Just in time for ending out April, Microsoft is today beginning to ship the "Windows 10 April 2018 Update" what was previously known as the "Spring Update" and "Redstone 4". Of course, we're mentioning this for what Linux and other operating systems now have to compete against and as a prelude for some forthcoming benchmarks on Phoronix...
Following the release of Chrome 66 earlier this month, Google developers working on the Chrome/Chromium web-browser have officially promoted Chrome 67 to beta...
AMD quietly released their Radeon Software for Linux 18.10 driver. This was what was basically referred to as "AMDGPU-PRO" but is now part of the "Radeon Software" branding especially with this driver package continuing to offer the option of an "AMDGPU All-Open" stack to complement the PRO components...
As part of our ongoing benchmarks of the recently released Ubuntu 18.04, here is a look at the performance of Ubuntu Linux on the same laptop while testing all Long-Term Support releases from 12.04 to 18.04 for seeing how the Ubuntu performance has evolved over the past six years on this Intel laptop.
The GCC 8 compiler will likely be introduced as stable this week or next in the form of the GCC 8.1 premiere release. Here's a look at the prominent changes for this annual update to the GNU Compiler Collection...
The Linux 4.16.6 kernel was released on Sunday and besides various other fixes, AMD Ryzen 7 2700X corrected temperature reporting is among the changes...
Libplacebo is an effort to shift the MPlayer2-forked MPV media player's core rendering code into a reusable library. The libplacebo library can allow for cleaning up MPV's APIs in the process as well as providing a standard library for GPU-accelerated video and image processing...
On Saturday was the latest code drop for the XGL component update to the AMDVLK open-source Linux Vulkan driver, which incorporates the work done internally by AMD developers on their official Vulkan driver code-base over the past number of days...
Mesa 18.0.2 is now the latest stable release for Mesa3D while those wishing to ride the bleeding-edge version for these OpenGL/Vulkan drivers can try Mesa 18.1-RC2...
Karol Herbst and others at Red Hat continue working on improving the open-source GPU compute for Linux, particularly for the Nouveau open-source reverse-engineered NVIDIA driver...
The RadeonSI compiler queue can now run across more CPU cores/threads of modern systems though it appears this will primarily just benefit those running the shader-db shader test cases...
Yesterday I wrote about GCC developers moving to drop Intel MPX support and now the Linux kernel developers are looking at dropping the Memory Protection Extensions support too, thereby rendering this modern CPU feature unsupported by Linux...
Last year Canonical began developing a new Ubuntu Server installer and while it was quite rough at first, it got into shape in subsequent months and is used by default for the newly-released Ubuntu Server 18.04...
While OpenMP 4 supports accelerators like GPUs and DSPs, HardCloud is a new initiative focused on OpenMP offloading for FPGAs and with an emphasis on speeding up cloud computing...
Last year we reported on GCC deprecating Intel Memory Protection Extensions (MPX) and now it looks like with GCC 9 they will be dropping the support entirely...
The visually stunning and technically advanced Unigine 2 engine that is well supported on Linux is out with a new release, Unigine 2.7. Unigine 2.7 rolls out with updated SDK offerings of Unigine 2 Entertainment, Unigine 2 Engineering, and Unigine 2 Sim depending upon your commercial needs...
The Arcan Display Server that is the display stack built off (in part) a game engine and also developing the Durden desktop and most recently developing a "Safespaces" VR Linux desktop has also been working on porting the code from Linux to OpenBSD...
While we are still waiting for Intel Cannonlake CPUs with "Gen 10" graphics to formally launch (which looks like may not happen now until very late 2018 or early 2019, with the recent Intel earnings call indicating no 10nm volume production until 2019), open-source Intel developers continue their work on the Linux bring-up of Icelake "Gen 11" graphics...
Juan Suarez Romero who is maintaining the Mesa 18.0 stable series today announced the 18.0.2 release candidate as what will be the second point release...
While Fedora had been notorious for releasing often weeks behind schedule, they've been working on improving their release process management and bug handling and it's paid off. Fedora 28 will be shipping on-time for its final release next week!..
A guest post on AMD's GPUOpen blog outlines the overhead issues with using the Vulkan loader library and possible performance advantages to using vkGetDeviceProcAddr or more easily via a little heard of project called Volk...
I can't imagine many Linux desktop users are interested in a closed-source, commercial-driven password manager for their systems, but for those that are, Keeper launched a new version of its Keeper Password Program Manager for Linux...
With Red Hat deprecating Btrfs in RHEL7 with that "next-gen" Linux file-system not having panned out like many had hoped for or expected, Red Hat has been investing in their new "Stratis" storage project. More details on Stratis have now come to light...
Landing today within the Coreboot Git tree is support for the RISC-V based SiFive Freedom Unleashed 540 System-on-a-Chip and SiFive's Unleashed mainboard making use of this SoC built around the royalty-free and open processor ISA...
While openSUSE Leap 15 is coming next month that hasn't slowed down openSUSE developers from continuing to update the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed platform...
Here are our latest Linux gaming benchmarks comparing the Intel Core i7 8700K to the newly-released Ryzen 7 2700X. The focus in this article is on the Rise of the Tomb Raider Linux port released last week by Feral Interactive and powered by Vulkan.
LibreOffice 6.1 Alpha 1 was tagged overnight as the first development release towards this next updated open-source office suite release succeeding the big LibreOffice 6.0...
Earlier this month Vega M support came to RadeonSI OpenGL, with Vega M being the Radeon graphics found within Intel's Kabylake G processors. There was then Vega M support for the RADV Vulkan driver but these user-space drivers won't work without the kernel bits and now there is that support with 32 AMDGPU DRM patches...
With the recent release candidates to the long overdue X.Org Server 1.20, OpenGL rendering has been broken when using DDX drivers like Intel and Nouveau rather than the generic xf86-video-modesetting. That was fixed today...
Going back several years one of our most favorite open-source games to monitor was the Unvanquished game project with its roots in the Tremulous game and built off the Daemon Engine that is a distant fork to ioquake3 by way of the also once very promising ET: XreaL work...
Back in February was the controversial announcement that Canonical would begin offering a hardware/software survey for Ubuntu installations to premiere with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. This week while running some benchmarks of the effectively final release of Bionic Beaver, I noticed they finally got the feature exposed to users. Here's what it looks like and some of the hardware and software information detailed in these opt-out reports to Canonical.