Phoronix

While every few weeks or so we have ended up running benchmarks of the latest Linux Git kernel to see the evolving performance impact of KPTI (Kernel Page Table Isolation) and Retpolines for Meltdown and Spectre V2 mitigation, respectively, a request came in last week from a premium supporter to see some new comparison test runs on CentOS 7 with its older 3.10-evolved kernel...

The annual Game Developers Conference (GDC 18) kicked off yesterday in San Francisco and one of the most popular topics this year is ray-tracing...

GStreamer 1.14.0 is now available as the first big feature release of 2018 for this widely-used, open-source multimedia framework...

Karol Herbst at Red Hat started off this week by publishing his latest patches around Nouveau NIR support as part of the company's effort for getting SPIR-V/compute support up and running on this open-source NVIDIA driver...

Unity Tech made public at the Game Developers Conference their game engine plans for the year...

Aside from a few touchpad issues and other minor random issues with select hardware, libinput these days is mostly in great shape for being a generic input handling library that is working out well for both X.Org and Wayland users...

The beta releases are available today of Wayland 1.15 and the Weston 4.0 reference compositor...

As it's been a few weeks since last delivering a modest Linux GPU comparison and given the continuously evolving state of the Linux kernel Git tree as well as the Mesa project that houses the RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan drivers, here are our latest benchmarks showing the current state of the AMD Radeon open-source Linux graphics driver performance relative to NVIDIA's long-standing and high-performance but proprietary driver using several different graphics cards.

Last week Intel announced their open-source sound firmware project while the latest project in the open-source realm comes via the Linux Foundation with the launch of OpenBMC...

With Ubuntu 18.10 being the release after an LTS cycle, it's shaping up to be another big feature period. They have already been discussing Zstd-compressed Debian packages for Ubuntu 18.10 while the latest proposal for this next cycle is on switching from Gzip to LZ4 for the default kernel initramfs image...

Sure enough, HTC and Valve are using GDC this week to talk more about the VIVE PRO VR headset...

Oracle has made available updated installation media for Oracle Linux 7 for ARM64...

What was Palm webOS nearly a decade ago is seeing its latest incarnation as LG webOS Open-Source Edition...

Last week the release candidate of Mesa 17.3.7 was issued with more than 50 patches queued. That count grew more over the weekend resulting in an additional release candidate...

There are several dozen test profiles so far available for the new/rewritten Phoronix Test Suite port to Windows...

While the Linux kernel maintainers are currently working on dropping support for some old CPU architectures, a new CPU architecture is looking to receive the mainline treatment...

Earlier this year work on the "Chai" open-source Mali T700 GPU driver resumed with an aim to get a working Mesa driver for this "Midgard" graphics architecture. There's still a long battle ahead, but their NIR shader compiler is beginning to work...

The GNU Project has released an updated version of their alternative to Vixie Cron from handling cron jobs. Today's Mcron 1.1 release is the first update to the project in several years...

Linus Torvalds has announced the sixth weekly release candidate of the forthcoming Linux 4.16 kernel...

The GTK+ 4.0 tool-kit has just landed its GtkMediaStream / GtkMediaFile / GtkVideo / GtkMediaControls widgets for now having native multimedia stream playback support in the tool-kit that in turn is backed by GStreamer / FFmpeg...

For those still holding out the dream for Ubuntu on phones/tablets, the UBports community continues their work in updating their Ubuntu Touch fork to riding off a 16.04 Xenial base rather than the existing Ubuntu 15.04...

While this week's Wine 3.4 release delivers on working Wine Vulkan ICD support for beginning to allow Windows Vulkan programs to work under Wine assuming the host has Vulkan API support, this current implementation still requires the user to install the Windows Vulkan SDK...

Unfortunately the AMDKFD GPUVM support for discrete GPUs isn't looking like it will make it for the Linux 4.17 kernel cycle...

KDE contributor Nathaniel Graham is out with another recap of the usability and productivity improvements made this past week by the KDE community...

Thomas Gleixner who has been wrangling all of the Spectre and Meltdown related patches for the Linux kernel tree has submitted another pull request of more changes to land for the Linux 4.16 cycle that is nearing the end of its development...

Fresh off the release of Wine 3.4 on Friday, the maintainers corralling the Wine-Staging releases have now put out their second modern release...

The latest feature addition to the GCC compiler this week is support for Intel's new "ENCLV"...

The AMD developers working on their official cross-platform "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver have updated their open-source code-base for Linux users...

There are six candidates running for this year's X.Org Foundation Board of Directors with four seats being open this election...

We have been tracking the development of Elisa, one of several KDE music players, since development started about one year ago. Following the recent alpha releases, the KDE Elisa 0.1 stable release is on the way...

The first point release to the Vulkan 1.1 release from earlier this month is now available. Vulkan 1.1 promoted a lot of functionality to core while also officially adding sub-groups and protected content support. This Vulkan 1.1.71 point release adds a new extension and fixes...

Longtime Linux kernel developer Arnd Bergmann is working to drop a number of old and obsolete CPU architectures from the next kernel cycle, Linux 4.17...

GNOME developers previously dropped support for Synaptics and other input drivers from Mutter in favor of the universal libinput stack that is also Wayland-friendly. Canonical developers tried to get Synaptics support on X11 added back into Mutter but it looks clear now that was rejected...

KDE Connect is the exciting project that allows you to leverage your KDE desktop from Android tablets/smartphones for features like sending/receiving SMS messages from your desktop, toggling music, sharing files, and much more. KDE Connect does continue getting even better...

The HAMMER2 file-system has been available with install-time support since DragonFlyBSD 5.0 while the latest Git code continues to revise this next-generation FS for DragonFly. Landing overnight in DragonFlyBSD were several HAMMER and HAMMER2 improvements...

Since the introduction of the AMDGPU DC display code (formerly known as DAL) in Linux 4.15, this modern display stack has just been enabled by default for newer Radeon Vega and Raven Ridge devices. With Linux 4.17 that is changing with AMDGPU DC being enabled by default across the board for supported GPUs...

The latest bi-weekly release of Wine is now available for running your favorite or necessary Windows programs/games on Linux and macOS...

While waiting for Mesa 18.0, the Mesa 17.3.7 point release will soon hit stable users of this open-source, user-space graphics stack...

Linux Mint's GNOME/GTK-derived Cinnamon Desktop Environment will soon be able to launch applications faster...

Michel Dänzer of AMD issued bug-fix updates on Thursday for the xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-amdgpu DDX drivers...

Ahead of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS next month the Mir developers are working to release Mir version 0.31...

Facebook developers working on the HHVM Hack/PHP language stack have released version 3.25 of the HipHop Virtual Machine...

The Qt Company has some new software development releases available in time for weekend testing...

Daniel Schürmann continues hacking on the sub-group patch-set for the RADV Vulkan driver to expose this important feature of the recent Vulkan 1.1 release...

Red Hat's David Malcom has outlined some of the usability improvements coming with the imminent release of GCC 8...

Chris Wilson of Intel's Linux graphics driver team posted a big set of 36 patches on Wednesday for their DRM kernel driver...

A few years back was the news of Russia wanting to get into the CPU business and at the time were aiming for ARM-based processors but ended up settling for MIPS. It turns out those "Baikal" processors are still around and being worked on as indicated by some fresh benchmarks this week...

A Phoronix Premium supporter recently requested some Windows vs. Linux networking performance benchmarks. That is being done as part of a larger comparison also featuring the popular BSDs, but for some initial measurements, here are some Netperf networking performance metrics on Microsoft Windows Server 2016 and various Linux distributions...

The GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers have been working on Icelake CPU support for a while now as just the "icelake" target but now it's being separated into "icelake-client" and "icelake-server" as the CPU feature differences between the desktop-class processors and Xeon server chips become more clear for this succeeding generation to Cannonlake...

With Ubuntu 18.04 LTS set to be released next month and its final package configuration quickly falling into place, we have begun firing up some benchmarks for seeing how this Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" release is comparing to various other Linux distributions. Up first as part of this series of benchmarks is using an AMD EPYC workstation/server for seeing how the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS performance compares to six other Linux distributions.