Phoronix

The AMD Platform QoS support talked about a few months ago on Phoronix is landing for the upcoming Linux 4.21 kernel. While not officially confirmed, this Quality of Service system resource work appears almost surely for the next-generation 7nm EPYC processors coming out in the months ahead...

While Wine-Staging 4.0-RC2 was released just a few days ago, Wine-Staging 4.0-RC3 is now available with a quicker turnaround time stemming from Friday's release of upstream Wine 4.0-RC3...

It's been a lighter week of KDE development due to many developers taking time off for the holidays, but there still was a fair amount of new activity going into KDE around polishing it up and the never-ending process of usability improvements...

While there has long been the vkQuake hobbyist project that brought a Vulkan renderer to the original Quake game, there is now vkQuake2 for a Vulkan rendering of Quake II...

David Miller is one of the latest kernel maintainers sending in his pull requests early for the upcoming Linux 4.21 kernel with its merge window expected to open during the holidays...

Debian is currently running a survey for selecting the default artwork of their upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 10 "Buster" release...

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, or happy benchmark season... Regardless of whatever holidays you celebrate or not, it's time for the 2018 Christmas/Winter sale if you wish to join Phoronix Premium to help us out as we approach the 15th birthday of Phoronix.com and see a strong year ahead for Linux hardware performance testing, open-source news coverage, and more. Premium gets you ad-free access to the site, multi-page featured articles on a single page, and other benefits...

Another one of the pull requests sent in early for the Linux 4.21 kernel cycle due to the holidays are the ACPI and power management trees maintained by Intel's Rafael Wysocki...

Kernel changes continue flowing for addressing the "Year 2038" problem where on where on 19 January 2038 a signed 32-bit integer is no longer large enough for accommodating the number of seconds since 1970 as the 32-bit Unix time format...

Yesterday I unexpectedly found my hands on a NVIDIA TITAN RTX graphics card as the company's newest Titan graphics card built upon the Turing architecture and is now available via retail channels at $2499 USD. Here is an initial look at the NVIDIA TITAN RTX performance under Ubuntu Linux with a variety of compute workloads (including TensorFlow) as well as for entertainment are some Vulkan gaming benchmarks.

Tom Stellard of Red Hat has announced the release of LLVM 7.0.1 that incorporates a variety of fixes introduced over the past few months...

It was nearly a year ago to the day that PC/OpenSystems LLC announced they were resurrecting Linspire and Freespire from the dead. The company is celebrating that milestone for the OS previously known as "Lindows" by releasing Freespire 4.5...

In the event you need to deal with software S3TC decoding rather than on the GPU in cases of hardware limitations or running within a VM, Mesa this week picked up a faster implementation...

While Linux 4.20 isn't even expected for release until Sunday, which itself is delivering many new features and hardware support, the Linux 4.21 release is another big one that will start off the new year...

Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek, part of the systemd team at Red Hat, has taken the reins from Lennart Poettering to release systemd 240 ahead of Christmas...

Valve has made available a new version of their Wine-based Proton layer that powers Steam Play for allowing many Windows games to run seamlessly on Linux via their Steam client. This new Proton 3.16-6 Beta offers up several notable improvements...

It's been over three years since the original proposal for re-licensing the LLVM compiler infrastructure and while they have reached community consensus on their new "Apache 2.0 with LLVM Exception" license, there's still a big task at hand of getting all past contributors signing off on the process...

This year the focus for modern Linux gaming really shifted to Vulkan with Feral's major new game ports being exclusively Vulkan-based, DXVK and Steam Play coming about for relying upon Vulkan for Direct3D 10/11 emulation on Linux, Vulkan 1.1 and subsequent point releases ironing out desired functionality by developers for this graphics API, and all of the open/closed-source drivers continuing to mature. But there is still a plethora of OpenGL-only Linux games out there and AMD's open-source driver team hasn't let up in continuing to improve and optimize their RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. Here are some benchmarks showing how the RadeonSI performance has improved over the past year on an AMD RX Vega graphics card.

We're another week closer to next month's expected Wine 4.0 debut and as such there is another release candidate out for some holiday testing...

It's too late to get as a stocking stuffer, but AMD announced today that two more Athlon 200 series parts with two Zen cores and Vega 3 graphics...

With the end of another year upon us, there has been the start of many year-end benchmark comparisons looking at how various aspects of Linux performance has evolved over 2018. In this comparison though is going back further than that and seeing how five Linux distributions have experienced performance changes over the past nearly three years -- using the CentOS, Clear Linux, Fedora, and openSUSE Linux distribution releases from early 2016 to their latest releases as of right now with their stable updates.

IBM is working on the necessary upstream Linux kernel work for supporting the NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs on the POWER9 servers like what comprises the Sierra and Summit supercomputers...

Yet another pull request sent in early ahead of the holidays for the Linux 4.21 kernel merge window are the DMA-Mapping updates managed by Christoph Hellwig. Normally the DMA-Mapping changes aren't really worth noting on Phoronix, but this time around it brings some improvements to help offset the overhead incurred by Retpolines for Spectre V2 mitigation...

Performance optimizations are always great presents to see in open-source projects around the holidays (well, any time of the year for that matter). Libvpx today picked up another optimization for helping out with VP9 video decoding...

Should you have some extra time this holiday season and wish to dive into some fun operating system tests, the release candidate of ReactOS 0.4.11 is available. Two decades after its start, ReactOS continues striving to be an open-source operating system that offers binary compatibility with applications/games/drivers from Windows...

Now that Radeon Open Compute 2.0 is shipping with OpenCL 2.0 support and many other improvements around Radeon GPU computing, a new focus by the developers working on ROCm is to make it easier to build and install on more Linux distributions...

In preparing for the Linux 4.21 merge window that is expected to open up over the holidays, the sound subsystem updates have already been submitted. There isn't much in the way of core infrastructure work this cycle, but a lot of sound driver activity...

The media subsystem is seeing a lot of work going into the upcoming Linux 4.21 kernel cycle. Two pull requests of media feature work have already been sent in for this imminent merge window...

The Lubuntu developers have announced today that their LXDE/LXQt downstream of Ubuntu Linux will no longer be offering 32-bit x86 releases moving forward while Lubuntu 18.04 LTS will continue to be supported...

As it's been two months since the Linux 4.20 cycle got underway with the feature-packed merge window and with this kernel expected out just in time for Christmas, here is a look back at some of the biggest and most notable features to this imminent kernel release...

Given the recently release of the PGI 18.10 Community Edition compiler by NVIDIA, I was curious to see how the performance on the CPU is looking for this proprietary compiler on Linux. For those curious as well, here are some benchmarks of the PGI 18.10 C/C++ compiler against the GCC 8.2.0 and LLVM Clang 7.0 open-source compilers.

Earlier this month NVIDIA announced their latest plans for an open-source PhysX and at the time put out the PhysX 3.4 SDK under a three-clause BSD license. Now the PhysX 4.0 release is available...

The Coreboot folks are ending out 2018 with the release of version 4.9 that has 2,610 changes since their previous release just over a half-year ago...

It looks like Intel might soon be launching a new CPU with the onboard Radeon "Vega M" graphics as another PCI ID was just added to the open-source Linux graphics driver...

As the latest from our year-end Linux benchmarks, here are tests when seeing how Mesa's RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver performance has evolved for Linux gaming. With a Radeon RX Vega 64 graphics card, the performance was looked at from Mesa 17.3 through Mesa 19.0-devel for showing the driver's evolution.

Greg Kroah-Hartman merged the Binderfs code to his char-misc-next branch on Wednesday, making it the latest feature set to premiere in the upcoming Linux 4.21 kernel...

Released this past summer was SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 while being worked on for its official debut next summer is the first service pack release...

Just in time for Christmas, the Radeon Open Compute "ROCm" 2.0 Linux stack is now available for AMD GPU computing needs with OpenCL 2.0, TensorFlow 1.12, and more...

Sed 4.6 is now available of the popular GNU utility for command-line text/stream editing...

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team has posted a set of patches implementing support for shaderStorageImageMultisample. These patches are based upon work started months earlier by David Airlie and important for DXVK and for other Vulkan use-cases...

Should you still be utilizing Qualcomm Adreno 200 series graphics hardware, the open-source graphics driver support is getting better for this hardware that was Adreno's first offering a programmable pipeline and clock speeds up to 133MHz...

The latest notes from the Debian anti-harassment team on Wednesday caught my attention when reading, "We were requested to advice on the appropriateness of a certain package in the Debian archive. Our decision resulted in the package pending removal from the archive." Curiosity got the best of me... What package was deemed too inappropriate for the Debian archive?..

WireGuard 0.0.20181218 is now available as another test release of this secure network VPN tunnel, but sadly it doesn't look like it will be landing in the upcoming Linux 4.21 cycle...

Microsoft is getting into the open-source UEFI game with today's announcement of Project Mu, which powers their Surface hardware as well as Hyper-V platform...

Last month AMD commented they would be releasing ROCm 2.0 prior to the end of 2018 and it looks like they will make good on their word. ROCm 2.0 is being prepared for release - source code is available albeit the reference Ubuntu/RHEL binaries are not yet out...

The latest Linux desktop environment sought for inclusion in the Fedora package repository is for the Deepin Desktop Environment...

Due to the Linux 4.21 merge window expected to open up next week just prior to Christmas, some kernel subsystem maintainers who won't be around in the days ahead have been sending in their pull requests early. Among those with early feature pulls is David Sterba continuing to oversee the Btrfs file-system development...

The I3C subsystem had sought to be included in Linux 4.20, but ultimately it was rejected for being too late in the cycle for introducing a brand new subsystem. But now it's requested to be pulled into the upcoming Linux 4.21 merge window...

With yesterday's release of Oracle VM VirtualBox 6.0, one of the most pressing changes for Linux guests is the use of the new VMSVGA 3D graphics device emulation by default. VMSVGA is the SVGA II graphics adapter from virtualization competitor VMware, but allows for the mature SVGA Linux graphics driver stack to be used. Here are some benchmarks looking at the OpenGL performance on VirtualBox 6.0.

With the upcoming Flatpak 1.2 release for app sandboxing, the command-line experience will be much better for those that prefer the CLI to the graphical utilities around Flatpaks...