Phoronix

Ensuring your CPU microcode is kept up-to-date for Zen processors is now a little bit easier with the microcode files being added to the linux-firmware.git collection...

For those aspiring Vulkan programmers, the Vulkan experts at LunarG have published a tutorial to learn how to make use of the newest debug extension, VK_EXT_debug_utils...

When it comes to open-source ARM Mali graphics driver efforts there has been the Panfrost driver targeting the Mali T700 series that has occupied much of the limelight recently, but there has been a separate effort still working on open-source driver support for the older 400/450 series...

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has been working on support for 32-bit GPU pointers for user SGPRs as his latest performance enhancement for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver...

Depending upon the motherboard and other factors, the Raven Ridge Linux support has been a bit of a mess since its February launch. Fortunately, with time various Linux driver fixes have landed for improving the stability and performance of these APUs with Zen CPU cores and Vega graphics. During my recent testing of the AMD Ryzen 5 2400G, it was completely stable and running fine with the newest open-source driver code but the Ryzen 3 2200G was still a stability nightmare.

AMD has landed a number of updated firmware images into the linux-firmware tree for their recent generations of hardware...

One of Sony's compiler experts has taken to working on some tuning for the AMD Ryzen "znver1" microarchitecture support within the LLVM compiler stack. This begs the question why Sony is working on Ryzen improvements if not for a future product...

Next year's GCC 9 compiler release will be eliminating support for older ARM versions...

First time Mesa release manager Dylan Baker has managed to release Mesa 18.1 on time as the Q2'2018 quarterly update to this OpenGL/Vulkan driver stack...

After working on Lubuntu-Next for a while in transitioning from the GTK-based LXDE desktop environment to the modern and maintained LXQt desktop environment that is powered by Qt5, the Lubuntu 18.10 will be the release that officially moves over to the LXQt desktop and pushes out LXDE...

Canonical and Microsoft have rolled out Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to the Microsoft Store for running with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Here are some initial benchmarks of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on Windows 10 WSL with the April 2018 Update compared to the Bionic Beaver installed bare-metal and then also the older Ubuntu 16.04 WSL setup.

The Git Protocol Version 2 was announced today by Google as a major update to the distributed revision control system's wire protocol. Git protocol version 2 is much more efficient and yields significant performance benefits...

KDE Plasma 5.13 is out in beta form today ahead of its planned release in June. Plasma 5.13 has ended up being a very compelling and huge upgrade for the KDE Plasma 5 desktop...

Will Cooke, the Director of the Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical, has outlined the major desktop plans for the Ubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish" cycle...

Purism has formally introduced "Calls", its GTK3-based PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) phone dialing application that it hopes will be accepted into the upstream GNOME project. Purism plans to develop this phone dialer using GNOME's Telepathy framework but for now is using a simple oFono back-end...

Vim 8.1 is out today as the latest stable feature update to this advanced cross-platform text editor...

The Qt Company is hoping to be able to release the Qt 5.11 tool-kit in just a few days...

Initial open-source driver support for the NVIDIA GV100 "Volta" GPUs will be introduced with the upcoming Linux 4.18 kernel cycle...

The in-development Panfrost reverse-engineered, open-source driver for supporting ARM Mali T700 series graphics is now much more capable thanks to work carried out on their "half-way" Gallium3D driver in recent weeks...

Purism's Dorota Czaplejewicz has been active within the Wayland community recently as they work on their Librem 5 phone Wayland compositor and Phosh shell for this software stack and iMX8 hardware they hope to begin shipping next year...

One of the best and most long-standing open-source Linux games is 0 A.D. and in time for the weekend they have a new release...

Thomas Hellstrom of VMware who has worked on Mesa going back to the Tungsten Graphics days is developing a remote KMS back-end that could be transmitted over VNC or similar protocols...

We knew it was coming while today NVIDIA has rolled out the CUDA 9.2 stable release update...

Mesa 18.1 might be out this weekend but for those riding the Mesa 18.0 stable release series for now, Mesa 18.0.4 is the latest point release...

Version 3.2 of the Calamares universal Linux distribution installer framework is now available as their latest big feature release that has been in development the past number of months...

The group leader of the Linux porting efforts at Feral Interactive is leaving the company for different pastures...

The first of two new Steam Apps for mobile devices is now available...

If Purism didn't have their hands full enough already working to further free Linux laptops and their very ambitious project to get their own Linux smartphone software/hardware shipping next year, they have now expanded their portfolio with the Purekey...

In continuing with our recent benchmarks of the brand new GCC 8.1 compiler, here are more tests while using an Intel Skylake CPU and testing with -O2, -O3, and -O3 -march=native optimization levels while comparing the resulting binary performance of GCC 8.1 and GCC 7.3.

It's been almost one month since the Vulkan 1.1.74 debut but now that's been succeeded by Vulkan 1.1.75...

With the great shape that ROCm has been getting into recently for open-source Radeon GPU compute support on Linux including advancing OpenCL support, one might have rightfully assumed that was going to be their centralized compute stack moving forward. It turns out that their PAL-based compute stack will continue to be maintained too...

What was developed as the VC5 Gallium3D driver is now renamed to V3D and enabled by default in new Mesa 18.2 builds...

Usually X.Org DDX driver releases aren't too notable these days with most of the open-source Linux graphics innovations happening elsewhere in the stack, but for those using the VMware graphics virtualization support available through their different virtualization products, the xf86-video-vmware update out today is on the heavier side...

Last month we delivered launch-day Linux benchmarks of the Ryzen 5 2600X and Ryzen 7 2700X for these new "Zen+" processors while recently we received the non-X Ryzen 5 2600 and Ryzen 7 2700 processors for Linux testing as well. In this article are benchmarks of these new AMD Ryzen processors as well as other Intel/AMD CPUs for delivering a fresh nine-way Linux distribution comparison using the very latest software components.

For those that have been interested in the Talos II POWER-based system that is fully open-source down to the firmware but have been put off by its cost, Raptor Computer Systems today announced the Talos II Lite that is a slightly cut-down version of the Talos II Workstation...

For those that haven't yet upgraded to LLVM 6.0 stable, the long overdue LLVM 5.0.2 is now available...

Back in January was the news of Linspire (formerly known as "Lindows") making a comeback and this week marks the release of Linspire Server 2018...

While many Coreboot users just habitually ride the latest Git code, for those sticking to official stable releases, Coreboot 4.8 was released today...

For those using the long-lived NVIDIA 390 driver series rather than the latest NVIDIA 396 short-lived series (or happen to be stuck on 390 like for Fermi GPU support), the NVIDIA 390.59 Linux driver was released minutes ago...

Those running Intel Skylake servers may soon see better I/O performance if using the P-State powersave governor that is often the default on many Linux distributions...

Greg Kroah-Hartman has today released his latest slew of stable kernel release updates...

GNOME's 2018 Performance Hackfest is wrapping up today in Cambridge, UK after spending the past few days focusing on how to better optimize the desktop stack for RAM/CPU/GPU/power efficiency. The fruits of this hackfest will hopefully become apparent with the GNOME 3.30 release due out this September...

Qt 3D Studio, the 3D focused user-interface IDE born out of NVIDIA's big code contribution to Qt, is now in beta for its version 2.0 update...

The fourth development release of Phoronix Test Suite 8.0 is now available for evaluation ahead of the official stable release in the next few weeks...

The current Flatpak runtimes are based upon the 1.6 FreeDesktop.org runtime but a major new version is in the works...

In addition to being able to plot the frames per second, CPU usage, and many other possible sensor outputs, the Gallium3D Heads-Up Display (HUD) is now capable of showing the frametime while gaming...

Alex Deucher of AMD today submitted the initial batch of Radeon/AMDGPU DRM driver feature updates to DRM-Next that in turn are slated to land in the Linux 4.18 merge window in June. There's a fair amount of notable feature work this round for Radeon Linux users...

The folks working on the Endless OS as part of Endless Computer have just announced the latest release of their technologically innovative Linux distribution...

While waiting for Solaris 11.4 to be released, Oracle has today rolled out its thirty-second stable release update to Solaris 11.3...

With the Phoronix Test Suite 8.0 release this quarter on top of the rewritten Microsoft Windows 10 / Windows Server support and significantly better BSD support, Phoronix Test Suite 8.0 is also making it easier to create your own test profiles...