Phoronix

Palmer Dabbelt who maintains the RISC-V ports of GCC, Binutils, Linux, and glibc while working at RISC-V company SiFive spoke at FOSDEM 2018 this weekend about the software/hardware state of this royalty-free open-source CPU ISA...

Last week I provided some benchmarks showing how the RADV and RadeonSI performance changed with Mesa 18.0 while in this comparison is a look at how the Mesa 18.0 performance has evolved since Mesa 12.0 for Radeon open-source Linux graphics driver performance.

The OverlayFS union mount file-system of the Linux kernel gains a big new feature in Linux 4.16...

Intel Coffee Lake CPUs began shipping in October and while their UHD Graphics are effectively re-branded Kabylake graphics, it's taken until today to get mainline support for Coffee Lake OpenCL support on Linux with Beignet...

In addition to Igalia developers being at FOSDEM 2018 to talk about their work on Chromium porting for Wayland, Alejandro Piñeiro of this Spain consulting firm talked about their contributions towards SPIR-V support within Mesa and particularly for the Intel i965 OpenGL driver...

Added to AMD's proprietary Windows/Linux OpenGL driver last August was a AMD_gpu_shader_half_float_fetch GL extension while today the documentation has been published and already merged into the Khronos registry...

Arguably the most interesting keynote at this year's FOSDEM event was Red Hat's Jon Masters talking about the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities on an interesting technical level...

Released in time for this week's GNOME 3.28 beta milestone is the WebKitGTK+ 2.19.90 release as the GNOME platform port of the WebKit layout engine...

After adding the Mir back-end for the GTK+ 3.16 cycle, GTK+ 4.0 is dropping this back-end for the Canonical-developed display server...

The NetBSD project has issued an update concerning recent security efforts for this popular BSD operating system...

Besides talking about GNU Hurd in 2018 one of the other interesting talks in FOSDEM's micro-kernel track this year was on an Intel GPU resource multiplexer being developed by the Genode project...

Yesterday at FOSDEM 2018 Hurd developer Samuel Thibault talked about the work done on this GNU kernel for a PCI arbiter to allow different user-land drivers to access PCI devices concurrently. During this PCI arbiter talk he also went over the current state of the hardware support and recent achievements for GNU Hurd...

Last week Meltdown/Spectre patch wrangler Thomas Gleixner sent in various code clean-ups for Retpolines and KPTI with Linux 4.16 while today more feature work has been submitted. This includes initial mitigation work for Spectre v1 as well as IBPB support...

Albert Chu of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced the release this weekend of FreeIPMI, the GNU project implementing Intelligent Platform Management Interface v1.5/2.0 support...

Red Hat's Lyude Paul has been spending the past number of weeks working out clock-gating support for NVIDIA Kepler GPUs with the open-source Nouveau DRM kernel driver...

GFX-RS has been the Rust programming language project for a high-performance, portable graphics API that can map to Vulkan, Apple's Metal, Direct3D, etc from a single Rust API...

At this weekend's FOSDEM event in Brussels, Martijn Kaijser of the Kodi project provided an update on their current activities for 2018...

With this week's ARM SoC/platform updates for Linux 4.16 it was revealed the next kernel cycle might introduce i.MX8 SoC support...

A European cloud and dedicated server provider that designs their own servers is now designing their own BIOS using Coreboot and using this in production on thousands of servers...

Igalia has been one of the companies working on improving Chromium's support for Wayland and they shared their story about it at this weekend's FOSDEM 2018 event in Brussels...

It's been nine months since the release of GRUB 2.02 while the GRUB 2.04 stable release should be out by year's end...

Ted Ts'o sent in the pull request today of EXT4 file-system driver changes for the Linux 4.16 kernel...

In addition to the Nouveau driver crew talking about their Vulkan plans and other open-source work, Nicolai Hähnle of AMD represented the company's work on their Radeon Linux graphics driver stack(s) and the work they have going on for improving their GPU driver support...

Back in November I wrote about a GCC patch for the Intel Icelake CPU target and now that code has finally been merged for the GNU Compiler Collection ahead of the upcoming GCC 8.1 release...

Open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver developers Martin Peres, Pierre Moreau, and Karol Herbst took to the FOSDEM 2018 conference today to share a status update on their reverse-engineering and open-source driver writing work around this unofficial NVIDIA Linux driver...

There is no shortage of different KDE music/media player projects over the years but one of the most promising in recent times is Elisa. This week marks the second alpha release for the Elisa music player...

A few days back I wrote about how GTK+ 4.0 is being talked about for release this year and now a bit more specific timeline is in place...

For the better part of a year NVIDIA developers and Adam Jackson at Red Hat have been working on "server-side GLVND" and this new X.Org Server feature might finally be close to landing...

The GStreamer multimedia framework now has mainline support for WebRTC...

Keith Packard's latest work for Valve on improving the Linux display stack is on what he's exploring around "semi-automatic compositing" but at this point it's still a risky bet with the new protocol yet to be written...

The past few weeks I've had the pleasure of testing the Tyan Tempest S32272NR-C950 motherboard with Atom C3950 "Denverton" processor. Yes, it's been a real pleasure as it's been a few years since last touching an Atom system and this current combination allows for a mighty competent configuration with the C3950 server processor featuring 16 physical cores (no HT) running at a 1.7GHz base frequency and 2.2GHz turbo frequency all while having a 24 Watt TDP.

With two weeks having passed since the big Wine 3.0 release, the Wine crew is back to their bi-weekly development releases...

For those using Ubuntu Minimal images for containers/Docker, assembling your own base distribution, setting up an embedded Linux environment, or related use-cases, the minimal images for the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release will be even smaller...

Yesterday we heard of Purism's plans to support desktop diversity but by default for their Librem 5 smartphone they will likely be using GNOME in order to maintain a unified experience across their devices. The latest now is they might develop a new Wayland compositor in line with GNOME...

The POWER architecture code updates were sent in this Friday for the Linux 4.16 kernel and brings a few goodies if you happen to be using any modern PPC hardware...

Timothy Arceri of Valve's Linux GPU driver team continues getting the RadeonSI NIR support up to scratch...

Canonical's Tiago Daitx has laid out a proposal today for having an OpenJDK stable release update exception for the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" to reduce their long-term maintenance burden...

Adding to the list of big feature additions for Linux 4.16 is the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) pull request that has already been honored by Linus Torvalds...

Being released right on time is Glibc 2.27, version 2.27 of the GNU C Library...

Arnd Bergmann sent in his several pull requests on Thursday providing new ARM SoC platform support, driver updates, and DeviceTree bits for bringing up some new ARM hardware support within the mainline Linux kernel...

The GNOME 3.28 beta (v3.27.90) is due to happen next week that also marks a number of freezes for the desktop components ahead of the official release next month...

It's a bit late to make arrangements if you already weren't planning on it, but this weekend is FOSDEM in Brussels. FOSDEM remains one of the best open-source/Linux events in the world...

At least on a percentage basis, the Steam Linux marketshare grew slightly for January 2018...

After sending in the many networking subsystem updates yesterday, veteran kernel developer David Miller today sent in the SPARC architecture updates for Linux 4.16 that includes a new Oracle DAX driver...

For those making use of laptop-mode-tools as one of several Linux power saving tools with this one designed to improve Linux laptop battery life, version 1.72 is now available after more than one year of development...

Building the kernel beginning with Linux 4.16 now requires two more dependencies: Bison and Flex...

We are less than half-way into the Linux 4.16 kernel merge window and it's already proven to be a very busy cycle with significant additions to the Linux code-base...

A majority of last month was spent looking at and testing/benchmarking the Linux code to mitigate the much talked about Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities...

Purism has been supporting both the GNOME and KDE projects with their mobile ambitions and looking to have both desktop environments feature their wares on the in-development Librem 5 smartphone. But as far as the default user experience/interface goes on the Librem 5, they are leaning towards GNOME...

David Airlie has announced his plans to begin mainlining some early infrastructure work on the "soft" FP64 code into Mesa Git. This doesn't yet allow for soft FP64 on older GPUs lacking the hardware capability to do this otherwise, but will help in another area and can make for easier mainlining of the actual soft FP64 support in the future...