Phoronix

It's a busy week for Linux gaming with the Wine/Proton-based Steam Play from Valve, continued graphics driver improvements, and some activity in the Feral camp...

Ubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish" is now under a feature freeze to focus on bug-fixing ahead of the October debut of this next Ubuntu Linux installment...

Mesa 18.1.7 ships with the last two weeks worth of fixes in the Mesa stable space. But overall this isn't nearly as big as past Mesa 18.1 point releases. Mesa 18.1.7 has some minor fixes to R600 Gallium3D, Intel i965, RADV Vulkan driver fixes, the Doom workaround has been back-ported to RADV, and a variety of other fixes.'..

Last week I offered a look at the Btrfs RAID performance on 4 x Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSDs housed within the interesting MSI XPANDER-AERO. In this article are some EXT4 and XFS file-system benchmark results on the four-drive SSD RAID array by making use of the Linux MD RAID infrastructure compared to the previous Btrfs native-RAID benchmarks. Tests were done on the Linux 4.18 kernel to provide the latest stable look at the XFS/EXT4 MD RAID performance with these four powerful Samsung 970 EVO 250GB NVMe solid-state drives.

Valve open-source Linux GPU driver developer Timothy Arceri has spent a lot of time in recent months improving the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver's OpenGL compatibility profile support. Now there are patches taking it up to par with the core profile context support...

Making the Phoronix Test Suite even easier to use for container benchmarking, on Docker Hub now is the phoronix/pts image for easily carrying out Docker tests with a fully-standardized, performance-optimized user-space stack with many of the popular test profiles pre-seeded on the disk and is ready to begin benchmarking out-of-the-box.

AMD developers have done their weekly code drop to their official open-source Linux Vulkan driver code. This week there are fixes while most interesting is initial support for the yet-to-launch Vega 12 graphics processor...

There's some good news beyond Intel's CPU microcode re-licensing to clear up the confusion among users and developers this week: Intel is also re-licensing their FSP binaries to this same shorter and much more concise license...

Prolific Mesa contributor Marek Olšák has landed support for more OpenGL / OpenGL ES extensions into the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

The Magic Keyboard that was introduced by Apple in 2015 is seeing improved Linux support with a new kernel patch that's pending...

While OpenRISC has been around longer than RISC-V as an open-source processor ISA, with not having as many commercial stakeholders involved, it hasn't been off to the races as quickly, but it's still marching to the beat of its own drum...

Over the past day online there has been lots of controversy following some high-profile sites reporting about Intel's "un-friendly microcode license update" and its "ban on benchmarking", among other catch phrases. It's now been officially cleared up by Intel with a simpler license that doesn't forbid benchmarking, allows distribution vendors to re-distributed these binary files to their users, and doesn't have any other nastiness integrated into the legal text...

Last week AMD released the AMDGPU-PRO 18.30 hybrid driver featuring their latest optional proprietary Linux driver components as well as the "all-open" driver stack option. Here are some initial benchmarks of that driver stack compared to what's shipped by default in Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS as well as the latest upstream Mesa/AMDGPU support.

The plans talked about in early July for merging the AMDKFD driver into the AMDGPU DRM driver are moving ahead and out today are the initial patches working towards this merger...

Codeplay, the company behind tools like clspv for running OpenCL C code on Vulkan, today released ComputeCpp 1.0...

Back in March was the discussion about Ubuntu 18.10 considering an LZ4-compressed kernel image (initamfs) by default while now action has been taken on this support and coming up with a new default...

While FBDEV has been on its last leg for years with some calling for its deprecation and encouraging instead DRM/KMS drivers rather than (mostly embedded vendors) focusing on FBDEV frame-buffer drivers, with Linux 4.19 the FBDEV subsystem is bringing a useful addition to the kernel...

The past two weeks I have been delivering a great deal of AMD Threadripper 2990WX benchmarks on Linux as well as some against Windows and Windows Server. But recently I got around to trying out some of the BSD operating systems on this 32-core / 64-thread processor to see how they would run and to see whether they would have similar scaling issues or not like we've seen on the Windows side against Linux. In this article are FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD benchmarks with the X399 + 2990WX compared to a few Linux distributions.

Olof Johansson has sent in his usual batch of multiple pull requests updating the ARM hardware support, this time for the nearly-over Linux 4.19 kernel merge window...

Just over two years since digiKam 5.0 shipped, this Qt/KDE-aligned open-source photo management software has debuted its 6.0 beta release...

AKiTiO is the latest hardware vendor beginning to allow for firmware upgrades in an easy and reliable manner under Linux...

While it was just days ago that DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon got his hands on a Threadripper 2990WX 32-core / 64-thread "beast", got it working under this long ago forked operating system from FreeBSD, and proceeded to exclaim with joy how powerful this system is, he's now made it even better. Dillon has landed some additional kernel work to benefit the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX...

For the Linux 4.19 kernel there's been a lot of F2FS performance enhancements and more, the new EROFS file-system, low-level Btrfs improvements, and more. Some of the file-system work less in the spotlight are the OverlayFS and UBIFS updates sent in this week...

The x86 platform driver work was merged today for the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window...

On Monday NVIDIA introduced the GeForce RTX 20 series while today they have begun making some more performance details of these Turing-powered GPUs succeeding the GeForce GTX 1000 "Pascal" series...

While Linux 4.19 is slated to have a lot of new features as we have been covering now the past week and a half, Linus Torvalds is upset with these big pull requests and some of them being far from perfect -- to the extent of being rejected...

AMD developers have open-sourced rocprofiler for profiling the AMD GPU hardware performance counters under compute/OpenCL workloads...

The fourth release candidate of Mesa 18.2 is out today rather than the final release due to open blocker bugs still persisting...

While we are still waiting on Red Hat to roll out the overdue Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 public beta, today they have announced the beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6...

For those of you that have missed the ability to have desktop icons on the GNOME Shell desktop since the support was dropped from Nautilus, it's now sort of back thanks to GNOME developer Carlos Soriano...

Jaegeuk Kim, the creator and lead developer of the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS), has finally submitted the big feature updates slated for the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window...

Yesterday NVIDIA released the 396.54 Linux driver update and while from being another point release might feel like a mundane update hot on the heels of the GeForce RTX 2070/2080 series debut, it's actually a significant driver update for Linux gamers. Here are some benchmarks showcasing the performance fix that warranted this new driver release.

KDE developers have ported their Ubuntu-based KDE Neon distribution to the 64-bit ARM Pinebook as well as optimized the Plasma desktop experience for this device...

Daniel Vetter of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center team has written his first blog post in a while on Linux graphics. In this latest post he is answering why there isn't a 2D user-space API in the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) code...

Given Monday's press conference by NVIDIA where they launched the RTX 20 series and much of the two-hour-long event was focused on ray-tracing for games, you may be wondering about the state of Linux affairs.....

In addition to approving the Fedora 30 release schedule proposal, the members of the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee have approved this week a number of Fedora 29 features...

The SDL2 library that offers a cross-platform hardware abstraction layer primarily and primarily used by Linux/Windows/macOS/iOS/Android games now has a sensor API...

Valve has today announced a new version of Steam Play that allows Linux gamers to enjoy Windows games on Linux via their new Wine-based Proton project...

The support we talked about earlier this month for offering VKD3D-based Direct3D 12 support on macOS for Windows games/applications running under Wine is now merged...

While Fedora 29 isn't shipping until the end of October, the release schedule for Fedora 30 was firmed up this week at the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee meeting...

Last week I carried out some tests of BSD vs. Linux on the new 32-core / 64-thread Threadripper 2990WX. I tested FreeBSD 11, FreeBSD 12, and TrueOS -- those benchmarks will be published in the next few days. I tried DragonFlyBSD, but at the time it wouldn't boot with this AMD HEDT processor. But now the latest DragonFlyBSD development kernel can handle the 2990WX and the lead DragonFly developer calls this new processor "a real beast" and is stunned by its performance potential...

As covered earlier this month, Emil Velikov at Collabora has been working on EGLDevice support for Mesa. These EGL extensions originally developed by NVIDIA are being pursued by Mesa developers for better dealing with the enumeration and querying of multiple GPUs on a system...

One day after announcing the GeForce RTX 2070/2080 series, NVIDIA has released a new Linux driver. But it's not a major new driver branch at this time (that's presumably coming closer to the 20 September launch date) with the Turing GPU support, but is a point release delivering a practical bug fix...

It's been a while since last having any big security bulletins for the X.Org Server even though some of the code-base dates back decades and security researchers have said the security is even worse than it looks and numerous advisories have come up in recent years. But it's not because X11 is bug-free as today three more security bulletins were made public affecting libX11...

While Debian has tens of thousands of packages in its archive and users often tend to cite the size of a package archive as one of the useful metrics for evaluating a OS/distribution or package manager's potential, not all packages are maintained the same. In acknowledging that not all packages are maintained to the same standard and some ultimately slip through the cracks, Debian developers are discussing a salvaging process...

While Roccat previously backed their devices on Linux that is the case no more and what is left for the time being are various community/third-party applications for supporting gaming mice/keyboard configuration under Linux from Logitech to Razer and various other lesser known brands of gaming peripherals (Razer will hopefully change this, at least). One of the most promising efforts right now for unifying mouse configuration on Linux is libratbag and its GTK3 Piper interface. Ratbag and Piper have evolved into a very competent open-source project for configuring Logitech mice on the Linux desktop.

Now that Flatpak 1.0 was released yesterday, what's next for this leading Linux app sandboxing and distribution framework?..

Mesa 18.2.0 is expected to be released in the days ahead as the latest quarterly feature release to this collection of open-source user-space graphics driver components. As has been the case each quarter for particularly the past few years, these timed quarterly releases are quite feature-packed...

Earlier this year development on Linspire/Freespire was restarted for this Linux distribution that dates back to 2001 when it launched as "Lindows" before having to be renamed due to a trademark dispute with Microsoft. Back in January, PC/OpenSystems who is now developing the distribution, the Freespire 3.0 release debuted while today Freespire 4.0 is available...

Junio Hamano issued the first release candidate on Monday of the upcoming Git 2.19 distributed revision control system update...