Phoronix

Apple is said to be working on some new domain-specific compilers...

Thanks to Facebook / Open Compute Project, the Octeon CN81xx SoCs are now supported by upstream Coreboot and happen to be the first Cavium ARM SoCs supported by this project...

The USB Type-C DisplayPort Alternate Mode driver will be coming to the Linux 4.19 kernel...

One of the most exciting Google Summer of Code 2018 projects is Vulkan-Virgl for supporting this modern graphics/compute API within virtual machines...

It's an exciting day in RADV land as in addition to work on the new Vulkan 1.1.80 extensions, David Airlie landed a patch he's been baking for speeding up the shader compilation performance for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver within Mesa...

The belated Wine 3.12 development release is now available for testing, the first release following WineConf 2018...

The folks at iX Systems have announced their first public beta of FreeNAS 11.2, their downstream of FreeBSD 11.2 focused on supporting network-attached storage (NAS) systems...

After converting the GNU Emacs repository to Git a few years back, Eric S Raymond has been working on the massive undertaking of transferring the GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) repository in full over to Git. But the transition to GCC Git is being hampered since due to the massive size of the repository, Raymond's system is running under extreme memory pressure with 64GB of RAM...

Canonical today released new Ubuntu Minimal images for cloud computing. The new images are half the size of the traditional Ubuntu Server and are said to boot up to 40% faster, so I decided to run a quick Amazon EC2 Linux distribution boot time comparison today.....

A new pull request has been submitted to MoltenVK, the open-source project for mapping the Vulkan graphics/compute API over Apple's Metal to run on iOS/macOS. This pull request is working to address the issue that caused at least one MoltenVK-using iPhone/iPad game to be rejected from the Apple App Store...

Canonical today announced the new Minimal Ubuntu, which is a "tiny" package set focused for speed, performance, and stability of Ubuntu in cloud deployments...

Chances are if you are spending more than $400 USD to have the Intel Core i7 8086K, the limited edition processor that is Intel's first to have a turbo frequency at 5.0GHz (and can easily overclock on all cores to 5.0+ GHz), you probably care a great deal about your system's performance. For squeezing extra performance out of the hardware, there is a wide variety of software optimizations available. Many of those software optimizations can be found within Intel's own Clear Linux distribution as previously shown while for this i7-8086K benchmarking is a look at how nine Linux distributions compare out-of-the-box when tested on this Coffeelake CPU and all CPU cores overclocked to 5.0GHz.

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's open-source Linux GPU driver team has been particularly busy in recent days with "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver enhancements...

It looks like Arm Limited is going on the offensive against the RISC-V open-source processor instruction set architecture...

Fulfilling a 6+ year desire, GNOME's GLib library now has a generic memory reference counting API...

Taking place last week in The Hague, Netherlands, was the WineConf 2018 conference. This year's WineConf -- on top of the usual annual discussions about this open-source project for running Windows games/applications on Linux/macOS -- took the time to celebrate the project's 25th anniversary...

Queued into the staging code for introduction with the Linux 4.19 kernel is the Gasket driver framework and the first driver based upon it, Apex...

One of three new Vulkan extensions introduced in this weekend's Vulkan 1.1.80 specification update is VK_KHR_8bit_storage for providing 8-bit types is now available in patch form for the Intel open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver...

The fourth weekly test release of the Linux 4.18 kernel is now available...

If you are still running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 or one of the downstreams like CentOS, Scientific Linux, or Oracle Linux, these benchmarks are for you in showing the performance of Scientific Linux 6.9 vs. 6.10 vs. 7.5 for getting an idea about the current performance of EL6/EL7.

The latest hardware at Phoronix for testing is the Dell XPS 13.3-inch (XPS9370) with Intel Core i7-8550U Kabylake-R processor featuring UHD Graphics 620. A number of interesting Linux benchmarks are currently being worked on, including Windows versus various Linux distribution performance tests as well as power consumption, etc. For some initial figures for your viewing pleasure this weekend are some of the gaming/graphics tests between Windows 10 and Ubuntu Linux.

The open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver continues to be largely a community affair aside from occasional code/documentation dumps (and hardware supplies) from NVIDIA and then Red Hat also employing a few of the key contributors to the Nouveau DRM kernel driver and Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D within Mesa. When it comes to Red Hat's Nouveau developers like Ben Skeggs and Karol Herbst, they started out as community contributors over the years to this driver. Fortunately, this year has brought another new contributor to the Mesa driver stack...

Released yesterday was Vulkan 1.1.80 that offers three new extensions while the Intel ANV open-source driver has begun rolling out patches for supporting this latest Vulkan specification update...

Back in January there were Xilinx developers who posted a DRM/KMS driver for their DisplayPort subsystem as part of the ZynqMP SoC. It looks like the driver for this display pipeline may soon be ready for mainline...

The latest work on improving KDE's usability is adding a "share" menu to the Dolphin file manager...

Back in February MoltenVK was open-sourced as part of The Khronos Group and Valve working harder to get Vulkan working on macOS/iOS by mapping it through to using Apple's Metal Graphics/Compute API. The most notable user of MoltenVK on macOS to date is the Vulkan Dota 2 on Mac, but for those looking to use this Vulkan-to-Metal framework on iOS, it looks like Apple might be clamping down...

While GNOME's Wayland support has been in great shape with the Mutter compositor, it has depended upon X11/XWayland code even when starting with pure Wayland support. That's now changing and there is also now the optional "--no-x11" flag for starting the compositor without X11 support...

The Facebook developers working on the Zstandard "Zstd" compression technology released their latest update a few days ago, v1.3.5 that is codenamed the "Dictionary Edition" given its dictionary compression performance improvements...

For those compiling code on AArch64 (64-bit ARM) systems with LLVM Clang and tuning for your particular SoC, the Clang compiler now supports -mcpu=native...

The past week has seen a number of improvements to Wayland's Weston compositor with new features...

After a number of recent Vulkan 1.1 point releases being rather mundane, Vulkan 1.1.80 is out this morning and on top of documentation updates also brings three notable new Vulkan extensions...

Keith Packard doing his contract work for Valve to improve the Linux display infrastructure for VR head-mounted displays has been wrapping up his efforts with recently landing the Vulkan bits into Mesa and now the necessary xf86-video-amdgpu patches also are set to be merged there in the days ahead...

GIMP 2.10.4 was quietly released earlier this week as the latest stable release in the GIMP 2.10 series...

Tom Stellard at Red Hat has continued with his duties of serving as the LLVM point release manager and today formally issued the LLVM 6.0.1 update...

For fans of Latte Dock, the KDE Plasma aligned desktop dock, the version 0.8 release is around the corner with many new features to present...

It has been nearly two years since the debut of OpenMandriva Lx 3.0, but fortunately it's soon going to be succeeded by OpenMandriva Lx 4.0...

Intel announced the limited edition Core i7 8086K processor in June to celebrate 40 years since the introduction of the original 8086 processor that ushered in the x86 architecture. The Core i7 8086K is now widely available albeit with an apparent limited time available. This celebratory CPU is built off Intel's existing Coffeelake CPU micro-architecture but with an elevated CPU base frequency and a turbo frequency that tops out at 5.0GHz to make it the company's highest-performing mainstream desktop CPU to date.

Elisa 0.2 is now available as the second release for this Qt/KDE Plasma focused open-source music player...

GNU Guix 0.15 is out today as the latest feature update to this transactional package manager and is joined by an updated Guix System Distribution (GuixSD) release too as the GNU Linux-libre distribution built around it...

Feral's GameMode is soon going to be within easy each for Linux gamers running Red Hat's Fedora Linux distribution...

While the GCC compiler merged its RISC-V port last year, among its limitations have been not supporting the Ada compiler. That's now changing thanks to new patches posted today...

GUADEC 2018, the annual GNOME developers' conference, has kicked off this morning in Almería, Spain...

Based off last month's Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.10 update, CentOS 6.10 is available this week while also the Scientific Linux 6.10 release candidate has also been made available...

Towards the end of June an initial batch of AMDGPU updates were sent in to DRM-Next for targeting the Linux 4.19 kernel. Now a second round of updates have been submitted of the AMDGPU/Radeon kernel for this next kernel series...

In addition to working on statx() for glibc, landing in the GNU C Library this week was Unicode 11.0 support along with a renameat2() function...

While "AMDGPU" is often what is talked about when it comes to the Radeon graphics driver code within the Linux kernel with it being the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver for AMD GCN graphics cards and newer, there is also the AMDKFD kernel driver that plays a vital role for compute support...

Wayland-Protocols 1.15 has been released that introduces the new (unstable) XDG-Decoration protocol for drawing window decorations with Wayland...

The latest feature addition to the Nouveau Gallium3D driver is now supporting multi-sampled images for Maxwell graphics processors and newer...

The Qt Company is putting the finishing touches on the upcoming Qt Creator 4.7 integrated development environment release for Qt/C++...

The third alpha of this year's PHP7 update, PHP 7.3, is now available for evaluation...