's stabilized HAMMER2 while for your viewing pleasure this weekend are a variety of general BSD vs. Linux benchmarks while using the newly-released DragonFlyBSD 5.2, TrueOS 18.03, FreeBSD 11.1, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Ubuntu 18.04, and Intel's Clear Linux.

It's still not clear if the EGLStreams XWayland support will be merged for xorg-server 1.20 but at least the patches were revised this week, making it possible to merge them into this next X.Org Server release for allowing the NVIDIA proprietary driver to work with XWayland...

Vulkan continues sticking to the "release early, release often" mantra with the availability today of Vulkan 1.1.74...

The proposal for replacing early Ubuntu derivatives' early alpha/beta releases with "testing weeks" in its place is moving forward with no objections having been raised but flavors like Kubuntu and Xubuntu being in favor of the change...

A new version of Collabora Online is now available, the web-based open-source office suite derived from the cloud version of LibreOffice...

While still waiting on the long-awaited Xfce 4.14, out this weekend is an Xfce Settings 4.14.2 preview release as well as an Xfce Settings 4.12.3 stable series update...

The widely talked about "GNOME Shell memory leak" causing excessive memory usage after a while with recent versions of GNOME has now been fully corrected. The changes are currently staged in Git for what will become GNOME 3.30 but might also be backported to 3.28...

For those using the independent, open-source SC-Controller user-mode driver and GTK3 GUI for the Steam Controller, a new release is available in time for any weekend gaming...

FFmpeg 4.0 is now available as the latest major release for this widely-used open-source multimedia encode/decoder library...

It was just last year that open-source RadeonSI/RADV developers were trying to get the Radeon RX 580 "Polaris" GPU to be competitive with the GeForce GTX 1060 as it is under Windows given each GPU's capabilities. We've seen the RX 580 and GTX 1060 dancing under Linux the past few months and yesterday's 20-way GPU comparison with Rise of the Tomb Raider was quite significant -- perhaps most surprising being how well the RX 580 performed. Heck, just one or two years ago it was an accomplishment seeing any official Radeon driver support at-launch for new Linux game releases. So here are some extensive tests looking closer at the GTX 1060 vs. RX 580 battle in this latest Vulkan-powered Linux game port...

It's a busy month for the BSDs with DragonFlyBSD 5.2 having come along with OpenBSD 6.3 and right before that was TrueOS 18.03. Now there's finally the release candidate of the long-awaited NetBSD 8.0 update...

Arch Linux is finally transitioning to glibc 2.27, which may make for a faster system...

Following RadeonSI adding "Vega M" support for the new Radeon graphics appearing embedded on select Intel Kabylake processor packages, the RADV developers have similarly staged their Vega M support in this open-source Vulkan driver...

While the relevant bits for supporting Intel GPU mediated pass-through to virtual machines with KVM are now upstream in the Linux kernel as well as in QEMU 2.12, Intel developers have just announced their quarterly release of "KVMGT" for those wanting the officially blessed configuration for running Intel virtual GPU support with KVM virtual machines...

AMD's Alex Deucher has sent in a small set of fixes for the AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager driver in the Linux 4.17 kernel...

Following yesterday's 20-way graphics card comparison for Rise of the Tomb Raider that debuted yesterday on Linux and is exclusively powered by Vulkan, my next benchmarking objective was trying out the official AMD Vulkan driver, AMDVLK, to see how it would work given the successes of RADV on launch-day for this latest Feral Interactive game port...

Earlier this month we covered "The Forge" picking up initial Linux support and now they have rounded out their full-featured Linux support with Vulkan rendering...

The Broadcom VC5 driver stack is being renamed to V3D and developer Eric Anholt is looking at merging it into the mainline Linux kernel...

Today Feral Interactive released their much anticipated Linux port of Rise of the Tomb Raider, the game that was released for Windows in January of 2016 and then released for macOS last week. Feral's Mac port was relying upon the Apple Metal API while the Linux port is now their second game (after F1 2017) exclusively relying upon the Vulkan graphics/compute API rather than OpenGL. This morning I posted the initial Radeon results using the RADV driver while here is the NVIDIA GeForce vs. AMD Radeon graphics card comparison on Ubuntu Linux using twenty different graphics cards.

It's a busy day in the software and hardware space today as well as a busy week for Oracle with several big releases this week. The latest is the general availability of the long-awaited MySQL 8.0 update...

The embargo on the Ryzen 5 2600X and Ryzen 7 2700X processors has expired now that these Ryzen+ CPUs are beginning to ship today. We can now talk about the Linux support and the initial performance figures for these upgraded Zen desktop CPUs.

Today the Ryzen+ "Pinnacle Ridge" processors begin shipping and we can now share with you the initial performance results for the Ryzen 5 2600X and Ryzen 7 2700X processors. One of the most common questions I've received about these improved Zen processors since showing them off last week was inquiries/hopes about the Linux gaming performance, so those numbers are first up today followed by other Linux benchmark results forthcoming.

The KDE community has announced the release today of KDE Applications 18.04 as the first major update to the open-source KDE application set for 2018...

Yesterday Feral announced that the long-awaited Linux release of Rise of the Tomb Raider would be coming tomorrow and now they have honored that release. Rise of the Tomb Raider is now natively available for Linux and this port is exclusively relying upon the Vulkan graphics API for rendering. Here are our initial benchmarks of Rise of the Tomb Raider on Linux with Radeon GPUs while making use of the Mesa RADV driver.

Croteam today released a trailer for their upcoming game Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass...

AMD's Huang Rui has posted a set of 20 patches providing "GFXOFF" support for the AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager Linux kernel driver...

The usage of LLVM as part of the graphics driver stack continues to be picked up now especially in the Vulkan/SPIR-V world...

Earlier this month with the Vulkan 1.1.72 specification update was the new VK_EXT_descriptor_indexing extension that is quickly being well received by developers...