Phoronix

With yesterday's successful launch of Wine 3.0 I was curious how the past year of development on Wine compared to years prior, etc. Here are some Wine development statistics...

With the Linux 4.16 kernel cycle that is expected to begin immediately following the Linux 4.15 kernel debut on Sunday, AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) technology supported by their new EPYC processors will be mainline...

For the Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) support currently within the Linux kernel for addressing the Meltdown CPU vulnerability it's currently limited to 64-bit on the x86 side, but for the unfortunate souls still running x86 32-bit operating systems, SUSE is working on such support...

There are updated AMDGPU microcode/firmware files now available for recent Radeon GPUs...

OpenSUSE has continued rolling in the new year with several key package updates in January...

Harry Wentland of AMD has sent out the latest batch of patches for the AMDGPU DC display code stack. Fortunately it lightens up the DRM driver by about six thousand lines thanks to removing some unused code...

Most pre-GCN AMD graphics cards are still limited to OpenGL 3.3 support at this time due to not supporting FP64. Only the HD 5800/6900 series on R600g currently have real double-precision floating-point support working right now so at present they are on OpenGL 4.3 rather than 3.3, but those other generations may be catching up soon thanks to the "soft" FP64 code...

Mesa 17.3.3 is now available as the latest point release for the Mesa 17.3 stable series...

Towards the end of December AMD quietly released ROCm 1.7.60 as the newest version of their Radeon Open Compute stack complete with their maturing OpenCL implementation. With the improvements there plus NVIDIA recently introducing their 390 Linux driver series (390.12 Beta currently), I ran some fresh Linux OpenCL GPU compute benchmarks on a variety of AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards for those curious how the current performance stacks up.

In 2018 the X.Org Server will introduce better support for 16:9 and 16:10 ratio monitors!..

The Wine camp has officially released Wine 3.0 as their annual feature update to this program for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other operating systems...

The Unity game engine has a New Year's resolution of improving its graphics renderer abilities in 2018...

Canonical has rolled out Spectre Variant One and Spectre Variant Two mitigation to their proposed repository with updated kernels for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS / 16.04 LTS / 17.10. These kernels with IBRS and IBPB added in will be sent down as stable release updates next week...

After abandoning their Fedora Server 27 Modular Edition work last year, Fedora developers interested in modularizing Fedora packaging have drawn up new plans that are now approved by the Fedora Council...

MenuLibre is an advanced menu editor that supports not just one desktop environment but GNOME, LXDE, Xfce, Cinnamon, and Unity Linux systems...

For those that were excited over the months of ongoing work by SUSE to bring up an in-kernel boot splash system that could be better than Plymouth for at least some use-cases and was interesting many readers, unfortunately it's not panning out for mainline...

These days when Dave Airlie isn't busy managing the DRM subsystem or hacking on the RADV Vulkan driver, he's been spending a fair amount of time on some OpenGL improvements to the aging R600 Gallium3D driver. That's happened again and he's landed some more improvements just ahead of the imminent Mesa 18.0 feature freeze...

With the Linux 4.17 kernel (not the upcoming 4.16 cycle) there is likely to be added initial HDCP support to Intel's Direct Rendering Manager driver. Ahead of that this High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection support continues getting improved upon...

Git maintainer Junio Hamano has released version 2.16.0 of this distributed revision control system...

Last week when sharing the results of tweaking Ubuntu 17.10 to try to make it run as fast as Clear Linux, it didn't take long for Phoronix readers to share their opinions on Arch Linux and the request for some optimized Arch Linux benchmarks against Clear Linux. Here are some results of that testing so far in carrying out a clean Arch Linux build with some basic optimizations compared to using Antergos Minimal out-of-the-box, Ubuntu Server, and Clear Linux.

Endless OS developer Philip Chimento has developed Flapjack as a means of helping developers work on Flatpak...

While LLVM/Clang 6.0 was branched earlier this month and under a feature freeze with master/trunk moving to LLVM 7.0, two weeks later the first release candidate is now available...

With the next update to X-Plane 11 introducing VR support, I have renewed interest in this realistic, cross-platform flight simulator. It's been a few years since we last delivered any benchmarks with X-Plane, but for your viewing please today is an assortment of 24 graphics cards both old and new, low-end to high-end from NVIDIA and AMD in looking at how this flight simulator is running on Ubuntu Linux.

With the launch of Mozilla Firefox 58 slated for next week, WebAssembly will become even faster thanks to a new two-tiered compiler...

The experimental RadeonSI NIR back-end is taking a final step forward for Mesa 18.0...

GNU developers are preparing to quickly ship GCC 7.3 now in order to get out the Spectre patches, a.k.a. the compiler side bits for Retpoline with -mindirect-branch=thunk and friends...

The Dead Island open world survival horror action RPG game that's more than six years old should now work with Mesa's Gallium3D drivers...

With being past the cutoff of new features to be merged to DRM-Next for targeting the upcoming Linux 4.16 kernel merge window, here is a recap of the prominent changes to the Direct Rendering Manager drivers for this next kernel cycle...

While KDE Discover's Flatpak support was declared "production ready", that isn't the only app sandboxing tech they are working on: their Ubuntu Snap support is also coming together nicely...

Beyond the Retpoline support already found in the mainline Linux kernel, developers are working on Retpoline Underflow support that would be used for Intel Skylake and Kabylake CPUs. RETPOLINE_UNDERFLOW protects against falling back to a potentially poisoned indirect branch predictor when a return buffer underflows and this additional protection is needed for Intel Skylake/Kabylake processors. I ran a couple benchmarks...

With the flurry of Mesa development activity with Mesa 18.0 being branched in a few days, the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver picked up support for another extension...

If you have been curious about the state of Purism's Librem 5 smartphone project since its successful crowdfunding last year and expedited plans to begin shipping this Linux smartphone in early 2019, the company has issued their first status update...

We have looked several times already at the performance impact of Retpoline support in the Linux kernel, but what about building user-space packages with -mindirect-branch=thunk? Here is the performance cost to building some performance tests in user-space with -mindirect-branch=thunk and -mindirect-branch=thunk-inline.

The Mesa 18.0 feature freeze and release candidate will be issued in the days ahead...

The Facebook crew responsible for the HHVM project as a speedy Hack/PHP language implementation is out with its 3.24 release...

For those curious about the performance impact of the Retpoline patches as found in the latest Linux 4.15 kernel, here are some benchmarks on an assortment of old and new AMD Linux systems...

For those using the 340 series legacy driver for NVIDIA GeForce 8 and GeForce 9 series GPU support, the 340.106 driver has been released...

With KDE Plasma 5.12 LTS, the KWin window manager / compositor's X11/X.Org code will now be under an "eternal feature freeze" as development will focus more on Wayland...

Epic Games has rolled out their public preview build of the upcoming Unreal Engine 4.19 game engine update...

Valve has pushed out a new SteamOS Beta build for the Debian Jessie-based "Brewmaster" series...

Mesa 17.3.3 should be released later this week with nearly three dozen fixes over the previous Mesa 17.3 point release...

Patches are being prepped to improve the OverDrive overclocking/underclocking support within the AMDGPU DRM driver and for allowing voltage controls...

An independent open-source developer has announced "Advanced DRI Configurator" in what he's hoping could eventually replace DriConf for configuring Mesa parameters...

The backporting of -mindirect-branch, -mindirect-return and -mindirect-branch-register, a.k.a. the GCC "Retpoline" patches, have been back-ported and merged into the GCC 7 branch...

Microsoft made many upstream contributions to the Git version control system over the past year to improve its performance and they plan to continue contributing to the project...

Yet more functionality to find with the upcoming Linux 4.16 kernel is the first bits of Jailhouse hypervisor functionality being mainlined...

While BPF has been under the spotlight recently in light of Spectre, with the upcoming Linux 4.16 cycle this in-kernel virtual machine and originally packet filter will be picking up new features...

In improving the power-savings of NVIDIA GeForce 600/700 "Kepler" GPUs running on the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver, Red Hat developer Lyude Paul has published a set of patches allowing for full clock-gating with these older graphics cards...

Ahead of the official release expected in February, the KDE Plasma 5.12 Beta is available today as the latest step forward for the KDE desktop...

Last week I provided a fresh look at the NVIDIA GeForce vs. AMD Radeon Linux gaming performance using the latest drivers at the start of 2018. That testing included the latest NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, but for those curious how these numbers compare for older NVIDIA GPUs, here's a look with the Kepler and Maxwell graphics cards added to the comparison.