Phoronix

The bumpy Linux 4.19~4.20 road continues but at least another performance regression is now crossed off...

The Qt Company began shipping Qt 5.12 this morning as their latest long-term support version of the Qt5 tool-kit while also shipping Qt Creator 4.8 as their C++ focused integrated development environment...

A new release of the FreeBSD+ZFS-based network attached storage operating system, FreeNAS, is now available for this platform developed by iXsystems...

Originally slated for the current Linux 4.20 kernel cycle was high-resolution scroll wheel support for Logitech mice. Just a short time after merging, the support was reverted as it ended up breaking support for some existing devices. Fortunately, the revised implementation is progressing and perhaps will be ready for Linux 4.21...

While at the start of the year Nouveau developers expressed their hope to create a basic open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver this calendar year, it doesn't look like it's panning out...

The EXT4 file-system corruption issue on Linux 4.19 that also affected 4.20 development builds is now case closed for this pesky data corruption issue...

The sixth and final release candidate of Mesa 18.3 is now available for last minute testing of this quarterly Mesa3D update...

Usually this late into a current Linux kernel development cycle the DRM graphics driver fixes don't tend to be too notable, but that's certainly not the case with today's batch of AMDGPU and TTM fixes sent off to the DRM tree...

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released Linux 4.19.7 today as another rather eventful point release in the Linux 4.19 stable series. He's also updated the older LTS branches too should you be depending upon them...

Coincidentally the DragonFlyBSD 5.4 release and FreeBSD 12.0 lined up to be within a few days of each other, so for an interesting round of benchmarking here is a look at DragonFlyBSD 5.4 vs. 5.2.2 and FreeBSD 12.0 vs. 11.2 on the same hardware as well as comparing those BSD operating system benchmark results against Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS, Clear Linux, and CentOS 7 for some Linux baseline figures.

We knew MPX support was on its way out of the kernel especially after GCC dropped its compiler-side support for it. It looks now like the Memory Protection Extensions support will be removed from Linux 4.21...

For those interested in the proposed quad-core RISC-V Libre SoC that is intended to go in-step with the Rust-written Kazan for offering Vulkan support, the initial performance target has now been shared...

ARM developers have posted their first public patches for the new "Komeda" display driver for the Linux kernel that offers DRM/KMS integration...

Being more than a month past the Ubuntu 18.10 release, development on Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco Dingo" is progressing at full-speed...

More than a year ago Western Digital talked up how they would begin designing RISC-V cores and shipping them in devices and that is indeed panning out. The company has unveiled their new SweRV core and plans to open-source it in 2019...

For those interested in some interesting and highly-technical talks about the Linux kernel and other low-level plumbing that makes up Linux systems, all of the Linux Plumbers Conference 2018 videos are now online...

The Fedora-led effort for perfecting the flicker-free Linux boot experience has landed its Plymouth boot splash screen changes for reusing the UEFI boot/logo screen during the boot process...

Cleared from this week's DragonFlyBSD 5.4 release, feature work is resuming on this BSD operating system towards the DragonFlyBSD 5.6 release expected out in about six months based on their usual release cadence. Some early work now staged is updating the Intel DRM/KMS driver for a slew of recent hardware...

The saga about EXT4 file-system corruption on Linux 4.19 kernels that has increased in recent weeks might soon be drawing a close... This data corruption bug though is looking like it doesn't originate from within the EXT4 code at all...

With the time for new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver feature material to enter DRM-Next for the Linux 4.21 kernel cycle quickly coming to a close, the Intel Open-Source Technology Center crew has sent in a final feature pull of material for this next kernel development cycle...

NVIDIA has quietly outed the key features they will be introducing with their upcoming Video Codec SDK 9.0 release...

Complementing the recent Linux 4.19 I/O scheduler benchmarks using SATA 3.0 SSD storage, here are some benchmarks when using the current Linux 4.20 development kernel and also using faster NVMe solid-state storage for benchmarking. Most Linux distributions default to no I/O scheduler in the case of NVMe SSDs, but for your viewing pleasure today is a look at the performance against MQ Deadline, Kyber, and BFQ.

As an early Christmas surprise, Microsoft has today open-sourced Windows Forms, WinUI (Windows UI Library), and WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation)...

A new feature release of CodeWeavers' Wine-based CrossOver software for Linux and macOS is now available...

After weeks of rumors, Epic Games today officially announced the Epic Games Store as their own electronic game store alternative to Steam...

AMD's Vulkan driver developers have done their first fresh code drop of the AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver code in two weeks and it's a big push...

Greg Kroah-Hartman today published the initial patch series of work he intends to use as forming the Linux 4.19.7 point release in the coming days. With Linux 4.19.7 there are some important fixes...

Yesterday saw the release of Vulkan 1.1.95 that introduced the new VK_KHR_shader_float18_int8 extension for supporting 16-bit floating-point types and 8-bit integer types within shader code for arithmetic operations, compared to earlier extensions limiting these data types to load/store operations. NVIDIA released a same-day driver update for the new 1.1.95 extensions while now Intel's "ANV" open-source Vulkan code is the second Linux driver seeing this support (or first if just looking at the open-source drivers)...

Mesa developers have been discussing on and off in recent months about dropping their Autotools build system support considering there is also the SCons build support, Android build system support, and most notably is the increasingly mature Meson build system coverage...

Ongoing LLVM release manager Hans Wennborg has laid out plans for releasing LLVM 8.0 and related sub-projects like Clang 8.0 in early March...

Eric Anholt of Broadcom's graphics driver team has provided another status update about their open-source Linux driver work in recent weeks on the VC4 driver stack mostly known for being the open-source 3D driver for the Raspberry Pi as well as the V3D driver for next-gen Broadcom VideoCore hardware...

Besides the mysterious EXT4 issue on Linux 4.19 that is still being sorted out, another known issue but with a fix pending that is hopefully not far out pertains to running newer Radeon graphics cards with older motherboards...

The past several years Red Hat developer Jerome Glisse has been working on Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) for the Linux kernel to handle the mirroring of process address spaces, system memory that can be transparently used by any device process, and similar functionality around today's GPU computing needs and other devices. Jerome today published the next step as part of his low-level memory device management work and that is the Heterogeneous Memory System for exposing complex memory topologies of today's systems...

Complementing our many recent bare-metal Linux distribution comparison benchmarks, here is a fresh look at how the various high profile Linux distributions are running on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). For this round of testing on their current-generation M5 instance type, Amazon Linux 2, Clear Linux 26600, Debian 9.6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15, and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS were benchmarked.

Last month when the AMD Radeon RX 590 launched, it wasn't working on Linux to much surprise considering it's another Polaris refresh. Today there are new AMDGPU DRM kernel patches and firmware/microcode files that do allow the RX 590 now to work properly under Linux...

Adding to NVIDIA's busy Monday morning of announcing the TITAN RTX and open-sourcing PhysX, they also shipped their latest Vulkan beta driver support for Windows and Linux...

Days ahead of the FreeBSD 12.0 release, the long-ago-forked DragonFlyBSD is out with its very exciting 5.4 six-month feature update...

Developers are beginning to firm up the Darktable 2.6 release as the next feature update to this amazing, cross-platform open-source RAW photography software...

As a very big surprise bundled alongside the announcement today of the $2,499 USD TITAN RTX graphics card is word that NVIDIA's PhysX software is going open-source!..

After teasing the TITAN RTX over the weekend on social media, NVIDIA this morning officially announced this new $2,499 USD graphics card...

While the long-term prospects of the project have yet to be determined, longtime Linux input expert Peter Hutterer of Red Hat has hacked together "GGKBDD" as the generic gaming keyboard daemon for Linux systems...

The Khronos Group's Vulkan working group is kicking off the start of a new week with a new specification update. The Vulkan 1.1.95 release brings with it two new floating point extensions...

The ARM Linux developers continue working on Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) for the mainline Linux kernel to better handle systems with asymmetric CPU topologies, namely SoCs like those with ARM big.LITTLE cores...

For those utilizing OpenBLAS as the linear algebra library for your application(s), OpenBLAS 0.3.4 was released on Sunday with the latest features and CPU optimizations for multiple architectures...

Last month at the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC 2018) was a presentation by Red Hat's open-source graphics driver developer David Airlie on creating a vendor-neutral compute stack that theoretically could take on NVIDIA's CUDA dominance...

Linus Torvalds has outed the fifth weekly release candidate of the in-development Linux 4.20...

Given the AMDGPU changes building up for DRM-Next to premiere in Linux 4.21 that is on top of the AMDGPU performance boost with Linux 4.20, here are some benchmarks of Linux 4.19 vs. 4.20 Git vs. DRM-Next (Linux 4.21 material) with the Radeon RX Vega 64 compared to the relevant NVIDIA GeForce competition.

Ubuntu 17.10 stopped producing 32-bit x86 ISOs and many other *buntu derivatives followed suit earlier this year. One of them still producing i386 images was Xubuntu, but now they have decided to abandon them as well...

There is still four weeks or so until the Linux 4.20 kernel will be officially christened, but there are already some changes we are excited for that should be on the table with Linux 4.21...

SQLite developers started off December by releasing a new feature update to their widely-used, embed-friendly SQL database library...