Phoronix

Taking place last week in The Hague, Netherlands, was the WineConf 2018 conference. This year's WineConf -- on top of the usual annual discussions about this open-source project for running Windows games/applications on Linux/macOS -- took the time to celebrate the project's 25th anniversary...

Queued into the staging code for introduction with the Linux 4.19 kernel is the Gasket driver framework and the first driver based upon it, Apex...

One of three new Vulkan extensions introduced in this weekend's Vulkan 1.1.80 specification update is VK_KHR_8bit_storage for providing 8-bit types is now available in patch form for the Intel open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver...

The fourth weekly test release of the Linux 4.18 kernel is now available...

If you are still running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 or one of the downstreams like CentOS, Scientific Linux, or Oracle Linux, these benchmarks are for you in showing the performance of Scientific Linux 6.9 vs. 6.10 vs. 7.5 for getting an idea about the current performance of EL6/EL7.

The latest hardware at Phoronix for testing is the Dell XPS 13.3-inch (XPS9370) with Intel Core i7-8550U Kabylake-R processor featuring UHD Graphics 620. A number of interesting Linux benchmarks are currently being worked on, including Windows versus various Linux distribution performance tests as well as power consumption, etc. For some initial figures for your viewing pleasure this weekend are some of the gaming/graphics tests between Windows 10 and Ubuntu Linux.

The open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver continues to be largely a community affair aside from occasional code/documentation dumps (and hardware supplies) from NVIDIA and then Red Hat also employing a few of the key contributors to the Nouveau DRM kernel driver and Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D within Mesa. When it comes to Red Hat's Nouveau developers like Ben Skeggs and Karol Herbst, they started out as community contributors over the years to this driver. Fortunately, this year has brought another new contributor to the Mesa driver stack...

Released yesterday was Vulkan 1.1.80 that offers three new extensions while the Intel ANV open-source driver has begun rolling out patches for supporting this latest Vulkan specification update...

Back in January there were Xilinx developers who posted a DRM/KMS driver for their DisplayPort subsystem as part of the ZynqMP SoC. It looks like the driver for this display pipeline may soon be ready for mainline...

The latest work on improving KDE's usability is adding a "share" menu to the Dolphin file manager...

Back in February MoltenVK was open-sourced as part of The Khronos Group and Valve working harder to get Vulkan working on macOS/iOS by mapping it through to using Apple's Metal Graphics/Compute API. The most notable user of MoltenVK on macOS to date is the Vulkan Dota 2 on Mac, but for those looking to use this Vulkan-to-Metal framework on iOS, it looks like Apple might be clamping down...

While GNOME's Wayland support has been in great shape with the Mutter compositor, it has depended upon X11/XWayland code even when starting with pure Wayland support. That's now changing and there is also now the optional "--no-x11" flag for starting the compositor without X11 support...

The Facebook developers working on the Zstandard "Zstd" compression technology released their latest update a few days ago, v1.3.5 that is codenamed the "Dictionary Edition" given its dictionary compression performance improvements...

For those compiling code on AArch64 (64-bit ARM) systems with LLVM Clang and tuning for your particular SoC, the Clang compiler now supports -mcpu=native...

The past week has seen a number of improvements to Wayland's Weston compositor with new features...

After a number of recent Vulkan 1.1 point releases being rather mundane, Vulkan 1.1.80 is out this morning and on top of documentation updates also brings three notable new Vulkan extensions...

Keith Packard doing his contract work for Valve to improve the Linux display infrastructure for VR head-mounted displays has been wrapping up his efforts with recently landing the Vulkan bits into Mesa and now the necessary xf86-video-amdgpu patches also are set to be merged there in the days ahead...

GIMP 2.10.4 was quietly released earlier this week as the latest stable release in the GIMP 2.10 series...

Tom Stellard at Red Hat has continued with his duties of serving as the LLVM point release manager and today formally issued the LLVM 6.0.1 update...

For fans of Latte Dock, the KDE Plasma aligned desktop dock, the version 0.8 release is around the corner with many new features to present...

It has been nearly two years since the debut of OpenMandriva Lx 3.0, but fortunately it's soon going to be succeeded by OpenMandriva Lx 4.0...

Intel announced the limited edition Core i7 8086K processor in June to celebrate 40 years since the introduction of the original 8086 processor that ushered in the x86 architecture. The Core i7 8086K is now widely available albeit with an apparent limited time available. This celebratory CPU is built off Intel's existing Coffeelake CPU micro-architecture but with an elevated CPU base frequency and a turbo frequency that tops out at 5.0GHz to make it the company's highest-performing mainstream desktop CPU to date.

Elisa 0.2 is now available as the second release for this Qt/KDE Plasma focused open-source music player...

GNU Guix 0.15 is out today as the latest feature update to this transactional package manager and is joined by an updated Guix System Distribution (GuixSD) release too as the GNU Linux-libre distribution built around it...

Feral's GameMode is soon going to be within easy each for Linux gamers running Red Hat's Fedora Linux distribution...

While the GCC compiler merged its RISC-V port last year, among its limitations have been not supporting the Ada compiler. That's now changing thanks to new patches posted today...

GUADEC 2018, the annual GNOME developers' conference, has kicked off this morning in Almería, Spain...

Based off last month's Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.10 update, CentOS 6.10 is available this week while also the Scientific Linux 6.10 release candidate has also been made available...

Towards the end of June an initial batch of AMDGPU updates were sent in to DRM-Next for targeting the Linux 4.19 kernel. Now a second round of updates have been submitted of the AMDGPU/Radeon kernel for this next kernel series...

In addition to working on statx() for glibc, landing in the GNU C Library this week was Unicode 11.0 support along with a renameat2() function...

While "AMDGPU" is often what is talked about when it comes to the Radeon graphics driver code within the Linux kernel with it being the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver for AMD GCN graphics cards and newer, there is also the AMDKFD kernel driver that plays a vital role for compute support...

Wayland-Protocols 1.15 has been released that introduces the new (unstable) XDG-Decoration protocol for drawing window decorations with Wayland...

The latest feature addition to the Nouveau Gallium3D driver is now supporting multi-sampled images for Maxwell graphics processors and newer...

The Qt Company is putting the finishing touches on the upcoming Qt Creator 4.7 integrated development environment release for Qt/C++...

The third alpha of this year's PHP7 update, PHP 7.3, is now available for evaluation...

Developers working hard on the Kdenlive open-source video editor are preparing to unveil their significantly refactored code-base in the upcoming KDE Applications 18.08 release. But for helping weed out the bugs, you can now test an AppImage for this big release that is nearly two years in the making...

Back in March we looked at the cooling performance of Noctua's AMD EPYC heatsinks for cooling these Zen-based server processors. The Noctua heatsinks tested did a wonderful job testing those socket SP3 processors so when the Austrian company announced a few weeks ago their Xeon Scalable heatsink line-up, we decided it would be interesting to see how their latest Intel server heatsinks perform.

First of all, Happy Independence Day to the Phoronix readers in the United States. On this rather light day, here is a look back at the most popular Phoronix articles during the second quarter of the year. During Q2-2018 were 924 original news articles published with new content each and everyday and that's in addition to another 68 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles...

The first half of 2018 was certainly eventful for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) with the stable release of GCC8, feature development on GCC9 kicking off, and all the associated fun...

What does Valve's Linux GPU driver developer Timothy Arceri do now that he took the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver up to OpenGL 4.4 in its compatibility profile mode? Work on OpenGL 4.5 compatibility profile support, of course...

A few days back we reported on the Red hat progress with supporting WebRTC-based screen-casting under Wayland that's working both for KDE Plasma and GNOME Shell. Given all the concerns over the years in supporting screen sharing / remote desktop under Wayland and the bits only coming together recently, Red Hat's Jan Grulich has offered up a guide...

When it comes to the growing number of changes slated for Fedora 29, while most of the feature plans benefit all supported CPU architectures, there are also some ARM-specific improvements planned...

Red Hat developer Florian Weimer sent out a patch this week adding the statx function to the GNU C Library (glibc)...

For fans of the desktop-focused, easy-to-use, and elegantly designed Elementary OS Linux distribution, their beta of the upcoming 5.0 "Juno" is now available for public testing...

With the BUS1 in-kernel IPC mechanism continuing to be off in the distance as a potential successor to the current form of D-Bus, the BUS1 developers continue working on Dbus-Broker as the "Linux D-Bus Message Broker" that retains compatibility with the D-Bus specification while offering higher performance and greater scalability...

For those currently making use of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with its default graphics stack (Linux 4.15 + Mesa 18.0) and are wondering if it makes sense upgrading to a newer version of the Linux kernel and/or Mesa, here is an extensive Mesa+AMDGPU comparison testing four graphics driver configurations across three popular AMD Radeon graphics cards.

Announced back in May were several new Dell Precision laptops pre-loaded with Ubuntu Linux. The Dell Precision 7530 and 7730 from that batch are now shipping with Ubuntu as a factory option...

The end of July marks one year since the release of OpenGL 4.6 but sadly it doesn't look like the Mesa drivers will meet that anniversary for having working open-source OpenGL 4.6 compliance in the mainline Mesa code-base...

In late May Spectre V4 was made public and coinciding with the public reveal was the Linux kernel patches for the Speculative Store Bypass Disable (SSBD) mode for mitigating this latest side-channel attack. For SSBD on Intel CPUs, updated microcode is required and those patched microcode files are now being delivered down through new BIOS updates from motherboard vendors. In recent days with seeing ASUS motherboards get the updated supported, I decided to run some initial Core i7 Coffeelake benchmarks with/without the SSBD support being enabled in the Linux kernel.

With the Linux 4.18 kernel development settling nicely, I've been ramping up tests lately on the Linux Git state. For those curious, here are some fresh benchmarks using the current AMD flagship EPYC processor of Linux 4.16, 4.17, and 4.18 Git...