Phoronix

Over the past decade we have looked at many interesting PCs from CompuLab, a vendor capable of delivering Linux-friendly PCs that are originally designed and often catered to meet demanding industrial requirements. The latest Linux PC we have been putting through its paces the past several weeks has been the Fitlet2, which CompuLab describes as being designed "from the ground-up to minimize size and maximize capabilities, durability and thermal performance." After running our plethora of benchmarks on this mini Linux PC, we can say with confidence they have succeeded in their mission.

For those relying upon GTK applications like LibreOffice, GIMP, and GNOME programs from the KDE desktop, the integration is taking a step forward with Plasma 5.13...

The Qt Company developers are soliciting feedback from developers and the community about what they would like to see out of WebAssembly support for the tool-kit...

With today's Mesa 18.1-devel Git code, the last of the Tegra/Nouveau code has landed where it's now rounded off for offering a completely open-source and accelerated graphics stack that works well on the Tegra210 (Tegra X1) SoC...

Intel open-source developers are preparing the last of their feature work for the i915 DRM driver with the upcoming Linux 4.17 kernel cycle...

The Android-x86 port of the Android Open-Source Project for running on x86 Intel/AMD PCs and devices is now up to running on the "Nougat" code-base for its stable release...

The first milestone development release of Phoronix Test Suite 8.0-Aremark was tagged in Git on Thursday night as inching towards this next major release of our open-source automated benchmarking platform and this release will also commemorate ten years since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0...

RenderDoc 1.0 has been released, the open-source standalone graphics debugger that supports frame capturing and introspection of Vulkan, D3D11, D3D12, OpenGL, and OpenGL ES APIs across all major platforms...

Longtime Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst who joined Red Hat at the end of 2017 continues working on Nouveau compute support along with fellow hat-wearing open-source graphics driver developer Rob Clark...

With Vulkan 1.1 it should be technically possible to write a driver/vendor-agnostic Wayland compositor using Vulkan thanks to the new core extensions...

The DXVK project that has been making significant progress the past several months in getting Direct3D accelerated via Vulkan for Wine gamers now has a new release available...

Moving forward the Phoronix Test Suite will be offering Microsoft Windows support that's at near feature parity to the automated, reproducible, open-source benchmarking support we have offered the past decade for Linux as well as BSD, macOS, and Solaris platforms. This is brand new, rewritten Windows support with a focus on Windows 10 x64 and Windows Server 2016.

Today marks the long-awaited release of LLVM 6.0 as the slightly late half-year update to this open-source compiler stack and its sub-projects like Clang, LLD, etc...

With the upcoming Linux 4.17 kernel cycle there will be initial support for HDCP with the i915 DRM driver. That High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) support in its initial form is limited to v1.4 on HDMI/DP connectors, but HDCP 2.2 is now being tackled...

Last year AMD's GPUOpen group posted the Vulkan Memory Allocator while coming soon is version 2.0 of this code-base...

More new material has been submitted to DRM-Next for AMDGPU feature improvements in Linux 4.17...

Valve released a new SteamVR update for Linux gamers last night and while there are just two Linux-specific changes, both of them are high impact...

Waking up this morning and preparing for Vulkan 1.1 I wasn't too sure what to expect from the open-source drivers and certainly wouldn't have envisioned in my wildest dreams that by the time of going to sleep there would be initial support merged into Mesa Git on launch-day for a major graphics API update... But open-source developers have achieved just that today...

Microsoft's next installment of Windows 10, the Spring Update, is bringing some interesting changes for those Linux enthusiasts that may be stuck using Windows at times. The experience may be more bearable with more Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) improvements and even native Curl and Tar support coming to the OS...

If you have been affected by AMDGPU DC display code fallout on the Linux 4.16 release candidates up to this point, fortunately there is a big batch of fixes set to land still for this kernel cycle...

While we are past the first release candidate on the X.Org Server 1.20 release, one of the patch series still being wrangled for this update by release manager Adam Jackson is EGLStreams support for XWayland, benefiting the NVIDIA Linux driver...

Today's Vulkan 1.1 release is met by brilliant Linux driver support across the board. Not only is there the NVIDIA Linux driver update we have come to expect but this launch has been met by on-time open-source driver support with the AMDVLK driver and Intel ANV Vulkan driver too having day-one support in source form. But that's not all as Bas and Dave have managed to get day-one conformance too with RADV...

Google today is making available the first public developer preview release of the forthcoming Android P...

Intel has joined the party with NVIDIA and AMD in offering launch-day Linux driver support for the big new Vulkan 1.1 update available today from The Khronos Group...

When writing about the big Vulkan 1.1 release a few days ago I was wondering myself whether the official AMDVLK Vulkan driver or RADV Mesa-based Vulkan driver would be first to the table with Vulkan 1.1 patches... It turns out AMDVLK won this round, at least by a small measure of time...

The Khronos Group has today announced Vulkan 1.1 as the first major update to this high-performance graphics/compute API since the initial Vulkan 1.0 release two years ago. And it's thankfully a hard launch with multiple vendors putting out Vulkan 1.1 conformant drivers today.

Just as we have been accustomed to seeing over the years with OpenGL and now Vulkan, NVIDIA is first out the door with Windows and Linux drivers for this new graphics API update...

Sadly right now with the highly-anticipated Vega+Zen Raven Ridge desktop APUs is in fairly rough shape with some hangs, display corruption, etc. Fortunately it looks like Linux 4.17 support will be in better shape...

For the past several months Microsoft developer Matthew Wilcox has been working on an XArray implementation for the Linux kernel that he hopes to eventually replace the radix tree data structure. He's now hoping to land the initial XArray support in Linux 4.17...

GNOME developer Federico Mena-Quintero has made a call to action for trying to get some support for improving Cairo, the widely-used 2D rendering library. Its own test suite is no longer passing with interest in Cairo seeming to wane these days...

While Red Hat has been divesting from Btrfs and pursuing other Linux storage alternatives like Stratis, it looks like Fedora 28 will feature slightly better support for those opting for Btrfs...

Google has rolled out Chrome 65 to its stable channels on Linux, macOS, Android, and Windows...

Microsoft has announced this week the latest Linux distributions now available via the Windows 10 Store for running on Windows Subsystem for Linux...

It was last summer that a GSoC student developer worked on an OpenMAX Tizonia state tracker for Gallium3D to replace the existing and out-of-date "Bellagio" code. Finally today that new Tizonia code has landed in Mesa 18.1-devel Git...

Days after the release of xf86-video-amdgpu 18.0 is now an updated xf86-video-ati / Radeon DDX release for namely the pre-GCN graphics processors...

Besides the Ubuntu 18.04 minimal spin that is around to 30MB compressed, the Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" installer recently added an option for a "minimal installation" from the desktop Live DVD/USB environment. Here's a look at what that means for desktop users...

Last month Intel open-sourced a new "NEO" OpenCL driver including an LLVM graphics compiler and its compute runtime supporting OpenCL 2.1. I finally found some time to give this new open-source Intel OpenCL Linux driver a try.

The Solaris-derived OpenIndiana operating system now has KPTI (Kernel Page Table Isolation) support for testing to mitigate the Intel Meltdown CPU vulnerability...

Intel open-source developer Ankit Nautiyal has restarted work on adding picture aspect ratio support to the Linux kernel's Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) layer...

Version 2.4.91 of the Mesa DRM library (libdrm) is now available for this component that notably sits between the Linux kernel and various user-space clients like Mesa and the X.Org Server...

With Wayland not enforcing any standard for screensharing, KDE developers are now building off GNOME's approach of XDG-Desktop-Portal and PipeWire for desktop/screen sharing for adding this feature to Plasma on Wayland...

If for some reason you are still riding the Linux 4.1 kernel series, you really should think about upgrading to at least a newer LTS series in the near future. But if you still plan on riding it for a while longer, at least it's getting page table isolation support for Meltdown mitigation...

Last month we reported on work resuming with the Mali T700 series open-source GPU driver called Chai. It's continued with the lead developer now working on an Assembler and soon beginning work on shaders...

We knew it was coming still for X.Org Server 1.20, but now the DRI3 v1.2 support has landed in the server...

While systemd 237 was released just over one month ago, systemd 238 was released today as the next installment of this init system...

While Google has already been using LLVM's Clang C/C++ compiler to build the release builds of the Chrome web-browser for Linux rather than GCC and has also switched to using Clang on other platforms, this open-source C/C++ compiler has now been able to replace Microsoft's Visual C/C++ compiler for building Chrome on Windows...

Adam Jackson of Red Hat who is also the X.Org Server 1.20 release organizer has made available a Copr repository for those wanting to test this near-final X.Org Server and updated DDX drivers on Fedora systems...

It was seven years ago that Mandriva 2011 switched to using RPM5 from RPM4, but now for the next OpenMandriva release they are transitioning back to using RPM4 and with that making use of Fedora's DNF...

Intel developers are working on bringing transparent memory encryption support to the Linux kernel that works in conjunction with upcoming Intel platforms...

While id Software founder John Carmack has been known for his open-source and Linux interests over the years and even working on Utah GLX back in the day, he just wrapped up a self-driven "programming retreat" where he was using OpenBSD...