Phoronix

While the DragonFlyBSD kernel has already landed its mitigation for Spectre V1/V2 and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities, a fresh round of CPU bug hardening work was just merged into their kernel...

Published this weekend was a 25-way Linux graphics card comparison for the newest major Linux game release, A Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia, that was released natively for Linux days ago by Feral Interactive and ported from Direct3D to Vulkan in the process. As a result of premium requests, here are some additional tests for this Linux game when comparing the performance on Intel Core i7 8700K and Ryzen 7 2700X processors.

Wine's bi-weekly release cycle for new development releases is slightly off target with it surfacing today rather than last Friday, but the changes are worthwhile...

Neovim, the fork of Vim focused on offering better extensibility and usability, has issued their v0.3 release...

Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) maintainer Jaegeuk Kim has submitted the file-system updates intended for the Linux 4.18 kernel...

This month marks one year since AMD returned to delivering high-performance server CPUs with the debut of their EPYC 7000 series processor line-up. It's been a triumphant period for AMD with the successes over the past year of their EPYC family. Over the past year, the Linux support has continued to improve with several EPYC/Zen CPU optimizations, ongoing Zen compiler tuning, CPU temperature monitoring support within the k10temp driver, and general improvements to the Linux kernel that have also helped out EPYC. In this article is a comparison of a "2017" Linux software stack as was common last year to the performance now possible if using the bleeding-edge software components. These Linux benchmarks were done with the EPYC 7351P, 7401P, and 7601 processors.

For those making use of the Qt 5.9 long-term support series, Qt 5.9.6 was outed today by The Qt Company...

The MIPS P6600 processor was announced in 2015 as one of the Warrior Processors based upon MIPS64 Release 6. The P6600 is based on a 28nm process, clock speeds up to 2.0GHz, and is the fastest performing of the MIPS Warrior cores. Only now has MIPS posted an enablement patch for the MIPS P6600 with GCC...

Kicking off a new week is the Vulkan 1.1.77 specification update...

The VirGL stack for offering OpenGL hardware acceleration to guest virtual machines with KVM is now capable of utilizing OpenGL 4.1...

Released this week was the first alpha of PHP 7.3 and I decided to take it for a spin with some benchmarks. While not as dramatic as going from PHP5 to PHP 7.0, the performance of PHP7 continues getting better...

This week Mac/Linux game porting company released the Linux port of A Total War Saga: THRONES OF BRITANNIA, just two months after this game was released for Windows. With the Linux port of this strategy game the Vulkan API is being used for graphics rendering, which makes it interesting for benchmarking. Here is our extensive look at the performance of this major Linux game port when testing twenty-five different AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards to see how this game is performing on Ubuntu Linux.

The AMD Radeon driver developers maintaining the open-source AMDVLK Vulkan Linux driver have pushed out their latest week's worth of changes...

It's too late for the upcoming LibreOffice 6.1, but LibreOffice 6.2 will feature PDF importing improvements...

Linux 4.17 landed the initial Spectre V4 mitigation as "Speculative Store Bypass Disable" (SSBD) while primarily focused on Intel CPUs and for Linux 4.18 the SSBD code has been updated for AMD processors...

Adding to the list of new features for Linux 4.18 is the long-in-development work on the restartable sequences system call...

The second release candidate of FreeBSD 11.2 is now available for testing...

There are a lot of staging changes for the busy Linux 4.18 kernel merge window...

The latest monthly update is now available to the KDE Frameworks that complements the capabilities of the Qt5 tool-kit...

While there are the VIA/Centaur-based Zhaoxin desktop CPUs targeted for the Chinese market, it turns out there is another x86 Chinese CPU effort but this time is a collaboration with AMD...

For those relying upon DXVK for running Direct3D 11 games over Vulkan with Wine, the RADV Vulkan driver from Mesa Git should now be working out much better for this fast-developing graphics translation layer...

We are about half-way through the Linux 4.18 kernel merge window, so here is a look at the most interesting work that's been merged so far for this next kernel release that should debut as stable around mid-August...

Unrelated to this week's announcement of Microsoft acquiring GitHub, the X.Org code repositories will soon be managed on GitLab...

KDE developer Markus Slopianka has looked at the state of Flatpak and Snap application deployment/sandboxing technologies across the state of several Linux distributions...

Devuan 2.0 has now been released as stable, the downstream of Debian GNU/Linux that aims for "init freedom" by decoupling the packages from being dependent upon systemd...

As it stands right now the most competitive graphics card battle on the Linux gaming front is the Radeon RX 580 against the GeForce GTX 1060. NVIDIA continues with their first-rate performant drivers while the Polaris hardware on the open-source RADV/RadeonSI drivers is mature enough now that it's competing with the GTX 1060 like it should be and in some cases even performing much better than the NVIDIA Pascal part. With this week's release of Thrones of Britannia and powered by Vulkan, here is an extensive look at the two competing GPUs and their performance...

The ATI Rage 128 series was introduced in 1998 while now twenty years later a renewed DDX driver and potentially DRM/KMS kernel driver is going to be attempted for these AGP/PCI graphics cards from the days of OpenGL 1.2...

The latest feature plan for Fedora 29 is to finally have Wayland remote desktop support in place...

NVIDIA has rounded out their supported Linux drivers with X.Org Server 1.20 support...

Oak Ridge National Laboratory has officially launched their "Summit" supercomputer today that also comes in as the world's fastest...

The ARM64 (64-bit ARM / AArch64) architecture updates have been submitted today for the Linux 4.18 kernel...

This week have been various unique and extra articles and benchmarks for commemorating the Phoronix 14th birthday. The latest of these fun articles is taking a look back at how various CPUs over the years compare to today's Intel Core and AMD Ryzen offerings.

Just as we have been expecting of the Steam Controller kernel driver to land with Linux 4.18, it's happening and has just been submitted as part of the HID subsystem updates for this next kernel release...

Support for Intel Memory Protection Extensions (MPX) is now pretty much dead on Linux...

Just a friendly reminder that if you wish to enjoy Phoronix Premium for ad-free viewing and multi-page articles on a single page while scoring quite a deal on it, today is the last day of the birthday special...

Last month we reported on Raptor Computing Systems announcing the Talos 2 Lite as their most affordable POWER9-based, open-source down to the firmware system and at least for now also happens to be the cheapest POWER9 configuration we have seen from any vendor...

One of the latest planned features for Fedora 29 is to update the system-wide cryptography policy...

It's now much easier tracking the state of VirGL that allows for OpenGL acceleration within guest virtual machines by passing on the rendering calls to the system's host OpenGL driver via Mesa and the virglrenderer library...

For those not satisfied by last week's Chrome 67 stable release, Chrome 68 is now available in beta form with the latest and greatest feature work...

PHP 7.3 Alpha 1 is available today as the PHP developers kick off their next release cycle for getting this next version of PHP7 out by the end of 2018...

This morning Feral Interactive released A Total War Saga: THRONES OF BRITANNIA for Linux gamers. This Linux port of A Total War Saga: THRONES OF BRITANNIA is powered by the Vulkan graphics API rather than OpenGL and makes for an interesting test subject. Here are our initial benchmarks of this game under Ubuntu Linux with a range of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

Continuing LLVM release manager Hans Wennborg has begun discussing plans for the upcoming LLVM 7.0 release...

David Miller has submitted the big platter of networking updates for the in-development Linux 4.18 kernel...

Feral Interactive has released their latest Linux game port, A Total War Saga: THRONES OF BRITANNIA, is now live via their store and on Steam...

A premium patron recently asked about testing the open-source Radeon driver performance when testing the forced "high" dynamic power management state rather than the default "auto" mode. Here are some benchmarks...

Thunar 1.8 is now available as the latest stable release of the Xfce desktop's file manager...

For over six years now has been the Intel DRM driver's "Fastboot" support for eliminating unnecessary mode-set operations during the boot process, with an original focus on improving the laptop/ultrabook boot experience. While there have been attempts at getting Fastboot enabled by default, it hasn't happened to date but now a Red Hat developer is hoping to get it turned on for at least some generations of Intel hardware to benefit the work going into improving the Fedora boot experience...

Adding to the growing list of kernel changes for Linux 4.18 are a great deal of sound driver/subsystem updates...

DXVK 0.54 is available today as the latest version of this Direct3D-11-over-Vulkan translation layer to benefit Wine gamers looking to enjoy faster D3D11 gaming performance on Linux...

While 64-bit ARM (AArch64) has been mitigated for months with the mainline Linux kernel against Spectre Variant One and Two, with the upcoming Linux 4.18 kernel is finally Spectre V1/V2 treatment for 32-bit ARM...