Phoronix

While some at Oracle were busy releasing Oracle Linux 7 Update 5 as their RHEL7 downstream, the remaining Solaris developers were putting out a refreshed public beta spin of Solaris 11.4...

GNOME 3.29.1 was released this afternoon as the first step towards what will eventually become GNOME 3.30 in September...

Last week NVIDIA released their first 396 Linux driver beta that most notably introduces their new "NVVM" Vulkan SPIR-V compiler. Coming out today is a new Vulkan beta update with some continued enhancements...

Just one week after launching Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5, Oracle has released the latest version of their RHEL7-derived Oracle Linux 7. The Oracle Linux 7 Update 5 pulls in the latest *EL7 changes while also offering their "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" option...

Nginx 1.14.0 is now available as the latest open-source stable release of this popular web server alternative to Apache...

With last week's release of Feral GameMode as a system tool to optimize Linux gaming performance, which at this point just toggles the CPU frequency scaling driver's governor to the "performance" mode, reignited the CPU governor debate, here are some fresh Linux gaming benchmarks. Tests were done with both the CPUFreq and P-State scaling drivers on Linux 4.16 while testing the various governor options and using both AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

Of the many great features/changes for Linux 4.17, one of the most exciting to us is the idle power efficiency and performance-per-Watt improvements on some systems thanks to a rework to the kernel's idle loop handling. Rafael Wysocki and Thomas Ilsche as two of the developers working on this big code change presented on their work today for this CPU idle loop ordering problem and its resolution...

Eric Anholt believes he is getting quite close to the stage of merging the Broadcom VC5 DRM driver into the mainline Linux kernel tree...

The upcoming Qt 5.11 tool-kit release will have generalized ray-casting support within the Qt 3D module...

The upcoming Fedora 28 Linux distribution release is now under its "final freeze" for releasing in the next few weeks...

The 2018 X.Org Board of Directors elections are over with 49 of the 91 X.Org registered members having casted a ballot...

Earlier this month Intel ISA documentation pointed to a new CPU micro-architecture codenamed "Tremont", we've seen a few kernel patches also referencing Intel Tremont, and now there is Tremont microarchitecture support for LLVM's Clang compiler...

While back in 2015 there was Azure Cloud Switch as Microsoft's first foray into having their own Linux distribution that handles networking within their Azure data centers, today they have announced their Azure Sphere product for IoT use-cases and it's powered by Linux...

The Debian release team has put out their latest information concerning the upcoming Debian 10 "Buster" release...

AMD kicked off the start of a new week by doing fresh code drops of the PAL and XGL code-bases used to form the AMDVLK open-source Radeon Vulkan Linux driver...

Texas Instruments is still dealing with Imagination Tech PowerVR SGX GPUs and has now posted an open-source DRI3 WSEGL plug-in for getting this binary blob to work with 3D acceleration under an X.Org Server using Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3...

Vulkan 1.1.73 is out as the latest minor refinement since last month's big Vulkan 1.1 update...

While the Linux 4.17 merge window officially closed yesterday with the release of Linux 4.17-rc1, FUSE maintainer Miklos Szeredi is now trying to get his changes added...

Phoronix Test Suite 8.0 Milestone 3 is now available for evaluation as the latest step towards the official 8.0-Aremark release due out later this quarter...

With Qt 5.11 already due to ship at the end of next month, Qt developers have begun discussing the follow-on Qt 5.12 release to ship in late 2018...

Purism's latest hire to work on the Librem 5 privacy-minded Linux smartphone effort is a UI/UX designer who has long been involved with GNOME...

This year's X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC2018) has already received some big name sponsors...

Just like clockwork the Linux 4.17-rc1 kernel was released tonight following the two week long merge window...

Of the many improvements to be found in the in-development Linux 4.17 kernel -- nicely summarized in our Linux 4.17 feature overview -- one of the features I've been anxious the most to begin benchmarking has been the reported power management improvements. Here are my initial power/performance tests of Linux 4.17 that for some systems is seeing a measurable drop in power usage, even in some cases under load while without sacrificing the performance.

Mesa 18.0.1 is being planned for release on Wednesday as the first stable point release / maintenance update for this quarterly installment to Mesa 3D...

While the Linux 4.17 kernel merge window is closing today and is already carrying a lot of interesting changes as covered by our Linux 4.17 feature overview, Thomas Gleixner today sent in a final round of x86 (K)PTI updates for Meltdown mitigation with this upcoming kernel release...

Besides looking at the HAMMER2 performance in DragonFlyBSD 5.2, another prominent change with this new BSD operating system release is the Spectre and Meltdown mitigations being shipped. In this article are some tests looking at the performance cost of DragonFlyBSD 5.2 for mitigating the Meltdown Intel CPU vulnerability...

Linus Torvalds is expected by the end of the day to release Linux 4.17-rc1, thereby marking the end of the two-week merge window that saw a lot of changes and new features land for Linux 4.17. Here is our original feature overview of the changes to be found in this next major release of the Linux kernel, which should premiere as stable by the middle of June.

A few weeks back we reported on plans for OpenCL C++ support to be mainlined in LLVM's Clang C/C++ compiler front-end and that work is now happening...

At the end of March longtime Mir developer Alan Griffiths of Canonical announced EGMDE, the Mir Desktop Environment as a desktop example implementing Mir/MirAL APIs and supporting Wayland clients. Griffiths has now put out his latest article in guiding interested developers in working with the code...

As part of the AMDVLK/XGL/PAL driver stack is now the WSA library...

Based off Friday's release of Wine 3.6 is now a new Wine-Staging release that is carrying about 930 patches atop the upstream Wine code-base...

KDE Plasma 5.13 will be starting up even faster, focusing more on Wayland improvements, improved monitor hot-plugging, GTK global menu support, and a lot of polishing throughout...

With this week's release of DragonFlyBSD 5.2 this popular BSD operating system is promoting its own HAMMER2 file-system as stable. As a result, here are a few fresh benchmarks of HAMMER vs. HAMMER2 on DragonFlyBSD 5.2 while more tests are forthcoming.

With the RADV Vulkan driver recently landing improvements to its out-of-order rasterization support, I ran some performance benchmarks of this non-default feature to see if it made much of a deal for today's Vulkan Linux games...

The Gallium3D Heads-Up Display (HUD) has matured into quite a useful option for Mesa users over the past several years. There is now a Gallium HUD "simple" option...

DXVK 0.42 is now available as the open-source project implementing the Direct3D 11 API over Vulkan for the benefit of Wine-based gamers...

At the end of March the US Federal Court of Appeals made a reversal in the long-running Oracle vs. Google battle over the use of Java APIs within Android. The appeals court determined that Google's use of some Java APIs were not under fair-use, which could set a dangerous precedent for some open-source projects...

One of the features not being supported by Microsoft's "Windows Subsystem for Linux" (WSL) up until now was copying and pasting to/from the console...

The latest monthly feature update to the KDE Frameworks collection of add-on libraries is now available. There's a lot of feature work to be found within today's KDE Frameworks 5.45.0 debut...

Linux PC vendor System76 has released their second test spin of the upcoming Pop!_OS 18.04, which is also derived from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS but with a growing set of changes...

For those still using Subversion for revision control system for cases like managing of large files or dealing with legacy code-bases, the Apache Subversion 1.10 release is now available...

We have covered all of the prominent subsystem updates for the Linux 4.17 merge window and I'll have out a feature recap this weekend following the two week long merge window for this next version of the Linux kernel. Here's just a look at some of the Git pulls to have been submitted in the past few days...

Wine 3.6 is now the latest bi-weekly test release for what will eventually become Wine 4.0 stable around the start of 2019...

GNOME 3.28.1 was released today as the first point release to GNOME 3.28 that debuted one month ago...

Following next month's release of Qt 5.11, The Qt Company will be introducing as a technology preview the new Qt for Python...

It's been a number of years since the last major update to the OpenAFS Andrew distributed file-system but there's a Friday the 13th release today introducing the shiny new v1.8 release...

You may have heard that next week is the AMD 2000 series Ryzen CPU launch. That's indeed accurate while today is just a meet and greet with these new Ryzen processors.

Ryan Gordon's new MojoAL sound library now supports audio spatialization...

When Ubuntu-loaded laptop and desktop vendor System76 announced their new Ubuntu downstream last year as "Pop!_OS" it began as mostly cosmetic changes to the desktop shell and other minor improvements. Over time they've been investing more into it with work items like a better installation process, but it looks like they will be diving deeper as they begin exploring performance and power optimizations...