Phoronix

With Qt 5.9 being a Long-Term Support series, The Qt Company continues working it into better shape and the latest refinement to it is now available in the form of Qt 5.9.5...

As another milestone for the Vulkan API, as of today there are more than 2,000 projects referencing Vulkan on GitHub!..

AMD's XGL Vulkan API layer for their "AMDVLK" driver has been updated this week with a number of enhancements...

With Linux PC vendor System76 getting more involved in the open-source software game since they began developing their Ubuntu-derived Pop!_OS operating system last year, their latest step forward is joining the GNOME Advisory Board...

Barring any last minute blocker bugs from being discovered, QEMU 2.12 is expected for release next week as the latest feature update for this important piece of the Linux virtualization stack...

The latest libinput hackery being worked on by Linux input expert Peter Hutterer at Red Hat is custom profile support for pointer acceleration...

While last week was the main power management feature updates for the Linux 4.17 kernel merge window that included the new ACPI TAD driver, Rafael Wysocki today sent in a secondary set of feature updates and it includes a rather significant development for Linux power and performance...

Purism has begun with their Librem 5 phone platform documentation as they still plan to get developer boards out this summer and ideally begin shipping the actual Linux security-minded smartphones next year...

Following rumors the past few days, AMD officially confirmed the Radeon RX 500X series today for desktops and notebooks, but these effectively are just re-branded GPUs for OEM builders...

Following this week's Wayland 1.15 launch, there are now patches on the floating list to add Meson build system support to Wayland-Protocols...

The Khronos Group has officially announced the long-awaited open-source availability of their SPIRV-LLVM-Translator that allows the bi-directional translation of SPIR-V and LLVM IR...

Yesterday NVIDIA released their first 396 Linux driver beta in the form of the 396.18 release and its biggest addition is a new Vulkan SPIR-V compiler to replace the compiler that's been hobbled together since the Vulkan 1.0 debut. Here are some fresh NVIDIA Vulkan Linux benchmarks and more on this new SPIR-V compiler.

While it unfortunately didn't happen in time for last month's GNOME 3.28 release, there are more performance improvements en route...

As a long overdue move, the GIMP image manipulation program now has support for moving the painting process off to a separate CPU thread...

Igalia developers have been working on shaderInt16 support Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver to provide 16-bit integer support...

Commits these days to Plymouth are fairly rare with this Red Hat developed project seeing its first commits of 2018 yesterday...

On Tuesday a new X.Org Server 1.20 release candidate was issued by Red Hat's Adam Jackson for this prolonged development cycle now stretching well more than one and a half years...

The GRUB2 boot-loader now has support for the Flash-Friendly File-System so it can boot to systems formatted with F2FS as the root file-system...

In wake of recent privacy scandals in the tech world, Valve is now offering new privacy settings for Steam users...

With the in-development Linux 4.17 kernel there is the long-awaited discrete GPU support in good shape at least for hardware like Polaris and Fiji. While the latest and greatest AMD GPUs are the Vega family, more work has been needed for AMDKFD support. Unfortunately those Vega changes didn't make it in for Linux 4.17, but those patches are now available...

Andy Shevchenko has submitted the platform-drivers-x86 updates for the Linux 4.17 kernel merge window that largely benefit modern x86 laptops running Linux...

While it could have been pretty much assumed up until now that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 would ship without Python 2 considering that next enterprise Linux OS release isn't even out yet, its long-term maintenance support, and Python 2 reaching EOL at the start of 2020, but now it's been made official...

There are old CPU architectures being dropped from the Linux 4.17 kernel while also some new CPU support added. The latest work added with the busy Linux 4.17 development cycle is support for the MIPS-based Microsemi Ocelot SoCs...

While AMD has plumbed in FreeSync variable-rate refresh support with their AMDGPU DC display code stack, it's not yet all happy on the open-source mainline kernel as the missing piece has been over having a unified API for the Direct Rendering Manager drivers that can be used for supporting Free-Sync or the VESA-approved AdaptiveSync or HDMI VRR (Variable Refresh Rate). The discussion over having this common API for DRM drivers is back to being discussed...

NVIDIA has rolled out an exciting beta Linux driver today, the first in their upcoming 396 driver series...

With today's release of the Feral GameMode library/daemon of course I am running some benchmarks... Here is some initial numbers while this has spurred some fresh benchmarks looking at the P-State vs. CPUFreq performance and their respective frequency scaling governor options...

ReactOS 0.4.8 is now available as the project's first update of 2018 that continues working on becoming an "open-source Windows" with binary drop-in compatibility support...

After its public beta rounds the past few months, Red Hat today has announced Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 has reached general availability status...

In addition to the overhauled/rewritten Windows support, the upcoming Phoronix Test Suite 8.0-Aremark is also featuring much better support for the BSDs. As part of that testing, here are some fresh benchmarks of FreeBSD and TrueOS...

The latest driver optimization work by Timothy Arceri on Valve's Linux GPU driver team has been working on function inlining within NIR rather than within the GLSL IR optimizations. The net result is faster NIR compile times that benefit the Intel OpenGL driver and also help with RadeonSI Gallium3D...

Ahead of this month's Rise of the Tomb Raider Linux release, Feral Interactive has released a new system tool for Linux called GameMode...

If you have been using ZOL 0.7.7 that was released last month, you will want to upgrade right away to ZFS On Linux 0.7.8...

DragonFlyBSD 5.2 is now available as the latest installment of this popular BSD operating system...

The third beta of the upcoming Qt 5.11 tool-kit release is now available and it shouldn't be much longer before the release candidate is christened...

Last month I wrote about Broadcom's Eric Anholt exploring the use of AMDGPU's DRM scheduler within the in-development Video Core V (VC5) DRM driver. That work has panned out and looks like it will eventually work out for this open-source Broadcom graphics driver...

The "real-time clock" (RTC) changes usually aren't too notable to the Linux kernel merge windows, but for the in-development Linux 4.17 kernel to prolong their life for decades to come, at least as far as the clock is concerned...

KDE Connect is the nifty KDE project providing allowing communication between your Linux desktop computer and your Android smartphone/tablet via a secure communication protocol. KDE Connect 1.3 is now the latest feature release...

Today's hardware monitoring subsystem updates sent into the Linux 4.17 kernel merge window were a bit peculiar with "new Centaur CPUs" now being supported for reading the CPU core temperatures...

The Vulkan CTS as the conformance test suite for ensuring drivers are properly and fully implementing the Vulkan graphics and compute API continues getting even more in-depth and attempts to cover as many corner-cases as possible...

Today marks the long-awaited debut of Wayland 1.15 and the Weston 4.0 reference compositor...

Hitting the Mesa mailing list today from AMD developers are a set of twenty-two patches providing VP9 video acceleration support via the Gallium3D VA-API state tracker...

The latest feature pull request for the Linux 4.17 kernel are the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization updates...

When it comes to Mir acting as a Wayland compositor, feature support continues to be extended for making this a more viable offering for those looking to have full Wayland support...

Thanks to Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux driver team, the RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver supports the new VK_AMD_shader_core_properties extension...

As of the Linux 4.16 kernel that was released one week ago, the kernel-side bits are in place for Intel Virtual GPU support and in user-space the upcoming QEMU 2.12 has the necessary code for the GTK and SPICE code-paths...

Over the weekend marked the release of phpMyAdmin 4.8.0 as the latest major update to this widely-used MySQL web-based administration interface...

Prominent Ubuntu community developer Simon Quigley has sparked a discussion about Ubuntu's release milestones and the possibility of moving away with their alpha and beta one milestones moving forward...

Feral Interactive has just confirmed that Rise of the Tomb Raider for Linux will be released this month...

Libinput 1.10.14 is now available and while it's just a point release, there is at least one change sure to catch your attention...

Landing in Linux 4.15 was performance counters support in the Etnaviv DRM driver as the low-level bits for exposing the hardware counters with this reverse-engineered, open-source Vivante graphics driver. The user-space/Mesa side code has now landed too...