Phoronix

Valve's latest monthly Steam Survey results are in for August 2018...

The Vega 20 open-source driver enablement march continues with Bas Nieuwenhuizen, the RADV independent Radeon Vulkan driver co-founder, introducing an initial patch series this weekend adding support for the unreleased graphics processor...

With GNOME 3.30 due to be released this week, GNOME-Tweaks 3.30 has been released as being ready to tweak this latest flagship open-source desktop environment...

One week past the merge window of Linux 4.19 and the 4.19-rc1 release to close that off, Linux 4.19-rc2 is now available for testing...

Thomas Gleixner has submitted a batch of x86 fixes today to the Linux 4.19 kernel, which include several changes around the speculative execution vulnerability mitigations...

Those of you dealing with files stored on Samba shares while accessing them from the KDE desktop will soon see a variety of improvements to that experience...

DXVK is out with a new release, the Direct3D 10/11 to Vulkan API translation layer used by a growing number of Wine gamers and now by Steam Play's Proton with Valve funding the developer behind this open-source project...

While Red Hat and several other Linux vendors have either deprecated Btrfs support or at least not embraced it like they originally talked up this "next-gen file-system" years ago, SUSE has continued supporting Btrfs both with openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise...

In addition to Google's Summer of Code recently having wrapped up, so have the Outreachy projects that also engaged in various open-source activities over the summer months...

In addition to the embedded Linux experts at Bootlin having worked on the Allwinner VPU open-source support this summer they have also been developing an Amlogic video decode driver for the Linux kernel...

Back in April was a discussion about dropping MPX support from the Linux kernel but no action taken. Now though an Intel developer is preparing to see this Memory Protection Extensions functionality removed from the mainline Linux kernel...

Georgia Tech tends to be home to a lot of interesting open-source projects and incubating long-term FLOSS/Linux developers. This university's latest interesting open-source project is "ExtFUSE" for making user-space FUSE file-systems faster by making use of the in-kernel eBPF framework...

The AMD developers responsible for maintaining the "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver that shares common code with their Windows driver have done another weekly code push of their newest bits...

While there is already Cannonlake and Icelake support within Intel's Mesa drivers, the Amberlake support has just been merged...

Mesa 18.2 ended up having two unscheduled release candidates due to open blocker bugs, but those issues have been cleared up and so this official quarterly update should be launching soon...

The six-month internship at Bootlin that was crowd-funded for improving the Allwinner VPU support on Linux has drawn to a close with mostly achieving success...

KaOS 2018.08 has been released as the newest stable ISO spin of this built-from-scratch, Arch-inspired Linux distribution that offers a first-rate KDE Plasma desktop experience...

Friday night marked the release of GNOME 3.29.92 that serves as the second and final release candidate ahead of next week's GNOME 3.30 six-month desktop update...

August 2018 was the busiest month in the open-source/Linux space and hardware in many months... So busy in fact your's truly wrote a combined total of 352 original articles over the course of August. Here's a look back at what made this month so exciting...

The latest Linux kernel patch coming to light in the Spectre space is by SUSE's Jiri Kosina for enabling cross-hyperthreaded Spectre V2 STIBP mitigation...

NVIDIA today released new Vulkan beta drivers in the form of v399.17 for Windows and v396.54.02 for Linux...

Announced back in May by Dell was an Ubuntu option for their new (2018) xx30 series Precision laptops. They previously began shipping the Ubuntu-loaded Dell Precision 3530/7530/7730 mobile workstations while beginning to ship as of today is the Precision 5530 Developer Edition...

Wine 3.15 is out today as the first development release since last week's landmark announcement of Valve's Steam Play to run Windows games on Linux using the Wine-forked "Proton" with the help of CodeWeavers...

This week Intel opened up a newly-completed Trusted Platform Module 2.0 (TPM2) stack with support for Linux and Microsoft Windows...

Last week I posted some initial tests and benchmarks of DragonFlyBSD/FreeBSD on the AMD Threadripper 2990WX. While that went well and the BSDs scale with this 32-core / 64-thread processor better than Windows, lead DragonFly developer Matthew Dillon had picked up a 2990WX system and has been tuning the kernel ever since. Here are some benchmarks looking at some of his recent optimizations...

If you are a fan of Linux Mint and their GNOME/GTK-forked Cinnamon desktop but prefer not having the Ubuntu base, Linux Mint Debian Edition 3 "Cindy" is now available...

With some out-of-tree code of Firefox Nightly with a modified version of Gecko using GFX-RS, it's possible to use the web-browser powered by the Vulkan API on Linux...

ARM developer Adenilson Cavalcanti has been working on optimizing the Zlib compression/decompression performance on ARM systems...

With KDE4 not having seen an upstream release in years and the old KDE4 code beginning to break under newer C++ compilers, the KDE-FreeBSD team has announced a four-month deprecation period after which they are dropping the KDE4 ports from the operating system...

Sean Paul of Google who herds the drm-misc-next code into DRM-Next sent the first pull request of new material targeting the next kernel cycle, Linux 4.20 but more likely to be known as Linux 5.0...

Godot has been on a roll lately with this 2D/3D open-source game engine having seen lots of well-deserved attention. Following their big Godot 3.0 release in January, Godot 3.1 is on the way as another significant update...

The latest work being sought by Google's Chrome OS team for inclusion into the upstream Linux kernel is high-resolution scrolling for Logitech mice...

If you tend to routinely ride the latest Linux Git code and are still using 32-bit (x86) hardware, you may want to watch out for problems around the new Kernel Page Table Isolation (K/PTI) functionality...

The GCC Steering Committee is accepting OpenRISC as the newest architecture port for inclusion into the GNU Compiler Collection...

Raptor Computer Systems began their open-source hardware expedition with the POWER8-based Talos Secure Workstation that was quite expensive but last year launched the Talos II platform with IBM POWER9 processors and earlier this year launched the Raptor Talos II Lite systems at a cheaper price-point but still quite a significant investment compared to x86_64 AMD/Intel products. They've been pushing ahead on making their platform more viable for Linux users as well as more affordable and it looks like they will soon be launching a new product...

It's just been over one month since the release of ReactOS 0.4.9 while the next version is beginning to formulate...

While still waiting on the ROCm 1.9 release to happen, version 1.8.3 of the Radeon Open Compute stack was released for Linux systems...

One of the most frequent test requests recently has been to look at the overall performance cost of Meltdown/Spectre mitigations on the latest Linux kernel and now with L1TF/Foreshadow work tossed into the mix. With the Linux 4.19 kernel that just kicked off development this month has been continued churn in the Spectre/Meltdown space, just not for x86_64 but also for POWER/s390/ARM where applicable. For getting an overall look at the performance impact of these mitigation techniques I tested three Intel Xeon systems and two AMD EPYC systems as well as a virtual machine on each side for seeing how the default Linux 4.19 kernel performance -- with relevant mitigations applied -- to that of an unmitigated kernel.

The Genode Operating System Framework is out with its latest release as well as an updated SculptOS that they are forging as their general purpose operating system...

The VLC media player was one of the big recipients of this year's Google Summer of Code with seeing several students work on some pretty interesting projects...

Mesa 18.2 will be slipping into September with two open Intel driver bugs still blocking the official release...

GNOME's Usage application that allows visualizing processor, memory, disk, and network usage may soon be able to report your system's power consumption data...

The work done by Valve open-source Linux GPU driver Timothy Arceri to implement OpenGL 4.5 compatibility profile has been merged into Git master for next quarter's Mesa 18.3 release...

Purism shared today about the work they are engaged in on supporting SMS messaging with their in-development Librem 5 smartphone...

Announced last October was a 24-core ARM developer box being worked on by Linaro/96Boards, Socionext, and Gigabyte. The specifications are appealing with twenty-four ARM 64-bit cores with the SoC on a micro-ATX sized motherboard, support for a PCI Express graphics slot, and onboard Gigabit Ethernet. Here are our first benchmarks of this Socionext 96Boards Developerbox.

The soon-to-be-released Linux 4.18.6 stable kernel will correctly report the CPU core temperatures of the new AMD Threadripper 2950X and 2990WX processors...

While .NET applications have been supported on Linux for a while now via the .NET Core, using performance profiling tools really haven't working out but that is now changing...

Word this week of the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier Development Kit being up for pre-order reminded me of some benchmarks I had been meaning to do of seeing how the NVIDIA Jetson TX2 developer kit's performance has evolved since its launch a year and a half ago. There's actually a quite measurable improvement in performance with the latest software/drivers compared to it was at launch.

For those looking at affordable metal server racks / open rack cabinets, I continue to be quite impressed by the StarTech.com four-post server racks. Recently I commissioned two more of their 12U racks in order to accommodate the latest Threadripper 2 systems in our Linux benchmarking farm...

At this week's Open-Source Summit in Vancouver is a presentation by an Activision developer talking about Call of Duty performance but sadly it's not what may come to mind...