Phoronix

For those making use of Secure Encrypted Virtualization for secure VMs running on AMD EPYC platforms, the firmware bits required for supporting SEV have now been added to the linux-firmware.git tree to allow for easier updating to this virtualization security feature...

It's been three weeks since the last open-source code push for AMD's "AMDVLK" official open-source Vulkan driver while today they've finally updated their public code-bases and tagged AMDVLK 2019.Q1.6...

In hoping to improve the situation for running Windows programs on POWER9 hardware under Linux, Raptor Engineering has contributed a set of patches so far for bringing PowerPC 64-bit little endian support to Wine's library. This is great news if you are a current Talos II customer or hoping to get one of the lower-priced POWER9 Blackbird systems from the company this year...

If all goes well, LLVM 8.0 will ship as soon as tomorrow along with the Clang 8.0 C/C++ compiler and the other sub-projects for this open-source compiler stack. Here's a look at what LLVM 8 means for developers...

Google's team responsible for the Go programming language has released Go 1.12 with a half-year worth of improvements and new features...

Developers have been working on TPM-backed measured boot support with Coreboot. The patches are pending for upstream Coreboot to be able to offer this trusted boot integration...

Last year Fedora's Engineering and Steering Committee approved a plan to drop packages with consistently bad security track records where these packages aren't being punctually maintained in order to address known security vulnerabilities or potentially unmaintained entirely. FESCo has now approved a set of guidelines for the process by which these packages can be retired from Fedora but still stand a chance to be re-adopted and maintained...

For those interested in Arm's Cortex-A76 that was announced last year, this CPU with "desktop-class performance with smartphone efficiency" is now supported by the LLVM Clang compiler...

For fans of OBS Studio for desktop screen recording and live-streaming, version 23.0 is now available for this cross-platform Linux / macOS / Windows screen broadcasting software...

If the day wasn't exciting enough for Linux gamers thanks to the release of DXVK 1.0, long-time Linux game porter and FNA developer Ethan Lee has seen his FAudio implementation land in Wine for improving the state of XAudio2 support...

Philip Rebohle just announced the release of DXVK 1.0, his project for mapping Direct3D 10/11 to Vulkan API that has gone on to become an essential component to Valve's Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

Marek Olšák of AMD has published a set of patches today plumbing in support for Mesa/Gallium3D with the KHR_parallel_shader_compile and ARB_parallel_shader_compile while enabling these parallel shader compile extensions for the RadeonSI Gallium3D OpenGL driver...

Purism has another announcement to make today... PureBoot! PureBoot is the privacy-minded, Linux-focused company's collection of safeguards to protect the boot process while empowering the end-user...

Last week NVIDIA unveiled the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti as their first Turing graphics card shipping without the RTX/tensor cores enabled and that allowing the company to introduce their first sub-$300 graphics card of this new generation. I bought an EVGA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti XC Black graphics card for delivering Linux OpenGL/Vulkan gaming benchmarks of this TU116 GPU and have the initial results to share today compared to a total of 16 different NVIDIA GeForce / AMD Radeon graphics cards on the latest Linux graphics drivers.

It's not too surprising given the trajectory of Vulkan and past comments by The Khronos Group, but today at Embedded World Conference they announced the formation of the "Vulkan Safety Critical" working group as they seek to define a Vulkan standard for environments like automobiles and aircraft wanting to tap advanced, high-performance graphics and compute...

The mainline GNU GRUB boot-loader now supports the RISC-V architecture as another important step for better mainline support for this new, royalty-free processor ISA...

Back in January was the surprise of AMD developers publishing a lot of new code to support a new SMU block of "future GPUs". That SMU code continues to be refined and another patch series sent out today fills in more functionality, exporting more system management unit information and controls to Linux user-space...

On the LLVM/Clang front one of the milestones we are looking forward to hopefully see happen in 2019 is the merging of Intel's SYCL back-end. The first baby step in that direction has now been merged to Clang albeit it's not the actual back-end and just preparatory work...

Over the course of the GNOME 3.32 that is nearly complete as well as GNOME 3.30 there was a lot of measurable performance fixes and enhancements to improve the fluidity of the GNOME desktop as well as addressing various latency issues. While in some areas these performance improvements make a night and day difference, work isn't done on enhancing GNOME's performance...

While the "Panfrost" open-source, reverse-engineered Gallium3D driver for Arm's Mali Midgard/Bifrost graphics architectures were only merged to Mesa weeks ago, with a performance optimization added this weekend, the performance for this community-driven driver already makes it competitive to the official Arm binary driver at least for some OpenGL workloads...

With Linux 5.0 that is coming out next weekend, one of the features worth talking up on the Arm side is the long in development work on Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS)...

Linus Torvalds opted for issuing an eighth weekly release candidate tonight for the Linux 5.0 kernel rather than going straight to the official/stable release...

It shouldn't come as a surprise with X11R7.7 being the last "katamari" release and it having debuted back in 2012, but no further "bundled" releases of X.Org are planned...

Git maintainer Junio Hamano has just announced the release of Git v2.21.0 with more than 500 commits since the previous release from more than six dozen developers...

A year and a half ago shortly after the ASUS ZenScreen MB16AC USB-C Portable Monitor launched, we checked it out under Linux. This lightweight, 1080p 15-inch portable display could be made to work with the binary DisplayLink driver, but in trying it out now with Ubuntu 18.10, it's now a pleasant out-of-the-box experience...

A change for Google's Chrome OS is working its way into the upstream Linux 5.1 codebase that adds a new mode to the kernel's USB authorization mechanism. This opt-in change will allow users/administrators to only authorize internal USB devices by default...

Available this weekend for testing is the second beta release of the long-awaited Mageia 7 Linux distribution...

It was another busy week in the KDE space with many developers engaged in various polishing and improvements to the KDE desktop stack...

While the GNU Gold linker has been quite promising especially in being faster than the conventional GNU linker, Google developers are no longer actively advancing this linker and thus raising concerns it could begin to suffer from bit-rot...

One of the latest feature additions for the Xfce desktop is support for the colord system service for managing/using color profiles for output devices (displays)...

The ISO C++ committee has wrapped up its winter meeting in Hawaii that also served as the last meeting for approving new features for the upcoming C++20 revision to the C++ programming language...

There's work-in-progress patches for DXVK and Wine to improve the integration between the two for this Direct3D-on-Vulkan library...

It's been a while since last having anything significant to report on Redox OS, the Unix-like operating system written in the Rust programming language and pursuing a micro-kernel design, but fortunately this open-source OS is still moving along and they have some interesting plans moving forward...

Gentoo's Linux kernel build has long offered various CPU options in allowing those building their distribution to optimize their kernel build to the CPU being used. Every so often the patch is suggested for upstreaming to the mainline Linux kernel before being quickly rejected by the upstream maintainers...

With openSUSE Leap 15.1 reaching beta this week I decided to take it for a quick spin of this Linux distribution derived from the same sources as SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP1. Here are some quick benchmarks compared to Leap 15.0 as well as the latest rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed.

Published back in January were initial open-source kernel driver patches for Habana Labs' Goya processor intended for accelerating deep learning workloads. This new Habana Labs kernel driver will debut with the mainline Linux 5.1 kernel...

A change made courtesy of Google engineers to the Linux kernel will make it so exploits on Linux have a tougher time trying to disable SMAP and SMEP protections as part of their exploit path...

The release of NetworkManager 1.16 is right around the corner with this morning's first release candidate...

No further point releases to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS had been planned, but in light of the recent APT vulnerability, Canonical has decided to issue an Ubuntu 16.04.6 update that will be hitting the mirrors soon...

With the Linux 5.0 kernel performance approaching the finish line, the past few days I've been ramping up my tests of this new kernel in our benchmarking farm. Unfortunately, when looking at the results at a macro level it's pointing towards Linux 5.0 yielding lower performance than previous kernel releases.

In addition to NVIDIA christening the 418 driver series as stable today with the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti release, they also issued updates for their 390 legacy driver series as well as the 410 long-lived driver release series...

As expected given today's GeForce GTX 1660 Ti launch, NVIDIA has released a new Linux graphics driver supporting the 1660 Ti as well as the RTX 2070 with Max-Q Design and RTX 2080 with Max-Q Design, among other changes...

While the GCC 9 stable compiler release is a few weeks away in the form of GCC 9.1, the GNU Compiler Collection is up to version 8.3.0 today as their newest point release to last year's GCC 8 series...

The Qt Company has published a 2019 roadmap of sorts for areas they plan on focusing their resources this 2019 calendar year...

With the Linux 5.1 kernel cycle soon to kick-off, an early batch of fixes for the AMDGPU DRM driver and other fixes were sent in on Thursday to queue along with all of the new functionality being staged in DRM-Next...

After weeks of leaks, the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is expected to be formally announced in just a few hours. This is a ~$300 Turing graphics card but without any ray-tracing support as so far has been common to all Turing graphics cards. The GTX 1600 series family is expected to expand as well in the weeks ahead...

Earlier this week Arm announced their next-generation Neoverse N1 and E1 platforms with big performance potential and power efficiency improvements over current generation Cortex-A72 processor cores. The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) ahead of the upcoming GCC9 release has picked up support for the Neoverse N1/E1...

With the Linux 5.0 kernel due out within the next week or two, here's a look back at the biggest end-user facing changes for this kernel release that started out as Linux 4.21...

The Raspberry Pi folks have been working the past few months on upgrading their kernel in moving from Linux 4.14 to 4.19. That roll-out has now begun...

Phoronix Test Suite 8.6.1 is now available as a minor update over Phoronix Test Suite 8.6-Spydeberg that shipped at the start of February...