Phoronix

While VKD3D 1.0 is out today for Direct3D 12 mapped over Vulkan, the DXVK project for running Direct3D 11 over Vulkan is also out with a new release today...

The Wine project has announced the release of VKD3D 1.0, the first official release of this Direct3D 12 over Vulkan layer primarily developed at CodeWeavers. VKD3D is the approach Wine is pursuing for getting Direct3D 12 games from Windows working on Wine under Linux or also under macOS when paired with MoltenVK...

For those wanting to use the open-source ROCm Radeon Open Compute stack on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, it will be supported by the next release...

Given recent improvements to AMD Zen (znver1) with LLVM, the new AMD AOCC 1.2 compiler release, and GCC 8.1 having premiered just weeks ago, here is a fresh look at the performance of six different C/C++ code compilers when testing the performance of the resulting binaries on an AMD Threadripper 1950X system.

Adding to the list of changes coming to Linux 4.18 are updates to CPUFreq's "Schedutil" CPU frequency scaling governor...

While DragonFlyBSD 5.3/5.4 is exciting on the performance front for those making use of the stable DragonFly operating system releases, DragonFlyBSD 5.2.1 is available this week...

While Mesa 18.1 just officially shipped last week, Mesa 18.2 as next quarter's open-source 3D OpenGL/Vulkan graphics driver stack update is scheduled for release in mid-August...

There's a suggestion/proposal to disable the Spectre Variant Two and Meltdown mitigation by default with the Linux kernel for in-order CPUs...

Just over one month after there were 2,000 Vulkan-mentioning projects on GitHub, the 2,100 project milestone has been breached...

PostgreSQL 11 is the next major feature release of this open-source database SQL server due out later in 2018. While it's not out yet, their release notes were recently updated for providing an overview of what's coming as part of this next major update...

Yesterday the latest Spectre vulnerability was disclosed as Spectre Variant 4 also known as "Speculative Store Bypass" as well as the less talked about Spectre Variant 3A "Rogue System Register Read". Here are my initial tests of a patched Linux kernel on AMD hardware for Spectre V4.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has today released the Linux 4.9.102, 4.14.43, and 4.16.11 kernels. Most notable about these stable release updates is Spectre Variant Four mitigation...

Back in December was the announcement of Intel's Clear Containers being spun into a new project called Kata Containers in collaboration with other organizations. Kata Containers has now reached their version 1.0 milestone...

Following the Intel/AMD Spectre Variant 4 mitigation landing yesterday with "Speculative Store Bypass Disable" (SSBD) and then the POWER CPU mitigation landing today, ARM developers have posted their set of patches for 64-bit ARM CPUs to mitigate against this latest Spectre vulnerability around speculative execution...

Thanks to the work done by Christoph Haag on a SteamVR plug-in for OpenHMD, the PlayStation VR (PSVR) head-mounted display is working out for handling Steam VR Linux games like Dota 2...

FLAC and Ogg now have faster audio encoding and decoding capabilities thanks to recent code improvements...

The developers working on the combined Razor-qt and LXDE desktop effort, LXQt, have rolled out their newest feature release...

The Qt Company has managed to release Qt 5.11 one week ahead of schedule compared to its original road-map, which is quite a feat considering some of the past Qt5 release delays. Beyond that, Qt 5.11.0 is offering a big slab of improvements...

Back in February the folks at Feral Interactive announced Thrones of Britannia would be coming to Linux, the latest in the Total War game franchise. They have confirmed today the Linux port will be out in June...

Within the libinput world, the 1.11 development cycle has been going on long with Libinput 1.10 having debuted in January. But this long development cycle is bringing with it many changes...

Following yesterday's public disclosure of Spectre Variant Four, a.k.a. Speculative Store Bypass, the Intel/AMD mitigation work immediately landed while overnight the POWER CPU patch landed...

Purism has published their nearly final specifications on their limited-run Librem 5 Dev Kit. The cutoff for ordering a developer kit is next week as they are placing their hardware order and planning on only this single, limited run of the developer kit prior to the phones becoming available next year...

If you have been experiencing rendering issues with the Vulkan-over-Direct3D "DXVK" layer while playing games on Wine and are using the RADV Vulkan driver, you may want to upgrade to the latest Git...

Spectre Variants 3A and 4 are now public as the newest speculative execution vulnerabilities affecting many CPUs and with the mitigations also expected to affect performance. Initial Linux kernel patches are available...

Lennart Poettering has announced the call for presentations of this year's All Systems Go! conference, what was born out of the earlier systemd.conf conference...

Given that DragonFlyBSD recently landed some SMP performance improvements and other performance optimizations in its kernel for 5.3-DEVELOPMENT but as well finished tidying up its Spectre mitigation, this weekend I spent some time running some benchmarks on DragonFlyBSD 5.2 and 5.3-DEVELOPMENT to see how the performance has shifted for an Intel Xeon system.

There still are several weeks to go until the Linux 4.17 kernel will be officially released and for that to initiate the Linux 4.18 merge window, but we already know some of the features coming to this next kernel cycle as well as an idea for some other work that may potentially land...

With the recently minted Linux 4.17 kernel there was initial USB Audio Class 3.0 support for this audio-over-USB specification while with Linux 4.18 that UA3 support will be further enhanced...

With the Linux benchmarks of the Ryzen 7 2700 last week I included a few Linux gaming benchmarks, but for those evaluating CPU options for your next Intel/AMD Linux gaming system upgrade, here is a much more thorough set of benchmarks from a wide variety of OpenGL and Vulkan powered Linux games. The Ryzen 7 2700, Ryzen 7 2700X, and Core i7 8700K processors were tested for this Ubuntu gaming comparison while testing with both a Radeon RX Vega 64 and GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.

With development on Phoronix Test Suite 8.0 wrapping up for release in the coming weeks, here is a recap of some of the prominent changes for this huge update to our open-source, cross-platform benchmarking software...

Taking place last week in Oxford, UK was IWOCL 2018: the International Workshop on OpenCL. For those that couldn't make this compute conference, session videos have begun appearing online...

Linux 4.17 is up to its sixth weekly release candidate ahead of the official release expected by mid-June...

Just shy of one month since the long-awaited debut of GIMP 2.10, the first stable point release is now available...

Anyone happening to have an ATI Mach 64 graphics card from the mid-90's or a 3Dfx-competitor Rendition graphics card also from the 90's can now enjoy the benefits of the recently released X.Org Server 1.20...

Last month AMD released the AOCC 1.2 compiler for Zen systems. This updated version of their branched LLVM/Clang compiler with extra patches/optimizations for Zen CPUs was re-based to the LLVM/Clang 6.0 code-base while also adding in experimental FLANG support for Fortran compilation and various other unlisted changes to their "znver1" patch-set. Here's a look at how the performance compares with AOCC 1.2 to LLVM Clang 6.0 and GCC 7/8 C/C++ compilers.

The Linux 4.18 kernel will feature the initial Steam Controller kernel driver that works without having to use the Steam client or using third-party user-space applications like the SC-Controller application...

The second beta release of FreeBSD 11.2 is now available for weekend testing...

Ensuring your CPU microcode is kept up-to-date for Zen processors is now a little bit easier with the microcode files being added to the linux-firmware.git collection...

For those aspiring Vulkan programmers, the Vulkan experts at LunarG have published a tutorial to learn how to make use of the newest debug extension, VK_EXT_debug_utils...

When it comes to open-source ARM Mali graphics driver efforts there has been the Panfrost driver targeting the Mali T700 series that has occupied much of the limelight recently, but there has been a separate effort still working on open-source driver support for the older 400/450 series...

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has been working on support for 32-bit GPU pointers for user SGPRs as his latest performance enhancement for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver...

Depending upon the motherboard and other factors, the Raven Ridge Linux support has been a bit of a mess since its February launch. Fortunately, with time various Linux driver fixes have landed for improving the stability and performance of these APUs with Zen CPU cores and Vega graphics. During my recent testing of the AMD Ryzen 5 2400G, it was completely stable and running fine with the newest open-source driver code but the Ryzen 3 2200G was still a stability nightmare.

AMD has landed a number of updated firmware images into the linux-firmware tree for their recent generations of hardware...

One of Sony's compiler experts has taken to working on some tuning for the AMD Ryzen "znver1" microarchitecture support within the LLVM compiler stack. This begs the question why Sony is working on Ryzen improvements if not for a future product...

Next year's GCC 9 compiler release will be eliminating support for older ARM versions...

First time Mesa release manager Dylan Baker has managed to release Mesa 18.1 on time as the Q2'2018 quarterly update to this OpenGL/Vulkan driver stack...

After working on Lubuntu-Next for a while in transitioning from the GTK-based LXDE desktop environment to the modern and maintained LXQt desktop environment that is powered by Qt5, the Lubuntu 18.10 will be the release that officially moves over to the LXQt desktop and pushes out LXDE...

Canonical and Microsoft have rolled out Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to the Microsoft Store for running with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Here are some initial benchmarks of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on Windows 10 WSL with the April 2018 Update compared to the Bionic Beaver installed bare-metal and then also the older Ubuntu 16.04 WSL setup.

The Git Protocol Version 2 was announced today by Google as a major update to the distributed revision control system's wire protocol. Git protocol version 2 is much more efficient and yields significant performance benefits...

KDE Plasma 5.13 is out in beta form today ahead of its planned release in June. Plasma 5.13 has ended up being a very compelling and huge upgrade for the KDE Plasma 5 desktop...