Phoronix

In addition to Mesa 18.2 expected today, also out this Friday is Mesa 18.1.8 as the latest stable point release for this important piece of the open-source Linux graphics stack...

The last planned development release ahead of the official Phoronix Test Suite 8.2.0 "Rakkestad" quarterly feature release is now available for testing with our open-source benchmarking framework for Linux, macOS, BSD, and Windows operating systems...

After the Jetson Xavier pre-orders started last month, NVIDIA is now shipping their latest developer kit that features eight of their custom Carmel 64-bit ARMv8.2 cores, 512 Volta GPU cores, dual deep learning accelerators, 16GP of LPDDR4x, 32GB of eMMC storage, and a 7-way VLIW vision accelerator...

It turns out some Vulkan stakeholders are working on a transform feedback extension that would help efforts like DXVK and VKD3D in mapping Direct3D to Vulkan...

There is a new public cloud provider that exited beta this past weekend and is exclusively offering Linux instances from Arch Linux to CentOS to Debian and Fedora. In addition to the usual assortment of Intel Xeon powered clouds/VPS instances, they also offer a range of AMD EPYC powered systems too.

In addition to the recently covered work on making FUSE file-systems faster with eBPF, another separate optimization is on the way for the Linux kernel's FUSE bits that allow for file-systems to be implemented in user-space...

The latest "sanitizer" worked on by Google's developers for the LLVM/Clang compiler infrastructure is a Kernel Memory Sanitizer (KMSAN)...

Taking place last month in the beautiful city of Vienna was KDE's annual developer conference, Akademy. Session recordings are now available if you are interested in the latest work happening in the KDE desktop space...

Last month we were the first to point out that Intel is developing a new Gallium3D graphics driver for their recent generations of HD/UHD Graphics and presumably moving forward with their discrete GPU solutions coming out in 2020. This new Intel Gallium3D driver called "Iris" continues making progress though isn't yet ready for end-users...

Back in June we brought up how some of the SiFive HiFive Unleashed initialization code was closed-source for this developer board built around the RISC-V open-source processor ISA. One of the pain points was the DDR memory initialization code being closed-source but then SiFive announced they would allow for a fully open-source boot process. They've now made good on their word with their new open-source project...

Purism announced earlier this week that the Librem 5 smartphone has been delayed to April 2019. In trying to make that date not slip further, which they attributed this three-month delay on NXP hardware errata, they continue working quickly on the software side of this privacy-minded GNU/Linux smartphone puzzle...

We've been looking forward to the OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 release for a number of months now with Lx 3.0 having debuted two years ago. Fortunately, that release is inching closer to release as this week the alpha release is now available for testing...

As promised, following my 10 Reasons Linux Gamers Might Want To Pass On The NVIDIA RTX 20 Series, here are ten reasons on the opposite side for considering these new Turing graphics cards for Linux...

The latest merged feature work for NetworkManager is for supporting LLMNR (Link-Local Multicast Name Resolution) in conjunction with systemd-resolved...

AMD has a few processor announcements this morning that are no longer under embargo...

It's arguably a bit late, but patches are now pending for optimizing the RadeonSI Gallium3D open-source Linux graphics driver for the AMD Ryzen CPU microarchitecture...

If you enjoyed the original Life is Strange that Feral Interactive ported to Linux two years back, Life is Strange: Before the Storm will be released for Linux next week...

With the last of the major GCC 8 build issues of the DragonFlyBSD code-base resolved, this BSD operating system has switched to using this latest stable release of the GNU Compiler Collection by default...

Another drm-misc-next pull request was sent in Wednesday with new feature material slated for the Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel release by way of DRM-Next...

With Chrome 69 out the door and that having marked Chrome's 10th birthday, Google developers have Chrome 70 in their dev channel fresh out of the oven...

There was some NVIDIA signed firmware activity today in the linux-firmware.git tree for Pascal GPUs... Sadly, it's not the long sought after PMU firmware or any breakthrough in allowing the open-source Nouveau driver to properly support re-clocking or other long missing functionality from this open-source NVIDIA driver. Rather, it's just to help out newer laptops with Pascal discrete graphics...

It's been open-source since its inception but is only being promoted now by Google: their Tink cryptography library that aims to be easy-to-use...

Mesa 18.2 as the third-quarter feature update for this collection of primarily Vulkan/OpenGL drivers is expected to make its official debut on Friday...

With Firefox 62.0 having shipped, Mozilla promoted Firefox 63.0 to beta as part of their usual release cadence...

GNOME 3.30 has been officially released as the latest major feature release for the GNOME Shell desktop and associated components...

The GNOME Foundation received a $400k donation of which $100k is heading to the GIMP developers for helping to improve their open-source image manipulation program that for some can compete with Adobe's Photoshop functionality...

Intel's Open-Source Technology Center is launching a new initiative... a podcast. Through their new show Open-Source Voices they will be focusing upon their many open-source software projects and other efforts they are engaged in through the OTC. On their premiere episode happens to be Kelly Hammond (Software Engineering Director) and your's truly talking about the work Intel's been doing on Linux distribution development via Clear Linux...

It has been expected that Vega 20 would feature XGMI as a high-speed GPU interconnect alternative to PCI Express and that was firmed up today thanks to a new set of AMDGPU Linux driver patches...

Greg Kroah-Hartman has rolled out a batch of stable kernel updates today including Linux 3.18.121, 4.4.154, 4.9.125, 4.14.68, and 4.18.6...

GDB 8.2 is out today as the latest feature update for this GNU source-level debugger for many languages, architectures, and operating systems...

There's been AMD Radeon code in the works for the GCC compiler as a new back-end going back years but never really seems to takeoff in comparison to the AMD support on LLVM. SUSE formerly worked on a lot of Radeon + GCC code for GPU offloading while more recent Code Sourcery has been working on a new AMD GCN back-end. The newest AMD GCN code was posted today for the GNU Compiler Collection...

With the start of a new month comes fresh benchmarks of some of the leading rolling-release Linux distributions. For kicking off September are benchmarks of the Arch-based Antergos, Intel's Clear Linux, and openSUSE Tumbleweed when testing on four distinctly different systems.

Continuing on from the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 expectations on Linux shared earlier this week, here's a list of ten reasons why Linux gamers might want to pass on these soon-to-launch graphics cards from NVIDIA...

While yesterday we looked at the Renegade ROK-RK3328-CC Libre Computer Board, they already have the successor well in the works. The Renegade was interesting as for just dollars more than the Raspberry Pi it offers better performance, Gigabit Ethernet makes the networking potential a lot more than the slow Ethernet on the Pi, there is USB 3.0 connectivity, and its using DDR4 memory, among other technical advantages. But the new Renegade Elite even puts that to shame...

With GNOME 3.30 releasing today, the GNOME release team has already finalized the release schedule for the next development cycle...

GNOME 3.30 is releasing today as the newest feature release for this open-source desktop environment on its usual six-month release cadence...

Merged today into systemd is basic keydev support for cryptsetup-generator to allow unlocking an encrypted drive by using a key file that is stored on an external drive...

MoltenVK continues getting better for offering Vulkan graphics/compute support on macOS by leveraging it on top of Apple's Metal drivers...

The folks at the Linux-friendly CompuLab hardware vendor have introduced WILD, the first WiFi RTT access point to allow for WiFi indoor location detection/tracking with supported Android 9 smartphones. CompuLab WILD is able to deliver under 0.5 meter accuracy...

While Firefox is hitting version 62 this week, Google has introduced Chrome 69 as the newest version of their cross-platform web-browser that recently celebrated its tenth birthday...

While Mozilla isn't expected to officially announce Firefox 62.0 until tomorrow, as usual the binaries are available for wanting this web browser update right now...

We knew it was pretty much inevitable, but Purism's embargo has just expired confirming the news that the Librem 5 smartphone will not be released in January as originally planned...

While Google got the NSA-developed Speck into the Linux kernel on the basis of wanting to use Speck for file-system encryption on very low-end Android (Go) devices, last month they decided to abandon those plans and instead work out a new "HPolyC" algorithm for use on these bottom-tier devices due to all the concerns over Speck potentially being back-doored by the US National Security Agency...

The folks from LoverPi.com have sent out some of their newest ARM SBCs. What we're taking a look and benchmarking first is the Libre Computer Board ROC-RK3328-CC. Pricing on this board, which was developed between the Libre Computer Project and Firefly, starts at $35 USD with 1GB of DDR4 but at $80 USD a 4GB version can be acquired. This quad-core 64-bit ARM board has modern features like Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0, and other interfaces over what is found with current generation Raspberry Pi hardware.

One of the few longtime independent contributors to the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver, Ilia Mirkin, sent out a set of patches today working on basic HDMI 2.0 functionality for this Linux DRM driver...

Peter Hutterer of Red Hat today announced the third and expected final release candidate of the long-baking libinput 1.12 cycle...

Patches currently under review for the Linux kernel's "Sun4i" Direct Rendering Manager driver provide support for the Display Engine 3.0 hardware found on newer Allwinner SoCs and most notably HDMI 2.0a support...

With many of our other initially planned Threadripper 2 Linux benchmarks out of the way, recently I carried out a compiler benchmarking comparison on the Zen+ Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX between GCC and Clang.

Besides the Linux "k10temp" AMD CPU temperature reporting driver recently seeing support for Threadripper 2 temperature monitoring, much older Excavator (Bulldozer 4th Gen) processors will now see working CPU temperature reporting for select models...

A compiler engineer working for Loongson Technology Co is looking to land a number of improvements to these newer MIPS64 processors into the mainline GCC code-base...