Phoronix

On Friday a news report suggested Microsoft and GitHub were furthering along talks to acquire the popular code hosting site and now a deal has reportedly been reached...

The first preview release of Ruby 2.6 is now available and its big change compared to its earlier releases is a just-in-time (JIT) compiler...

It's been a while since last having any Linux driver progress to report on for the DisplayLink hardware that is found in many of the USB-powered displays. Fortunately, Red Hat developer Mikulas Patocka has posted a set of improvements to the DisplayLink kernel drivers of the UDL-KMS DRM driver and the UDLFB frame-buffer driver...

Yesterday I posted some Radeon graphics benchmarks under Clear Linux now that Intel's performance-optimized Linux distribution ships with AMDGPU+RadeonSI/RADV support. While doing that comparison I also took the opportunity to run some fresh UHD Graphics "Coffeelake" benchmarks on Clear Linux against Ubuntu.

If all goes well, the Linux 4.17 kernel will debut as stable today. Linus Torvalds last week indicated that this next kernel stable release could be coming for this weekend, but there has been a lot of changes merged in recent days, so we'll see if Linus is still leaning towards releasing today or instead opts for Linux 4.17-rc8. Whatever he ends up deciding, there are a lot of great changes with Linux 4.17...

Mesa 18.0.5 is out as the latest point release for the Mesa 18.0 release from Q1'2018, but it also now marks the end of the series...

Derek Foreman at Samsung's Open-Source Group has initiated a formal discussion over the Wayland and Weston release schedules...

When using a GCN 1.1 CIK / Sea Islands GPU with the non-default AMDGPU DRM driver, it will soon begin defaulting to use PowerPlay for power management rather than the old DPM code...

Version 18.05 of the Genode operating system framework is now available along with the second revision to its Sculpt OS, what desires to become a general purpose OS based upon Genode...

Since the unveiling of Spectre Variant Four last month ARM has been publishing patches for their mitigation for the 64-bit ARM CPUs. While the Intel/AMD and POWER mitigation landed for Linux 4.17, the SSBD work on AArch64 is landing for Linux 4.18...

ReactOS, the "open-source Windows" operating system re-implementation, is now able to finally self-host itself in fully compile ReactOS from ReactOS...

Intel's Clear Linux distribution is quite performant as shown by our many Linux distribution benchmarks for delivering lightning-fast out-of-the-box Linux performance that is generally unmatched by other distributions. While the Clear Linux package (bundle) archive continues getting larger and more desktop packages are being included, one area that sadly had been left out up until recently was support for RadeonSI/RADV. Up until recently their Mesa build was just with the Intel OpenGL/Vulkan driver support as well as the software rasterizers, but now the open-source Radeon drivers are being included as well as Nouveau too for open-source NVIDIA driver support. I took Clear Linux's Radeon stack for a whirl to check out the performance capabilities.

The 2018 trend of migrating open-source project infrastructure to GitLab continues...

The AMD developers maintaining the PAL (Platform Abstraction Layer) and XGL components comprising the official AMDVLK Linux Vulkan driver have made public their latest code commits from the past week...

For those wondering what's been going on with the Ardour digital audio workstation cross-platform, open-source software, their developers have posted a status update about their ongoing progress to the project...

One of the most fascinating hobbyist projects of interest on Phoronix in recent years has been Arcan, the display server built off a game engine and that has been amassing an interesting feature set, and with it the project's Durden desktop environment. The project is celebrating its two year milestone since going public so they have recapped some of their recent work...

Nearly one year after the release of Opus 1.2, the Opus 1.3 release is happening quite soon with Friday marking the availability of the release candidate for this open-source and versatile audio codec implementation...

Ahead of its expected release by month's end, FreeBSD 11.2 is now in the release candidate phase of development...

Next week marks the 14th birthday of the founding of Phoronix.com as well as ten years since the initial stable release of the Phoronix Test Suite (v1.0) on 5 June. There is a lot of content queued up for the days ahead and more...

Following the Steam Survey corrections beginning with the April numbers that came following slightly inaccurate numbers due to cyber-cafe reporting and at a time when there has been large swings in users due to popular games like PUBG, the numbers for May 2018 have barely budged on the Linux front...

Yesterday Valve released Vulkan support for Dota 2 on macOS. Indeed, this first major game relying upon MoltenVK for mapping Vulkan over the Apple Metal drivers is delivering performance gains...

Ben Widawsky, one of the Linux graphics architects at Intel where he has been working on the Mesa driver stack for the past eight years, is now re-tasking to FreeBSD...

For those waiting until the first point release of a new Mesa series before updating, Mesa 18.1.1 is out to kick off June as the first update to Mesa 18.1...

Last week was a look at the latest Linux graphics drivers with current-generation graphics cards while for your viewing pleasure this Friday is a 29-way graphics card comparison. Using the very latest Linux graphics drivers, 29 distinct graphics cards were tested from current and recent generations of GPUs all the way back to the GeForce GTX 600 "Kepler" series on the NVIDIA side and on the AMD side was back to the Radeon HD 5800 "Cypress" hardware with a range of Linux games.

It's always great having more open-source graphics driver improvements to kick off a new month. Marek has started the day by volleying 14 new RadeonSI patches...

There are more AMDGPU improvements just sent in to DRM-Next for landing in the Linux 4.18 kernel...

The GCC 8.1 stable compiler release that debuted a few weeks ago is now available on OpenIndiana, the Illumos-based OpenSolaris-derived operating system...

For those still interested in Jolla's Sailfish OS Linux-based mobile device platform, version 2.2 has rolled out with a variety of enhancements...

Of our 23 featured articles and 310 original news articles this month on Phoronix, here is a look back at the most popular open-source/Linux news and reviews to happen this month with our original daily content happening each and every day on Phoronix. Next week is also marked by the 14th birthday of Phoronix...

A feature proposal for Fedora 29 would hide the GRUB boot menu by default on installations where Fedora is the only installed operating system. Surprisingly this has spun into a lot of discussion and debate over the matter...

Back when Vulkan for macOS/iOS was announced at the end of February thanks to the opening up of MoltenVK for mapping Vulkan atop Apple's Metal graphics API, Valve announced they would be bringing Dota 2 on Vulkan to Mac. Today that milestone has finally been reached...

ARM has announced their next-generation wares...

NetworkManager 1.11.4 is out today as the newest development release for this widely-used Linux network management user-space utility...

While Kevin Brace of the OpenChrome project as the lead and only developer left working on this open-source VIA driver stack has restarted the discussion towards mainlining the OpenChrome DRM/KMS driver, he has decided to take a break from that for a few weeks and to focus on developing a "reusable DRM module" to help other vintage/obscure graphics hardware...

As part of the large Linux performance tests we have begun and continuing through June with Phoronix celebrating its 14th birthday next week along with the 10th anniversary of the Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 release, for your viewing pleasure today is a 15-way Linux distribution / operating system comparison testing not only the leading and latest Linux distributions but also Windows 10 April 2018 Update and Linux on Windows WSL.

Huawei's Gao Xiang has announced the EROFS open-source Linux file-system intended for Android devices, but still at its very early stages of development...

Mesa 18.0.5 is the last planned point release for the Mesa 18.0 series that debuted at the end of March as the Q1'2018 release for Mesa3D...

Support for AMD K8 "Hammer" processors including the original Athlon 64 processors and original AMD64 Opterons has been dropped from Coreboot...

Rumors have been circulating that NVIDIA's "Turing" mainstream GPUs will launch this summer while it seems to be a bit more solidified now with a conference schedule pointing out NVIDIA's next-gen mainstream GPU...

If you try running the GNOME Shell today on the Raspberry Pi, it's a frustratingly slow experience. While some work is being done in addressing GNOME's GPU, CPU, and memory consumption, it might not ever be in a state to run smoothly on Raspberry Pi hardware...

While the recently released X.Org Server 1.20 has initial EGLStreams for XWayland support to allow X11 on Wayland client application support for use with the NVIDIA proprietary driver, the support isn't automatically available when needed. Fortunately, that's being corrected for a future point release...

Adding to the list of new features coming for Linux 4.18 is BPFILTER...

AMD's Boyuan Zhang has sent out an initial set of 18 patches adding JPEG handling to the AMDGPU kernel driver for VCN "Video Core Next" as the new media encode/decode block found with Raven Ridge APUs for media decode/encode...

Earlier this month Feral's Linux team lead left the company after a triumphant five years at the company leading the Linux game porting team through titles such as HITMAN, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and Rise of the Tomb Raider. It turns out he's now working for Unity Technologies...

The fifth and final development/test release of Phoronix Test Suite 8.0 is now available ahead of its official release planned for next week to further advance open-source Linux / macOS / BSD / Windows automated benchmarking...

With Bcachefs on its trek towards the mainline Linux kernel, this week I conducted some benchmarks using the very latest Bcachefs file-system code and compared its performance to the mainline Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS file-system competitors on both rotating and solid-state storage.

If you want a laptop or convertible tablet that "respects your freedoms" at all costs with the hardware freed down to the BIOS and don't mind running on outdated hardware to accomplish that goal, the Free Software Foundation has now certified the Minifree X200 that is a refurbished model of the decade-old Lenovo X200 as being "RYF" compliant...

Google has rolled out Chrome 67 to its stable channel for all major platforms, including Linux...

With the Linux 4.17 kernel soon to be released, I've been running some fresh file-system and I/O scheduler tests -- among other benchmarks -- of this late stage kernel code. For your viewing pleasure today are tests of a high performance Intel Optane 900p NVMe SSD with different I/O scheduler options available with Linux 4.17.

Longtime GNU toolchain developer at Red Hat, David Malcolm, has announced the work he is pursuing on compiler-assisted performance analysis with GCC...