Phoronix

Intel has landed initial support for Coreboot on their current-generation Coffeelake processors...

While the WireGuard secure VPN tunnel was just sent out this week for review as the first formal step towards getting it mainlined in the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds is already looking forward to it...

With development wrapping up soon on the Linux 4.18 kernel (although it looks like the official release will likely be delayed one week), I've been carrying out some fresh benchmarks of this near-final kernel in the latest Linux Git state on various Intel and AMD desktop CPUs -- mostly the higher-end desktop systems. Here are those 100+ benchmark results across six different systems...

Given our fascination with Intel's Clear Linux performance in the plethora of performance benchmarks we frequently run at Phoronix and this open-source operating system being maintained in a rolling-release style, here's a look at how the performance for this x86_64 Linux distribution evolved over the past month...

Google has rolled out the Chrome 69 beta web-browser update today for Linux, Android, and other supported platforms...

The GNOME 3.30 Release Candidate (v3.29.90) is now available that also marks the UI, API, and feature freezes for this next desktop environment update debuting in September...

As expected, the Mesa 18.2 feature development is now over with the code having branched. Now open on Git master is Mesa 18.3-devel...

For those still on the Ubuntu 16.04 "Xenial Xerus" Long Term Support series and not yet ready to make the transition to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver", Ubuntu 16.04.5 is now available as the last planned Xenial point release...

Given that it was only earlier this summer when UBports' Ubuntu Touch OTA-4 upgraded to an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS base, you might be wondering when they intend to transition to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS... But don't hold your breath...

The end of July marked the code branching and feature freeze for PHP 7.3 followed by the creation of the first beta...

Following AMD staging numerous AMDGPU DRM improvements in DRM-Next for Linux 4.19, they have moved onto further testing this code and providing various fixes for some of the early fallout to these changes ahead of the next kernel cycle...

In addition to Keith Packard talking about the state of the Debian GNU/Linux stack for gaming in 2018, during this week's DebConf 18 was a talk by Debian developer Markus Koschany on the state of games for the Linux distribution...

Robert Foss at Collabora has recently been working on supporting the "kms_swrast" code under Android...

The lead developer of the Sway Wayland compositor, Drew DeVault, has for the past year also been working on the "wlroots" Wayland compositor library that is modular and can perform a lot of the "heavy lifting" when it comes to writing new Wayland compositors. Way-Cooler, Purism's Phosh, and other projects have also been investigating wlroots for their own use-cases...

As part of this week's volleying of WireGuard onto the Linux kernel mailing list included as part of that is Zinc, a new cryptography API for the Linux kernel...

While back in May the reported Steam Linux use by Valve was at 0.57% and then dropped to 0.52% for June, over the course of July it took another step lower...

Hong Jen Yee, the developer of the PCMan File Manager that has long served as the default file manager on the LXDE desktop environment, presented at this week's Debian DebConf 18 event about the LXDE/LXQt desktop efforts...

Arch Linux developer Jelle van der Waa has provided an update concerning recent Arch updates...

The GNOME 3.30 beta is being prepped for release and the UI/API/ABI freezes are now in place ahead of this desktop environment update to ship as stable in September. GNOME Shell and Mutter have staged their latest development releases for testing...

Valve has just sent out a press release about allowing attendees at PAX West in a few weeks will be able to play their forthcoming Artifact game, but more exciting is they plan to publicly release the game at the end of November...

Not only is Mesa 18.2 ending feature development today to begin their release candidates, but LLVM 7.0 and its sub-projects like Clang 7.0 also happens to have aligned with a similar release schedule...

Think Silicon announced this morning they have open-sourced GLOVE, a middleware layer that implements OpenGL ES over Vulkan...

HiSilicon is looking to add WarpDrive to the Linux kernel. Not to be confused with anything from Star Trek, WarpDrive is a generic accelerator framework they have been developing...

Just over one month has passed since Kodi 18 Alpha 2 while today the third and final alpha build is now available...

Linus Torvalds was looking at releasing Linux 4.18 this coming weekend but it looks like that is no longer going to happen with instead seeing a 4.18-rc8 test release...

Adding to the big list of DRM driver changes for Linux 4.19 is atomic mode-setting for the Armada DRM driver...

The mad rush to land last minute work ahead of the Mesa 18.2 branching has continued. The branching is set to happen today but there's been several notable last minute additions hitting Git...

Glibc 2.28, the latest update to the GNU C Library, is now available to start off the month of August...

Another month is in the books with 280 original news articles and 24 featured Linux hardware reviews / featured articles. As with most months, there was a lot of interesting open-source and Linux progress this month, PC hardware continuing to work better under Linux, and the Linux kernel and other key projects continuing to mature gracefully...

In the mad rush to land last minute features into Mesa 18.2 prior to its code branching and release candidate phase beginning, David Airlie has settled OpenGL 4.2 support for the VirGL stack...

After being in development the past few years, the first version of WireGuard has hit the kernel mailing list for review on its path to being included in the mainline Linux kernel...

While OpenWRT 18.06 was released today as the popular Linux-based networking/embedded distribution, for those preferring FreeBSD, the OPNsense 18.7 release is also shipping today...

Purism has provided a design update on the state of their planned communication apps for their Librem 5 smartphone, Messages and Calls...

Longtime GNOME developer and Red Hat engineering manager Jiri Eischmann has looked at recent Fedora Workstation crashes and other problems happening with the GNOME Shell and the most common denominator is problems caused by the GNOME Shell extensions written in JavaScript...

OpenWRT 18.06 is now available as the router/networking/embedded-focused Linux distribution...

When it comes to new laptops for the summer of 2018 that are Linux-friendly, the latest-generation Dell XPS 13 with Intel Kabylake-R processor ranks high on that list. Recent in upgrading my main production workstation, I decided to go with the Dell XPS 13 9370 while using Fedora Workstation 28 and it's been a phenomenal combination. Here are my thoughts on the current Dell XPS 13 as well as some benchmarks and other information.

Libjpeg-Turbo 2.0 was released in the past few days as the JPEG image codec library known for being quite speedy thanks to its various optimizations on different CPU instruction sets, by as much as two to six times faster than the conventional JPEG library...

Making good on their word to release the LMDE 3 beta by the end of July, officially out today is the beta of Linux Mint Debian Edition 3 "Cindy"...

Happening now in Hsinchu, Taiwan is Debian's DebConf 18. Of the many interesting talks at this multi-day event is X11 veteran Keith Packard talking about gaming on Debian...

Adding to the list of notable changes for the Linux 4.19 kernel is run-time power management for Thunderbolt controllers...

Last week "SpectreRSB" was detailed as a new Spectre Variant Two like attack affecting modern processors. A Linux kernel patch was quick to materialize and now it's been staged for merging soon into the mainline Linux kernel...

Jonas Ã…dahl announced the release earlier today of Wayland Protocols 1.16 , the newest feature update to this collection of Wayland protocols, both stable and unstable...

With July quickly coming to a close, the Haiku project has published their latest monthly report regarding the happenings for this open-source BeOS-inspired operating system...

As what was a proposal to eliminate unnecessary linking in Fedora 29 is going to be postponed to be an early change for Fedora 30...

Freedreno lead developer Rob Clark at Red Hat has sent in his batch of feature updates to DRM-Next ahead of the imminent Linux 4.19 kernel development cycle kicking off...

Remember earlier this month when GCC's long in the works conversion from SVN to Git was being held up by the lack of RAM on Eric S Raymond's system? Well, it turns out that's just part of the problem...

The lazy TLB mode as a way to delay translation look-aside buffer updates will be improved upon with the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel...

Just weeks ahead of SIGGRAPH 2018, Vulkan 1.1.82 is now available as the latest specification update to this year's Vulkan 1.1 graphics/compute API...

Adding to the list of great stuff for Linux 4.19 is the introduction of the EROFS file-system...

Landing last week in the X.Org Server Git code is a change to ensure DRI3 gets enabled when using GLAMOR acceleration for XWayland...