Phoronix

While the kernel configuration is just one part of Intel's Clear Linux optimizations for their performance-oriented distribution, a Fedora user has taken the liberty of spinning a Fedora kernel build based upon Clear Linux's kernel configuration...

Back in April 2017 was the announcement that System76 would begin designing and manufacturing their own systems beginning with desktops and to be followed at a later date by their own laptops, rather than relying upon whitebox designs that they currently retail with their Ubuntu/Pop!_OS-loaded PCs. The Colorado-based company is inching closer to fully realizing their goal...

In addition to sending down a new SRU for Solaris 11.3, the Oracle developers left maintaining Solaris have issued their second beta of the upcoming Solaris 11.4...

While Linux hardware support for desktop PCs has advanced a great deal over the years, one area that continues to struggle is support for fan/thermal/power sensors on many of today's motherboards. This area has struggled with not enough public documentation / data-sheets from ASIC vendors as well as not enough upstream Linux kernel developers being interested in the hwmon subsystem. The IT87 Linux driver for many common Super I/O chips found on countless motherboards is unfortunately facing a downfall...

The public draft of the OpenMP 5.0 SMP programming standard is now available for review ahead of the specification's expected stable release before the end of 2018...

While Solaris 11.4 is still in the oven being baked at Oracle, the thirty-fourth stable release update of Solaris 11.3 is now available...

Recently I have published benchmarks looking at Windows Server and FreeBSD against eight Linux distributions as well as a 9-way Linux desktop OS benchmark comparison while the latest in this string of fresh Linux distribution benchmarks is looking at the Linux laptop performance impact, if any, between these operating systems. Up for this benchmarking dance was Microsoft Windows 10, Windows 10 when running Ubuntu 18.04 via WSL, Ubuntu 18.04 itself, Fedora Workstation 28, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Clear Linux.

A SUSE developer is seeking feedback and interest on the possibility of allowing a scripting language -- most likely Python -- to be used within the GCC compiler code-base. This would primarily be used for replacing existing AWK scripts...

Another one of the new frameworks slated for the Linux 4.19 kernel cycle kicking off in August is for idle injection...

The latest AMDGPU firmware/microcode binary images for Radeon GPUs have landed in the Linux-Firmware Git tree...

There's already a new framework coming to Linux 4.19 in the form of Google's Gasket while queued this week is now another new framework: the FPGA Device Feature List...

While Ubuntu and most of its derivatives have stopped producing 32-bit x86 images with the number of devices out there dwindling that can't run x86_64, Lubuntu is among the few still offering i686 images to help those who may be running on outdated hardware but still interested in running the latest Linux software...

Landing yesterday in Glibc for Intel's Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) were the instructions for Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) and Shadow Stack (SHSTK)...

Purism has offered a status update on their software/hardware efforts around the Librem 5 smart-phone they have been working on that is security-minded, open-source, and that they plan to begin shipping in January of 2019...

NVIDIA released today the 390.77 Linux driver, the latest in the 390 "long-lived" driver branch, for those not using the short-lived 396 bleeding-edge driver series...

There had been plans drafted to finish dropping Yum 3 in Fedora now that DNF is quite mature as the next-generation package manager, but that isn't happening now until at least Fedora 30...

Igalia developers have been very involved with the Intel open-source developers on getting the long-awaited OpenGL 4.6 support into the "i965" Mesa driver. As has been the case for a while, out-of-tree patches can allow this to happen but with the Mesa 18.2 branching soon, it doesn't look like this will materialize ahead of this next release...

One of the exciting additions to look forward to with the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel cycle is the virtual "VKMS" kernel mode-setting driver. The driver is still a work-in-progress, but multiple developers are working on it...

ReactOS 0.4.9 release candidates have been available for weeks while now the official v0.4.9 release images are now spun...

The GCC 8 compiler brought the Synopsys ARC CPU target while for the GCC 9 release is going to be support for the company's HS4x processors...

While the RadeonSI and Intel i965 Mesa drivers have been at OpenGL 4.5 compliance for a while now, the Nouveau "NVC0" Gallium3D driver has been bound to OpenGL 4.3 officially...

While GTK4 likely isn't coming out until next spring, the Nautilus file manager port to this updated tool-kit is well underway...

Taking place last month at Berlin's C-Base was the sixteenth Linux Audio Conference. The 2018 Linux Audio Conference focused on everything from different open-source sound projects to different multimedia tools and more...

The fifth weekly release candidate for the Linux 4.18 kernel is now available for testing...

Latte Dock 0.8 is now available as the latest feature update for this open-source, KDE-aligned desktop dock...

The Catfish search utility now officially lives under the Xfce umbrella...

Alfred Chen announced this week the release of PDS-mq 0.98s, his latest patch-set of this CPU scheduler against the Linux 4.17 upstream code-base and includes minor optimization work and bug fixes...

Longtime Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst who joined Red Hat several months ago has been working on Nouveau NIR support as stepping towards SPIR-V/compute support and this summer the work very much remains an active target...

Following the news about VP9 and AV1 having more room to improve particularly for alternative architectures like POWER and ARM, a Phoronix reader pointed out an effort that Mozilla is behind on developing the "rav1e" encoder...

Presented at this past week's 2018 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC18) was TxFS, the Texas Transactional File System for Linux...

At the recent GUADEC 2018 conference in Spain, GNOME developers plotted the imminent Flatpak 1.0 release as well as what's coming after the big 1.0 milestone...

A new release of the Binutils collection of important tools is now available with a number of new features and improvements...

It has been a while since last publishing some Linux GPU driver benchmarks focused explicitly on the OpenGL vs. Vulkan performance, but that changed today with a fresh look at the performance between these two Khronos graphics APIs when tested with AMD and NVIDIA hardware on the latest RadeonSI/RADV and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers.

Debian GNU/Linux 9.5 is out today as the latest stable update to the "Stretch" series...

KDE Frameworks 5.48 is now the latest monthly update to this collection of add-on libraries complementing Qt5...

AMD's leading open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D developer, Marek Olšák, sent out a new patch series this week aiming to benefit this Radeon OpenGL driver's performance in CPU-bound scenarios...

Pairing nicely with Wine 3.12 or Wine-Staging 3.12 is now DXVK 0.62, the library for accelerating the Direct3D 11 API using Vulkan to allow for faster D3D11 Windows games running under Wine...

The other day we reported on a GCC 8 regression where Skylake and newer CPUs with "-march=native" haven't been performance as optimally as they should be. Fortunately, that patch was quickly landed into the GCC SVN/Git code for GCC 9 as well as back-ported to GCC 8...

After several big feature pull requests of new "i915" Intel DRM driver features landing in DRM-Next for Linux 4.19, the Intel open-source developers have sent in what they believe to be their last batch of feature changes for queuing this next kernel cycle...

If you have been part of the group of Radeon RX Vega Linux users trying out Linux 4.18 and finding your display no longer lights up, heading to Linux 4.18 Git should be a fix for at least some of the users...

DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has provided an update on the open-source operating system project's infrastructure and acknowledging the SSD upgrades that are noticeably beneficial over HDDs...

CodeWeavers' Andrew Eikum has added support to Wine for using Vulkan on macOS via the open-source MoltenVK...

For those abiding by Mesa stable releases, Mesa 18.1.4 is now available -- in time for updating prior to any weekend Linux gaming or other activities -- for these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan driver components...

Samsung's Derek Foreman has announced the alpha release of Wayland 1.16 as well as the Weston 5.0 reference compositor...

Canonical developers working on Mir have prepared the release of Mir 0.32.1 with a few fixes and improvements off the recent release of Mir 0.32...

Given the recent releases of FreeBSD 11.2, Scientific Linux 6.10, openSUSE Leap 15, and other distribution updates in the past quarter, here are some fresh benchmarks of eight different Linux distributions compared to FreeBSD 11.2 and Microsoft Windows Server 2016. The tested Linux platforms for this go-around were CentOS 7.5, Clear Linux 23610, Debian 9.4, Fedora Server 28, openSUSE leap 15.0, Scientific Linux 6.10, Scientific Linux 7.5, and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

GNOME 3.30 is looking like Mutter will be quite fit with the ability to remove its dependence on X11 code and various performance tuning optimizations. On top of already landed performance work in recent months, more optimizations have just landed and it looks like more could still be on the way...

The Speculative Load Hardening (SLH) effort that has been in development for months as a compiler-based automated Spectre Variant One mitigation technique has landed within LLVM trunk...

Peter Hutterer at Red Hat is trying again to get trackpoint acceleration performing nicely under the libinput library so trackpoints behave nicely across Wayland, X.Org, and Mir systems...

Felix Kuehling of AMD sent out the remaining six patches for getting the AMD Raven Ridge (Ryzen APUs) working with the AMDKFD kernel compute driver so that the ROCm/OpenCL user-space compute stack can be run on these new APUs...