Phoronix

With July quickly coming to a close, the Haiku project has published their latest monthly report regarding the happenings for this open-source BeOS-inspired operating system...

As what was a proposal to eliminate unnecessary linking in Fedora 29 is going to be postponed to be an early change for Fedora 30...

Freedreno lead developer Rob Clark at Red Hat has sent in his batch of feature updates to DRM-Next ahead of the imminent Linux 4.19 kernel development cycle kicking off...

Remember earlier this month when GCC's long in the works conversion from SVN to Git was being held up by the lack of RAM on Eric S Raymond's system? Well, it turns out that's just part of the problem...

The lazy TLB mode as a way to delay translation look-aside buffer updates will be improved upon with the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel...

Just weeks ahead of SIGGRAPH 2018, Vulkan 1.1.82 is now available as the latest specification update to this year's Vulkan 1.1 graphics/compute API...

Adding to the list of great stuff for Linux 4.19 is the introduction of the EROFS file-system...

Landing last week in the X.Org Server Git code is a change to ensure DRI3 gets enabled when using GLAMOR acceleration for XWayland...

While libinput 1.11 was released less than two months ago, the first release candidate of Libinput 1.12 is now available for what is going to be a big release...

VK9 for Direct3D 9 mapped over Vulkan isn't advancing nearly as fast as DXVK for D3D11-on-Vulkan, but it's still coming along...

Linus Torvalds has announced the seventh and likely final release candidate of the upcoming Linux 4.18 kernel...

It's been sixteen years since the release of Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind while the open-source community continues working on their re-implementation of this game that was originally powered by the Gamebryo engine...

The ReactOS "open-source Windows" operating system is now able to boot from a Btrfs file-system...

Taking place the past few months has been migrating the FreeDesktop.org infrastructure to GitLab and the developers/administrators involved are quite happy with this big improvement to better their code hosting, issue tracking, etc...

This week support for the official C++17 "filesystem" feature landed within LLVM's libc++ standard library...

ARM's Richard Earnshaw has posted a revised version for their months-in-development patch-set for mitigating against unsafe data speculation by the GCC code compiler. This new Spectre V1 mitigation for ARM 64-bit would be exposed via a new -mtrack-speculation compiler switch...

Earlier this month we reported on a game studio finding their MoltenVK-using game rejected from Apple's App Store. Fortunately, that situation is now firmly resolved and Apple has allowed this Vulkan-over-Metal game into their iOS marketplace...

Last week I wrote about a change for the Linux kernel would better protect entropy sent in from user-space as a change driven as a result of some Linux distributions (such as Fedora) using a CPU jitter random number generator to resolve the lack of entropy at boot time and that on systemd-enabled Linux systems sometimes leading to slow boot times. That change has now ended up being queued into Linux 4.18 rather than having to wait for 4.19...

The latest notable patch series by prolific Mesa contributor Marek Olšák of AMD is on allowing ASTC texture compression support for all Gallium3D drivers...

For those making use of Virt-Viewer, this utility for displaying the graphical console of a virtual machine via SPICE/VNC, its version 7.0 release is now available...

Coming in as a late pull request to DRM-Next for Linux 4.19 are the AMDKFD kernel driver changes that is the critical piece to the modern open-source AMD compute stack...

Last year Microsoft announced the "GVFS" open-source project as the Git Virtual File-System. Many took issue with Microsoft's open-source project being called GVFS since for years prior GNOME has been developing the well known GVfs as the virtual file-system for GIO/GLib. At first Microsoft resisted calls for changing their project's name, but now are making good on doing so...

While Mesa 18.2 is on track for debuting as the next stable feature release by the end of August, for those sticking to the latest stable releases, that's now Mesa 18.1.5...

Feature development on GNOME 3.30 is nearing the end ahead of the stable desktop environment update premiering in September. Nautilus developer Carlos Soriano has provided a look at some of the improvements coming to GNOME's file manager for the 3.30 milestone...

The beta releases of Wayland 1.16 and the Weston 5.0 reference compositor are now available for testing...

Following the success of their work on open-source video decode for MPEG/H.264 following their crowd-funding campaign, Bootlin has now taken to working on H.265 video decode for the Sunxi-Cedrus open-source effort...

It's been a while since last delivering any benchmarks focused on the NVIDIA OpenCL compute performance, but for those curious, here are some fresh GPGPU performance numbers using the latest NVIDIA Linux driver release while testing from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

With Dell's seventh-generation XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop it has shipped with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS up until now, but beginning today in the US there is now the option for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS...

Intel's open-source PowerTOP utility has been around for more than a decade now for aiming to extend the battery life of x86 Linux laptops. Following the recent Linux laptop battery life benchmarks of various distributions, a Phoronix Premium patron was asking whether PowerTOP still makes a difference with 2018 Linux distributions... Here are some fresh test results.

Following the GCC 9.0 benchmarks earlier this week I ran some tests seeing how the GCC 8 stable compiler and GCC 9 development state compare to the LLVM Clang 6.0.1 stable compiler and LLVM Clang 7.0 development. Here are those benchmarks using the AMD EPYC 7601 32-core / 64-thread processor.

Mesa's RADV Vulkan driver now has support for ETC2 texture compression on select GPUs...

It's been a while since last hearing anything about the Trinity Desktop Environment, which is a fork of the KDE 3.5 desktop, but a new release is on the way...

NetSpectre is a new network-based speculative attack vulnerability that doesn't require exploited code to be running on the target machine...

Taking place this week was DebCamp while officially starting this weekend is DebConf18, the first DebConf (Debian Conference) to be held in Asia...

For those that tend to wait for the first point release of a new Ubuntu LTS release before upgrading, Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" is now available...

For those curious about the current performance state for the recent wave of Vulkan-powered Linux games, which so far are primarily Linux game ports from Feral Interactive, aside from Valve's Dota 2 and Croteam's games, here are some fresh benchmarks using twenty different graphics cards on the latest drivers.

Jakub Jelinek of Red Hat today announced the relase of GCC 8.2 stable as the first point relase to the stable GCC 8 compiler that debuted earlier this year...

While the Linux 4.18 kernel is still likely a week and a half out from being released at least, a ton of new material has been staged already ahead of the Linux 4.19 cycle that has us excited...

Earlier this week SpectreRSB was revealed by University of California researchers as a new Spectre V2 like attack affecting modern processors. A Linux kernel patch is in the works for starting to mitigate SpectreRSB...

At the beginning of the year Oracle reaffirmed their commitment for DTrace on Linux. For those still interested in using this dynamic tracing framework on Linux, Oracle has been rolling out a number of feature updates...

PECI is a new one-wire bus interface being developed at Intel for communication between Intel CPUs and chipset components to external monitoring/control devices. The Linux support for this Platform Environment Control Interface continues to be worked out by Intel's open-source Linux kernel developers...

Back during GDC 2018, Alen Ladavac serving as the CTO of Croteam presented on their research and testing into frame timing for helping uncover why some games are stuttering even when being rendered at high frame-rates. The short story is the issue can be addressed by just not measuring the time for rendering each frame in a game but to measure the time needed to actually present that frame on a display output. For that there is VK_GOOGLE_display_timing for Vulkan and other similar extensions...

Mesa 18.2 is going to be branched at the end of the month to mark the end of feature development for this quarterly Mesa feature release. This is a few weeks later than originally scheduled and has allowed for some extra features to land. Here is a look at some of the Mesa 18.2 changes on the way...

Recently I have been posting a number of Linux laptop battery benchmarks including how the power consumption compares to Windows 10. If you are curious how these numbers play out on the desktop side and when using AMD hardware, here are some results for your viewing pleasure with a Ryzen 7 2700X and Radeon RX Vega 64 desktop system...

Less than one full week after their previous code drop, the AMD developers maintaining the AMDVLK Vulkan Linux driver today pushed out their freshest code...

LibreOffice 6.1 is planned for release by the middle of August but for that next version to happen without a hitch, the LibreOffice team could use a hand with the testing of their latest release candidates...

Since January there has been KPTI in the x86_64 Linux kernel as Kernel-based Page Table Isolation for mitigating the Meltdown CPU vulnerability. On the back-burner since then has been KPTI support for the Linux x86 32-bit kernel to protect those using older 32-bit-only processors. With the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel, KPTI is landing for Linux x86 32-bit. Here are sone benchmarks showing the performance penalty when upgrading to this new kernel on an Ubuntu i686 laptop.

With the cutoff of new feature material to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 4.19 cycle coming to an end, here is an overview of the prominent Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) changes on the plate for this next kernel version...

Out today is a new release of the Intel IWD network stack, the wireless daemon hoping to eventually replace WPA Supplicant...

While Fedora 28 has been a fantastic release, Fedora 29 that is currently under development for releasing in October is going to be what feels like a massive amount of changes...