Phoronix

Purism's latest hire to work on the Librem 5 privacy-minded Linux smartphone effort is a UI/UX designer who has long been involved with GNOME...

This year's X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC2018) has already received some big name sponsors...

Just like clockwork the Linux 4.17-rc1 kernel was released tonight following the two week long merge window...

Of the many improvements to be found in the in-development Linux 4.17 kernel -- nicely summarized in our Linux 4.17 feature overview -- one of the features I've been anxious the most to begin benchmarking has been the reported power management improvements. Here are my initial power/performance tests of Linux 4.17 that for some systems is seeing a measurable drop in power usage, even in some cases under load while without sacrificing the performance.

Mesa 18.0.1 is being planned for release on Wednesday as the first stable point release / maintenance update for this quarterly installment to Mesa 3D...

While the Linux 4.17 kernel merge window is closing today and is already carrying a lot of interesting changes as covered by our Linux 4.17 feature overview, Thomas Gleixner today sent in a final round of x86 (K)PTI updates for Meltdown mitigation with this upcoming kernel release...

Besides looking at the HAMMER2 performance in DragonFlyBSD 5.2, another prominent change with this new BSD operating system release is the Spectre and Meltdown mitigations being shipped. In this article are some tests looking at the performance cost of DragonFlyBSD 5.2 for mitigating the Meltdown Intel CPU vulnerability...

Linus Torvalds is expected by the end of the day to release Linux 4.17-rc1, thereby marking the end of the two-week merge window that saw a lot of changes and new features land for Linux 4.17. Here is our original feature overview of the changes to be found in this next major release of the Linux kernel, which should premiere as stable by the middle of June.

A few weeks back we reported on plans for OpenCL C++ support to be mainlined in LLVM's Clang C/C++ compiler front-end and that work is now happening...

At the end of March longtime Mir developer Alan Griffiths of Canonical announced EGMDE, the Mir Desktop Environment as a desktop example implementing Mir/MirAL APIs and supporting Wayland clients. Griffiths has now put out his latest article in guiding interested developers in working with the code...

As part of the AMDVLK/XGL/PAL driver stack is now the WSA library...

Based off Friday's release of Wine 3.6 is now a new Wine-Staging release that is carrying about 930 patches atop the upstream Wine code-base...

KDE Plasma 5.13 will be starting up even faster, focusing more on Wayland improvements, improved monitor hot-plugging, GTK global menu support, and a lot of polishing throughout...

With this week's release of DragonFlyBSD 5.2 this popular BSD operating system is promoting its own HAMMER2 file-system as stable. As a result, here are a few fresh benchmarks of HAMMER vs. HAMMER2 on DragonFlyBSD 5.2 while more tests are forthcoming.

With the RADV Vulkan driver recently landing improvements to its out-of-order rasterization support, I ran some performance benchmarks of this non-default feature to see if it made much of a deal for today's Vulkan Linux games...

The Gallium3D Heads-Up Display (HUD) has matured into quite a useful option for Mesa users over the past several years. There is now a Gallium HUD "simple" option...

DXVK 0.42 is now available as the open-source project implementing the Direct3D 11 API over Vulkan for the benefit of Wine-based gamers...

At the end of March the US Federal Court of Appeals made a reversal in the long-running Oracle vs. Google battle over the use of Java APIs within Android. The appeals court determined that Google's use of some Java APIs were not under fair-use, which could set a dangerous precedent for some open-source projects...

One of the features not being supported by Microsoft's "Windows Subsystem for Linux" (WSL) up until now was copying and pasting to/from the console...

The latest monthly feature update to the KDE Frameworks collection of add-on libraries is now available. There's a lot of feature work to be found within today's KDE Frameworks 5.45.0 debut...

Linux PC vendor System76 has released their second test spin of the upcoming Pop!_OS 18.04, which is also derived from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS but with a growing set of changes...

For those still using Subversion for revision control system for cases like managing of large files or dealing with legacy code-bases, the Apache Subversion 1.10 release is now available...

We have covered all of the prominent subsystem updates for the Linux 4.17 merge window and I'll have out a feature recap this weekend following the two week long merge window for this next version of the Linux kernel. Here's just a look at some of the Git pulls to have been submitted in the past few days...

Wine 3.6 is now the latest bi-weekly test release for what will eventually become Wine 4.0 stable around the start of 2019...

GNOME 3.28.1 was released today as the first point release to GNOME 3.28 that debuted one month ago...

Following next month's release of Qt 5.11, The Qt Company will be introducing as a technology preview the new Qt for Python...

It's been a number of years since the last major update to the OpenAFS Andrew distributed file-system but there's a Friday the 13th release today introducing the shiny new v1.8 release...

You may have heard that next week is the AMD 2000 series Ryzen CPU launch. That's indeed accurate while today is just a meet and greet with these new Ryzen processors.

Ryan Gordon's new MojoAL sound library now supports audio spatialization...

When Ubuntu-loaded laptop and desktop vendor System76 announced their new Ubuntu downstream last year as "Pop!_OS" it began as mostly cosmetic changes to the desktop shell and other minor improvements. Over time they've been investing more into it with work items like a better installation process, but it looks like they will be diving deeper as they begin exploring performance and power optimizations...

As some good news for ZFS On Linux following the recent data loss issue, a Phoronix reader pointed out that it appears SSD TRIM support is nearly ready for ZOL...

The past year we have been covering the development of the VC5 open-source Linux graphics driver stack for Broadcom's unreleased "VideoCore V" GPU, succeeding the VideoCore IV GPU most notably found on Raspberry Pi boards. Disappointing readers though has been the lack of availability for VC5 hardware, but that's beginning to change...

While the source to Oracle's "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" has been available via the company's own servers, now the organization is publishing their source kernel changes to GitHub in a bid to increase the popularity of their patched version of Linux...

Following the big DRM pull request that was honored last week, David Airlie decided to send in a pre-RC1 pull request of various outstanding bug fixes against these Direct Rendering Manager drivers...

Back in December Amazon rolled out Amazon Linux 2 as a big upgrade to its Linux distribution intended for the EC2 compute cloud as well as on-site via VMware/VirtualBox/Hyper-V virtualization. Amazon Linux 2 rolled out an upgraded Linux kernel, compiler, and many other packages as well as switched to using systemd. Coming out this week was Amazon Linux 2 Candidate 2 as the next installment of this long-term support Linux platform.

After being in development the past year, Elisa has done its first official release...

NVIDIA has today released the display hardware documentation for "GV100" Volta graphics hardware...

Mesa 17.3.9 is expected to be released at the start of next week as the final point release for the Mesa 17.3 driver series that was introduced back in Q4'2017...

With Qt 5.9 being a Long-Term Support series, The Qt Company continues working it into better shape and the latest refinement to it is now available in the form of Qt 5.9.5...

As another milestone for the Vulkan API, as of today there are more than 2,000 projects referencing Vulkan on GitHub!..

AMD's XGL Vulkan API layer for their "AMDVLK" driver has been updated this week with a number of enhancements...

With Linux PC vendor System76 getting more involved in the open-source software game since they began developing their Ubuntu-derived Pop!_OS operating system last year, their latest step forward is joining the GNOME Advisory Board...

Barring any last minute blocker bugs from being discovered, QEMU 2.12 is expected for release next week as the latest feature update for this important piece of the Linux virtualization stack...

The latest libinput hackery being worked on by Linux input expert Peter Hutterer at Red Hat is custom profile support for pointer acceleration...

While last week was the main power management feature updates for the Linux 4.17 kernel merge window that included the new ACPI TAD driver, Rafael Wysocki today sent in a secondary set of feature updates and it includes a rather significant development for Linux power and performance...

Purism has begun with their Librem 5 phone platform documentation as they still plan to get developer boards out this summer and ideally begin shipping the actual Linux security-minded smartphones next year...

Following rumors the past few days, AMD officially confirmed the Radeon RX 500X series today for desktops and notebooks, but these effectively are just re-branded GPUs for OEM builders...

Following this week's Wayland 1.15 launch, there are now patches on the floating list to add Meson build system support to Wayland-Protocols...

The Khronos Group has officially announced the long-awaited open-source availability of their SPIRV-LLVM-Translator that allows the bi-directional translation of SPIR-V and LLVM IR...

Yesterday NVIDIA released their first 396 Linux driver beta in the form of the 396.18 release and its biggest addition is a new Vulkan SPIR-V compiler to replace the compiler that's been hobbled together since the Vulkan 1.0 debut. Here are some fresh NVIDIA Vulkan Linux benchmarks and more on this new SPIR-V compiler.