Phoronix

Earlier this year with Wine 3.9 its Direct3D code changed to default to OpenGL 4.4 core contexts rather than the legacy/compatibility context. NVIDIA GPUs ended up being left at the older value but now that has changed...

One of several KDE music/media player options is Elisa and its v0.3 release has just occurred...

Released at the end of September was GNOME 3.30.1 as the first and only point release collection to the GNOME 3.30 desktop environment feature update that debuted earlier in September. Finally out today are the v3.30.1 updates for Mutter and the GNOME Shell...

Prolific open-source developer Matthias Clasen at Red Hat has shared some of the post-1.0 plans for the Flatpak app sandboxing/distribution tech. As it stands now, Flatpak 1.2 will likely be out around the end of the calendar year with the next batch of features...

Making the rounds last week was a nasty power regression hitting Linux 4.18 stable and as we ended up bisecting was caused by a change to the AMDGPU kernel driver and affected select Radeon graphics cards. It looks like the goal this week is to get that patch reverted from Linux 4.18...

Happening now in New York City is the Intel "Fall Desktop Launch Event" where they are announcing their latest wares, much of which has already been leaked to date...

The upcoming Linux kernel that will be at either version 4.20 or 5.0 is going to fix a kernel issue that dates back at least a year where plugging-in or even unplugging recent Apple MacBook Pro laptops will lead to excessive CPU resources being consumed... Basically, the charging/uncharging event change for these recent MBP laptops was causing issues within the kernel -- adding to the list of problems Linux faces trying to run on recent Apple hardware...

For those curious about the TensorFlow performance on the newly-released GeForce RTX 2080 series, for your viewing pleasure to kick off this week of Linux benchmarking is a look at Maxwell, Pascal, and Turing graphics cards in my possession when testing the NGC TensorFlow instance on CUDA 10.0 with the 410.57 Linux driver atop Ubuntu and exploring the performance of various models. Besides the raw performance, the performance-per-Watt and performance-per-dollar is also provided.

The AMDGPU DC "Display Code" stack formerly known as DAL that's been in the mainline kernel the past several releases might soon see support for GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" GPUs. This is the big display code stack necessary for atomic mode-setting, FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync, HDMI/DP audio, and other modern display features. When AMD brought up this DC stack, they hadn't brought it back to GCN 1.0 since for those original GCN GPUs they by default still use the Radeon DRM driver. But now they might soon see AMDGPU DC support...

The latest rumors in the Radeon space is that AMD is in the final stages of preparing to release its third iteration of Polaris GPUs... We could be seeing a Radeon RX 670 and RX 680 very soon...

DDR4 memory has been around for several years already yet the mainline Linux kernel doesn't have a driver for reading the SPD EEPROMs abiding by the JEDEC EE1004 standard as used by DDR4 SDRAM memory modules...

The first development milestone release of the Phoronix Test Suite 8.4-Skiptvet series is now available for evaluation...

An independent open-source developer has started the VUDA project as an effort to provide a CUDA Runtime API interface based on Vulkan...

The Gentoo-based Calculate Linux distribution that offers versions ranging from desktop to server offerings is out with their newest release...

The Linux kernel's Code of Conduct that was abruptly dropped onto the Linux kernel, which happened as Linus Torvalds was announcing his empathy retreat last month, will likely see some revisions ahead of the upcoming Linux 4.19 stable debut...

Greg Kroah-Hartman continues managing the Linux 4.19 kernel cycle while Linus Torvalds remains off on his empathy retreat...

Vulkan 1.1.87 is another Sunday morning update to the Vulkan graphics/compute specification...

Prolific Radeon Mesa contributor Marek Olšák of AMD started off his Sunday by posting another set of RadeonSI driver patches...

One of the still ongoing projects based upon the open-source id Tech 3 / ioquake3 engine still having a following in 2018 is ET: Legacy. ET: Legacy is the open-source project retaining full compatibility with Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory 2.60 while continuing to make engine improvements and with time have been remastering many of the original maps...

At the end of September in Berlin was the All Systems Go! conference focusing on user-space Linux and evolving from what years ago was the annual systemd conference. We've covered many of the interesting sessions from that conference while what we hadn't highlighted until now was Lennart Poettering's systemd update...

Whether it's called Linux 4.20 or Linux 5.0, the next kernel cycle is bringing a heck of a lot of improvements for the open-source graphics/display drivers on the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) front...

Speculative Store Bypass Safe (SSBS) is a new bit added with ARMv8.5-A for SoCs moving forward like the ARM Cortex-A76 as a means for mitigation against Spectre V4...

It's been another busy week in the KDE space with a plethora of improvements from the KDE Plasma desktop to the expansive collection of desktop applications...

NixOS, the Linux distribution built atop the unique and functional Nix package manager, is out with its latest operating system refresh...

Linux developer Simon Peter who has spent years working on application standards like AppImage and Klik recently presented on what he believes are the 2018 Desktop Linux Platform Issues and the unfortunate continually moving target of "the year of the Linux desktop" that never materializes...

Taking place a month ago in Manchester was the annual GNU Tools Cauldron conference where developers and other key stakeholders to the GNU toolchain presented their latest research and development activities. The videos from that developer event are now available...

With the Open-Source Firmware Conference 2018 videos having been uploaded this week, another one of the interesting videos to watch from this conference was about Facebook's preference for open-source firmware...

This week at the OpenPOWER Summit Amsterdam, Texas-based libre computer vendor Raptor Computing Systems announced Blackbird as a low-cost, micro-ATX POWER9 motherboard to be available in the coming months. The company has now revealed some additional details...

William Wold of Canonical's Mir team shared their latest weekly progress report on this display server supporting the Wayland protocol. While a short report, the two bits shared are quite interesting...

Jason Donenfeld started off his weekend by publishing the seventh and possibly final set of patches for the WireGuard secure network tunnel that is likely to be merged for the upcoming Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel cycle...

The Mageia Linux distribution with its lineage going back to Mandriva and before that Mandrake is out with a slightly updated OS this weekend...

Back in June there was the initial Whiskey Lake support for the Intel DRM kernel driver ahead of the Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake announcement from late August. Now there is formal Whiskey Lake support for Intel's Mesa code...

DXVK lead developer and Valve contractor Philip Rebohle just announced the release of DXVK 0.81 for providing this latest Direct3D-over-Vulkan library (D3D10/D3D11) in time for weekend Linux gamers...

We knew AMD was planning to release the rest of the Threadripper 2 line-up in October and now we finally know the precise date...

Git maintainer Junio Hamano issued new versions of this widely-used version control system today going back to the Git 2.14 release series in order to address a new security vulnerability...

The first post-1.0 release of VKD3D for mapping Direct3D 12 to Vulkan for use by Wine for faster Windows gaming performance on macOS/Linux is being prepared...

At the high-end of the AMD desktop CPU 2018 spectrum is the insanely fast Threadripper 2990WX while at the opposite end of that spectrum is the recently announced Athlon 200GE. For just $60 USD is this Zen+Vega chip that we have begun testing and have our initial Linux performance benchmarks out today compared to a range of lower-end and older desktop CPUs as well as integrated graphics test results, power consumption data, and performance-per-dollar metrics.

Mesa 18.2.2 is out this morning as the second point release to the Q3'2018 stable release series...

The OpenBMC project hosted by the Linux Foundation to begin providing open-source Baseboard Management Controller firmware stacks is planning for its first major/official release in 2019 as this collaborative community project from leading software and hardware vendors...

At last week's All Systems Go! 2018 conference in Berlin, Davide Cavalca talked about Facebook's use of systemd in 2018 and how it's expanded since their talk a year ago on the subject...

The Qt Company has announced the immediate availability of the Qt 5.12 beta...

Init-kconfig is the new software project trying to make it easy for re-using the Kconfig configuration system outside of the Linux kernel and more adaptable for independent software projects...

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...