Phoronix

Adding to the exciting week for AMD open-source Linux graphics is that in addition to the long-awaited patch update for FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync/VRR, patches for the Linux kernel were sent out prepping the graphics upbringing for the unreleased "Picasso" APUs...

HHVM that started out as Facebook's project for a high-performance PHP implementation and morphed into the basis of their Hack programming language will cease to support PHP...

While Jolla's Linux-based Sailfish OS mobile operating system hasn't turned out to be as great as many anticipated, today the Finnish company released Sailfish OS 2.2.1 under the Nurmonjoki codename...

For your Linux benchmark viewing pleasure today are test results from twenty-two distinct Intel / AMD systems when running a recent release of the performance-optimized Clear Linux distribution and the hardware spanning from old AMD FX and Intel Core i3 Haswell CPUs up through the high-end desktop Core i9 and Threadripper processors.

With Q3 coming towards an end, here is a fresh look at the Mesa Git development trends for the year-to-date. Mesa on a commit basis is significantly lower than in previous years, but there is a new top contributor to Mesa...

The European Union funded LPGPU2 initiative for helping to extend the mobile battery life of systems by delivering more power efficient code for GPUs has formally announced their open-source tool-set today...

The AMD developers maintaining their "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver have pushed out their latest batch of code comprising this driver including the PAL abstraction layer, XGL Vulkan bits, and LLPC LLVM-based compiler pipeline...

Firefox nightly builds are now built with the LLVM Clang compiler on all major platforms and the Linux build in particular is also now utilizing PGO optimizations too. Faster Firefox is coming thanks to this compiler work...

Taking place last weekend over in Manchester was the annual GNU Tools Cauldron conference where toolchain developers spent a few days discussing the latest open-source compiler work...

There is one week to go until NVIDIA begins shipping the GeForce RTX 2080 "Turing" series but while waiting for that hardware, here is a look back at how various graphics cards are performing for Linux games from the GTX 1000 Pascal series back through the GTX 600 Kepler series. On the AMD side in this comparison is also going from Vega back to the GCN 1.0 Southern Islands. The Vulkan/OpenGL Linux gaming performance is being looked at as well as the overall system power consumption and performance-per-Watt.

While the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics stack has gotten into particularly good shape the past two years or so, one of the areas that has left the red Linux gamers unsatisfied is the lack of FreeSync support (or DisplayPort Adaptive-Sync / HDMI Variable Refresh Rate) when using the fully open-source stack. It looks like that could be changing soon with the new set of patches under review...

The OpenSSL team has announced the OpenSSL 1.1.1 stable release today that's been two years in the making and most notably has TLS 1.3 support...

Phoronix Test Suite 8.2.0-Rakkestad is officially shipping today as the latest quarterly feature release to our open-source, cross-platform automated benchmarking software. In addition to the Phoronix Test Suite 8.2 itself, there is the first official release of the newly-introduced "phoronix/pts" Docker image on Docker Hub for easily carrying out the benchmarks with the pre-seeded image.

Last week I reported on Code Sourcery / Mentor Graphics posting their new AMD GCN port to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). This GPU back-end for the widely-used GCC compiler is hoped for merging ahead of the GCC 9 stable release expected in early 2019. At this past weekend's GNU Tools Cauldron 2018 conference was a briefing by Mentor Graphics on undertaking funded by AMD...

Peter Hutterer announced the release today of libinput v1.12 as the widely used Linux input handling library on Wayland/Mir/X.Org desktops...

Following the release of ZFS On Linux 0.7.10, the developers went ahead and released the big v0.8 release candidate. ZFS On Linux 0.8 is bringing a lot of new functionality...

Given last week's big GNOME 3.30 release I was eager to test the updated desktop environment with its Mutter compositor improvements on Wayland as well as seeing how its performance under the conventional X.Org Server. Here are some of these benchmarks of various graphics applications and games tested under both GNOME 3.28.3 and GNOME 3.30.0 with both Wayland and X.Org sessions.

Version 14 of the ownCloud-forked Nextcloud personal "cloud" client-server software is now available...

Git 2.19 was released today as the latest stable feature release to this widely-used distributed version control system...

With Khronos' Vulkan working group yesterday having released Vulkan 1.1.84 that introduces new extensions, the NVIDIA driver team today released a new beta that incorporates support for some of these extensions...

VMware has landed more than fifty Mesa patches today adding a lot of new functionality to its "SVGA" Gallium3D driver that is used for providing OpenGL/GPU acceleration to guest virtual machines with its virtualization products...

While only two release candidates were on the schedule for LLVM 7.0, release manager Hans Wennborg today opted for a third RC that he intends to be the final test version before officially releasing the LLVM 7.0.0 collection...

Following weeks of leaks about these new processors targeting OEMs and system integrators, AMD today officially announced the Ryzen 3 2300X and Ryzen 5 2500X processors...

This weekend I decided to fire up the current Linux 4.19 development kernel on the dual Intel Xeon Gold 6138 test platform based on the wonderful Tyan GT24E-B7106. At least for this system, it's really benefiting from the new kernel that will be released as stable in October...

For those making use of ZFS On Linux to utilize ZFS file-system support on Linux systems, a new ZOL 0.7.10 release along with its SPL layer have been released...

It's running a few days late, but the LLVM 7.0 release along with sub-projects like Clang 7.0 should be released very soon. Here is a look at some of the features coming to this six-month compiler infrastructure update...

AMD's GPUOpen group has announced a new version of their open-source Vulkan Memory Allocator project that seeks to make it easier to deal with memory allocation and management when using this graphics API...

Born out of code open-sourced by NVIDIA, the Qt 3D Studio software suite for designing 3D user-interfaces is out with a beta for its next feature release...

AMD's fully open-source GPU compute stack in the form of ROCm "Radeon Open Compute" is nearing its next milestone with OpenCL 2.0 compliance...

Linus Torvalds has done his usual Sunday evening release dance in issuing the latest test release of the upcoming kernel, Linux 4.19...

Here are the results from some weekend benchmarking looking at the current stage of the AMDGPU + RadeonSI/RADV open-source AMD Linux graphics card performance when using the very latest code from the Linux 4.19 development kernel and Mesa 18.3. It's also an interesting mix of AMD Radeon graphics cards from the HD 7950 through the latest RX Vega 64.

Released this weekend was the monthly update to the KDE Frameworks 5 collection of libraries that complement Qt5...

DOSBox, the DOS emulator used by Wine and also can be run directly on Linux / macOS / Windows / BSD systems, released version 0.74-2 at the end of August with some Wine compatibility improvements...

Covered on Phoronix back during the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window was the new option for distribution vendors or those compiling their own Linux kernel to decide whether you trust the CPU's random number generator. That compile-time functionality has now been re-worked to allow for a boot-time option so users can more easily indicate whether they trust their own processor's RNG...

For fans of the Nano text editor, version 3.0 was released today with some significant performance improvements among other enhancements for this common Linux command-line program...

There's nothing like a new Vulkan spec update to help waking up on a Sunday morning. Vulkan 1.1.84 is out today and is the first since the minor 1.1.83 revision last month at SIGGRAPH...

It's been another busy week for the crew polishing up the Plasma desktop and other KDE components. Say "hi" to HiDPI and hibernation work this week...

Earlier this week I reported on the RadeonSI Gallium3D code being tuned for AMD Zen CPUs in an attempt to deliver greater gaming performance for Ryzen processors. That work has now been merged into Mesa 18.3...

It's been a while since last having major progress to report on the Broadcom VideoCore 4 (VC4) open-source driver stack most notably used by the Raspberry Pi boards or the next-generation Broadcom VideoCore "V3D" driver stack. The lack of recent progress has been due to lead developer Eric Anholt being away on paternity leave, but he is back now with another update on this open-source ARM graphics undertaking...

The latest improvements published by Red Hat's Benjamin Tissoires for bettering the Linux input stack is expanded Logitech support within its HID++ (logitech-hidpp) driver...

Just a few months since NetworkManager 1.12 has passed and the NetworkManager 1.14 feature update is now around the corner...

In addition to Le Potato and Renegade, another line-up of ARM boards being offered by Libre Computer is Tritium. The Libre Computer Tritium boards are Allwinner-based boards with options from the H2+ for IoT use-cases, the H3 as a mid-range offering, or H5 for a better-performing ARM board that is well supported by the open-source Linux community.

This week Intel developers sent in their first batch of drm-intel-next feature changes to DRM-Next of new material that will be merged for the next kernel cycle whether it ends up being called Linux 4.20 or likely Linux 5.0...

While the Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers have matured into great shape particularly over the past two years for vastly improving the Linux gaming experience on Radeon and Intel hardware, with Valve's Steam Play allowing more Windows games on Linux via Proton/Wine has opened up Mesa to needing a lot more optimizations, workarounds, and dealing with other intricacies. The latest receiving the special treatment is Wolfenstein: The Old Blood...

On Intel systems affected by the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, another minor optimization is on its way to the Linux kernel to ever so slightly lower the impact of the kernel-based page table isolation (PTI) mitigation...

The Haiku operating system has been in development since 2002 as an open-source BeOS-inspired platform and nearly a decade since they reached the alpha stage for their first release, they are nearly ready to deliver the beta...

While Canonical divested from their Linux smartphone plans, they continue maintaining the Mir display server as any regular Phoronix reader should know. Mir continues to be developed with Wayland functionality for IoT and desktop use-cases but the

An Amazon developer working on the Linux kernel has posted perhaps their largest feature patch-set for the kernel: implementing co-scheduling support for the Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS)...

Following a few delays that pushed back its release date from August to ultimately today, Mesa 18.2 is out as this third-quarter 2018 update to the Mesa3D graphics driver stack most commonly associated with the Linux desktop's open-source Vulkan/OpenGL drivers for Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau (as well as many smaller drivers)...

A big update to Blade Symphony game is due out later this month that is bringing Linux support to this game...