Phoronix

A new release of the Binutils collection of important tools is now available with a number of new features and improvements...

It has been a while since last publishing some Linux GPU driver benchmarks focused explicitly on the OpenGL vs. Vulkan performance, but that changed today with a fresh look at the performance between these two Khronos graphics APIs when tested with AMD and NVIDIA hardware on the latest RadeonSI/RADV and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers.

Debian GNU/Linux 9.5 is out today as the latest stable update to the "Stretch" series...

KDE Frameworks 5.48 is now the latest monthly update to this collection of add-on libraries complementing Qt5...

AMD's leading open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D developer, Marek Olšák, sent out a new patch series this week aiming to benefit this Radeon OpenGL driver's performance in CPU-bound scenarios...

Pairing nicely with Wine 3.12 or Wine-Staging 3.12 is now DXVK 0.62, the library for accelerating the Direct3D 11 API using Vulkan to allow for faster D3D11 Windows games running under Wine...

The other day we reported on a GCC 8 regression where Skylake and newer CPUs with "-march=native" haven't been performance as optimally as they should be. Fortunately, that patch was quickly landed into the GCC SVN/Git code for GCC 9 as well as back-ported to GCC 8...

After several big feature pull requests of new "i915" Intel DRM driver features landing in DRM-Next for Linux 4.19, the Intel open-source developers have sent in what they believe to be their last batch of feature changes for queuing this next kernel cycle...

If you have been part of the group of Radeon RX Vega Linux users trying out Linux 4.18 and finding your display no longer lights up, heading to Linux 4.18 Git should be a fix for at least some of the users...

DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has provided an update on the open-source operating system project's infrastructure and acknowledging the SSD upgrades that are noticeably beneficial over HDDs...

CodeWeavers' Andrew Eikum has added support to Wine for using Vulkan on macOS via the open-source MoltenVK...

For those abiding by Mesa stable releases, Mesa 18.1.4 is now available -- in time for updating prior to any weekend Linux gaming or other activities -- for these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan driver components...

Samsung's Derek Foreman has announced the alpha release of Wayland 1.16 as well as the Weston 5.0 reference compositor...

Canonical developers working on Mir have prepared the release of Mir 0.32.1 with a few fixes and improvements off the recent release of Mir 0.32...

Given the recent releases of FreeBSD 11.2, Scientific Linux 6.10, openSUSE Leap 15, and other distribution updates in the past quarter, here are some fresh benchmarks of eight different Linux distributions compared to FreeBSD 11.2 and Microsoft Windows Server 2016. The tested Linux platforms for this go-around were CentOS 7.5, Clear Linux 23610, Debian 9.4, Fedora Server 28, openSUSE leap 15.0, Scientific Linux 6.10, Scientific Linux 7.5, and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

GNOME 3.30 is looking like Mutter will be quite fit with the ability to remove its dependence on X11 code and various performance tuning optimizations. On top of already landed performance work in recent months, more optimizations have just landed and it looks like more could still be on the way...

The Speculative Load Hardening (SLH) effort that has been in development for months as a compiler-based automated Spectre Variant One mitigation technique has landed within LLVM trunk...

Peter Hutterer at Red Hat is trying again to get trackpoint acceleration performing nicely under the libinput library so trackpoints behave nicely across Wayland, X.Org, and Mir systems...

Felix Kuehling of AMD sent out the remaining six patches for getting the AMD Raven Ridge (Ryzen APUs) working with the AMDKFD kernel compute driver so that the ROCm/OpenCL user-space compute stack can be run on these new APUs...

Developers behind the GNU Compiler Collection intend to get release preparations underway soon for the GCC 8.2 compiler...

With the upcoming Linux 4.18 kernel release due out in August there is the AMDGPU kernel driver support for Vega 20, the yet-to-be-released Vega GPU said to be the 7nm part launching later this year in Radeon Instinct products and featuring 32GB of HBM2 and adding some new deep learning instructions. Now the RadeonSI Gallium3D user-space driver for OpenGL within Mesa has Vega 20 support...

It turns out that when using GCC 8 since April (or GCC 9 development code) if running on Intel Skylake (or newer architectures like the yet-to-be-out Cannonlake or Icelake) and compile your code with the "-march=native" flag for what should tune for your CPU microarchitecture's full capabilities, that hasn't entirely been the case. A fix is en route that can correct the performance by as much as 60%...

For those looking to pick up a new Linux game this weekend, Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War was released today with same-day native Linux support...

Intel rolled out today the Xeon E-2100 processors as the successor to the Xeon E3 CPUs. The Xeon E-2100 series is intended for entry-level workstations and based upon the Coffeelake CPU microarchitecture...

NVIDIA developers today released the 396.24.10 driver, their latest beta driver for Linux focused on the latest Vulkan innovations and improvements and is joined by the Windows 398.58 driver...

In part with GPU demand by crypto-currency miners waning a bit, NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics card availability at retailers has been improving in recent weeks as well as seeing less inflated prices than just recently had been the case. Given the better availability and stabilizing prices, here is a fresh look of the current line-up of GeForce and Radeon graphics cards under Ubuntu Linux using the newest AMD/NVIDIA drivers and also providing performance-per-dollar metrics given current retail prices.

Granted OpenBSD isn't the most desktop focused BSD out there and that WiFi isn't therefore the highest priority for this security-focused operating system, but with the latest code it can now finally auto-join WiFi networks...

While the GTK+ 4.0 tool-kit was previously talked about for release by the end of 2018, that's now looking more like spring of 2019 when this next major version will be released...

The AMDVLK open-source Radeon Vulkan Linux driver has seen its latest weekly code drop that brings with it some of the extensions needed for supporting the Steam VR experience...

Linux 4.19 is shaping up to be a pretty exciting kernel release for what is expected to be the last version before Linux 5.0...

For those maintaining their own home-built Linux router, Linux 4.19 is going to be pretty exciting: CAKE Qdisc has been merged into net-next, making it a feature for this next kernel cycle...

Luc Trudeau, a video compression wizard and co-author of the AV1 royalty-free video format, has written a piece about the optimization state for video formats like VP9 and AV1 on POWER and ARM CPU architectures...

Another routine Mesa 18.1. point release is being prepared while waiting for the August debut of the Mesa 18.2 feature update...

It's rare in recent years to have anything to report on xf86-video-ati, the X.Org driver for the display/2D experience for pre-GCN Radeon graphics cards. But this week has been a large batch of fixes and improvements for those using this DDX driver with pre-HD7000 series hardware...

The GLib low-level GNOME library while being quite mature is seeing a significant update with its version 2.58 release due out this September for GNOME 3.30...

One of the surprisingly controversial changes being implemented for Fedora 29 is dropping GCC and GCC-C++ from the default BuildRoot for assembling Fedora packages with Koji and Mock...

Developers behind Samba, the open-source SMB/CIFS implementation for providing integration with the Windows Server Domain and Windows clients, is preparing for their next 4.9 release...

The NVIDIA Jetson Xavier Development Kit is pretty darn exciting with having eight ARMv8.2 cores, a 512-core Volta GPU, 16GB of LPDDR4, and under 30 Watt power use...

Open-source developer Antonio Larrosa who contributes to KDE and openSUSE has been developing a command-line music manager called Bard. He's written an interesting post about how he sped up some of his operations by around eight-thousand times faster...

In addition to the AMD-licensed Chengdu Haiguang x86 server processors and Zhaoxin x86-compatible CPUs from VIA Centaur lineage, another CPU effort within China has been C-SKY...

One month ago Intel was quick following the Linux 4.18 merge material to begin sending in new feature work for Linux 4.19 by means of the DRM-Next repository. They've already done a few rounds of updates while now another serving of Direct Rendering Manager patches were served up...

One day past the release of upstream Wine 3.12, the downstream Wine-Staging 3.12 is now available that continues incorporating hundreds of experimental/testing patches atop these bi-weekly Wine releases...

At the end of last year the Intel Clear Linux project's Clear Containers initiative morphed into OpenStack's Kata Containers. Clear Linux now supports the resulting Kata Containers...

With the current-generation Dell XPS 13 XPS9370-7002SLV currently being tested at Phoronix, one of the areas I was most anxious to benchmark was the power consumption... For years it has been a problem of Linux on laptops generally leading to less battery life than on Windows, but in the past ~2+ years there has been some nice improvements within the Linux kernel and a renewed effort by developers at Red Hat and elsewhere on improving the Linux laptop battery life. Here are some initial power consumption numbers for this Dell XPS 13 under Windows 10 and then various Linux distributions...

The march to QEMU 3.0 is now underway following discussions at the end of last year for jumping to the v3.0 milestone after the long-running v2.x series. The first release candidate is now available and marks a hard feature freeze for the QEMU 3.0 milestone...

Being roughly mid-way through the Linux 4.18 kernel development cycle, I spent some time this weekend running benchmarks of the AMDGPU DRM driver on Linux 4.18 Git compared to Linux 4.17 stable on three different Radeon graphics cards while using the Mesa 18.1.3 based drivers.

It's one month late but the Xen Project Hypervisor 4.11 release is available today with great scads of new features...

A new beta of the Radeon Open Compute "ROCm" stack was quietly made available for v1.8.2...

Version 2018.2 of the Unity Game Engine is now available as the latest quarterly update to this widely-used, cross-platform engine. Unity 2018.2 is quite exciting and does include some Vulkan and Linux changes...

If the Lynx open-source text-based browser isn't satisfying your needs with viewing modern web sites via the terminal, Browsh is a new entrant into the text-based web-browser space that seeks to support modern web standards...