Phoronix

Desktop-based instant messaging clients are becoming increasingly rare in the age of mobile apps and browser-based alternatives, but Pidgin formerly known as GAIM continues moving along albeit slowly. Recently the Pidgin 2.13.0 release happened without much attention...

Greg Kroah-Hartman's char/misc pull this week included a fair amount of Thunderbolt support improvements for the forthcoming Linux 4.17 kernel...

The Forge, a cross-platform rendering framework developed by Confetti, a graphics research think-tank and consulting company, has rolled out Linux and Vulkan support...

The open-source Haiku operating system that is still striving for compatibility with BeOS had another busy month...

Today was another weekly Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo). We had been looking forward to this meeting for a decision on the GNOME auto-suspend by default behavior but there wasn't a quorum and that topic was then diverted until next week. But there were also early Fedora 29 features approved this week...

With plans to officially ship KDE Applications 18.04 later this month, the release candidate is out today for this collection of K* applications...

Vulkan 1.1.72 is now available, which for simple terms is really "Vulkan 1.1.2" except for the patch number having not been reset when Vulkan 1.1 was launched last month...

A number of improvements to Coreboot were merged to Git master overnight...

The final beta release of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" is now ready for testing ahead of the official launch expected at the end of April...

A long available tool has been AMD's ROCm HIP that allows converting CUDA code to portable C++ code that in turn can be executed on Radeon GPUs. There is now work on getting the upstream LLVM Clang compiler's CUDA toolchain support to also support HIP...

There's a lot of ARM work that has built up for the Linux 4.17 development cycle...

DXVK 0.41 is now available as the library for Wine users to have Direct3D 11 implemented over Vulkan for generally allowing higher performance than Wine's own D3D11-over-OpenGL layer...

From several of the pull requests covered on Phoronix this week for the in-progress Linux 4.17 kernel, there are many areas seeing improved hardware/device support with this next kernel upgrade, including the input drivers...

While Ubuntu developers have decided to no longer enable auto-suspend by default as set with the new GNOME 3.28 desktop when running on AC power, Fedora developers are still debating the issue...

After being at Canonical for a decade (aside from a brief stint at Gazzang), Dustin Kirkland who most recently served as the company's VP of Product, is joining Google...

When it comes to our AMD EPYC Linux testing the past number of months, one of the most common test requests was to test the Gigabyte MZ31-AR0 motherboard, which is more workstation oriented than traditional server with plenty of PCI Express slots for suiting multiple graphics cards, etc. Over the past month I have been testing out this single-socket AMD EPYC motherboard and overall it has worked out fairly well.

The HID subsystem updates have been submitted for the Linux 4.17 merge window and that set of driver updates includes a variety of new product support...

NVIDIA has released a new version of their Video Codec SDK that serves as CUDA-based, cross-platform video encode and decode functionality that ultimately succeeds their VDPAU Linux video decode stack for GPU video coding needs...

For fans of the NixOS Linux distribution that makes use of the Nix package manager, version 18.03 "Impala" is now available...

The explicitly flash-focused F2FS file-system is the latest noteworthy pull request on its way to the mainline Linux 4.17 kernel...

Longtime Linux sound system maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE has sent in his album of updates for the Linux 4.17 kernel...

Alyssa Rosenzweig who has been leading the charge recently on the open-source Mali T700 GPU driver that was called "Chai" but has been renamed to "Panfrost" is now pursuing a "half-way driver" approach to testing their knowledge of the hardware's command stream...

A few days back we covered the heated exchange on the kernel mailing list over the path being pursued by the Linux kernel "lockdown" patches. Those back and forth messages between Google's Matthew Garrett and Linus Torvalds have now spilled over into a blog post by Garrett...

If you have been a Phoronix reader for any decent amount of time, you have likely seen how well Intel's Clear Linux distribution continues to run in our performance comparisons against other distributions. The developers behind this Linux distribution have begun a new blog series on "behind the magic" for some of the areas they are making use of for maximizing the out-of-the-box Linux performance...

While the Linux 4.17 kernel is getting much larger in some areas like the sizable additions to DRM this cycle, when it comes to the kernel's staging area where new/experimental code gets vetted before being officially mainline, it's lost tens of thousands of lines of code this cycle...

The initial RISC-V architecture support landed in Linux 4.15 and now this open-source, royalty-free processor ISA is seeing further improvements with the Linux 4.17 cycle...

Intel published new ISA documentation today where the "Tremont" architecture is a major addition to this documentation update...

Given the booming popularity of Linux containers, it's little surprise but unfortunate that Linux file-systems are having to protect against specially-crafted file-system images by malicious actors looking to exploit vulnerabilities in the code...

For several days we've had remote access to one of the brand new Raptor Talos II Workstations that is powered by POWER9 processors and open-source down through the firmware. For those curious how these latest POWER processors compare to AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon processors, here are some benchmarks comparing against of the few other systems in house while all testing was done from Debian GNU/Linux.

The Mesa-based RADV Vulkan driver has landed initial support for out-of-rasterization support, but it's currently disabled by default...

The Linux 4.17 kernel is bringing further improvements to USB Type-C support...

The latest batch of AMDGPU DC display code patches were posted last night on the mailing list. These 32 patches touching around three thousand lines of code have more fixes and also work on the FreeSync module...

Last week David Airlie sent in the big DRM feature update for Linux 4.17 prior to going on holiday. For those wondering whether there was going to be any drama with the DRM updates increasing the size of the Linux kernel by another one hundred thousand lines of code, in large part due to Vega 12 header additions, Linus pulled it in without any fuss...

With Linux suspend/resume support still sometimes being problematic, it's great to hear Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has a team working on continuing to improve the Linux support for this power-saving functionality...

The Linux 4.17 kernel cycle is in full swing with many large pull requests pending...

While there was a lot of hoopla recently about Valve removing the "Steam Machines" link from their main navigation on their website, Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais has written a public post to reaffirm the company's commitment to Linux and SteamOS...

The kernel lockdown feature further restricts access to the kernel by user-space with what can be accessed or modified, including different /dev points, ACPI restrictions, not allowing unsigned modules, and various other restrictions in the name of greater security. Pairing that with UEFI SecureBoot unconditionally is meeting some resistance by Linus Torvalds...

Last month I wrote how Ubuntu 18.04 began enabling "automatic suspend" by default on new installations where after 20 minutes systems were suspending without notice and in some cases still causing issues trying to resume with modern x86 hardware in 2018... Fortunately, Ubuntu developers are reverting that behavior when on AC power...

For those waiting until v18.0.1 before upgrading to the Mesa 18.0 series, Mesa 17.3.8 is now available as the latest release off this stable series from the end of 2017...

David Sterba sent in the Btrfs file-system updates today for the Linux 4.17 kernel merge window...

Mozilla has today announced Firefox Reality as "a new kind of web browser that has been designed from the ground up to work on stand-alone virtual and augmented reality (or mixed reality) headsets."..

The beta of the much anticipated Fedora 28 beta release is now available for testing...

As part of the remote testing of the Raptor Talos II Workstation that is comprised of fully free software down to the firmware and powered by high-end POWER9 processors, over Easter weekend I carried out some GCC vs. Clang benchmarks...

With the Linux 4.17 kernel the s390 architecture updates include more mitigation work around the Spectre Variant One and Two vulnerabilities...

It's been just about twenty-four hours that Linus Torvalds has been accepting new material for the Linux 4.17 mainline kernel and it's looking indeed like it will be another very busy kernel update...

It's roughly once a week that AMD updates their external and public facing AMDVLK/PAL source tree for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver while following last week's significant update with Wayland support and more, they have quickly issued another update to this RADV driver alternative...

GnuCash 3.0 is now available for those looking for a free and open-source accounting program with a focus on personal and small business accounting...

Darrick Wong has submitted the XFS file-system updates targeting the Linux 4.17 kernel. It's a bit lighter than 4.15 and 4.16 that brought "great scads of new stuff", but there still is a fair amount of feature work taking place...

RadeonSI Gallium3D has caught up to the fellow Intel i965 and Nouveau NVC0 drivers in supporting the OpenGL KHR_blend_equation_advanced extension...

Not only is there a new X.Org Server 1.20 release candidate today but the folks managing Wayland/Weston development have today announced the first release candidates of Wayland 1.15 and the Weston 4.0 reference compositor...