Phoronix

Linux 4.17 landed the initial Spectre V4 mitigation as "Speculative Store Bypass Disable" (SSBD) while primarily focused on Intel CPUs and for Linux 4.18 the SSBD code has been updated for AMD processors...

Adding to the list of new features for Linux 4.18 is the long-in-development work on the restartable sequences system call...

The second release candidate of FreeBSD 11.2 is now available for testing...

There are a lot of staging changes for the busy Linux 4.18 kernel merge window...

The latest monthly update is now available to the KDE Frameworks that complements the capabilities of the Qt5 tool-kit...

While there are the VIA/Centaur-based Zhaoxin desktop CPUs targeted for the Chinese market, it turns out there is another x86 Chinese CPU effort but this time is a collaboration with AMD...

For those relying upon DXVK for running Direct3D 11 games over Vulkan with Wine, the RADV Vulkan driver from Mesa Git should now be working out much better for this fast-developing graphics translation layer...

We are about half-way through the Linux 4.18 kernel merge window, so here is a look at the most interesting work that's been merged so far for this next kernel release that should debut as stable around mid-August...

Unrelated to this week's announcement of Microsoft acquiring GitHub, the X.Org code repositories will soon be managed on GitLab...

KDE developer Markus Slopianka has looked at the state of Flatpak and Snap application deployment/sandboxing technologies across the state of several Linux distributions...

Devuan 2.0 has now been released as stable, the downstream of Debian GNU/Linux that aims for "init freedom" by decoupling the packages from being dependent upon systemd...

As it stands right now the most competitive graphics card battle on the Linux gaming front is the Radeon RX 580 against the GeForce GTX 1060. NVIDIA continues with their first-rate performant drivers while the Polaris hardware on the open-source RADV/RadeonSI drivers is mature enough now that it's competing with the GTX 1060 like it should be and in some cases even performing much better than the NVIDIA Pascal part. With this week's release of Thrones of Britannia and powered by Vulkan, here is an extensive look at the two competing GPUs and their performance...

The ATI Rage 128 series was introduced in 1998 while now twenty years later a renewed DDX driver and potentially DRM/KMS kernel driver is going to be attempted for these AGP/PCI graphics cards from the days of OpenGL 1.2...

The latest feature plan for Fedora 29 is to finally have Wayland remote desktop support in place...

NVIDIA has rounded out their supported Linux drivers with X.Org Server 1.20 support...

Oak Ridge National Laboratory has officially launched their "Summit" supercomputer today that also comes in as the world's fastest...

The ARM64 (64-bit ARM / AArch64) architecture updates have been submitted today for the Linux 4.18 kernel...

This week have been various unique and extra articles and benchmarks for commemorating the Phoronix 14th birthday. The latest of these fun articles is taking a look back at how various CPUs over the years compare to today's Intel Core and AMD Ryzen offerings.

Just as we have been expecting of the Steam Controller kernel driver to land with Linux 4.18, it's happening and has just been submitted as part of the HID subsystem updates for this next kernel release...

Support for Intel Memory Protection Extensions (MPX) is now pretty much dead on Linux...

Just a friendly reminder that if you wish to enjoy Phoronix Premium for ad-free viewing and multi-page articles on a single page while scoring quite a deal on it, today is the last day of the birthday special...

Last month we reported on Raptor Computing Systems announcing the Talos 2 Lite as their most affordable POWER9-based, open-source down to the firmware system and at least for now also happens to be the cheapest POWER9 configuration we have seen from any vendor...

One of the latest planned features for Fedora 29 is to update the system-wide cryptography policy...

It's now much easier tracking the state of VirGL that allows for OpenGL acceleration within guest virtual machines by passing on the rendering calls to the system's host OpenGL driver via Mesa and the virglrenderer library...

For those not satisfied by last week's Chrome 67 stable release, Chrome 68 is now available in beta form with the latest and greatest feature work...

PHP 7.3 Alpha 1 is available today as the PHP developers kick off their next release cycle for getting this next version of PHP7 out by the end of 2018...

This morning Feral Interactive released A Total War Saga: THRONES OF BRITANNIA for Linux gamers. This Linux port of A Total War Saga: THRONES OF BRITANNIA is powered by the Vulkan graphics API rather than OpenGL and makes for an interesting test subject. Here are our initial benchmarks of this game under Ubuntu Linux with a range of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

Continuing LLVM release manager Hans Wennborg has begun discussing plans for the upcoming LLVM 7.0 release...

David Miller has submitted the big platter of networking updates for the in-development Linux 4.18 kernel...

Feral Interactive has released their latest Linux game port, A Total War Saga: THRONES OF BRITANNIA, is now live via their store and on Steam...

A premium patron recently asked about testing the open-source Radeon driver performance when testing the forced "high" dynamic power management state rather than the default "auto" mode. Here are some benchmarks...

Thunar 1.8 is now available as the latest stable release of the Xfce desktop's file manager...

For over six years now has been the Intel DRM driver's "Fastboot" support for eliminating unnecessary mode-set operations during the boot process, with an original focus on improving the laptop/ultrabook boot experience. While there have been attempts at getting Fastboot enabled by default, it hasn't happened to date but now a Red Hat developer is hoping to get it turned on for at least some generations of Intel hardware to benefit the work going into improving the Fedora boot experience...

Adding to the growing list of kernel changes for Linux 4.18 are a great deal of sound driver/subsystem updates...

DXVK 0.54 is available today as the latest version of this Direct3D-11-over-Vulkan translation layer to benefit Wine gamers looking to enjoy faster D3D11 gaming performance on Linux...

While 64-bit ARM (AArch64) has been mitigated for months with the mainline Linux kernel against Spectre Variant One and Two, with the upcoming Linux 4.18 kernel is finally Spectre V1/V2 treatment for 32-bit ARM...

When running tests this week on a MacBook Pro for the Dota 2 Vulkan/OpenGL cross-OS performance I also took the opportunity as part of the fun benchmarking week for celebrating the Phoronix 14th birthday by running a broader set of system benchmarks across the latest macOS 10.13 High Sierra, Windows 10 Pro, and various Linux distributions. Here are those CPU/system performance benchmark results.

The FUSE updates have been sent in for allowing file-systems in user-space, what Linus Torvalds previously referred to as being for toys and misguided people...

It's not a CPU-based Vulkan implementation or along those lines, but Intel's newest open-source project allows converting SPIR-V into optimized instructions for running on modern CPUs...

Going back to when TrueOS was known as PC-BSD, the operating system has generally been known as a desktop-friendly version of FreeBSD that currently ships with its own Qt5-powered Lumina Desktop Environment while also having a server installer, etc. The folks working on TrueOS at iXsystems are now planning to take TrueOS into a new direction...

SQLite 3.24.0 was quietly released earlier this week as the newest version of this widely-used embedded database library...

A Phoronix reader has written in with some exciting updates for the open-source Haiku operating system, the project continuing where BeOS left off...

Linux hardware manufacturer Purism is reaffirming their commitment this morning to shipping the Librem 5 smart-phone in January...

The X-Plane cross-platform flight simulator has been depending upon OpenGL for nearly two decades since the program first came into existence, but a port of its rendering engine to use the Vulkan API has been a work-in-progress...

David Airlie, the subsystem maintainer for the Direct Rendering Manager, has submitted the big feature pull request today for the Linux 4.18 kernel. All of the DRM feature work yields a net gain of close to fifty-thousand lines of code for this cycle...

Overnight was the AMD press conference at Computex 2018. Here are the highlights...

HarfBuzz 1.8 was released on Tuesday, the same day as the Unicode 11 release. HarfBuzz is the text shaping library born out of the FreeType project that is now widely used across many applications from Firefox to Inkscape and Java...

The Linux kernel has already been prepping for years for Year 2038 and that work is still ongoing with the in-development Linux 4.18 kernel...

The Etnaviv Gallium3D driver for providing reverse-engineered, open-source 3D graphics driver support for Vivante graphics hardware is currently pursuing NIR intermediate representation support...

Here is a look back at the most popular Linux and open-source achievements and other covered news over the past 14 years...