Phoronix

Another batch of drm-misc-next changes has been staged ahead of the Linux 4.21 kernel merge window that will open at the end of December or early January...

After working on the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver for nearly a decade, Ben Widawsky of the Intel Open-Source Technology Center shifted roles to focus on Intel enablement for FreeBSD. In this role over the past several months he has been focusing on FreeBSD power management improvements for Intel hardware...

GNOME's Mutter compositor native back-end will now deal with GPU hot-plugging at run-time and begin managing its display outputs...

The FreeBSD desktop with NVIDIA graphics driver support is about to become more viable for gaming with the 64-bit Linux compatibility layer...

It was just two months ago that the VideoLAN/VLC crew announced the DAV1D AV1 video decoder and already it's becoming quite feature complete and super fast...

Yesterday Feral Interactive released their much anticipated port of Total War: Warhammer II for Linux. This latest Linux game port is yet another Vulkan-powered game. Here are some initial benchmark results of Warhammer II running natively on Ubuntu Linux with a variety of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

While this year Oracle was successful in getting DTrace working well on Linux assuming you apply their patches or (more easily) using their Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel on Oracle Linux, they are looking at enhancing DTrace with the increasingly-used eBPF framework / in-kernel JIT...

Version 7 of the task property based options to enable Spectre V2 userspace-userspace protection patches, a.k.a. the work offering improved / less regressing approach for STIBP, is now available for testing and code review...

Intel developers have submitted their GCC compiler enablement patch for the Cascade Lake 14nm CPUs due out starting in early 2019...

At the start of 2018 there was early work on Cgroups support for DRM drivers. That early work was done by Intel developers on using cgroups to allow restricting the GPU priority. AMD is now looking to build a more extensive DRM cgroup controller support for monitoring and restricting GPU resources...

Years ago there was much interest in the ability to build the mainline Linux kernel with the LLVM Clang compiler as an alternative to using the GCC compiler in order to ensure better code portability, shaking out GCC'isms, possible build speed improvements, and other benefits. But in recent years it seems to have waned in interest but now things are heating up again...

After the AMD Zen tuning for RadeonSI was dropped earlier this month, a revised implementation has now landed in Mesa 19.0-devel...

A revised patch was posted on Tuesday for adding ARMv8 tuning support for Ampere Computing's eMAG platform...

Last week AMD released the Radeon RX 590 Polaris refresh graphics card, but after buying this ~$279 USD graphics card, sadly it's not yet out-of-the-box on Linux for driver support. I am still working on getting it working with the open-source driver stack but have a brief update to share...

NVIDIA has just released the 415.18 Linux graphics driver as their first stable update in the 415 driver series...

Feral Interactive just lit up the Linux build of Total War: WARHAMMER II on Steam...

Earlier this month marked the release of the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler 1.3 (AOCC 1.3) with a re-base to the LLVM 7.0 code-base, enhanced loop optimizations, better vectorization, code generation, integration of the optimized AMD Math Library, and other enhancements. Here are some fresh benchmarks against AMD AOCC 1.3 against LLVM Clang 7.0 upstream as well as GCC 8.2.0.

While waiting for the release of Warhammer II today, Feral Interactive just announced they will be releasing Shadow of the Tomb Raider for Linux (and macOS) in 2019...

It appears AMD is stepping up their game around the open-source AMDVLK Vulkan Linux driver with moving to tagged releases and better release notes...

Linux file-systems continue getting better along with the infrastructure around it in the VFS and block code, but still there are some pain points for both users and developers around Linux storage...

The third and possibly final development release of the upcoming Phoronix Test Suite 8.4-Skiptvet is now available for testing of our open-source, cross-platform testing and benchmarking framework...

Intel's Clear Linux distribution is making progress on their new installer, including the ability to (finally) carry out encrypted installations...

DragonFlyBSD developer Justin Sherrill has shared that DragonFlyBSD 5.4 release preparations will begin soon...

An improvement was merged today to GNOME's Mutter compositor / window manager that should allow it to perform much better in multi-GPU setups, particularly for scenarios where the display is driven via a USB-based DisplayLink adapter...

GNU OrgaDoc is a means of copying and maintaining a pool of documents between a set of computers. Document synchronization is handled by rsync or unison and is done without needing a database server or other components...

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team has landed a patch providing another optimization around fast clears for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver within Mesa 19.0...

For those wishing to learn more about the LLVM compiler stack and open-source compiler toolchains in general, the videos from October's LLVM Developers' Meeting 2018 in San Jose are now online...

Given last week's new images release of the rolling-release, systemd-free, original-creation Void Linux I decided to take it for a spin with some fresh benchmarking as it had been two years or so since last trying out that Linux distribution with its XBPS packaging system. For seeing how the performance compares, I benchmarked it against some of the other primarily enthusiast/rolling-release/performant Linux distributions including Antergos, Clear Linux, Debian Buster Testing, Fedora Workstation 29, Manjaro 18.0, Sabayon Linux, Solus, and Ubuntu 18.10.

It turns out that Linus Torvalds himself was even taken by surprise with the performance hit we've outlined on Linux 4.20 as a result of STIBP "Single Thread Indirect Branch Predictors" introduction as well as back-porting already to stable series for cross-hyperthread Spectre V2 protection. He doesn't want this enabled in full by default...

Collabora developer Scott Anderson sent out a "request for comments" patch series that would add a Secure Output Protocol to the Wayland space...

Heterogeneous Memory Management is the effort going on for more than four years that was finally merged to the mainline Linux kernel last year but is still working on adding additional features and improvements. HMM is what allows for allowing the mirroring of process address spaces, system memory to be transparently used by any device process, and other functionality for GPU computing as well as other device/driver purposes...

Back when Huawei introduced the EROFS Linux file-system earlier this year, there wasn't any open-source user-space utility for actually making EROFS file-systems. Even when EROFS was merged into the mainline tree, the user-space utility was still non-existent but now that issue has been rectified...

If you are/were a fan of Ubuntu's Unity desktop environment, Unite-Shell is one of the most promising efforts to date for making the current GNOME 3 stack more like Unity...

OpenCV 4.0 is now officially out as the widely-used real-time computer vision library...

Linus Torvalds just announced the release of Linux 4.20-rc3 as his weekly test release update to the in-development Linux 4.20...

It's been a busy past few days of benchmarking after discovering earlier this week the Linux 4.20 performance was dropping, bisecting the cause to be the introduction of STIBP for cross-hyperthread Spectre V2 mitigation, and seeing just how significant is the impact. Here are my latest tests and findings...

If you are hoping to pick-up a new graphics card during the upcoming holiday sales, here is a 20-way NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon Linux gaming benchmark comparison using a wide assortment of GPUs while using the very newest graphics drivers and a variety of OpenGL/Vulkan titles.

Continuing to make Sunday mornings more entertaining are new Vulkan documentation updates on their weekly-ish update cycle...

LibreOffice 6.2 was branched from master this weekend and the first beta release tagged for this open-source, cross-platform office suite...

With the launch this week of the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+, they made it clear whatever comes next will be a big re-design compared to all of the Raspberry Pi ARM single board computers up to this point. So what would you hope they incorporate into the next-generation of these low-cost boards?..

It's been another busy week in the KDE development space ahead of the holidays and developer Nate Graham has done another great job detailing all of the changes made over the past week for this open-source desktop environment...

The first release candidate of the upcoming FreeBSD 12.0 operating system update is available for testing this weekend...

Intel developers have been punctual in their bring-up of Icelake support within Coreboot...

It turns out Google's recently announced Pixel 3 smartphone is making use of the MSM Direct Rendering Manager driver associated with the Freedreno open-source Qualcomm graphics project. Google is also getting more Android vendors moving over to using DRM/KMS drivers to power their graphics/display...

As outlined yesterday, significant slowdowns with the Linux 4.20 kernel turned out to be due to the addition of the kernel-side bits for STIBP (Single Thread Indirect Branch Predictors) for cross-HyperThread Spectre Variant Two mitigation. This has incurred significant performance penalties with the STIBP support in its current state with Linux 4.20 Git and is enabled by default at least for Intel systems with up-to-date microcode. Here are some follow-up benchmarks looking at the performance hit with the Linux 4.20 development kernel as well as the overall Spectre and Meltdown mitigation impact on this latest version of the Linux kernel.

At this week's Linux Plumbers Conference, David Airlie began talking about the possibility of a vendor-neutral compute stack across Intel, Radeon, and NVIDIA GPU platforms that could potentially take on NVIDIA's CUDA dominance...

While Con Kolivas' kernel patch series decided to do away with BFQ support, the GNOME-aligned Endless OS Linux distribution has decided to do the opposite in move from CFQ as the default I/O scheduler over to BFQ...

Earlier this month AMD quietly released a new version of their Optimizing C/C++ compiler in the form of AOCC 1.3. This new compiler release has more Zen tuning to try to squeeze even more performance out of Ryzen/EPYC systems when using their LLVM-based compiler...

Following the recent application period, Outreachy on Thursday announced the dozens of selected participants who will have a $5500 USD paid internship the next few months for working on open-source projects...

Back in September Code Sourcery / Mentor Graphics posted the Radeon GCC back-end they have been developing with the cooperation of AMD. This is for allowing the GCC compiler to eventually offload nicely to Radeon GPUs with its different programming languages and supported parallel programming models, particularly with OpenMP and OpenACC in mind. But for now this patch series just works with single-threaded C and Fortran programs. The second version of this port was posted for review...