Phoronix

While Linux 4.16 is coming in the next few days, I am already quite excited about the upcoming Linux 4.17 kernel cycle and the changes it will bring...

LibreOffice 6.0 was released at the end of January while already is a fair amount of new features over the past two months that have started up building for the next release of this open-source office suite, LibreOffice 6.1...

This week Raspbian OS, the official Debian-based operating system of the Raspberry Pi, finally upgraded to the Linux 4.14 LTS kernel. Considering that Raspbian was previously on Linux 4.9, it's quite the kernel upgrade, and I decided to run some before/after benchmarks...

The Linux 4.16 kernel is hopefully being released this Sunday, marking the end to another busy kernel development cycle. We have already written dozens of articles about changes to be found with Linux 4.16 and benchmarks, while here is a quick recap of what makes Linux 4.16 special...

LightNVM patches are called for pulling into the Linux kernel's block layer that would land for the Linux 4.17 kernel and provide Open-Channel 2.0 support...

Last week Fedora 28's beta was delayed due to open blocker bugs but fortunately the developers managed to get the issues squared away...

With the Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" release fast approaching and it being the latest Long-Term Support release, the latest benchmarking at Phoronix has been looking at how the Ubuntu LTS performance has evolved going as far back as the Ubuntu 10.04.0 LTS "Lucid Lynx" release. On three systems where supported Ubuntu 10.04 / 12.04 / 14.04 / 16.04 / 18.04 were tested each time.

While Mesa 17.3 started out very buggy, the developers have slowly been getting it into shape. If you are waiting to upgrade to the newly-released Mesa 18.0 until it further stabilizes with some point releases, Mesa 17.3.8 will be released in the days ahead as the latest and greatest off last quarter's driver code-base...

One of several new drivers slated for Linux 4.17 is PXRC for the Phoenix RC flight controller adapters...

While the Linux 4.16.0 kernel hasn't even been released yet, Direct Rendering Manager subsystem maintainer David Airlie has already sent in his big feature pull request for Linux 4.17 since he will be going on holidays the next few weeks...

With it having been two weeks since AMD last updated their PAL/AMDVLK source tree, today's update contains a fair amount of changes to this official open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan Linux driver...

Remember Arcan, the open-source game engine powered display server? This project that has been going strong for several years now and began venturing into VR has now announced what we believe to be the first open-source VR Linux desktop environment...

Version 1.25.0 of the Rust programming language implementation is now available. Rust 1.25 comes in as being a bit more significant than some of the recent updates...

In addition to receiving Vega 12 support in the past few hours, the RADV Vulkan driver living within Mesa has landed the latest extension work...

As of yesterday, Raptor Computing Systems has begun shipping the Talos II Workstation in volume. This POWER9 system is open down to the firmware and schematics while delivering quite a practical performance punch compared to today's proprietary x86/ARM servers...

Adam Jackson at Red Hat has announced the second release candidate to the long-in-development X.Org Server 1.20...

Raspberry Pi's official Linux distribution, Raspbian, is now ready with their Linux 4.14 kernel to replace their aging Linux 4.9-based kernel...

NVIDIA today released the 390.48 graphics driver for Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris systems...

With support for the unreleased "Vega 12" AMD GPU seeing its kernel-side support coming with Linux 4.17, AMD's Marek Olšák has landed support for this scarcely detailed GPU now in their user-space OpenGL driver...

The first release candidate is now available of the upcoming DragonFlyBSD 5.2 operating system...

With Debian having been added to the Microsoft Store earlier this month for running Debian 9 on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) plus in wanting to do some fresh updates prior to Microsoft shipping their Spring Creators Update, here are some fresh benchmarks of various Linux distributions and their raw performance, the current major Linux distributions available on WSL, and then also the native Windows 10 performance in the various supported tests.

In addition to the Qt Creator 4.6 IDE being released today, The Qt Company also released the Qbs 1.11 build system...

Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, NVIDIA, and others making up the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) have today announced the public release of the AV1 royalty-free video format!..

Another interesting Vulkan open-source project worthy of a shout-out is Talvos, a dynamic analysis framework and debugger for Vulkan and SPIR-V programs...

The Qt Company has released Qt Creator 4.6, the latest version of their Qt/C++ focused integrated development environment...

Francisco Jerez of Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver team has posted not some new DRM driver patches today but rather CPUFreq/P-State driver patches that could really help Intel integrated graphics performance under some conditions and especially on the lower-power Intel platforms...

While LLVM 6.0 is available as the latest and greatest stable Mesa release, LLVM 5.0.2 is in the works for releasing in the days ahead. Besides normal bug fixes, LLVM 5.0.2 also carries the compiler-side Retpoline patches for Spectre...

The VC5 open-source Linux graphics driver stack has been under heavy development now the past nearly year while not yet seeing any major ARM SBCs or other products making use of this Broadcom VideoCore V (VC5) 3D hardware, which now supports OpenCL and Vulkan. While many are holding out hopes for eventually seeing a next-gen Raspberry Pi with this beefed up VideoCore, it appears there is already a VC6 in the works too...

Continuing on to with some of what we can look forward to seeing with Linux 4.17 for end-users, the sound driver updates are fairly notable for this upcoming kernel cycle...

This past weekend I posted some Linux 3.17 to Linux 4.16 kernel benchmarks using two older Intel hardware platforms and one of the most frequent requests to come in following that article were some AMD benchmarks looking at the Intel Linux performance going a ways back. Here are some test results from Linux 4.4 to 4.16 using an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X system.

Mesa 18.0 managed to meet its Q1'2018 release target by just a couple of days... After being delayed a month and a half, Mesa 18.0.0 is now the latest stable version of this user-space driver stack most commonly associated with its OpenGL and Vulkan implementations...

Another new driver coming for Linux 4.17 is a device driver implementing ACPI's specification for the Time and Alarm Device (TAD). On systems with a supported ACPI version, this can be a handy means of waking up a system with some trivial scripting...

NVIDIA used their annual GTC conference for announcing their latest Volta-based GPU product, the Quadro GV100...

A new HID input driver for an apparent yet-to-be-released Google device is coming for the Linux 4.17 kernel merge window...

Earlier this month was the big batch of AMDKFD driver updates for DRM-Next / Linux 4.17 for getting the Radeon discrete GPU support squared away. Now coming in as a late pull request is the rest of that dGPU work for AMDKFD...

Richard Biener of SUSE issued a status report today on GCC 8.0.1 ahead of the GCC 8.1 stable release expected in the weeks ahead...

Intel Linux driver developers working on their networking support now have their new ICE driver queued in net-next ahead of the next merge window...

With the Linux 4.16 kernel release likely to happen this coming Sunday and that marking the opening of the Linux 4.17 merge window, many subsystem maintainers are preparing their "-next" trees of feature updates...

Valve is preparing to make another significant open-source code contribution in the very near future...

While mainline Wine development code has enough Vulkan support that it can run the few Windows Vulkan games like Wolfenstein and DOOM along with the Vulkan code samples and the Vulkan information utility, it's currently dependent upon the Windows Vulkan SDK being manually installed on the system. That's now changing with Wine developers working on their own Vulkan loader library...

GIMP 2.9 development releases have been happening the past several years and that is finally about to culminate with the long-awaited GIMP 2.10 stable release. Out now is the first release candidate for this big stable update to this GTK2-based image manipulation program...

It looks like the much-delayed X.Org Server 1.20 release with its initial Meson build system support will almost be to feature parity with the server's Autotools build system integration...

While upstream Clang has support for OpenCL C 2.0, it doesn't currently have mainline support for OpenCL C++ but fortunately that soon should change...

The xf86-video-amdgpu DDX driver is being updated with support for non-legacy color management properties...

While FreeBSD has a Linux compatibility/emulation layer that allows it to run some Linux games, an independent community developer has been working on porting Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4 to FreeBSD...

A half-year after Android Studio 3.0, the Android Studio 3.1 integrated development environment for Android app developers is now available...

Stemming from the Fedora Server special interest group planning to update their product requirements with a plan to retire the concept of "server roles", Red Hat / Fedora Server SIG is looking for feedback about what you would like to see from Fedora Server...

The process is now more clear how Linux distributions can be adapted to run on Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with the company now having open-sourced a "WSL Sample" to build WSL distribution packages for the Microsoft Store and for allowing custom Linux distribution packages to be sideloaded onto systems...

Following the very short RC period, the lightweight Slax 9.4 distribution is now available...

The latest program joining the Zstd bandwagon is Tar...