Phoronix

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has landed some fresh patches in Mesa 19.0 (and also marked for back-porting to the stable branch) to help out the DXVK gaming experience for Windows games using Direct3D 11 that are re-mapped to run on top of the Vulkan graphics API...

The QEMU emulator that is widely used by the open-source Linux virtualization stack is out with its version 3.1 feature release. This is the QEMU update that is adding multi-threaded Tiny Code Generator support, display improvements, adds the Cortex-A72 model and other ARM improvements, and various other enhancements...

Complementing the Meson build system support for Wayland itself, the Weston reference compositor now has been Meson-ized...

AMD has published their latest batch of "DC" Display Core patches for the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver...

NVIDIA has been shipping the Jetson AGX Xavier Developer Kit the past few months while now they are beginning to ship the AGX Xavier Module intended for use in next-generation autonomous machines...

With just over one week to go until the expected Linux 4.20 kernel release, Alex Deucher of AMD today sent in the latest batch of fixes to the DRM tree for landing at the end of this cycle...

GNOME 3.31.3 was released today as the latest development stepping stone towards next March's GNOME 3.32 desktop environment update...

Besides seeing Icelake demos at the Intel Architecture Day that were running on Ubuntu, with closely tracking the Linux kernel's development most of the new features presented for Sunny Cove and Gen11 graphics have already been merged or at least available in patch form for some months within the Linux ecosystem. Here's a look at the features talked about yesterday and their state on Linux...

AMD developers today outed their latest "AMDVLK" open-source Vulkan driver code drop dubbed AMDVLK 2018.Q4.4...

It was just last week NVIDIA released the 415.22 driver while out today is the 415.23 update...

Intel's Architecture Day on Tuesday was delightfully filled with an overwhelming amount of valuable hardware information, but Intel's software efforts were also briefly touched on too. In fact, Raja Koduri reinforced how software is a big part of Intel technology and goes in-hand with their security, interconnect, memory, architecture, and process pillars and that's where their new oneAPI initiative will fit in. But what learning afterwards was most exciting on the software front...

Intel's 2018 Architecture Day was primarily focused on the company's hardware architecture road-map, but one of the software (pre)announcements was their oneAPI software stack...

At Intel's architecture day, the company finally detailed their "Gen 11" graphics that we've been seeing open-source Linux graphics driver patches for many months (Intel OTC posted their initial open-source display driver code in early January and has continued the enablement work since) albeit elusive in substantive user details and hardware until Icelake. But today at least we can share more about the significant improvements with Gen11 graphics...

The Btrfs file-system hasn't supported Swap files on it in early a decade, but that support will be restored again with the upcoming Linux 4.21 kernel...

Mesa 18.3 was released less than a week ago while today Mesa 18.3.1 was issued due to an error in the Vulkan specification...

Intel's promising IWD open-source wireless daemon continues picking up additional functionality in its trek towards potentially replacing wpa_supplicant. Out this week is IWD 0.13...

FreeBSD 12.0 has made its debut as the latest stable version of this popular BSD operating system...

Firefox 64.0 is available today as the last major feature update to Mozilla's web browser for 2018...

A new beta relase of Proton 3.16 is now available, the Wine-based software that powers Valve's Steam Play for running many Windows games on Linux...

Hardkernel recently sent over the ODROUD-XU4 for benchmarking. This ARM SBC that just measures in at about 82 x 58 x 22 mm offers much better performance than many of the sub-$100 ARM SBCs while also featuring dual USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, eMMC storage, and is software compatible with the older XU3 ARM SBCs. Here's a look at the performance of the ODROID-XU4 compared to a variety of other single board computers.

It was just several years ago that the open-source ecosystem began supporting the x32 ABI, but already kernel developers are talking of potentially deprecating the support and for it to be ultimately removed...

One of the most exciting developments in the open-source Intel driver space this year was the Iris Gallium3D driver taking shape as what's destined to eventually succeed their "classic" i965 Mesa driver. With Iris Gallium3D maturing, here's a look at how the performance currently stacks up to their mature OpenGL driver.

Out today is DAV1D as the first official (v0.1) release of this leading open-source AV1 video decoder...

Just in time for the upcoming Linux 4.21 kernel, the developers working on the reverse-engineered, open-source support for NVIDIA GeForce RTX "Turing" GPUs have published their preliminary code. But before getting too excited, there isn't GPU hardware acceleration working yet...

Following the move by upstream Mozilla in switching their Linux builds of Firefox from being compiled by GCC to LLVM Clang, Fedora is planning the same transition of compilers in the name of compilation speed and resulting performance...

For hopefully helping out with code reviews and getting code staged in a timely manner before being upstreamed to the mainline Linux kernel, Daniel Vetter of the Intel Open-Source Technology Center is set to become a co-maintainer...

Good news for those using the LLVM Clang compiler on OpenBSD or DragonFlyBSD: the OpenMP run-time should now be supported with the latest development code...

Red Hat developers have proposed a new VirtIO-FS component to provide better support for shared folders/files between the host and guest virtual machines...

It should come as no surprise since it was deprecated in this year's GCC 8 release, but the PowerPC SPE code has been removed...

It looks like the recent efforts led by Red Hat / Fedora on providing a flicker-free Linux boot experience and thanks to their upstream-focused approach is starting to pay off for the other desktop Linux distributions... A flicker-free boot experience can now be achieved on Arch Linux with the latest packages, assuming you don't have any quirky hardware...

Linux 4.21 is set to further improve the system security around potentially malicious Thunderbolt devices...

Besides the lack of games, one of the other pressing reasons why some desktop/workstation users haven't migrated full-time to Linux has been over the lack of Adobe's Creative Suite working natively on Linux (and the Wine-based options often only working well for dated versions of Adobe's software). But if you hope to see Adobe Linux software, their customer care recommends you vote...

As it's been a while since last looking at the NVIDIA vs. Nouveau Linux OpenGL driver performance, here's a look at the current performance difference as the end of the year quickly approaches. This benchmarking roundabout features multiple generations of GeForce GPUs while testing with the NVIDIA 415 proprietary driver against the Nouveau stack on Linux 4.19 and Mesa 19.0-devel.

With aiming to improve the deep learning development experience, Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has announced the Deep Learning Reference Stack...

Adiantum, Google's newly developed crypto algorithm to replace their planned use of the controversial Speck, is ready to begin providing speedy file-system encryption support for low-end devices with the upcoming Linux 4.21 merge window...

It looks like AMD could be announcing Vega II as new 7nm Vega GPUs soon complementing the recently announced Vega 20 Radeon Instinct MI50 / MI60 accelerators...

While the i.MX8 series was announced almost two years ago and the open-source developers working on the enablement for these new NXP SoCs hoped for initial support in Linux 4.17, the Linux 4.21 kernel that will be released in the early months of 2019 is slated to possibly have the first i.MX8 support in the form of the i.MX8MQ and also supporting its development/evaluation board...

Unvanquished had been easily one of the most promising open-source games several years back with decent in-game visuals/art, a continually improving "Daemon" engine that was a distant mod of ioquake3 while leveraging ETXReaL components and more, and all-around a well-organized, advancing open-source game project. Their monthly alpha releases stopped almost three years ago while today that's changed just ahead of Christmas...

Released on Friday was Wine 4.0-RC1 while coming out over the weekend was the Wine-Staging re-base that is carrying still over 800 patches on top of the upstream Wine code-base...

While many Linux distributions have moved past GnuPG 1 and some no longer even packaging it, Fedora Linux continues using GnuPG 1 as the default gpg, but that is likely to change with Fedora 30...

An open-source audio initiative that's been in development for years but flying under our radar until its lead developer chimed in is AeonWave, which supports Windows and Linux systems while being inspired by Microsoft XAudio and Apple's CoreAudio...

Linus Torvalds has just rolled out the sixth weekly test release of the upcoming Linux 4.20...

Phoronix Test Suite 8.4.1 is now available as a minor but important update to last month's Phoronix Test Suite 8.4-Skiptvet release...

KDE Frameworks 5.53 is now available as the latest monthly update to this collection of add-on libraries complementing Qt5...

KDE developers aren't slowing down at all as the end of the year quickly approaches, this week they had another busy week landing more usability enhancements and other refinements to their slew of applications and Plasma desktop...

Junio Hamano has released Git 2.20 as the newest version of this widely-used distributed revision control system...

Published on Friday was my Radeon RX 590 Linux benchmarks now that the kinks in the support for this latest Polaris refresh are worked out (at least in patch form). Here are some complementary data points with some of the OpenGL tests outside of the Steam games for those curious about the RX 590 performance in other workloads or wanting to see how your own GPU performance would compare to these results...

While Qualcomm was busy hosting their Tech Summit this week in Hawaii, the independent open-source developers were pressing ahead with their reverse-engineered Qualcomm Adreno 3D graphics driver support...

While it's not as exciting as if seeing full 3D open-source driver support, with the upcoming Linux 4.21 kernel are some mainline Tegra improvements that does include HDMI audio support for the X2 and Xavier SoCs...

After a short-lived experience on Linux 4.20 when it was added and then reverted due to fallout, the reworked high-resolution scroll-wheel support will re-premiere with Linux 4.21...