Phoronix

It looks like the DragonFlyBSD 5.4 release will be delivering at least a few kernel-level performance improvements...

A Phoronix reader recently pointed out that LibJPEG 2.0 Beta quietly shipped last month as working towards the next big update for this speed-focused JPEG library...

Last week Intel's Open-Source Technology Center released their latest quarterly "graphics stack recipe" for the Linux desktop...

In addition to the Xfce Settings update this weekend there is also a new release of the Xfce PluseAudio Plugin providing better support for this sound server on the Xfce desktop...

KDE Plasma 5.13 that is due for release in June will have a great number of improvements to its Wayland support for allowing the KDE Plasma desktop to work much better on this alternative to the X.Org Server...

Seemingly flying under our radar is that Mesa 18.1 has already been branched and the first release candidate issued...

AMD developers maintaining their official Vulkan cross-platform driver code have pushed their end-of-week updates to their external source repositories for those wanting to build the AMDVLK driver on Linux from source...

This week I posted some benchmarks looking at the Meltdown mitigation impact on BSD vs. Linux as well as some tests of DragonFly's stabilized HAMMER2 while for your viewing pleasure this weekend are a variety of general BSD vs. Linux benchmarks while using the newly-released DragonFlyBSD 5.2, TrueOS 18.03, FreeBSD 11.1, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Ubuntu 18.04, and Intel's Clear Linux.

It's still not clear if the EGLStreams XWayland support will be merged for xorg-server 1.20 but at least the patches were revised this week, making it possible to merge them into this next X.Org Server release for allowing the NVIDIA proprietary driver to work with XWayland...

Vulkan continues sticking to the "release early, release often" mantra with the availability today of Vulkan 1.1.74...

The proposal for replacing early Ubuntu derivatives' early alpha/beta releases with "testing weeks" in its place is moving forward with no objections having been raised but flavors like Kubuntu and Xubuntu being in favor of the change...

A new version of Collabora Online is now available, the web-based open-source office suite derived from the cloud version of LibreOffice...

While still waiting on the long-awaited Xfce 4.14, out this weekend is an Xfce Settings 4.14.2 preview release as well as an Xfce Settings 4.12.3 stable series update...

The widely talked about "GNOME Shell memory leak" causing excessive memory usage after a while with recent versions of GNOME has now been fully corrected. The changes are currently staged in Git for what will become GNOME 3.30 but might also be backported to 3.28...

For those using the independent, open-source SC-Controller user-mode driver and GTK3 GUI for the Steam Controller, a new release is available in time for any weekend gaming...

FFmpeg 4.0 is now available as the latest major release for this widely-used open-source multimedia encode/decoder library...

It was just last year that open-source RadeonSI/RADV developers were trying to get the Radeon RX 580 "Polaris" GPU to be competitive with the GeForce GTX 1060 as it is under Windows given each GPU's capabilities. We've seen the RX 580 and GTX 1060 dancing under Linux the past few months and yesterday's 20-way GPU comparison with Rise of the Tomb Raider was quite significant -- perhaps most surprising being how well the RX 580 performed. Heck, just one or two years ago it was an accomplishment seeing any official Radeon driver support at-launch for new Linux game releases. So here are some extensive tests looking closer at the GTX 1060 vs. RX 580 battle in this latest Vulkan-powered Linux game port...

It's a busy month for the BSDs with DragonFlyBSD 5.2 having come along with OpenBSD 6.3 and right before that was TrueOS 18.03. Now there's finally the release candidate of the long-awaited NetBSD 8.0 update...

Arch Linux is finally transitioning to glibc 2.27, which may make for a faster system...

Following RadeonSI adding "Vega M" support for the new Radeon graphics appearing embedded on select Intel Kabylake processor packages, the RADV developers have similarly staged their Vega M support in this open-source Vulkan driver...

While the relevant bits for supporting Intel GPU mediated pass-through to virtual machines with KVM are now upstream in the Linux kernel as well as in QEMU 2.12, Intel developers have just announced their quarterly release of "KVMGT" for those wanting the officially blessed configuration for running Intel virtual GPU support with KVM virtual machines...

AMD's Alex Deucher has sent in a small set of fixes for the AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager driver in the Linux 4.17 kernel...

Following yesterday's 20-way graphics card comparison for Rise of the Tomb Raider that debuted yesterday on Linux and is exclusively powered by Vulkan, my next benchmarking objective was trying out the official AMD Vulkan driver, AMDVLK, to see how it would work given the successes of RADV on launch-day for this latest Feral Interactive game port...

Earlier this month we covered "The Forge" picking up initial Linux support and now they have rounded out their full-featured Linux support with Vulkan rendering...

The Broadcom VC5 driver stack is being renamed to V3D and developer Eric Anholt is looking at merging it into the mainline Linux kernel...

Today Feral Interactive released their much anticipated Linux port of Rise of the Tomb Raider, the game that was released for Windows in January of 2016 and then released for macOS last week. Feral's Mac port was relying upon the Apple Metal API while the Linux port is now their second game (after F1 2017) exclusively relying upon the Vulkan graphics/compute API rather than OpenGL. This morning I posted the initial Radeon results using the RADV driver while here is the NVIDIA GeForce vs. AMD Radeon graphics card comparison on Ubuntu Linux using twenty different graphics cards.

It's a busy day in the software and hardware space today as well as a busy week for Oracle with several big releases this week. The latest is the general availability of the long-awaited MySQL 8.0 update...

The embargo on the Ryzen 5 2600X and Ryzen 7 2700X processors has expired now that these Ryzen+ CPUs are beginning to ship today. We can now talk about the Linux support and the initial performance figures for these upgraded Zen desktop CPUs.

Today the Ryzen+ "Pinnacle Ridge" processors begin shipping and we can now share with you the initial performance results for the Ryzen 5 2600X and Ryzen 7 2700X processors. One of the most common questions I've received about these improved Zen processors since showing them off last week was inquiries/hopes about the Linux gaming performance, so those numbers are first up today followed by other Linux benchmark results forthcoming.

The KDE community has announced the release today of KDE Applications 18.04 as the first major update to the open-source KDE application set for 2018...

Yesterday Feral announced that the long-awaited Linux release of Rise of the Tomb Raider would be coming tomorrow and now they have honored that release. Rise of the Tomb Raider is now natively available for Linux and this port is exclusively relying upon the Vulkan graphics API for rendering. Here are our initial benchmarks of Rise of the Tomb Raider on Linux with Radeon GPUs while making use of the Mesa RADV driver.

Croteam today released a trailer for their upcoming game Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass...

AMD's Huang Rui has posted a set of 20 patches providing "GFXOFF" support for the AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager Linux kernel driver...

The usage of LLVM as part of the graphics driver stack continues to be picked up now especially in the Vulkan/SPIR-V world...

Earlier this month with the Vulkan 1.1.72 specification update was the new VK_EXT_descriptor_indexing extension that is quickly being well received by developers...

Intel tonight announced they are open-sourcing their nGraph compiler code, which serves as a framework-neutral deep neural network model compiler...

One of the most common Linux hardware questions I've received dozens of times in the past few weeks alone has been over the support for "RX Vega M" Vega-based graphics processors found on select newer Intel Kabylake CPUs. It appears RadeonSI at least should now support these Radeon graphics on Intel CPUs...

In addition to Mesa 17.3.9 being released today, Mesa 18.0.1 also rolled out the door as the first point release to last quarter's Mesa 18.0 series...

Besides the fresh BSD/Linux disk performance tests, some other tests I ran on various BSDs and Linux distributions this week was looking at the performance impact of Intel Meltdown CPU vulnerability mitigation on each of them, namely the performance impact of using kernel page-table isolation...

The first release candidate of the upcoming Xen 4.11 virtualization hypervisor release is now available...

With the recent release of DragonFlyBSD 5.2 one of the prominent changes is HAMMER2 now being considered stable for most use-cases. I've been running some benchmarks of this file-system compared to alternatives on other operating systems and have some FreeBSD / Linux reference points to share...

We've known openSUSE Leap 15 would arrive this summer now we finally know when exactly it will make its debut...

With the RADV Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver continuing to be advanced by Valve and other independent developers while AMD continues with open-source code drops of their official AMDVLK Vulkan driver, it's been a friendly open-source Radeon Vulkan driver performance and feature/extension battle since that official AMD Vulkan driver was opened up at the end of last year. With new AMDVLK/XGL/PAL code drops happening about weekly and RADV continuing to receive new feature/performance work every few days, both drivers continue maturing gracefully as shown by our latest performance benchmarks.

Feral Interactive has just announced they will be launching Rise of the Tomb Raider for Linux tomorrow, 19 April...

For those still using the Mesa 3D release that debuted in Q4'2017, the Mesa 17.3.9 point release is now available while it's the last planned update for the series...

Google has rolled out Chrome 66 to its stable channel for Linux desktop users as well as other supported desktop/mobile operating systems...

Tuesday was a very busy release day for Oracle folks as in addition to shipping an updated Solaris 11.4 beta and Oracle Linux 7 Update 5, their compiler folks also announced the GraalVM 1.0 virtual machine release...

Four years after the debut of Trisquel 7.0 and a year and a half since the 8.0 Alpha, Trisquel 8.0.0 is now available for this Linux distribution that's endorsed by the Free Software Foundation...

Following last week's release of Wayland 1.15 / Weston 4.0, the development gates are once again open for new feature activity to land for Wayland and the reference Weston compositor. Weston has already landed a big patch series for what will likely become Weston 5.0...

In the three weeks since GIMP 2.10 finally reached the release candidate stage a lot of changes have continued to land and today marks the GIMP 2.10 RC2 availability...