Phoronix

While there has been lots of Intel updates and tons of AMDGPU activity in DRM-Next for the upcoming Linux 4.20~5.0 cycle, there hadn't been any changes to the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver while at least today the Nouveau DRM tree has seen some new updates...

Yabits was announced last month at the OSFC 2018 conference in Erlangen, Germany. Yabits is a lighter-weight alternative to the open-source TianoCore UEFI implementation and other commonly used proprietary UEFI implementations by motherboard vendors...

A Phoronix reader emailed in that since the recent Linux 4.18.10 stable kernel the power usage on his system has increased by around 50 Watts while idling... Not the overall AC system power draw being 50 Watts, but an increase of roughly that amount on the latest 4.18 stable point releases up to this point. I've now been able to reproduce as well as bisect the cause...

Valve updated their Linux graphics driver requirements today for using SteamVR. On the NVIDIA side you just need the proprietary 387 driver or newer and you are all set for SteamVR -- assuming your GPU is fast enough to keep pace. But on the AMD side is where there are still relatively tight requirements which leads them to recommending third-party PPAs for the best experience...

FreeBSD is looking to deprecate "most" of their 10/100 Ethernet drivers in FreeBSD 12 so that they can be dropped entirely in FreeBSD 13, but not everyone wants to see these older networking drivers dismissed...

Given AMD's weekly updating of the public AMDVLK Vulkan driver source tree as their official open-source Vulkan Linux driver while RADV continues to be maintained as the popular open-source Radeon Vulkan driver within the Mesa source tree, here is a fresh look at how those competing drivers perform. Additionally there are the results from Radeon Software / AMDGPU-PRO using its closed-source Vulkan driver that is derived from the same sources as AMDVLK but built against AMD's proprietary shader compiler.

Since August we've been excited to hear about Raptor Computing Systems' new POWER9 open-source system in development and today at the OpenPOWER Summit in Amsterdam they announced Blackbird...

Intel a while back open-sourced their sound firmware and SDK and also launched the "Sound Open Firmware" project in cooperation with the Linux Foundation. It's been an interesting journey and getting Intel pointed towards offering more open-source firmware...

The KDE/Qt-aligned Krita open-source digital painting program will soon see its 4.2 feature release that is bringing with it many new features...

Remember Kazan, the project originally known as Vulkan-CPU? That was the Google Summer of Code 2017 project to implement a CPU/software-based Vulkan driver. It had been dormant since GSoC 2017 ended, but now work on it has been restarted...

LinuxBoot is the year-old project for replacing proprietary UEFI implementations with the Linux kernel in essence. Adoption continues to grow for LinuxBoot and is now being used inside several large corporations...

The past year LibreOffice has sported a Qt5 interface plug-in for better integration with Qt-based environments like a better "KDE 5" experience. In recent days has been more improvements to this Qt5 integration...

PulseAudio has been slower than some of the other prominent open-source projects at moving to the Meson build system, but as of last night it appears a bulk of that new build system is in place...

The patches written by Google/ChromeOS developers to support the Apple Magic Trackpad 2 that we were talking about a few days back have now been queued ahead of the next Linux kernel cycle...

The initial Steam Linux market-share figures for September showed a rise in Linux gamers which isn't too surprising given the recent roll-out of Steam Play / Proton. It turns out those figures are even higher than originally reported...

Cling, the C++ interpreter built upon LLVM and Clang, is in the process of seeing support for NVIDIA CUDA...

Linux hibernation and suspend/resume works much better in recent years than a decade ago, certainly, but that isn't without some bugs still persisting either due to quirky hardware or the occasional kernel/software issues as well. Fedora developers are interested in hearing about your current system hibernation experience...

It's time for another two-week Mesa 18.2 point release, which is v18.2.2 and preparing for release on Friday...

Among the developer/enthusiast tool-set of the Intel open-source Linux graphics driver developers has been Intel GPU Top (the command intel_gpu_top) that is distributed with the Intel-GPU-Tools collection. This GPU information utility inspired by Linux's well known top command reports for Intel HD/UHD/Iris Graphics hardware the usage information, but does require root privileges to operate. Intel GPU Top is about to get a major overhaul...

In needing to make some room in the racks for some new hardware and some other interesting platforms on the way, I've retired the last of the Intel Nehalem era hardware at Phoronix that was still used for occasional historical Linux performance tests... I decided to take this Sun Microsystems SunFire X4170 server with dual Intel Xeon E5540 (Nehalem EP) processors for a final spin before pulling it from the racks. Here is a look at how the near-final Ubuntu 18.10 Linux performance compares to that of Ubuntu 12.10.

There's a new discussion taking place over the default I/O scheduler of the Linux kernel...

The open-source 3D driver support for Qualcomm Adreno A6xx series hardware has taken another step forward with the latest Mesa 18.3-devel Git...

A new release of xfce4-settings is out as another component update in the long road to Xfce 4.14...

It's 2018 and while Linux GPU drivers have improved a lot in recent years, Google engineers still don't find them reliable enough to ship the Chrome web-browser with GPU video decoding enabled...

Microsoft today announced the general availability of their Windows 10 October 2018 Update and for those on servers/clouds is Windows Server 2019...

While 4K displays are great for now, 5K displays are on the horizon and Intel is hard at work preparing their open-source Linux graphics driver for supporting 5K displays and beyond...

With the two main set of AMDGPU DRM driver updates merged (one and two) to DRM-Next ahead of the next Linux kernel cycle, I decided to run some benchmarks on this code using Vega and Polaris hardware for seeing how the performance compares to that of the Linux 4.18 stable and Linux 4.19 Git kernels.

Last week at Kernel Recipes 2018 in Paris, WireGuard lead developer Jason Donenfeld presented on the Zinc crypto API that he has been developing for the Linux kernel to suit his in-kernel secure VPN tunnel needs but also to potentially replace the existing Linux crypto code in the future...

The Freedreno-aligned MSM DRM driver for supporting Qualcomm Snapdragon hardware is preparing to make use of what was the AMDGPU DRM scheduler...

If you want to experiment with using the libc++ standard library alternative to libstdc++ on Ubuntu/Debian or also the LLVM OpenMP library (libomp), the LLVM project is now producing binaries for these sub-projects...

Stratis has been the Red Hat play two years in development for delivering next-gen Linux storage following their decision to abandon Btrfs support. Stratis offers ZFS and Btrfs like functionality and a lot of other new capabilities while this past week marked its first stable release...

Building off last Friday's release of Wine 3.17 is an updated staging release that consists of 882 extra patches on top of the upstream Wine build...

The Virtual Kernel Mode-Setting (VKMS) driver may soon work with Wayland compositors and see other capabilities for this recently-merged DRM code...

There was an increase in the Steam Linux gaming marketshare over last month, likely thanks to the late August announcement of Steam Play and the Wine-based Proton...

In marking twenty years since the first official release of this KDE integrated development environment, KDevelop 5.3 Beta 1 is available today as the first step towards this next feature release...

The VideoLAN/VLC developers in conjunction with the FFmpeg crew while being sponsored by the Alliance of Open Media have announced a new AV1 video decoder...

While there are no signs of an imminent "Turing" signed firmware release as a prerequisite for open-source driver support on the new GeForce RTX 2070/2080 series, NVIDIA has finally let loose the signed firmware images for Volta "GV100" hardware...

The Khronos working group responsible for Vulkan is working to drop Mir support, a.k.a. VK_KHR_mir_surface...

With BUS1 still appearing out in the distant for the mainline Linux kernel as an in-kernel IPC mechanism, dbus-broker is the year-and-a-half long effort so far at making a faster D-Bus compliant implementation in user-space...

Nuitka version 0.6 was quietly released last week as the Python 2/3 compiler that converts the Python code into optimized C code...

After optimizing the Linux laptop battery life last cycle, Hans de Goede of Red Hat has been working on Fedora 29 to provide a "flicker-free" boot experience. A Linux desktop flicker-free boot has been talked about for a decade or longer but with Fedora 29 and using Intel graphics that is finally becoming a reality...

After last month's beta, The Qt Company is marking the start of October by officially releasing Qt 3D Studio 2.1...

Last week at XDC2018 in Spain, Elie Tournier of Collabora presented on the current state of the Virgl effort for allowing OpenGL acceleration provided by a host's system within a QEMU/VirtIO-GPU virtual machine environment...

Over the course of September on Phoronix were 308 original news articles and 22 featured Linux hardware reviews and benchmarking articles. There was a lot of interesting activity on the hardware side from continued Threadripper tests to the GeForce RTX 2080 series launch as well as interesting news from the Linux code of conduct to the controversial Speck crypto code being removed...

Just days after announcing Total War: Three Kingdoms for Linux and releasing Life is Strange: Before The Storm, Feral Interactive has announced they will be bringing Life is Strange 2 to Linux (and macOS) in 2019...

One of the XDC2018 talks I was most looking forward to was the presentation by Red Hat's Karol Herbst and Rob Clark on their work with SPIR-V/NIR support inside Mesa for the context of OpenCL/compute support, which includes getting GPGPU computing on the Nouveau and Freedreno drivers...

The AMD developers uploaded their public Git trees making up the "AMDVLK" open-source AMD Vulkan driver stack prior to ending out September...

As perhaps a sign of where Intel is heading for their GPU computing strategy with their in-development discrete GPUs, they are developing a Vulkan compute back-end for the widely-used OpenCV library. This Vulkan back-end is for handling GPU-based compute for neural networks with this Open Computer Vision library as an alternative to the CUDA and OpenCL GPU compute support...

Feral's GameMode open-source project for dynamically optimizing a Linux system for gaming with automatically adjusting tunables like the CPU frequency scaling governor and real-time kernel optimizations may soon see another feature added...

Debian developers have been discussing what to many seems like a rather unorthodox idea of not allowing questions/answers following presentations at their annual DebConf conference. This idea of banning questions and answers follows a policy by a Python conference that forbids questions/answers following presentations and is meant to help ease newcomers...