Phoronix

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.

Released yesterday was version 0.11 of the XDG Desktop Portal and with this release comes initial support for Snap packages...

This morning I wrote about GCC 8 being branched and development on the master branch now being open for GCC 9.0. The GCC 8.1 release candidate has now been issued with the official release perhaps coming next week...

Last week I wrote about the NetBSD 8.0 RC1 images being available and the changes coming in this big update to this popular BSD platform. This morning that official NetBSD 8.0 RC1 announcement was issued...

DragonFlyBSD has implemented a portion of the Linux IRQ subsystem within its kernel...

This year Intel open-sourced their "NEO" OpenCL compute stack included a new compute runtime, a new LLVM/Clang-based compiler, makes use of the Intel Graphics Memory Management Library (GMMLIB), etc. While we don't hear too much from the NEO effort on an ongoing basis, their OpenCL 2.1 support for recent hardware generations is now to production quality...

The GNU Compiler Collection 8 stable release (GCC 8.1) is almost ready to make its debut...

Following Google announcing their GSoC 2018 participants, the Outreachy program to help support women and other under-represented groups in tech announced their summer 2018 interns...

Adam Jackson of Red Hat today announced the X.Org Server 1.20 Release Candidate 5, which he believes will be the last test release before going gold. Most excitingly about this new release candidate is the merged support for allowing the NVIDIA proprietary driver to work with XWayland...

Fedora Workstation 28 is shaping up to be another compelling update for those that are fans of this bleeding-edge Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution. I've been running Fedora Workstation 28 snapshots on a few laptops and test machines here and am quite happy with how it's shaped up as another Fedora release that delivers not only the latest features, but doing so in a seemingly sane and stable manner: I haven't encountered any problems unlike some of the past notorious Fedora releases from years ago. Overall, I am quite excited for next month's Fedora 28 release and will be upgrading my main production system to it...

With last week's initial launch-day Linux benchmarks of the Ryzen 5 2600X / Ryzen 7 2700X some found the Linux performance to be lower than Windows. While the root cause is undetermined, a BIOS/AGESA update does appear to help the Linux performance significantly at least with the motherboard where I've been doing most of my tests with the Ryzen 7 2700X. Here are the latest benchmark numbers.

Google has announced the accepted student projects for this year's Google Summer of Code. As usual, there is an interesting mix of open-source software projects across the hundreds (or rather thousands) of applicants. Here's a look at the most interesting initiatives we found when going through the list...

In addition to Purism working on their GNOME-based interface with their PureOS GNU/Linux on their upcoming Librem 5 smartphone as well as supporting KDE Plasma Mobile as another option, they will also be supporting the UBPorts community Ubuntu Touch work on this privacy-minded Linux smartphone...

Following Oracle offloading Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation and then renaming the project to Jakarta EE, we now know more about the future of this Java Enterprise Edition...

The Qt Company had been working on performance improvements for 64-bit ARM (AArch64) as part of the Qt 5.9 LTS cycle and continuing through with the ongoing long-term support point releases, and that work is paying off...

With last week's release of Rise of the Tomb Raider on Linux ported by Feral Interactive, when it came to Radeon GPU support for this Vulkan-only Linux game port the Mesa RADV driver was supported while the official AMDVLK driver would lead to GPU hangs. That's now been fixed...

While Linux distributions are still migrating to Glibc 2.27, in the two months since the release changes have continued building up for what will eventually become the GNU C Library 2.28...

The GNU Guix transactional package manager can be made to run on Android smartphones/tablets, but not without lots of hoops to jump through first...

Eric Anholt of Broadcom has sent out his revised patches for the "V3D" DRM driver, which up until last week was known as the VC5 DRM driver...

The upcoming release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 is offering an HPC (High Performance Computing) module for development, control, and compute nodes. Today that SLE15-HPC module is now available in beta...

The BUS1 in-kernel IPC mechanism born out of the ashes of KDBUS still hasn't been mainlined in the Linux kernel, but its code is still improved upon from time to time. At least though DBus-Broker as a new performance-oriented D-Bus implementation continues gaining ground in user-space...

While in recent months there have been some improvements to FreeBSD that have helped yield greater reliability in running AMD Ryzen processors on this BSD operating system, some users are still reporting hard to diagnose stability problems on FreeBSD...

Red Hat developers have managed to deliver on their goals around improving Thunderbolt support on the Linux desktop with the upcoming Fedora 28 distribution update...

As part of next month's Qt 5.11 tool-kit update, a new technology preview module will be WebAssembly support for running Qt5 user-interfaces within your web-browser...

Wayland's Weston reference compositor with its Pixman software-based renderer back-end has received a number of performance optimizations...

ThreadStack is yet another C++ project trying to make it easier dealing with multiple CPU threads...

The Panfrost open-source driver project previously known as "Chai" for creating an open-source 3D driver stack for ARM's Mali Midgard hardware now has a working shaded cube being rendered using the open-source code as part of its new "half-way" driver based on Gallium3D...

Linus Torvalds has announced the availability of the second weekly test release for what is becoming the Linux 4.17 kernel...

While still hoping to see their new Artifact game this year, it seems Valve is serious after all about getting back into the gaming spirit. News coming out this weekend is that Valve has acquired the Campo Santo game studio and its developers will be joining Valve...

With this week's Ryzen 5 2600X + Ryzen 7 2700X benchmarks some thought the CPUFreq scaling driver or rather its governors may have been limiting the performance of these Zen+ CPUs, so I ran some additional benchmarks this weekend...

MenuLibre is the advanced menu editor that supports most Linux desktop environments including GNOME, KDE Plasma, Budgie, Cinnamon, EDE, LXQt, MATE, and Pantheon. MenuLibre 2.2 is the first major release for the project in over two years...

It looks like the DragonFlyBSD 5.4 release will be delivering at least a few kernel-level performance improvements...

A Phoronix reader recently pointed out that LibJPEG 2.0 Beta quietly shipped last month as working towards the next big update for this speed-focused JPEG library...

Last week Intel's Open-Source Technology Center released their latest quarterly "graphics stack recipe" for the Linux desktop...

In addition to the Xfce Settings update this weekend there is also a new release of the Xfce PluseAudio Plugin providing better support for this sound server on the Xfce desktop...

KDE Plasma 5.13 that is due for release in June will have a great number of improvements to its Wayland support for allowing the KDE Plasma desktop to work much better on this alternative to the X.Org Server...

Seemingly flying under our radar is that Mesa 18.1 has already been branched and the first release candidate issued...

AMD developers maintaining their official Vulkan cross-platform driver code have pushed their end-of-week updates to their external source repositories for those wanting to build the AMDVLK driver on Linux from source...

This week I posted some benchmarks looking at the Meltdown mitigation impact on BSD vs. Linux as well as some tests of DragonFly's stabilized HAMMER2 while for your viewing pleasure this weekend are a variety of general BSD vs. Linux benchmarks while using the newly-released DragonFlyBSD 5.2, TrueOS 18.03, FreeBSD 11.1, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Ubuntu 18.04, and Intel's Clear Linux.

It's still not clear if the EGLStreams XWayland support will be merged for xorg-server 1.20 but at least the patches were revised this week, making it possible to merge them into this next X.Org Server release for allowing the NVIDIA proprietary driver to work with XWayland...

Vulkan continues sticking to the "release early, release often" mantra with the availability today of Vulkan 1.1.74...

The proposal for replacing early Ubuntu derivatives' early alpha/beta releases with "testing weeks" in its place is moving forward with no objections having been raised but flavors like Kubuntu and Xubuntu being in favor of the change...

A new version of Collabora Online is now available, the web-based open-source office suite derived from the cloud version of LibreOffice...

While still waiting on the long-awaited Xfce 4.14, out this weekend is an Xfce Settings 4.14.2 preview release as well as an Xfce Settings 4.12.3 stable series update...

The widely talked about "GNOME Shell memory leak" causing excessive memory usage after a while with recent versions of GNOME has now been fully corrected. The changes are currently staged in Git for what will become GNOME 3.30 but might also be backported to 3.28...

For those using the independent, open-source SC-Controller user-mode driver and GTK3 GUI for the Steam Controller, a new release is available in time for any weekend gaming...

FFmpeg 4.0 is now available as the latest major release for this widely-used open-source multimedia encode/decoder library...

It was just last year that open-source RadeonSI/RADV developers were trying to get the Radeon RX 580 "Polaris" GPU to be competitive with the GeForce GTX 1060 as it is under Windows given each GPU's capabilities. We've seen the RX 580 and GTX 1060 dancing under Linux the past few months and yesterday's 20-way GPU comparison with Rise of the Tomb Raider was quite significant -- perhaps most surprising being how well the RX 580 performed. Heck, just one or two years ago it was an accomplishment seeing any official Radeon driver support at-launch for new Linux game releases. So here are some extensive tests looking closer at the GTX 1060 vs. RX 580 battle in this latest Vulkan-powered Linux game port...

It's a busy month for the BSDs with DragonFlyBSD 5.2 having come along with OpenBSD 6.3 and right before that was TrueOS 18.03. Now there's finally the release candidate of the long-awaited NetBSD 8.0 update...

Arch Linux is finally transitioning to glibc 2.27, which may make for a faster system...