Phoronix

Last month Oracle rolled out the public beta of VirtualBox 6.0 though didn't include many user-facing changes. They have now rolled out a second beta that does add in a few more features...

For those using the NVIDIA long-lived 410 Linux driver series over the in-beta 415.xx driver series, the 410.78 driver release is out today as the newest stable binary driver build...

The Raspberry Pi Foundation today unveiled the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ ARM SBC that costs just $25 and offers Bluetooth, dual-band 802.11ac WiFi, and a 1.4GHz Cortex-A53 processor...

The newest open-source graphics project out of Google is called Amber and it's a multi-API shader testing framework focused on capturing and communicating of shader bugs...

The long-awaited public beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 is finally available!..

While it comes as no surprise given all the leaks in recent weeks, today AMD officially announced the Radeon RX 590 graphics card as another update to Polaris...

University researchers out of University of California Riverside have published a paper this week detailing vulnerabilities in current GPU architectures making them vulnerable to side-channel attacks akin to Spectre and Meltdown...

For those sticking to the Mesa stable release train, Mesa 18.2.5 is now available ahead of the Mesa 18.3 quarterly feature release due out in the weeks ahead...

With the tests earlier this week of the 16-way AMD EPYC cloud comparison the real standout of those tests across Amazon EC2, Packet, and SkySilk was Packet's bare metal cloud. For just $1.00 USD per hour it's possible to have bare metal access to an AMD EPYC 7401P 24-core / 48-thread server that offers incredible value compared to the other public cloud options for on-demand pricing. That led me to running some more benchmarks of Packet.com's other bare metal cloud options to see how the Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC options compare.

The RadeonSI OpenGL driver offered Vega primitive binning support the past year followed by the RADV Vulkan driver, but it hadn't been enabled by default. Those working on the RADV driver are now planning on unconditionally enabling this Vega performance optimization for up to a few percent performance boost...

It's now been nearly one year since longtime Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst joined Red Hat where one of his big projects has been working on OpenCL support for this open-source NVIDIA driver by bringing up NIR/SPIR-V support and making the necessary improvements for allowing OpenCL kernels to be represented in that IR commonly used by the Mesa drivers. The work still isn't yet in Mesa Git, but Karol this week sent out his newest patches...

PHP developers unanimously approved and already merged support for the new "preloading" concept for this web server language. PHP preloading basically allows loading PHP code that persists as long as the web server is running and that code will always be ready for each subsequent web request, which in some cases will dramatically speed-up the PHP performance on web servers...

AMD is hiring another open-source Linux graphics driver developer with a focus on the Mesa/RadeonSI driver stack...

Intel has published their initial whitepaper on BF16/BFloat16, a new floating point format to be supported by future Intel processors...

AMD has posted their initial set of AMDGPU driver changes slated to go into the future Linux 4.21 kernel by way of DRM-Next...

The recent release of Fedora 29 the long-desired goal of a flicker-free boot experience to the Linux desktop was finally achieved... Well, assuming you are for now using Intel graphics and set a couple extra settings and don't have any quirky hardware. While all of the key components are in place, for Fedora 30 and beyond they will likely be taking care of the "rough edges" and already there is work on a new Plymouth boot theme for pairing with this flicker-free boot process...

Back in August marked the release of DaVinci Resolve 15 with Linux support for this professional-grade video editing solution that also supports visual effects and audio post-production capabilities. That has now been succeeded by DaVinci Resolve 15.2...

The latest software initiative out of the Linux Foundation -- and in particular their Deep Learning Foundation -- is the Acumos AI "Athena" release that tries to make it easier dealing with artificial intelligence apps...

Since last month's Intel Core i9 9900K launch for this eight core / sixteen thread processor we have explored its performance for Linux gaming, how the performance and power efficiency go from the Intel 990X to 9900K, the Spectre mitigation costs, and the Intel Coffeelake Refresh performance across various Linux distributions. For those curious about using the new Intel CPUs and Z390 motherboards with one of the BSD operating systems, I spent a few days over the weekend trying out FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD releases with the i9-9900K and ASUS PRIME Z390-A motherboard combination.

With no recent activity on the NVIDIA-led Unix device memory allocation work that all developer communities could get behind to supersede GBM and EGLStreams for use by Wayland compositors, NVIDIA is working on an EGLStreams back-end for KDE's KWin compositor...

Con Kolivas is out with an updated version of his MuQSS scheduler (based on his former Brain BFS Scheduler work) as well as his "-ck" patch-set against the mainline kernel...

Collabora's Scott Anderson has revived work on the alpha compositing protocol for Wayland, which is based upon the work done by Google on this functionality for Chromium on Wayland...

KDevelop 5.3 is out today as the first major release to this KDE integrated development environment in about one year...

New development releases of GNOME Shell and Mutter are out today in the 3.31 development series along with new 3.30 stable point releases that back-port more fixes for these important pieces to the GNOME desktop...

Many have been curious to learn more about the Blackbird from Raptor Computing Systems as a lower-cost POWER9, open-source hardware alternative to their higher-end Talos II hardware that we've been recently benchmarking. The possible price has been revealed...

Wine 4.0 should be out in early 2019 as the next major stable release of this increasingly used software for running Windows games and applications on Linux and other operating systems. For those not riding the bi-weekly development releases that lead up to the eventual Wine 4.0, Wine 3.0.4 is coming in the days ahead as the latest stable point revision...

This past week was an ISO C++ committee meeting in San Diego, which happened to be their largest meeting ever, and they managed to accomplish a lot in drafting more planned changes around the C++20 language update...

The "AMDGPU" Radeon Linux kernel graphics driver is preparing support for "Adaptive Backlight Management" as a backlight power-savings feature for laptops...

Debian packages have supported the concept of vendor-specific patches whereby when DPKG unpacks a source package on different operating systems / distributions (such as Debian vs. Ubuntu), different patches could be selectively applied. Ubuntu is one of the main benefactors of this feature while effective immediately these vendor-specific patches to source packages will be treated as a bug and will be unpermitted following the Debian 10 "Buster" release...

With GCC 9 embarking upon its third stage of development where the focus ships to working on bug/regression fixes in preparation for releasing the GCC 9.1 stable compiler likely around the end of Q1'2019, here is a fresh look at the GCC 9 performance with its latest development code as of this week compared to GCC 8.2.0 stable while using an Intel Core i9 7980XE test system running Ubuntu Linux. For good measure are also fresh results from LLVM Clang 7.0 stable as well as LLVM Clang 8.0 SVN for the latest development state of that competing C/C++ open-source compiler.

Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco Dingo" development is now officially underway...

This morning Intel officially announced the Core i9 9980XE as the refreshed Skylake-X part succeeding the Core i9 7980XE...

The latest open-source project out of Microsoft under an MIT license is Shader Conductor, which allows for cross-compiling HLSL to other languages -- including GLSL for OpenGL/Vulkan usage...

Being well into the Mesa 18.3 feature freeze and that quarterly update to these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers due out in about two weeks, here is a look at all of the new features and changes you can expect to find with this big update...

It was just yesterday that the AMD Zen L3 thread pinning was dropped from Mesa due to that optimization not panning out as intended for benefiting the new AMD processors with the open-source Linux graphics driver stack. Lead Mesa hacker Marek Olšák is already out with a new Zen tuning implementation that may deliver on the original optimization goal...

If you are looking for a new Linux distribution to experiment with, Void Linux is one of the interesting ones that is an original creation and community driven that often doesn't receive the attention it deserves. Void Linux is built off its BSD-licensed XBPS packaging system, is a rolling-release platform, uses runit as the init system instead of systemd, opts for LibreSSL in place of OpenSSL, optional musl libc usage, and has a wealth of other changes...

The latest feature on deck for the long overdue Xfce 4.14 desktop update is support for the RandR primary display/output functionality...

Jonas Ã…dahl of Red Hat today released a new version of Wayland-Protocols, the collection of stable and unstable protocols for extending Wayland functionality...

It was just a few months back that the Mesa/RadeonSI open-source AMD Linux driver stack received Zen tuning for that CPU microarchitecture's characteristics. But now AMD's Marek Olšák is going back to the drawing board to work on a new approach for Zen tuning...

Landing just in time with the GCC 9 branching being imminent is ARMv8.5-A support in the GNU Compiler Collection's ARM64/AArch64 back-end...

With Feral Interactive preparing to release Total War: WARHAMMER II for Linux and macOS later this month, today they announced the system requirements for this latest native game port...

With last week Amazon Web Services rolling out AMD EPYC cloud instances to EC2, I figured it would be an interesting time for a fresh benchmark look at how the AMD Linux cloud performance compares from some of the popular cloud providers. For this article are sixteen different instances benchmarked while looking at the raw performance as well as the value on each instance type relative to the benchmark performance and time consumed for the on-demand spot instancing. EPYC instances were tested from Amazon EC2, Packet.com, and SkySilk.

Vulkan 1.1.92 is out today to mark the newest specification update to this high-performance graphics/compute API...

While Microsoft is self-proclaimed to love Linux, their common and very basic Microsoft OEM Mouse has not loved the Linux kernel or vice-versa... The Linux kernel HID code is finally getting a quirk fix to deal with the Microsoft OEM mouse as it would disconnect every minute when running at run-levels one or three...

Back in September Code Sourcery / Mentor Graphics posted their new Radeon GCN port for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). Two months later this port is still being worked on but not yet ready for mainline...

As new system calls get added to the Linux kernel, these syscalls generally get added to Glibc (and other libc libraries) for developers to make easy use of them from their applications. But as Glibc doesn't provide 1:1 coverage of system calls, sometimes is delayed in their support for new calls, and other factors, there is a discussion about providing an official Linux system wrapper library that could potentially live as part of the kernel source tree...

In the nearly one year that the AMDVLK official Vulkan driver has been open-source there hasn't been any "releases" but rather new code drops on a weekly basis that is pushed out of their internal development repositories. But surprisingly this morning is now a v2018.4.1 release tag for this open-source AMD Vulkan Linux driver...

The Linux kernel will likely be doing away with EXOFS, a file-system that had been around since the Linux 2.6.30 days...

Linus Torvalds put out the second weekly test release of the Linux 4.20 kernel and all-around it's been a normal week past the merge window...

Over the past year we have looked extensively at the performance impact of Spectre mitigations on x86_64 CPUs but now with having the Raptor Talos II in our labs, here are some benchmarks to see the performance impact of IBM's varying levels of Spectre mitigation for POWER9.