Phoronix

Mesa 19.0-RC7 was released on Wednesday rather than the official release due to four blocker bugs remaining, but this seventh weekly release candidate does have a number of fixes to offer...

Fedora Silverblue (formerly known as Fedora Atomic Workstation) now has support for running with NVIDIA's binary graphics driver stack...

These changes really shouldn't come as much of a surprise considering all of the major changes we've covered individually in recent weeks on Phoronix, but the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics/display driver changes have now been submitted for the Linux 5.1 kernel...

The UBports community that continues maintaining Ubuntu Touch has today released their OTA-8 update...

While there were many Linux gaming benchmarks within our recent GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Linux review, there were requests for 1080p tests and some other benchmarks... For honoring those requests, with some of them being made by our premium supporters, here are 117 graphics benchmarks tested not only on the GTX 1660 Ti but also the RTX 2060 and on the AMD side was the Radeon RX 590 and RX Vega 56 for an interesting mid-range graphics card comparison.

AMD released their newest xf86-video-amdgpu DDX driver today with various additions for enabling new functionality where needed by this X.Org display driver...

Greg Kroah-Hartman sent out the staging subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 5.1...

Purism announced this morning that their PureOS Linux distribution for their Librem laptops and forthcoming Librem 5 platform has achieved the goal of "convergence"...

The HID subsystem updates for Linux 5.1 is another busy cycle with new hardware support...

Intel has been developing "i10nm_edac" as the new Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) driver for supporting their next-generation 10nm-based server CPUs...

Linux has supported ELF binaries since the 1.x kernel days and now 25 years later, its support for the a.out file format is finally on the way out the door...

The Gallium Nine TTN support for "TGSI to NIR" to allow this Direct3D 9 state tracker to use the NIR intermediate representation as an alternative to Gallium's default TGSI representation has been merged to Git for Mesa 19.1...

With the in-development Linux 5.1 is a big step forward to the kernel's live-patching infrastructure for this functionality that allows primarily applying security updates against the running kernel without the need for reboots...

Recently I published a number of Linux 5.0 I/O scheduler benchmarks on laptop and desktop hardware with solid-state storage. A number of Phoronix readers were interested in seeing similar tests done but with traditional hard drives, so here are those results using two different drives and the different blk-mq I/O scheduler options with the new Linux 5.0 kernel.

AMD developers today posted a set of twenty patches implementing RAS support for the AMDGPU Linux kernel diver...

Linux 5.1 continues the massive undertaking in preparing the kernel for the Year 2038 problem...

The open-source Intel "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver has picked up support for some of the newer extensions...

One week ahead of the official debut of GNOME 3.32, the release candidate will be out this week and GNOME Shell along with the Mutter compositor have outed their 3.31.92 release...

With the initial Iris Gallium3D driver that was merged into Mesa at the end of February from our tests on UHD Graphics the performance is quite promising considering the early stage of this new open-source OpenGL driver and it not yet being fully tuned/optimized. The Iris Gallium3D driver support goes back to Broadwell CPUs so I decided to run some benchmarks with the legendary Core i7 5775C that features the Iris Pro Graphics 6200 with 128MB of eDRAM.

For years Debian developers have been planning for a merged /usr concept where the /{bin,sbin,lib}/ directories becoming symbolic links to /usr/{bin,sbin,lib}/. With the upcoming Debian 10 Buster is the initial step of their plan after it was postponed from Debian Stretch...

SPOILER is the newest speculative attack affecting Intel's micro-architecture...

While Intel may be developing the Iris Gallium3D driver as their future OpenGL driver, they haven't given up all work on their existing "i965" classic Mesa driver. Hitting Mesa 19.1's development code this morning is support for threaded OpenGL with this existing and widely-used driver on Linux systems...

The x86/pti updates for Linux 5.1 is bringing a new PR_SPEC_DISABLE_NOEXEC option where speculation protection for SSBD doesn't end up being passed to new processes started by exec in such use-cases where it's safe to do so. Utilizing this option will thus eliminate the overhead associated with this Spectre Variant 4 "Speculative Store Bypass" behavior...

While the upstream Linux kernel developers may not be interested in adding all of the CPU compiler tuning optimizations carried by Gentoo for their kernel builds, if you are after just "-march=native" compiler tuning to optimize your kernel build for the CPU being used, an updated patch is now available...

Now that the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) and Fwupd updating mechanism for firmware/BIOS updates is supported by all major vendors and has already served up more than five million firmware files, their newest focus is on easing the roll-out of firmware updates in enterprise settings...

The networking subsystem is busy as always and not any different pace with the in-development Linux 5.1 kernel...

Quietly released last week was Wireshark 3.0, the open-source packet analyzer software formerly known as Ethereal and previously as a GTK user-interface but now exclusively Qt...

While we are very much looking forward to the huge ZFS On Linux 0.8 release, as a new stable release for offering up compatibility with the newly minted Linux 5.0 is now the ZoL 0.7.13 milestone...

The upstream Linux kernel support for the MIPS architecture continues to be improved upon, which is great news especially with this processor ISA going open-source. With the Linux 5.1 kernel are more MIPS improvements...

The initial feature updates were sent in a short time ago for the Btrfs file-system changes targeting the Linux 5.1 kernel cycle...

The DAV1D open-source AV1 video decoder is now much more capable on older PCs and ARM mobile devices with its second release...

As usual, following yesterday's release of Linux 5.0 the GNU/FSF folks have put out their re-base of their version of the Linux kernel that strips out support for drivers depending upon binary-only firmware, the ability to load non-free (closed-source) kernel modules, and other functionality removed that isn't in strict compliance with open-source standards...

Collabora's Tomeu Vizoso has posted an initial set of patches he's been working on along with Rob Herring on developing a new open-source kernel DRM driver for Arm's Bifrost and Midgard graphics hardware...

It's always been a bit odd how the de facto Vulkan SDK is through LunarG rather than The Khronos Group, which could lead to confusion for those not familiar with the great folks at LunarG. But now it will be more clear with LunarG officially donating their Vulkan software development kit to Khronos...

In System76's road to manufacturing their own laptops and desktops, the Linux-focused Denver-based company has their eyes on offering ARM-based products...

The Khronos Group has announced the release of Vulkan 1.1.102, coming just a few weeks ahead of the Game Developers' Conference (GDC) later this month in San Francisco...

Intel has announced they are contributing the Thunderbolt 3 specification to the USB Promoter Group and making it royalty-free for other hardware vendors to implement support for it. Plus it was also announced the USB4 specifcation is based on the Thunderbolt protocol...

Linux power management expert Rafael Wysocki of Intel is off to the races early with his PM/ACPI updates submitted for the newly-opened Linux 5.1 merge window...

Dirt Rally 2.0 was released last week by Codemasters as the successor to 2015's Dirt Rally and another title on the EGO Engine. While Dirt Rally saw a native Linux port, Dirt Rally 2.0 hasn't seen any port announced by Feral Interactive (though they are currently porting DiRT 4 to Linux), but what's very exciting is this brand new Windows game runs great under Valve's Steam Play with Proton and DXVK! The experience for Dirt Rally 2.0 is quite great on Linux already thanks to Steam Play and with this being a benchmark-friendly game, here are some NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon benchmarks of this racing game on Linux.

With there being a lot of interest from when Intel recently open-sourced their SVT-AV1 video encoder and more recently their VP9 video encoder also under the "Scalable Video Technologies" umbrella, here are benchmarks from 27 different systems showing off their performance. Plus for kicks there are also some other CPU-based video encode benchmarks including AOM-AV1 and others...

One of the most asked questions in recent weeks has been how to enable the newly added support for FreeSync on Linux. Now with Linux 5.0 out there, here is a quick guide...

AMD is back on course for their weekly code drops of the AMDVLK sources that make up their official open-source Vulkan Linux driver...

Developers persisting on Haiku as the BeOS-inspired open-source operating system made more headway in February to advance their OS past the recent (and successful) beta milestone...

Linus Torvalds has gone ahead and just issued the Linux 5.0 stable kernel for what originally began as the Linux 4.21 kernel cycle. The Linux 5.0 kernel cycle delivers on the mainline AMD Radeon FreeSync support, continued work on bringing up Intel Icelake and other new CPU features, Logitech high-resolution scrolling capabilities, network improvements, and much more...

With it being a little over one year since Spectre and Meltdown mitigations became public and with the Linux kernel today hitting the big "5.0" release, I decided to run some benchmarks of the current out-of-the-box performance hit as a result of the current default mitigation techniques employed by the Linux kernel. The default vs. unmitigated performance impact for Spectre/Meltdown are tested on an Intel Core i7 and Core i9 systems while there is also an AMD Ryzen 7 box for reference with its Spectre mitigation impact on Linux 5.0.

ReactOS 0.4.11 is now available as the newest version of this open-source operating system re-implementing the Windows APIs with a focus on binary driver/application compatibility. With this being the first release since November's ReactOS 0.4.10, there are a fair amount of changes to find in this new build...

KDE developers remain quite busy in preparing for Frameworks 5.56, the next KDE Plasma 5.15 point release, and KDE Applications 19.04 for ensuring KDE is polished as ever with its forthcoming 2019 releases...

Building off the exciting Wine 4.3 release that brought the FAudio implementation, the Wine-Staging crew has outed their newest development release. Wine-Staging 4.3 has upstreamed a number of their patches into Wine while introducing some new work too and then re-basing their existing nearly 800 patches...

Before the day is through Linus Torvalds is expected to officially release the Linux 5.0 kernel and immediately following that he'll be kicking off the Linux 5.1 kernel cycle by the opening of the two-week-long merge window...

As a step towards getting the "soft" FP64 (and INT64) support working for Gallium3D OpenGL drivers, the Mesa state tracker has added FP64 / INT64 lowering support for the drivers utilizing NIR...