Phoronix

Canonical has expressed interest in shipping Ubuntu 18.10 with GS Connect, the GNOME Shell implementation of KDE Connect that allows interfacing with your phone from the desktop. GS/KDE Connect allows receiving phone notifications on your desktop, viewing and responding to messages from your desktop, and to use your phone as a remote control to the desktop, among other features...

The AMDKFD kernel driver in the upcoming Linux 4.17 has the long-awaited discrete Radeon GPU support working so it can be used with the ROCm/OpenCL compute user-space, but Vega GPU support wasn't ready for this release. Fortunately, it's ready for Linux 4.18...

Over the past week, benchmarks of this first RISC-V development board have begun appearing on OpenBenchmarking.org by the Phoronix Test Suite. Here are some of those initial benchmark numbers...

Last week marked the release of IWD 0.2, the second public release of this WiFi daemon for Linux systems destined as a replacement for WPA Supplicant...

Linus Torvalds has done a Mother's Day release of the Linux 4.17-rc5 kernel...

DXVK 0.51 is now available as the latest version of this library for running Direct3D 11 games under Wine via the Vulkan graphics API...

It's been a while since last checking out any SilverStone power supplies, but the company recently introduced the ET750-HG "Essential Gold" series power supply and sent over one for our thoughts. The SilverStone ET750-HG ends up being an efficient, well-built power supply while not costing too much.

Thomas Gleixner this morning sent in the latest batch of x86/pti updates for containing the latest mitigation improvements around Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities...

While the rapidly maturing DXVK library has been capturing much of the limelight when it comes to piping Direct3D over Vulkan, the VK9 project targeting Direct3D 9 on top of Vulkan continues making progress...

In recent days there have been a number of inquiries about paying for Phoronix Premium or providing tips using Bitcoin or other crypto-currencies. Yes, we happily accept it to help support our continued Linux hardware benchmarking, driver analysis, news coverage, and benchmark development...

The RADV Vulkan driver within Mesa has landed its VK_PIPELINE_CREATE_DISABLE_OPTIMIZATION_BIT support so applications/games can opt to disable optimizations when compiling a Vulkan pipeline. This is notably what was just covered the other day for helping to reduce stuttering with DXVK...

Jason Ekstrand has spent some time away from the Intel ANV Vulkan driver to kill the hardware blitter usage within the i965 Mesa OpenGL driver...

Not only are developers talking about dropping Ubuntu 32-bit x86 support but the ARMHF support might also be cut as well for 32-bit ARM boards...

If you happen to have an HP Elitebook 8770w laying around from Intel's Ivy Bridge era, that Hewlett Packard laptop has now been freed by Coreboot...

For those looking to enjoy Windows-only games on Linux this weekend, Wine-Staging 3.8 has been released as the newest experimental build of Wine...

KDE Frameworks 5.46.0 is out today as the newest version of this collection of add-on libraries used by KDE applications and more for complementing the Qt5 tool-kit...

For those wondering how the Radeon Linux gaming performance is changed between desktop environments when testing Ubuntu 18.04 LTS out-of-the-box, here are some benchmarks. Not only is it looking at the performance between GNOME Shell 3.28.1 and KDE Plasma 5.12.4, but it's also comparing each desktop environment with its X.Org and Wayland session support. Additionally, these tests were done with both AMD Radeon Polaris and Vega graphics cards.

The RADV Vulkan driver will soon have VK_PIPELINE_CREATE_DISABLE_OPTIMIZATION_BIT to help avoid stuttering with DXVK for running Direct3D 11 games on Wine over Vulkan...

It's almost one year since the release of OpenGL 4.6 and while there is support outside of the Mesa tree, mainline Mesa still doesn't support this latest OpenGL revision due to the holdups around SPIR-V ingestion support...

If you were hoping to build the newly-released X.Org Server 1.20 on your system(s) this weekend, be forewarned that a number of the DDX drivers haven't yet been updated for supporting the API/ABI changes of this big server update...

Testing of the release candidate earlier this month went well and out now is the official Scientific Linux 7.5 release...

FreeBSD 11.2 has reached the beta milestone to succeed FreeBSD 11.1 from last year and ahead of FreeBSD 12.0 that is expected this November...

This week the latest open-source drama was a differing of opinions between Richard Hughes of Red Hat who maintains Fwupd and LVFS for Linux firmware updating from the desktop and that of Linux PC vendor System76...

The NVIDIA 396.18.11 Vulkan beta driver for Linux was released on Friday as pulling in the latest upstream fixes to the Vulkan beta driver branch for Windows and Linux...

One month ago Linux game porter Feral Interactive introduced GameMode as a utility/service for dynamically optimizing the Linux system performance when running games. The initial focus on GameMode was on ensuring the CPU scaling governor was in its performance mode while today brought the GameMode v1.1 release...

While Mesa 18.0 debuted just about one and a half months ago, the fourth and final release candidate of Mesa 18.1 is now available for testing as the next quarterly feature installment to these primarily OpenGL/Vulkan open-source drivers...

Wine 3.8 is now available as the latest bi-weekly development release of this program to run Windows applications/games on Linux and macOS...

Purism has been working on reverse-engineering the Intel Firmware Support Package (FSP) module but it looks like that work may have taken a turn...

In addition to the potentially performance-doubling AMD Kaveri fix landing yesterday in Mesa 18.2 Git, also hitting this next version of Mesa is Enhanced Quality Anti-Aliasing (EQAA) support for Radeon GCN graphics processors...

While Purism had already been shipping Coreboot on their Librem 15 v2 laptop two years ago and has already succeeded by their third revision that does have mainline Coreboot support, the support was merged today to Coreboot proper for the Librem 15 v2...

Mir developers have been working on support for systemd's Logind and there is a "mess of a branch" that is nearly functionally complete and could soon be merged...

When using the latest Git/development code of Mesa 18.2 on Kaveri APUs you may find up to a 2x increase in performance if you are using the AMDGPU DRM driver rather than the default Radeon DRM driver...

Red Hat Summit 2018 in San Francisco has now wrapped up, marking Red Hat's 25th year hosting the event of customers and partners. Virtualization and containers continued being among the most discussed topics at the tech event...

The Purism crew working on the privacy-minded Librem 5 GNU/Linux smartphone have shared off their latest design plans...

The second and final planned point/bug-fix release to GNOME 3.28 is now available...

Following the slew of recent AMD/Radeon Linux driver updates, the ROCm 1.8.0 release was issued today for the Radeon Open Compute stack...

AMD has carried out their quarterly Radeon Pro Software driver update designated for their Radeon Pro professional/workstation graphics drivers with these updates having received additional QA for certified workloads. The Radeon Pro Software 18.Q2 Linux driver made it out alongside their Windows update...

Rust 1.26 is out today as the newest version of this popular systems programming language...

After more than one and a half years in development that is well off their past six-month release cadence, the long-awaited X.Org Server 1.20 has finally been released as this stable X11 implementation for Linux desktop systems not yet prepared to migrate to Wayland...

With GCC 8.1 having been officially released last week, I have spent the past number of days running a variety of compiler benchmarks comparing this initial GCC8 stable release to the previous GCC 7.3 stable compiler release. Tests were done on five different Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Linux systems running very different AMD and Intel processors.

Intel's performance-oriented Clear Linux operating system is already preparing to ship GCC 8.1 as the default compiler and over the days ahead will be rebuilding all of their packages under GCC8...

CentOS 7 1804 is now available as the latest release of this leading "community spin" of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The 1804 update to CentOS 7 is based on last month's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5...

While the Ubuntu desktop official images are no longer 32-bit/i386 and more Ubuntu derivatives are dropping their 32-bit x86 installers, not all 32-bit images/installers have been discontinued and the i386 package archive / port remains. That matter though is back to being debated...

It's been a while since last seeing any interesting products out of VIA with having been focusing on digital signage solutions and fabricating some basic ARM boards. The company has been exploring deep learning and AI and today announced the VIA Edge AI Developer Kit...

The code to the AMDVLK official open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux has received a big code update, syncing up the public tree from their internal development trees with about two weeks worth of changes...

While we have seen AMD GCN and HSA support in the past for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) we have unfortunately not heard of it being used much, but now CodeSourcery / Mentor Graphics has been working on a new/updated AMD GCN port for execution on Radeon GPUs that allows for OpenMP and OpenACC offloading...

The latest feature update is now available to AMD's TrueAudio Next solution for delivering advanced audio effects using OpenCL kernels without relying upon any dedicated DSP hardware...

While Peter Hutterer has been involved with the X.Org Server's input code and related projects for the past decade now and has spearheaded the projects around Multi Pointer X, X Input 2, and the Wayland/Xorg-using Libinput libraries, he's still had a tough time grasping the X.Org Server's pointer acceleration code...

Libdrm 2.4.92 is now available as the newest version of the Mesa DRM library that most notably sits between the Mesa drivers and the Linux kernel Direct Rendering Manager code...

Devuan remains the prominent Debian fork that is focused on "init freedom" by stripping out Debian's dependence on systemd...