Phoronix

While mainline Wine development code has enough Vulkan support that it can run the few Windows Vulkan games like Wolfenstein and DOOM along with the Vulkan code samples and the Vulkan information utility, it's currently dependent upon the Windows Vulkan SDK being manually installed on the system. That's now changing with Wine developers working on their own Vulkan loader library...

GIMP 2.9 development releases have been happening the past several years and that is finally about to culminate with the long-awaited GIMP 2.10 stable release. Out now is the first release candidate for this big stable update to this GTK2-based image manipulation program...

It looks like the much-delayed X.Org Server 1.20 release with its initial Meson build system support will almost be to feature parity with the server's Autotools build system integration...

While upstream Clang has support for OpenCL C 2.0, it doesn't currently have mainline support for OpenCL C++ but fortunately that soon should change...

The xf86-video-amdgpu DDX driver is being updated with support for non-legacy color management properties...

While FreeBSD has a Linux compatibility/emulation layer that allows it to run some Linux games, an independent community developer has been working on porting Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4 to FreeBSD...

A half-year after Android Studio 3.0, the Android Studio 3.1 integrated development environment for Android app developers is now available...

Stemming from the Fedora Server special interest group planning to update their product requirements with a plan to retire the concept of "server roles", Red Hat / Fedora Server SIG is looking for feedback about what you would like to see from Fedora Server...

The process is now more clear how Linux distributions can be adapted to run on Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with the company now having open-sourced a "WSL Sample" to build WSL distribution packages for the Microsoft Store and for allowing custom Linux distribution packages to be sideloaded onto systems...

Following the very short RC period, the lightweight Slax 9.4 distribution is now available...

The latest program joining the Zstd bandwagon is Tar...

AMD's GPUOpen group in cooperation with Khronos today is announcing V-EZ, a new project of theirs designed to make the barrier to entry for the Vulkan graphics API lower. V-EZ provides a middleware layer and simplified API for making it easier to get started with Vulkan development...

With the Linux 4.16 kernel release expected in just a matter of days, here are some fresh file-system benchmarks on this near-final kernel using a solid-state drive and hard drive while testing out the popular mainline file-system choices of Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS.

Coreboot is off to a busy start of the week with a number of notable enhancements having been merged to Git this morning...

Besides DriConf or the newer ADRICONF, another tool for open-source Radeon Linux driver users for monitoring their GPU(s) is RadeonTop. RadeonTop 1.1 is now available as the independent project's latest feature release...

Following Crytek putting out their CRYENGINE Sandbox editor source code, Unity Tech has published the C# reference code used by their Unity Engine and Unity Editor...

The Vega 12 Linux kernel patches posted last week will now be appearing in the Linux 4.17 kernel with the work having been merged into DRM-Next...

With the latest Etnaviv DRM code there is now performance counters support for being able to read the hardware counters via perfmon domains. The patches have now been published for making use of these Vivante performance counters from user-space...

Linus Torvalds has released his seventh weekly release candidate of the upcoming Linux 4.16 kernel release...

The DXVK project that is implementing Direct3D 11 atop of Vulkan for the benefit of Wine gamers is out this weekend with a new release...

Our latest benchmarking of the near-final Linux 4.16 kernel is checking on the performance of two Intel systems going back to the days of Linux 3.17, the oldest kernel that would successfully boot with the Ubuntu 18.04 user-space. Every major kernel release was tested as we see how the Linux kernel performance has evolved on these Haswell and Gulftown systems since October 2014.

Zstd compression continues becoming more widely adopted from Ubuntu looking at Zstd-compressed packages to compressing the Linux kernel image to now the OpenZFS file-system soon having support for Facebook's Zstandard compression algorithm...

With Q1'2018 wrapping up in the week ahead, here's a look back at our more than 856 original news articles and 76 featured benchmark articles / Linux hardware reviews this quarter...

GNOME contributor Yussuf Khalil has managed to uncover and resolve a bug in Clutter that was hurting GNOME's performance...

DigiKam 5.9.0 is now available for this KDE-aligned open-source photo management software...

The second development release of Phoronix Test Suite 8.0-Aremark is now available for your open-source benchmarking needs on Linux, macOS, BSD, Solaris, and Windows. As you've likely heard already, one of the big focuses this development cycle is on Windows support improvements with completely rewritten handling for that OS...

If you are looking for a tiny Linux PC and happen to be a Linux Mint user, the MintBox Mini 2 is now available...

The first release candidate of the Debian-based Slax Linux distribution is now available...

As a more modern and feature alternative to the DriConf configuration program for tweaking Mesa driver settings, a few months back we featured ADRICONF as the Advanced DRI Configuration. Recently this GUI program has picked up a few more features...

When having the Microsoft Windows 10 Professional x64 installation on the Core i7 8700K "Coffee Lake" system this week I also took the opportunity to run some fresh OpenGL benchmarks on Windows compared to Linux...

Following this month's successful launch of GNOME 3.28, the release team has now assembled the schedule for the GNOME 3.30.0 release and the 3.29 development milestones...

Back in February was the exciting AMD Raven Ridge desktop APU launch with the Zen CPU cores and Vega graphics. Sadly, however, the Raven Ridge Linux support still appears to be a bit problematic but there have been improvements in recent weeks...

One of the subtle changes that seemed to have been made during the Ubuntu 18.04 development cycle is automatic suspend now being enabled by default on desktop systems...

CodeWeavers' Józef Kucia has sent out a set of patches today against Winevulkan in shifting around some code in preparing to allow for the eventual Direct3D 12 support that's implemented on top of Vulkan by the external VKD3D library...

When it comes to RAW image editing on Linux, Darktable is what most often is talked about for its photography workflow and RAW image processing features. But another open-source alternative for RAW image processing is out with its latest release, RawTherapee...

Bootlin (formerly Free Electrons) continues making progress on their goal to have working and upstream open-source video encode/decode support for the Allwinner VPU...

It's been a while since last having anything new to report with the mainline Linux kernel's livepatching infrastructure, but some improvements are in the works...

Public details are still scarce about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, but it's looking like the alpha release might not be too far out...

Karol Herbst, who is a long-time Nouveau contributor who joined Red Hat at the end of last year, along with other hat-wearing Linux developers continue working on Nouveau compute support for this open-source NVIDIA driver...

The latest in our Windows versus Linux benchmarking is looking at the relative performance impact on both Linux and Windows of their Spectre and Meltdown mitigation techniques. This round of tests were done on Windows 10 Pro, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, and Clear Linux when having an up-to-date system on each OS where there is Spectre/Meltdown protection and then repeating the same benchmarks after reverting/disabling the security functionality.

The latest OpenBenchmarking.org milestone has now been crossed with a short time ago this component to the Phoronix Test Suite having served its 30 millionth test profile / test suite for running by our open-source benchmarking software...

Yesterday in our Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ benchmarks we looked at the faster Cortex-A53 CPU cores of this new $35 USD ARM SBC as well as its much faster Ethernet and better thermal management over earlier Raspberry Pi boards. The other area improved with the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ is the WiFi/WLAN wireless networking, which is what we have benchmarks of today.

AMD developers have already submitted a few rounds of feature work to DRM-Next for Linux 4.17, including enabling DC for all supported GPUs while now they have sent in a last-minute pull request in aiming to get their newly-published "Vega 12" GPU support into the Linux 4.17 kernel...

With Wayland appearing in more places from automobile in-vehicle infotainments to planes to smartphones, having a good touchscreen calibration system is certainly important. Collabora developers have been working on a new touchscreen calibrator and new protocol extension for Weston...

Here are our latest Windows 10 versus Linux benchmarks for the week. This benchmarking dance is looking at the Windows performance compared to Ubuntu, Clear Linux, Fedora, Antergos, and Solus Linux in various workloads. Among the tests this time around were looking at the performance with Go, Java, Perl, Python, FFmpeg, and more.

The RADV Vulkan driver performance on the latest Mesa Git code is already looking quite good compared to the NVIDIA Vulkan Linux performance and even the Vulkan driver on Radeon Software under Windows. But the game is not over for the never-ending process of tuning the driver for optimal performance...

For all the fans out there of the Rust programming language and/or micro-kernels, a new version of Redox OS is now available, the Rust-written from-scratch OS...

When carrying out this week's Windows vs. Linux gaming tests with AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce GPUs on the latest drivers, I also took the opportunity to run some fresh OpenCL benchmarks on Windows and Linux with the competing GPU vendors...

After a one month development hiatus, Mesa 18.0 is due to be released today as the first major Mesa 3D release of 2018...

The Blender 2.8 3D modeling software update isn't even reaching beta until likely the second half of this calendar year, but it's going to be a darn exciting update once it finally ships...