Phoronix

Support for Memory Protection Keys (a.k.a. PKU / PKEYs) was finished up this year in the Linux kernel, glibc, and related components. This memory protection feature premiered with Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs and is said to be coming to future desktop CPUs, but it doesn't look like that's happening for the Cannonlake or Icelake generations...

The first point release to NetBSD 7.1 is now available as this BSD operating system ends out 2017...

A new Btrfs file-system kernel driver patch is now available to improve its RAID1/RAID10 read performance, particularly for SSDs...

Back on Christmas Eve I posted our initial AMDVLK Radeon Linux driver benchmarks for this newly open-sourced official Radeon Vulkan driver. Complementing those earlier Vulkan Linux gaming numbers are some more performance metrics for AMDVLK compared to the Mesa-based RADV driver and then the closed-source AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan driver.

A week ago Ubuntu 17.10's ISO was pulled due to a show-stopping laptop bug whereby some UEFI-enabled laptops from multiple vendors were running into "BIOS corruption" where BIOS settings could no longer be changed, USB booting becoming non-functional, and similar UEFI-related issues. Fortunately, a fixed kernel is now available and some affected users are reporting a successful workaround for making their laptops full-functioning once again...

LLVM release manager Hans Wennborg is moving ahead with plans to branch the LLVM 6.0 code and its components earlier than anticipated...

With yesterday having looked at the AMD/Radeon popular Linux/open-source achievements of the year, the tables have turned to now look at the Intel Linux/FLOSS activity...

While Unigine Engine 2 has yet to be picked up by any major games besides Dual Universe, this highly advanced game engine continues advancing and its effort for industrial simulators appears to be paying off as well. Unigine Corp is ending out 2017 by having released Unigine 2.6.1...

This year on Phoronix were more than 290 news articles on Phoronix about the Vulkan graphics API, not counting our dozens of Vulkan benchmarking articles, etc. Here's a look at the most popular Vulkan moments of the year...

LLVM's Clang compiler support for the Intel Icelake processors that succeed Cannonlake is getting into better shape ahead of the LLVM/Clang 6.0 feature freeze in January...

The BlueZ Linux Bluetooth stack is out with a new feature update before ending out the year...

RADV Vulkan driver co-founder David Airlie has begun digging through AMD's newly-opened AMDVLK official Vulkan driver in order to gain some hindsight and port some fixes/changes to this unofficial Mesa-based open-source Vulkan driver...

This year on Phoronix there has been more than 3,700 original Linux/FLOSS news posts, benchmarks, hardware reviews and more. Here's how that compares to prior years...

If you happen to have an older Sandy Bridge era Intel NUC, it may now supported by mainline Coreboot...

Last week we reported on Ubuntu maker Canonical's financial performance for FY2017 with a $122M turnover and nearly 600 employees after spotting the latest data. For those wondering how that compares to previous years, here is more of the past year's performance...

LLVM had another successful year with in 2017 delivering the big LLVM 5.0 update and finishing up development of LLVM 6.0 right now while this open-source compiler stack continues to be adopted by new and interesting use-cases from tieing in LLVM IR to a wide variety of projects to the infrastructure being used heavily now by graphics drivers and other interesting purposes...

One of the common test requests to come in for our end-of-year benchmarking has been a fresh look at the Radeon GPU performance incorporating some both old and new GPUs to see the current state of the open-source driver stack. Tests were done from a Radeon HD 5830 on the Radeon+R600g driver stack to the RX Vega 64 on AMDGPU+RadeonSI, while using the Linux 4.15-rc5 kernel paired with Mesa 17.4-dev.

With the Christmas weekend release of the MPlayer-forked MPV Player 0.28, it's the first video player we are aware of supporting the Vulkan graphics API for video presentation. This release has just basic Vulkan support but it will be much better in the next release...

The OpenChrome DRM driver continues to largely be developed by one community contributor left standing for supporting VIA x86 graphics on the Linux desktop. These VIA graphics chipsets haven't been too common in about a decade, but OpenChrome continues persevering with working to deliver a full-functioning, open-source driver that VIA itself was never able to produce...

Here's a look at our most-viewed original AMD/Radeon Linux and open-source news stories of 2017...

Ben Skeggs of Red Hat has been working on a few Nouveau DRM changes for the next kernel cycle...

The FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report covering work done in the third quarter has now been published...

The MPlayer-forked MPV Player is out with a new feature release that presents several interesting features...

If you are running Fedora Rawhide (their daily/development packages) and using an Intel mobile chipset, be forewarned that they are enabling the SATA link power change that runs the slight risk of potentially causing disk corruption...

For those with extra time this holiday week, AMD recently published their latest patch queue of DC "display code" updates...

VLC lead developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf has released the big VLC 3.0-RC3 update for Christmas...

Making the rounds on the Internet this holiday weekend is an updated NVIDIA GeForce software license agreement prohibiting the use of their drivers in data-center deployments for consumer GPUs...

Well known open-source AMD driver developer Marek Olšák has taken to some Christmas day hacking on Mesa with a significant performance improvement for AMD APU owners and those who care about glxgears...

Rolling out as beta this Christmas is Debian Salsa...

Rob Clark of the Freedreno project has landed his context priority patches in Mesa that originate from this past October...

More AMDKFD changes are being queued for the upcoming Linux 4.16 kernel merge window with this being the kernel HSA driver for ROCm support, etc...

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and we wish you all the best for any and all holidays you may be celebrating as 2017 draws to a close...

If you find yourself with some extra time this holiday season and want to dive into a classic codebase on your modern Linux desktop, KDE developer Helio Castro has been working on his porting skills by porting KDE 2.2.2 and Qt2 to work on modern Linux systems...

With AMD's release on Friday of the long-awaited open-source "AMDVLK" Radeon Vulkan driver here are our initial benchmarks of this official Radeon open-source Vulkan driver compared to the unofficial RADV Mesa-based Vulkan driver and the similar AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 closed-source Vulkan driver.

Slax 9.3 is now available as the latest feature release for this long-time Linux distribution that focuses on delivering a lightweight yet featureful Linux desktop experience...

The long-awaited GIMP 2.10 stable update should indeed materialize in 2018 with the release now being under a tentative string freeze...

Darktable 2.4 is now available as the latest major release for this widely-acclaimed open-source RAW photography software...

The VK9 project that's been working on getting the Direct3D 9 API implemented on top of Vulkan has reached its self-assigned 23rd milestone...

As an early Christmas gift for those wanting to do some kernel testing this weekend, Linus Torvalds has done the release of Linux 4.15-rc5 a little bit early...

The Godot 3.0 game engine is preparing to ship early next year...

Andres Rodriguez, one of Valve's Linux GPU driver developers, has sent out his latest 22 patches for enabling semaphores support (GL_EXT_semaphore) within the RadeonSI driver...

Developers behind the Blender 3D modeling software have shared a "Christmas update" about their ongoing work towards Blender 2.8 as the next major release for this open-source, cross-platform modeling software...

For those still riding the older Mesa 17.2 series rather than the current Mesa 17.3 series that saw its v17.3.1 update this week, v17.2.8 is now available...

Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers have sent in their last planned set of feature changes for DRM-Next that in turn is targeting the Linux 4.16 kernel merge window...

Collabora's latest Wayland enablement effort is on getting the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) running nicely under Wayland with the Mus/Ozone infrastructure...

There's an active discussion this week about making Wayland support available by default on FreeBSD...

Keith Packard working under contract for Valve on improving the VR HMD / SteamVR support for the Linux display stack has sent out his latest - near final - patches for the RandR 1.6 additions...

The third weekly release candidate to next month's Wine 3.0 is now available for testing...

When Canonical announced they would be dropping their Unity 8 plans but that Mir would still be maintained, their reason at the time for maintaining it were "Internet of Things" (IoT) use-cases. While not yet clear, Canonical is privately working on Mir IoT plans for 2018...

For those wondering how the Vulkan vs. OpenGL performance is for various Linux games as we near the end of 2017, here are some test results from the benchmark-friendly Linux games that offer both OpenGL and Vulkan renderers. Tests were done with two Radeon graphics cards and two NVIDIA graphics cards using the latest available Linux GPU drivers.