Phoronix

It has been a long time since last having anything new to report on the Unvanquished open-source game project that is powered by the "Daemon Engine" as a long ago fork from ioquake3 and has seen countless improvements since. At least when the project started out several years back, the visual quality was great and they had been doing great alpha releases. However, in the past two years they haven't succeeded in putting out new alphas or their long-awaited beta, but fortunately the project is still alive...

After getting the Linux support squared away for Creative's Sound BlasterX AE-5 and Sound Blaster Recon3D, Connor McAdams latest challenge was getting the Sound Blaster ZxR support working on Linux. Overnight a set of 11 patches were sent out to get this ZxR sound card working on the mainline Linux kernel...

The KDE developers remain very busy improving their desktop environment...

Dragora is one of the lesser known Linux distributions that is focused on shipping "entirely free software" to the standards of the FSF/GNU...

While DXVK captures much of the limelight these days when it comes to accelerating Windows gaming on Linux by mapping Direct3D 11 (and D3D10) over Vulkan, the VK9 project and its main developer continue advancing D3D9-over-Vulkan for those preferring to relive over Direct3D Windows games...

While the maintained Linux 4.x kernel branches have all seen a lot of work on L1TF/Foreshadow and other x86/x86_64 speculation execution mitigation work, the Linux 3.16.59 kernel is bringing a load of work for those still riding this old kernel base...

Earlier this week I published some initial Windows vs. Ubuntu graphics tests with a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and other NVIDIA graphics cards. While having that Windows 10 install around, I also did some comparison tests with a Radeon RX 580 and RX Vega 64 on this same system and using the latest AMD drivers.

The Kyber I/O scheduler added back in Linux 4.12 and backed by Facebook engineers is seeing some improvements come the Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel cycle...

The Khronos Working Group maintaining Vulkan have released their 1.1.86 specification update to end out September. This is one of the more interesting Vulkan updates in recent times...

StepSync 1.0 is yet another option for those looking towards open-source options for file/folder synchronization and backups...

Arcan is that display server built originally off a game engine code base and has been building up a feature-set close to that of X11/Wayland. Durden is its accompanying desktop while the project has also been pursuing a virtual reality desktop and trying to work on other innovations in this space...

Veteran systemd and BUS1 developers are David Herrmann and Tom Gundersen have been working on "nettools" as a new network configuration libraries project for Linux...

The Haiku operating system after sixteen years in development and six years since their last alpha release, this BeOS-inspired open-source operating system has reached its beta milestone...

Last week Canonical developers released Mir 1.0 for the "next-generation of graphical solutions" particularly for IoT device makers. Mir lead developer Alan Griffiths published a bit of a redux today now with the 1.0 release out the door...

Four years ago Microsoft made public the source-code to MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 to the Computer History Museum. Today though they're making it much more accessible and friendly to modern developers by pushing it onto GitHub...

Wine 3.17 is out today as the latest bi-weekly development update to this increasingly popular way of running Windows games and applications on Linux...

Here is a fresh look at the current Linux OpenGL/Vulkan performance of various new and old Intel/AMD systems with integrated graphics using Ubuntu 18.10.

It's easy to get confused by the Radeon GPU compute stack / OpenCL driver support as there has been multiple offerings over the years from the no longer supported Clover Gallium3D OpenCL driver to a still-maintained PAL-based OpenCL driver to their modern ROCm compute stack. When it comes to ROCm though, besides OpenCL there is also their HCC and HIP approaches and from there support for a variety of frameworks, libraries, etc. Here are some overviews of the current ROCm compute stack those interested...

There have been rumors going on in recent days about Intel hitting supply challenges with their current-generation 14nm products. Intel CFO and Interim CEO, Bob Swan, wrote a public letter today outlining those challenges...

Not to be confused with the also new Zinc crypto code working its way to the mainline kernel as part of WireGuard, Zink is a new effort led by a developer at Collabora for implementing OpenGL on top of Vulkan drivers via Gallium3D...

The third-quarter was extremely busy to say the least... There was so much going on from the notable Linux 4.19 kernel merge window, the exciting material queueing ahead of Linux 4.20~5.0, continued open-source graphics driver advancements, Valve announcing Steam Play / Proton, many Vulkan milestones, and countless other reasons for Linux and open-source fans to celebrate. On the hardware front was also extremely busy with the AMD Threadripper 2 launch, the recent GeForce RTX graphics card launch delivering great performance for Linux gamers but at a significant cost, and continued hardware testing around Spectre mitigation...

Just last week a NVIDIA engineer sent out the initial Tegra194/Xavier SoC display enablement code for the Linux kernel's Tegra Direct Rendering Manager bits. Those patches have now been queued in DRM-Next for introduction in the next kernel release...

Driven to improve the Chrome OS user-experience, Intel open-source developers have been working on improving their GPU reset behavior when encountering problems under 3D/multimedia workloads...

A few days back I wrote about the SDL library improving its 2D rendering code with a new batching system to yield greater performance. Since then the improvements have not stopped for this library that is critical to most Linux games and other multi-platform software...

The red driver team has submitted their presumably last feature pull request to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel cycle. This pull does include some of the recently covered notable additions to the AMDGPU DRM driver...

For the past four years now we have been monitoring the development of Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) for allowing the mirroring of process address spaces and other functionality particularly designed around modern GPU compute needs but also applicable to other devices/drivers. The HMM kernel code was merged to mainline last year while haven't seen much activity by the DRM drivers but that now seems to be changing...

Over the past decade and a half of covering the Linux graphics scene, there have been many attempts at providing a fully open-source GPU (or even just display adapter) down to the hardware level, but none of them have really panned out from Project VGA to other FPGA designs. There's a new very ambitious project trying to create a "libre 3D GPU" built atop RISC-V, leveraging Rust and LLVM on the software side, and would also support Vulkan...

The Ubuntu 18.10 Beta was released today for the official desktop, server, and cloud products. As well, 18.10 betas are out today for Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, and Xubuntu...

Support for the Hygon Dhyana, a Chinese x86 server CPU based on AMD Zen/EPYC, will find its way into the next Linux kernel cycle...

It was a bit nerve-racking seeing Mesa 18.1 still in use by the Ubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish" in recent days, but fortunately it looks like the feature freeze exception is secured and Mesa 18.2 is on its way to landing...

Earlier this month Arm began publishing details of the ARMv8.5-A instruction set update, which is expected to be officially documented and released by the end of Q1'2019, while the LLVM compiler stack has already received initial support for the interesting additions...

Blade Symphony: Harmonious Prelude, a big update to this Source Engine powered "tactical slash-em-up" sword-fighting video game, is now available including with Linux support...

Last month we noted a new Gallium3D driver in-development by Intel dubbed "Iris" and potentially replacing their existing "classic i965" Mesa driver for recent generations of Intel HD/UHD/Iris graphics hardware. Intel developers have begun talking about this new open-source Linux GPU driver today at the XDC 2018 conference in A Coruña, Spain...

Feral Interactive announced today the latest Total War game they are porting to Linux and macOS...

With macOS Mojave having been released earlier this week, I've been benchmarking this latest Apple operating system release on a MacBook Pro compared to Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS with the latest updates as well as Intel's high-performance Clear Linux rolling-release operating systems to see how the performance compares.

The Linux mult-queue block I/O layer (blk-mq) has been working out well for delivering very fast performance particularly for modern NVMe solid-state storage and SCSI drives. But it turns out run-time power management hasn't been in use when blk-mq is active...

Longtime Linux PC vendor System76 has begun teasing a "new open-source computer" they will release in the coming weeks...

At XDC2018 in Spain this morning the talks were focused on testing of Mesa / continuous integration. During the talk by Mark Janes, the Intel open-source crew announced the public availability of all their CI data...

Separate from the recent FUSE performance work talked about for making FUSE faster with the eBPF in-kernel JIT that hasn't been staged for mainlined, "File-Systems in User-Space" are set to see better performance on the next kernel (Linux 4.20~5.0) thanks to other changes...

This year Intel HDCP support was merged into the mainline Linux kernel for those wanting to utilize this copy protection system in combination with a supported Linux user-space application, which for now appears to be limited to Chrome OS. HDCP 2.2 support is the latest revision now being worked on for the open-source Intel Direct Rendering Manager driver...

For developers interested in delivering cross-platform Vulkan games/applications and using MoltenVK for delivering macOS/iOS support, a new release is available that has a number of feature additions...

We've known Red Hat was working on converting the VirtualBox "vboxvideo" DRM/KMS driver to using the atomic APIs for atomic mode-setting to replace the legacy APIs and now those patches are out there...

Intel VT-d revision 3.0 adds a "Scalable Mode" translation mode for enabling Scalable I/O virtualization and the patches have been in the works for supporting this within the Linux kernel...

While it will be a ways from release, the codename to the successor of the AMD Radeon "Navi" GPUs might be Arcturus...

Besides the Spectre V2 userspace-userspace mitigation patches revised and sent out earlier today, some related Spectre V2 changes are now queued for soon merging to the mainline Linux kernel...

While AMD's open-source Linux driver developers have been busy on bringing up Vega 20 support as well as Picasso APUs, they aren't done yet optimizing their Vega 10 support...

Linux Mint lead developer Clément Lefèbvrehas has issued his latest monthly update concerning the activities within this Ubuntu/Debian-derived camp and their work on the GNOME-forked Cinnamon desktop environment...

Long-running open-source, cross-platform flight simulator FlightGear is preparing for its next feature release...

The latest in our GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Linux benchmarking is a look at how the NVIDIA Linux graphics driver performance on Ubuntu 18.04 is comparing to that of Microsoft Windows 10 when using these initial launch drivers. For additional perspective are also some basic Ubuntu vs. Windows NVIDIA tests on the GeForce GTX 1060 and GTX 1080 Ti.

Shepherd, the init/service manager of the GNU system with GNU Herd and can be used as an alternative to systemd on Linux systems as well, is up to version 0.5...