Phoronix

For those of you with a Radeon GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" GPU, the RADV Vulkan driver support for these first Graphics Core Next graphics processors continues to be improved...

The AMD developers working on their official, cross-platform "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver code have just pushed out another batch of changes to their open-source code repository...

Adriaan de Groot continues working on improving the KDE stack for FreeBSD. The moment is finally near where KDE Plasma 5 along with the modern KDE Applications stack should soon be available via the FreeBSD Ports collection...

The X.Org Foundation is calling on student developers to consider applying for this year's Google Summer of Code where you could be working on exciting projects for Nouveau, Mesa, Wayland, and more while gaining valuable work experience and earning a nice stipend...

Shortly after announcing the Wayland 1.15 Alpha release on Monday, Samsung's Derek Foreman did the adjoining alpha release of the Weston 4.0 reference compositor...

Two years after unveiling Qt Automotive Suite 1.0 for designing digital cockpits for the ever increasing number of screens within cars, The Qt Company has today announced Qt Automotive Suite 2.0...

It's been just one week since the Mesa 17.3.5 debut while today it's been succeeded by v17.3.6 as what's being advertised as an emergency release...

The Godot Game Engine is one of the few projects already announcing a change in their plans following this morning's announcement of better and open-source Vulkan support on macOS/iOS...

DC patch wrangler Harry Wentland of AMD has sent out the 33 latest patches for the AMDGPU display code stack...

Derek Foreman of Samsung's Open-Source Group has announced the alpha release of Wayland 1.15...

The in-development Linux 4.16 kernel has already received a few rounds of updates for the mitigation work on the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities while more is on the way...

Samsung OSG developer Mike Blumenkrantz is proposing a new Wayland protocol for dealing with session management behavior...

Two years and a few days since the Vulkan 1.0 release is now marked by a new significant milestone for this cross-platform graphics/compute API... It's not a new Vulkan release today, but Vulkan is now available on Apple's iOS and macOS platforms! Here are the details with the embargo just expiring on Vulkan now on macOS/iOS but still without the official support from Apple.

There has been some interesting open-source GPU compute happenings in the works this year including SPIR-V support for Gallium3D Clover and Nouveau NIR support along with associated Mesa changes. Rob Clark of Red Hat and lead developer on the Freedreno driver has also jumped on board these recent Mesa compute initiatives...

The third release candidate is available today of LLVM 6.0 and its associated components like Clang, Compiler-RT, libc++, LLDB, etc...

Jolla is talking up Sailfish OS 3.0 this week at the Embedded World conference as the "next-generation of the independent mobile operating system" and plans to ship it this calendar year...

While Meson+Ninja remains all the hype these days when it comes to open-source build systems, the GNU build system isn't going away any time soon and a key component of that was just updated, Automake 1.16...

Linus Torvalds released Linux 4.16-rc3 on Sunday night and overall it was another routine update towards stabilizing the Linux 4.16 kernel...

Oracle's current Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) release is making use of Linux 4.1 that is definitely showing its age... Fortunately, for those using this Oracle spin of the Linux kernel on their RHEL-clone Oracle Linux have UEK Release 5 in the pipe that is transitioning to Linux 4.14 LTS...

One of the nice elements of KDE Plasma 5.12 is that it starts up faster, particularly when running on Wayland, but with Plasma 5.13 it's looking like it will be an even faster experience getting to the Plasma desktop...

With the upcoming Linux 4.17 kernel cycle there is initial support for Radeon Wattman with the AMDGPU kernel driver and modern Radeon graphics processors. "Automan" is now the latest being worked on for Vega GPUs...

LLVM 6 is running a few days behind scheduled for its release along with Clang 6 for the C/C++ compiler, but this latest big update to this open-source compiler stack should still be on the ways in the days ahead...

A premium member this week had requested some benchmarks of openSUSE Tumbleweed when looking at the performance of KDE Plasma vs. GNOME Shell in some open-source graphics/gaming tests while also looking at the Wayland vs. X.Org Server performance...

The Sun4i DRM driver work has been progressing a lot since its mainline introduction two years ago with Linux 4.7. With the Linux 4.17 cycle, the A83T SoC will have initial HDMI output support...

Back in December I wrote about passively cooling a Radeon RX 480 by means of the after-market Accelero S3 passive cooler. That passive GPU cooler worked well but under demanding loads did get a bit hot, but what I came to realize after buying that cooler is the height requirements exceeded that of a 4U rackmount chassis... So recently I decided to switch to using the Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo III...

Earlier this month AMD developers landed VCN-powered video encode support for the HEVC main format while now this has come to the UVD engine so it will work with pre-Raven GPUs...

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus makes use of the Vulkan graphics API on the id Tech 6 engine but sadly remains Windows-only aside from the consoles. While it runs with Wine, there are some bugs when using the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver but fortunately one of Valve's Linux developers is working on some improvements...

Earlier this week I delivered a number of benchmarks comparing Amazon EC2 instances to bare metal Intel/AMD systems. Due to interest from that, here is a larger selection of cloud instance types from the leading public clouds of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine.

Noralf Trønnes has spent the past few months working on generic FBDEV emulation for Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers and this week he volleyed his third revision of these patches, which now includes a new in-kernel API along with some clients like a bootsplash system, VT console, and fbdev implementation...

Released at the beginning of February was Glibc 2.27 and it's comprised of a lot of new features and performance improvements. But what's the best of Glibc 2.27?..

This last week marked two years since the debut of Vulkan 1.0, you can see our our original launch article. My overworked memory missed realizing it by a few days, but it's been a pretty miraculous two years for this high-performance graphics and compute API...

Linux developers and enthusiasts on x86_64 have long enjoyed the ability to use the -march=native option for having the GCC compiler attempt to auto-detect the CPU and set the appropriate microarchitecture flags. That support is finally being offered up for ARM with GCC 8...

University student Andrew Comminos wasn't too familiar with Direct3D or Wine development, but out of a desire for better World of Warcraft performance on Linux, he figured out the code-base and a means of enhancing the WineD3D code...

AMD's Alex Deucher today sent in the first pull request to DRM-Next of AMDGPU (and Radeon) DRM driver feature material that will in turn be merged with the Linux 4.17 kernel down the road. There's some fun features for AMDGPU users coming with this next kernel!..

Going back to last October, Marek of AMD's open-source driver team has been working on ARB_compatibility support for Mesa with a focus on RadeonSI/Gallium3D. Today that work was finally merged...

With Mir focusing on Wayland compatibility now, toolkits and other software making direct use of Mir's APIs can begin making use of any existing Wayland back-end instead. GTK4 drops the Mir back-end since the same can be achieved with the Wayland compatibility and now SDL is now making a similar move...

We've known that Pengutronix developers had been working on i.MX8M / GC7000 graphics support within their Etnaviv open-source driver stack from initial patches posted in January. Those patches back at the start of the year were for the DRM kernel driver, but it turns out they have already got basic 3D acceleration working...

With having around a Windows 10 installation this week for the latest Windows 10 WSL vs. Linux benchmarking, I also carried out some fresh benchmarks of the Radeon gaming performance between Windows 10 and Ubuntu Linux using the very latest drivers on each platform. This time around a Radeon RX 580 and RX Vega 64 were used for this benchmarking.

The glxinfo utility is handy for Linux users in checking on their OpenGL driver in use by their system and related information. But it's not often that glxinfo itself gets updated, except that changed today with the release of mesa-demos-8.4.0 as the package providing this information utility...

After sitting in Bionic-Proposed the past week, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS has officially moved from the Artful Aardvark's Linux 4.13 kernel to now running on Linux 4.15...

I was surprised to learn that up until this week, Mir's initial Wayland support didn't allow for windows of Wayland clients to be moved around the screen...

Igalia's Jose Maria Casanova Crespo sent out a set of patches today for fixes that allow for the enabling of the VK_KHR_16bit_storage extension within Intel's ANV Vulkan driver...

Now that the dust is beginning to settle around the Meltdown and Spectre mitigation techniques on the major operating systems, in the weeks and months ahead we are likely to see more performance optimizations come to help offset the performance penalties incurred by mitigations like kernel page table isolation (KPTI) and Retpolines. This week a new patch series was published that may help with KPTI performance...

A year and a half ago I wrote about a start-up working on dynamically-tuned, self-optimizing Linux servers. That company is now known as Concertio and they just launched their "AI powered" toolkit for IT administrators and performance engineers to optimize their server performance...

Nix 2.0 is now available as the latest major update to this functional package manager most commonly associated with the NixOS Linux distribution...

Purism has released updated Coreboot images for their Librem 13 v2 and Librem 15 v3 laptops...

Back in December was our most recent round of Windows Subsystem for Linux benchmarking with Windows 10 while since then both Linux and Windows have received new stable updates, most notably for mitigating the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities. For your viewing pleasure today are some fresh benchmarks looking at the Windows 10 WSL performance against Linux using the latest updates as of this week while also running some comparison tests too against Docker on Windows and Oracle VM VirtualBox.

It's been a busy past week for open-source GPU compute with Intel opening up their new NEO OpenCL stack, Karol Herbst at Red Hat posting the latest on Nouveau NIR support for SPIR-V compute, and now longtime Nouveau contributor Pierre Moreau has presented his latest for SPIR-V Clover support...

Besides bringing Ubuntu Touch to new mobile devices, the UBports team has also managed to continue their community-driven work on advancing the Unity 8 convergence desktop after Canonical abandoned work on it last year. They now have Unity 8 working on top of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS...

NVIDIA developer Thierry Reding on Wednesday posted a series of patches for providing NVIDIA Tegra support in Mesa in conjunction with the Nouveau DRM driver...