Phoronix

This week Google announced the participating organizations for GSoC 2018 for students wishing to get involved with open-source/Linux development. Also happening this week is the application period opened for those wishing to participate in the summer 2018 paid internship program...

Greg Kroah-Hartman released a slew of stable point releases today to supported Linux kernel series. For the 4.14 and 4.15 branches this includes Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) for AArch64 hardware...

Should you find yourself using the xf86-video-vesa DDX for one reason or another, a new release is now available and it's the first in three years...

The OpenSolaris/Illumos-based OpenIndiana operating system has finally moved past GCC 4.9 as its base user-land compiler and is now using GCC 6.4...

Not only is there a new Rust release this week but the Google developers have put out the Go 1.10 update...

The latest bi-weekly Wine development release is now available...

A few days back I reported on Intel Icelake patches for the i965 Mesa driver in bringing up the OpenGL support now that several kernel patch series have been published for enabling these "Gen 11" graphics within the Direct Rendering Manager driver. This Icelake support has been quick to materialize even with Cannonlake hardware not yet being available...

Introduced as part of LunarG's recent Vulkan SDK update is the VLF, the Vulkan Layer Factory...

This week we have delivered the first Linux benchmarks of the OpenGL/Vulkan graphics capabilities of AMD's new Raven Ridge desktop APUs with the Vega 8 on the Ryzen 3 2200G an the Vega 11 on Ryzen 5 2400G. Those tests have included comparisons to the integrated graphics capabilities of Intel processors as well as older AMD Kaveri APUs. For those interested in seeing how the Raven Ridge Vega graphics compare to lower-end Radeon and GeForce discrete graphics cards, here are those first Linux benchmarks.

Khronos' glTF transmission format for 3D scenes and models continues getting better. This 3D format has seen adoption by countless applications and engines and even usage within Microsoft products. Khronos' latest advancement to glTF 2.0 is a compression extension...

Now it's clear why Intel hasn't been working on the Beignet code-base in months as they have been quietly working on a new and better OpenCL stack and run-time! On open-source Intel OpenCL you can now have OpenCL 2.1 while OpenCL 2.2 support is on the way...

The Solus Linux distribution has offered up some new details this week on their upcoming Solus 4 release...

As a sign that DRI3 v1.1 is hopefully ready to go, Louis-Francis Ratté-Boulianne of Collabora on Friday sent out his latest set of patches adding modifiers and multi-plane support to the Direct Rendering Infrastructure...

Fedora developers are now discussing the possibility of naming a release manager each development cycle as a person in charge of wrangling together each release and seeing that the "Rawhide" development state is kept in better condition. Who knows, this also might actually help Fedora's longtime trouble of delivering releases on time...

AMD on Wednesday released the Radeon Pro Software Enterprise Edition 18.Q1 for Linux driver. It really isn't noticeable for its official changes, but does claim to advertise Vulkan 1.1 support...

While Amarok was once KDE's dominant music player, it hasn't seen a new release now in about five years and has yet to see a release based on Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5. But there's hope that might still happen...

A fairly notable update to the Rust programming language compiler and its components is available today...

NVIDIA has begun work on sending out patches for upstreaming Tegra194 "Xavier" SoC support within the Linux kernel...

Canonical's Mir team has released Mir v0.30 as the latest version of this display server that for the past year has been retooling itself with Wayland protocol support...

While Mesa 18.0 should be released in the days ahead as the latest feature release to Mesa 3D, backporting of fixes/improvements to Mesa 17.3 isn't letting up. For those using this stable series from last quarter, Mesa 17.3.4 is out today with nearly 100 changes...

There's been a lot of activity in xorg-server Git the past few days, making it look like the developers may be trying to wrap up the very long X.Org Server 1.20 cycle. The latest major feature work landing is GLXVND...

While we are past the Linux 4.16 merge window, more Spectre and Meltdown related improvements and changes are still being allowed into the kernel, similar to all the KPTI/Retpoline work that landed late in Linux 4.15. On Wednesday was another big batch of KPTI and Spectre work that has already been merged...

Last October well known open-source AMD driver developer Marek Olšák began work on OpenGL compatibility profile support for Mesa. This work is about OpenGL 3.1 with ARB_compatibility support, something generally relevant for workstation OpenGL users and one of the few remaining advantages of AMD's current proprietary OpenGL driver...

Jonas Ã…dahl on Wednesday announced Wayland-Protocols 1.13, the collection of stable and unstable protocols to Wayland...

Open-source Intel driver developer Francisco Jerez has sent out a set of 15 patches implementing a new version of the EXT_shader_framebuffer_fetch OpenGL extension...

While it was a very busy January testing all the fallout from Spectre and Meltdown, February has become just as busy with monitoring all of the Linux 4.16 changes and beginning those benchmarks, all the testing now around the Raven Ridge APUs, and today's release of Phoronix Test Suite 7.8 among a lot of other Linux hardware tests that are ongoing...

The delayed Ubuntu 16.04.4 point release is now expected to become available at the start of March...

Will Cooke, Canonical's Director of Ubuntu Desktop, has announced plans to collect more diagnostics data from Ubuntu installations. This would involve collecting system hardware/software details during the installation process and be uploaded to Ubuntu servers, but users could opt-out of said survey...

The first baby steps towards implementing Direct3D 12 in Wine are now present in the Git code-base for this week's Wine 3.2 release but it won't be anything remotely usable for a while...

Yesterday I posted the initial Ryzen 5 2400G Vega 11 Linux graphics benchmarks while for your viewing please today -- as well as this morning's 21-way Intel/AMD CPU Linux comparison that featured these new Raven Ridge APUs -- the results now completed are initial OpenGL and Vulkan performance figures for the Vega 8 graphics found on the Ryzen 3 2200G.

Following a slight delay, the beta release of GNOME 3.28 is now available ahead of next month's official release...

Yesterday I posted some initial Linux benchmarks of the Ryzen 5 2400G Raven Ridge APU when looking at the Vega 11 graphics, but for those curious about the CPU performance potential of the Ryzen 5 2400G and its ~$100 Ryzen 3 2200G sibling, here are our first CPU benchmarks of these long-awaited AMD APUs. These two current Raven Ridge desktop APUs are compared to a total of 21 different Intel and AMD processors dating back to older Kaveri APUs and FX CPUs and Ivy Bridge on the Intel side.

Phoronix Test Suite 7.8.0-Folldal is now officially available as the first quarterly update to our open-source benchmarking software of 2018 and the last major release prior to the big Phoronix Test Suite 8.0 milestone slated for this summer...

Just like with the recent expiry of the MP3 patents and AC3, the last of the MPEG-2 patents have now expired...

Two years ago we reviewed the CompuLab Airtop as an interesting, industrial-grade, fanless PC that packed in high-end hardware of the time and worked out great initially and continues doing a phenomenal job at passively cooling the PC while running in our benchmark lab. CompuLab has now announced the Airtop2 and Airtop2 Inferno that is an even more impressive cooling feat...

Ubuntu developers are in the process of landing Mesa 18.0 within the "Bionic Beaver" archive for the upcoming 18.04 LTS distribution release. In the process they are also enabling GLVND for allowing the Mesa and NVIDIA proprietary drivers more happily co-exist on the same system...

Now that the Linux 4.16 merge window ended this past weekend, Intel has submitted their first pull request to DRM-Next of material they want to get in for Linux 4.17...

AMD developers working on their official, cross-platform XGL/AMDVLK driver code have pushed out another batch of changes for benefiting their official AMD Vulkan Linux driver...

Initial support for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) with the Intel DRM driver is being called for pulling into DRM-Next that in turn will land with Linux 4.17...

If you are a student interested in working on an open-source project this summer while gaining valuable experience and earning a stipend, it's time to start thinking about the 2018 Google Summer of Code...

Just like the Linux developers, in the wake of the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities DragonFlyBSD developers have also been working on a variety of security improvements...

Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has announced their 2017Q4 graphics stack recipe, which comes down to all of the system components they currently recommend for making a great Intel Linux system...

It's been a while since last having anything to report on Devuan, the Debian derivative focused on "init freedom" by shipping the Debian packages without any dependence on systemd. But just in time for Valentine's Day, Devuan 2.0 Beta is now available...

Here are our initial performance figures for the Vega graphics found on the newly-released Ryzen 5 2400G "Raven Ridge" APU under Linux and testing both OpenGL and Vulkan graphics benchmarks. CPU tests as well as benchmarks of the Ryzen 3 2200G under Linux are forthcoming on Phoronix.

Qualcomm in cooperation with Google developers and Rob Clark of Freedreno/MSM has sent out a set of kernel patches amounting to over 110,000 lines of new kernel code for the MSM DRM driver to bring-up display support for the SDM845...

Valve has made available a new Steam client beta that this time around has some interesting updates on the input side...

One month ago Intel's Open-Source Technology Center began posting the initial Linux driver enablement for Icelake "Gen 11" graphics, the generation succeeding this year's Cannonlake "Gen 10" hardware. That initial work focused on the DRM kernel driver while now they have posted the first Mesa patches...

With the feature-packed X.Org Server 1.20 going to be too late to make it into the April release of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, a new X.Org Server point release is being prepared by an Ubuntu developer that does include some basic new functionality...

The Qt Company has announced the availability of Qt 5.10.1, the first bug-fix release to Qt 5.10 that shipped back in December...

Feral Interactive has announced today that they are porting Rise of the Tomb Raider to Linux...