Phoronix

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...

As some good news for ZFS On Linux following the recent data loss issue, a Phoronix reader pointed out that it appears SSD TRIM support is nearly ready for ZOL...

The past year we have been covering the development of the VC5 open-source Linux graphics driver stack for Broadcom's unreleased "VideoCore V" GPU, succeeding the VideoCore IV GPU most notably found on Raspberry Pi boards. Disappointing readers though has been the lack of availability for VC5 hardware, but that's beginning to change...

While the source to Oracle's "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" has been available via the company's own servers, now the organization is publishing their source kernel changes to GitHub in a bid to increase the popularity of their patched version of Linux...

Following the big DRM pull request that was honored last week, David Airlie decided to send in a pre-RC1 pull request of various outstanding bug fixes against these Direct Rendering Manager drivers...

Back in December Amazon rolled out Amazon Linux 2 as a big upgrade to its Linux distribution intended for the EC2 compute cloud as well as on-site via VMware/VirtualBox/Hyper-V virtualization. Amazon Linux 2 rolled out an upgraded Linux kernel, compiler, and many other packages as well as switched to using systemd. Coming out this week was Amazon Linux 2 Candidate 2 as the next installment of this long-term support Linux platform.

After being in development the past year, Elisa has done its first official release...

NVIDIA has today released the display hardware documentation for "GV100" Volta graphics hardware...

Mesa 17.3.9 is expected to be released at the start of next week as the final point release for the Mesa 17.3 driver series that was introduced back in Q4'2017...

With Qt 5.9 being a Long-Term Support series, The Qt Company continues working it into better shape and the latest refinement to it is now available in the form of Qt 5.9.5...

As another milestone for the Vulkan API, as of today there are more than 2,000 projects referencing Vulkan on GitHub!..

AMD's XGL Vulkan API layer for their "AMDVLK" driver has been updated this week with a number of enhancements...

With Linux PC vendor System76 getting more involved in the open-source software game since they began developing their Ubuntu-derived Pop!_OS operating system last year, their latest step forward is joining the GNOME Advisory Board...

Barring any last minute blocker bugs from being discovered, QEMU 2.12 is expected for release next week as the latest feature update for this important piece of the Linux virtualization stack...

The latest libinput hackery being worked on by Linux input expert Peter Hutterer at Red Hat is custom profile support for pointer acceleration...

While last week was the main power management feature updates for the Linux 4.17 kernel merge window that included the new ACPI TAD driver, Rafael Wysocki today sent in a secondary set of feature updates and it includes a rather significant development for Linux power and performance...

Purism has begun with their Librem 5 phone platform documentation as they still plan to get developer boards out this summer and ideally begin shipping the actual Linux security-minded smartphones next year...

Following rumors the past few days, AMD officially confirmed the Radeon RX 500X series today for desktops and notebooks, but these effectively are just re-branded GPUs for OEM builders...

Following this week's Wayland 1.15 launch, there are now patches on the floating list to add Meson build system support to Wayland-Protocols...

The Khronos Group has officially announced the long-awaited open-source availability of their SPIRV-LLVM-Translator that allows the bi-directional translation of SPIR-V and LLVM IR...

Yesterday NVIDIA released their first 396 Linux driver beta in the form of the 396.18 release and its biggest addition is a new Vulkan SPIR-V compiler to replace the compiler that's been hobbled together since the Vulkan 1.0 debut. Here are some fresh NVIDIA Vulkan Linux benchmarks and more on this new SPIR-V compiler.

While it unfortunately didn't happen in time for last month's GNOME 3.28 release, there are more performance improvements en route...

As a long overdue move, the GIMP image manipulation program now has support for moving the painting process off to a separate CPU thread...

Igalia developers have been working on shaderInt16 support Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver to provide 16-bit integer support...

Commits these days to Plymouth are fairly rare with this Red Hat developed project seeing its first commits of 2018 yesterday...

On Tuesday a new X.Org Server 1.20 release candidate was issued by Red Hat's Adam Jackson for this prolonged development cycle now stretching well more than one and a half years...

The GRUB2 boot-loader now has support for the Flash-Friendly File-System so it can boot to systems formatted with F2FS as the root file-system...

In wake of recent privacy scandals in the tech world, Valve is now offering new privacy settings for Steam users...

With the in-development Linux 4.17 kernel there is the long-awaited discrete GPU support in good shape at least for hardware like Polaris and Fiji. While the latest and greatest AMD GPUs are the Vega family, more work has been needed for AMDKFD support. Unfortunately those Vega changes didn't make it in for Linux 4.17, but those patches are now available...

Andy Shevchenko has submitted the platform-drivers-x86 updates for the Linux 4.17 kernel merge window that largely benefit modern x86 laptops running Linux...

While it could have been pretty much assumed up until now that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 would ship without Python 2 considering that next enterprise Linux OS release isn't even out yet, its long-term maintenance support, and Python 2 reaching EOL at the start of 2020, but now it's been made official...

There are old CPU architectures being dropped from the Linux 4.17 kernel while also some new CPU support added. The latest work added with the busy Linux 4.17 development cycle is support for the MIPS-based Microsemi Ocelot SoCs...

While AMD has plumbed in FreeSync variable-rate refresh support with their AMDGPU DC display code stack, it's not yet all happy on the open-source mainline kernel as the missing piece has been over having a unified API for the Direct Rendering Manager drivers that can be used for supporting Free-Sync or the VESA-approved AdaptiveSync or HDMI VRR (Variable Refresh Rate). The discussion over having this common API for DRM drivers is back to being discussed...

NVIDIA has rolled out an exciting beta Linux driver today, the first in their upcoming 396 driver series...

With today's release of the Feral GameMode library/daemon of course I am running some benchmarks... Here is some initial numbers while this has spurred some fresh benchmarks looking at the P-State vs. CPUFreq performance and their respective frequency scaling governor options...

ReactOS 0.4.8 is now available as the project's first update of 2018 that continues working on becoming an "open-source Windows" with binary drop-in compatibility support...

After its public beta rounds the past few months, Red Hat today has announced Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 has reached general availability status...

In addition to the overhauled/rewritten Windows support, the upcoming Phoronix Test Suite 8.0-Aremark is also featuring much better support for the BSDs. As part of that testing, here are some fresh benchmarks of FreeBSD and TrueOS...

The latest driver optimization work by Timothy Arceri on Valve's Linux GPU driver team has been working on function inlining within NIR rather than within the GLSL IR optimizations. The net result is faster NIR compile times that benefit the Intel OpenGL driver and also help with RadeonSI Gallium3D...

Ahead of this month's Rise of the Tomb Raider Linux release, Feral Interactive has released a new system tool for Linux called GameMode...

If you have been using ZOL 0.7.7 that was released last month, you will want to upgrade right away to ZFS On Linux 0.7.8...

DragonFlyBSD 5.2 is now available as the latest installment of this popular BSD operating system...

The third beta of the upcoming Qt 5.11 tool-kit release is now available and it shouldn't be much longer before the release candidate is christened...

Last month I wrote about Broadcom's Eric Anholt exploring the use of AMDGPU's DRM scheduler within the in-development Video Core V (VC5) DRM driver. That work has panned out and looks like it will eventually work out for this open-source Broadcom graphics driver...

The "real-time clock" (RTC) changes usually aren't too notable to the Linux kernel merge windows, but for the in-development Linux 4.17 kernel to prolong their life for decades to come, at least as far as the clock is concerned...

KDE Connect is the nifty KDE project providing allowing communication between your Linux desktop computer and your Android smartphone/tablet via a secure communication protocol. KDE Connect 1.3 is now the latest feature release...

Today's hardware monitoring subsystem updates sent into the Linux 4.17 kernel merge window were a bit peculiar with "new Centaur CPUs" now being supported for reading the CPU core temperatures...

The Vulkan CTS as the conformance test suite for ensuring drivers are properly and fully implementing the Vulkan graphics and compute API continues getting even more in-depth and attempts to cover as many corner-cases as possible...