Phoronix

While we are still waiting for Intel Cannonlake CPUs with "Gen 10" graphics to formally launch (which looks like may not happen now until very late 2018 or early 2019, with the recent Intel earnings call indicating no 10nm volume production until 2019), open-source Intel developers continue their work on the Linux bring-up of Icelake "Gen 11" graphics...

Former Valve developer and texture compression wizard Rich Geldreich has open-sourced the "bc7enc16" BC7/BPTC texture encoder...

Juan Suarez Romero who is maintaining the Mesa 18.0 stable series today announced the 18.0.2 release candidate as what will be the second point release...

Ubuntu 18.04, the Bionic Beaver release, is now available as Canonical's latest Long-Term Support (LTS) release...

While Fedora had been notorious for releasing often weeks behind schedule, they've been working on improving their release process management and bug handling and it's paid off. Fedora 28 will be shipping on-time for its final release next week!..

A guest post on AMD's GPUOpen blog outlines the overhead issues with using the Vulkan loader library and possible performance advantages to using vkGetDeviceProcAddr or more easily via a little heard of project called Volk...

I can't imagine many Linux desktop users are interested in a closed-source, commercial-driven password manager for their systems, but for those that are, Keeper launched a new version of its Keeper Password Program Manager for Linux...

With Red Hat deprecating Btrfs in RHEL7 with that "next-gen" Linux file-system not having panned out like many had hoped for or expected, Red Hat has been investing in their new "Stratis" storage project. More details on Stratis have now come to light...

Landing today within the Coreboot Git tree is support for the RISC-V based SiFive Freedom Unleashed 540 System-on-a-Chip and SiFive's Unleashed mainboard making use of this SoC built around the royalty-free and open processor ISA...

While openSUSE Leap 15 is coming next month that hasn't slowed down openSUSE developers from continuing to update the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed platform...

Here are our latest Linux gaming benchmarks comparing the Intel Core i7 8700K to the newly-released Ryzen 7 2700X. The focus in this article is on the Rise of the Tomb Raider Linux port released last week by Feral Interactive and powered by Vulkan.

LibreOffice 6.1 Alpha 1 was tagged overnight as the first development release towards this next updated open-source office suite release succeeding the big LibreOffice 6.0...

GNOME Mutter 3.29.1 has been released as the first development snapshot of this window manager / compositor in the trek towards GNOME 3.30...

Legendary CPU designer Jim Keller has reportedly joined Intel following his brief stint at Tesla after leading the Zen team at AMD...

Earlier this month Vega M support came to RadeonSI OpenGL, with Vega M being the Radeon graphics found within Intel's Kabylake G processors. There was then Vega M support for the RADV Vulkan driver but these user-space drivers won't work without the kernel bits and now there is that support with 32 AMDGPU DRM patches...

Just a week after the NVIDIA 396.18.02 Linux driver beta is an updated Linux driver build (and for Windows too)...

With the recent release candidates to the long overdue X.Org Server 1.20, OpenGL rendering has been broken when using DDX drivers like Intel and Nouveau rather than the generic xf86-video-modesetting. That was fixed today...

Going back several years one of our most favorite open-source games to monitor was the Unvanquished game project with its roots in the Tremulous game and built off the Daemon Engine that is a distant fork to ioquake3 by way of the also once very promising ET: XreaL work...

QEMU 2.12 is now officially available as the latest stable feature update to this important component to the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

Back in February was the controversial announcement that Canonical would begin offering a hardware/software survey for Ubuntu installations to premiere with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. This week while running some benchmarks of the effectively final release of Bionic Beaver, I noticed they finally got the feature exposed to users. Here's what it looks like and some of the hardware and software information detailed in these opt-out reports to Canonical.

Released yesterday was version 0.11 of the XDG Desktop Portal and with this release comes initial support for Snap packages...

This morning I wrote about GCC 8 being branched and development on the master branch now being open for GCC 9.0. The GCC 8.1 release candidate has now been issued with the official release perhaps coming next week...

Last week I wrote about the NetBSD 8.0 RC1 images being available and the changes coming in this big update to this popular BSD platform. This morning that official NetBSD 8.0 RC1 announcement was issued...

DragonFlyBSD has implemented a portion of the Linux IRQ subsystem within its kernel...

This year Intel open-sourced their "NEO" OpenCL compute stack included a new compute runtime, a new LLVM/Clang-based compiler, makes use of the Intel Graphics Memory Management Library (GMMLIB), etc. While we don't hear too much from the NEO effort on an ongoing basis, their OpenCL 2.1 support for recent hardware generations is now to production quality...

The GNU Compiler Collection 8 stable release (GCC 8.1) is almost ready to make its debut...

Following Google announcing their GSoC 2018 participants, the Outreachy program to help support women and other under-represented groups in tech announced their summer 2018 interns...

Adam Jackson of Red Hat today announced the X.Org Server 1.20 Release Candidate 5, which he believes will be the last test release before going gold. Most excitingly about this new release candidate is the merged support for allowing the NVIDIA proprietary driver to work with XWayland...

Fedora Workstation 28 is shaping up to be another compelling update for those that are fans of this bleeding-edge Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution. I've been running Fedora Workstation 28 snapshots on a few laptops and test machines here and am quite happy with how it's shaped up as another Fedora release that delivers not only the latest features, but doing so in a seemingly sane and stable manner: I haven't encountered any problems unlike some of the past notorious Fedora releases from years ago. Overall, I am quite excited for next month's Fedora 28 release and will be upgrading my main production system to it...

With last week's initial launch-day Linux benchmarks of the Ryzen 5 2600X / Ryzen 7 2700X some found the Linux performance to be lower than Windows. While the root cause is undetermined, a BIOS/AGESA update does appear to help the Linux performance significantly at least with the motherboard where I've been doing most of my tests with the Ryzen 7 2700X. Here are the latest benchmark numbers.

Google has announced the accepted student projects for this year's Google Summer of Code. As usual, there is an interesting mix of open-source software projects across the hundreds (or rather thousands) of applicants. Here's a look at the most interesting initiatives we found when going through the list...

In addition to Purism working on their GNOME-based interface with their PureOS GNU/Linux on their upcoming Librem 5 smartphone as well as supporting KDE Plasma Mobile as another option, they will also be supporting the UBPorts community Ubuntu Touch work on this privacy-minded Linux smartphone...

Following Oracle offloading Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation and then renaming the project to Jakarta EE, we now know more about the future of this Java Enterprise Edition...

The Qt Company had been working on performance improvements for 64-bit ARM (AArch64) as part of the Qt 5.9 LTS cycle and continuing through with the ongoing long-term support point releases, and that work is paying off...

With last week's release of Rise of the Tomb Raider on Linux ported by Feral Interactive, when it came to Radeon GPU support for this Vulkan-only Linux game port the Mesa RADV driver was supported while the official AMDVLK driver would lead to GPU hangs. That's now been fixed...

While Linux distributions are still migrating to Glibc 2.27, in the two months since the release changes have continued building up for what will eventually become the GNU C Library 2.28...

The GNU Guix transactional package manager can be made to run on Android smartphones/tablets, but not without lots of hoops to jump through first...

Eric Anholt of Broadcom has sent out his revised patches for the "V3D" DRM driver, which up until last week was known as the VC5 DRM driver...

The upcoming release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 is offering an HPC (High Performance Computing) module for development, control, and compute nodes. Today that SLE15-HPC module is now available in beta...

The BUS1 in-kernel IPC mechanism born out of the ashes of KDBUS still hasn't been mainlined in the Linux kernel, but its code is still improved upon from time to time. At least though DBus-Broker as a new performance-oriented D-Bus implementation continues gaining ground in user-space...

While in recent months there have been some improvements to FreeBSD that have helped yield greater reliability in running AMD Ryzen processors on this BSD operating system, some users are still reporting hard to diagnose stability problems on FreeBSD...

Red Hat developers have managed to deliver on their goals around improving Thunderbolt support on the Linux desktop with the upcoming Fedora 28 distribution update...

As part of next month's Qt 5.11 tool-kit update, a new technology preview module will be WebAssembly support for running Qt5 user-interfaces within your web-browser...

Wayland's Weston reference compositor with its Pixman software-based renderer back-end has received a number of performance optimizations...

ThreadStack is yet another C++ project trying to make it easier dealing with multiple CPU threads...

The Panfrost open-source driver project previously known as "Chai" for creating an open-source 3D driver stack for ARM's Mali Midgard hardware now has a working shaded cube being rendered using the open-source code as part of its new "half-way" driver based on Gallium3D...

Linus Torvalds has announced the availability of the second weekly test release for what is becoming the Linux 4.17 kernel...

While still hoping to see their new Artifact game this year, it seems Valve is serious after all about getting back into the gaming spirit. News coming out this weekend is that Valve has acquired the Campo Santo game studio and its developers will be joining Valve...

With this week's Ryzen 5 2600X + Ryzen 7 2700X benchmarks some thought the CPUFreq scaling driver or rather its governors may have been limiting the performance of these Zen+ CPUs, so I ran some additional benchmarks this weekend...

MenuLibre is the advanced menu editor that supports most Linux desktop environments including GNOME, KDE Plasma, Budgie, Cinnamon, EDE, LXQt, MATE, and Pantheon. MenuLibre 2.2 is the first major release for the project in over two years...