Phoronix

Over the past week and a half we have highlighted many of the interesting presentations that took place at the annual Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brussels. Here's a look back if you are behind on your Phoronix reading...

Broadcom's Eric Anholt has shared another routine status update about his ongoing work with the open-source VC4 graphics driver supporting current generation Raspberry Pi hardware as well as his work on the next-gen Broadcom VC5 open-source graphics driver...

Many of you have expressed interest in Intel's virtual GPU pass-through support "GVT" and with Linux 4.16 the kernel-side bits have come together for local vGPU display support...

Red Hat's Peter Hutterer has announced the release of libinput 1.10, the latest feature release of this input handling library used by Wayland-based Linux desktops and optionally by those still using the X.Org Server...

Keith Packard has sent out his latest patches for implementing the non-desktop and DRM lease functionality from within the X.Org Server. This work also includes the relevant DDX bits being wired through for the xf86-video-modesetting driver...

With the AMDVLK Radeon Vulkan driver that AMD open-sourced in December continuing to be updated in weekly batches with new Vulkan extensions / features / performance optimizations and the RADV Mesa-based Radeon Vulkan driver continuing to march to its own beat, I have spent the past few days conducting some fresh benchmarks between the AMDVLK and RADV Vulkan drivers with RX 560, RX 580, and RX Vega 64 graphics cards.

Today marks the release of KDE Frameworks 5.43, the latest monthly update to this set of add-on libraries complementing the functionality found in the Qt5 tool-kit...

Following the release of the Linux 4.15 kernel with KPTI and Retpoline introduction, many Phoronix readers were interested in seeing a fresh Linux CPU performance comparison. For those reasons plus in preparing for the Raven Ridge testing, here are benchmarks of 19 different systems when using Ubuntu x86_64 with the Linux 4.15 stable kernel.

Open-source AMD Linux driver developers have started off the week by posting 34 more patches for the "DC" display code stack that was mainlined in Linux 4.15 and further improved with Linux 4.16. With these latest patches that begin the queue for Linux 4.17 there are yet more AMDGPU DC improvements and in particular Raven Ridge fixes...

Last week marked the inaugural release of Xorgproto, a new package consisting of all the X.Org protocol headers rather than being in standalone packages now that X.Org Server development is slowing down and that many of these protocol headers wind up getting updated at the same time. Today marks the Xorgproto 2018.2 release...

Wayland 1.15 and the Weston 4.0 compositor had been planned for release in February but Wayland developers decided there was still enough material on the verge of landing that they decided to delay the release. A new release schedule has now been put forward for getting these updates out in April...

Robert Foss of Collabora has shared some work they are engaged in with Google for virtualizing GPU access and allowing for OpenGL ES 2.0 acceleration for containers...

Tomorrow I will be posting our initial benchmarks of the Ryzen 3 2200G and Ryzen 5 2400G "Raven Ridge" APUs with the Zen CPU cores plus Vega graphics...

Coming later today is a large Intel/AMD CPU comparison using the latest Linux 4.15 stable kernel that is mitigated for Spectre and Meltdown and using around two dozen tests. For the high-end Xeon Gold and EPYC servers, I ran close to 200 tests on those platforms...

A decade ago Linux users were clamoring for Sun Microsystems to bring Solaris' DTrace and ZFS to Linux. While there are still petitions for Oracle to more liberally license ZFS so it could see mainline Linux support, it's been years since hearing much interest in DTrace for Linux. Over time other dynamic tracing implementations have come about and improved in comparison to DTrace, but for those still wanting this dynamic tracing framework that originated at Sun Microsystems, Oracle remains working on the Linux port...

This year marks one decade since the release of Python 3. Red Hat's Victor Stinner who is also a CPython core developer provided a retrospective on Python 3 at last week's FOSDEM conference...

Freedreno project leader Rob Clark who is employed by Red Hat has provided a status update on his activities around this reverse-engineered, open-source Qualcomm Adreno graphics driver...

Just like clockwork, the first release candidate of Linux 4.16 is now available...

For those that haven't been paying attention or have lost track of time, the first two Raven Ridge desktop APUs are expected to become available tomorrow with their Zen CPU cores and Vega graphics...

After the lengthy Linux 4.15 kernel cycle, the past two weeks have marked the Linux 4.16 merge window. Yet again it's been another heavy feature period for the kernel. There is still a lot of mitigation work going on for most CPU architectures surrounding Spectre and also Meltdown, the open-source graphics drivers have continued getting better, various CPU improvements are present, the VirtualBox Guest driver was mainlined, and dozens of other notable changes for Linux 4.16. Take a look.

The AMD developers working on their official, cross-platform Vulkan driver have carried out another weekly update to their AMDVLK public source tree...

In a new record for us, OpenBenchmarking.org has served up over one million test profile / test suite downloads in just over one month! That now puts the total test/suite downloads its served to Phoronix Test Suite at over 29,000,000 downloads...

The EOMA68 computer card project is the open-source hardware effort that aims to be Earth-friendly and allow for interchangeable computer cards that can be installed in laptop housings and other devices. The ambitious concept relying upon ARM SoCs raised more than $170k USD via crowdfunding in 2016 but its lineage dates back to the failed Improv dev board as well as the failed KDE Vivaldi tablet years earlier. It turns out in 2018 there is hope of EOMA68 hardware finally shipping...

Kodi developers have written a blog post outlining their work so far on Kodi 18 "Leia", which should be out at some point this year but with no formal release schedule yet...

Landing a few days ago for the Linux 4.16 kernel merge window was IBM z / s390 mitigation work for Spectre while now the necessary compiler-side changes are also present for the upcoming GCC 8 stable release...

It seems like every few years or so comes a patch series proposing to allow the Intel DRM driver to limit its platform support in the name of saving a few bytes from the kernel build. This week the latest "selectable platform support" patches are out there...

For those wondering how Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) performance is now after being mitigated for the recent Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities, here are benchmarks of five Linux distributions comparing the performance to last December prior to the Linux kernel mitigations coming about to now.

With more than one hundred different benchmarks, here are some fresh tests of the Core i9 7980XE and Ryzen Threadripper 1950X boxes when running on the Linux 4.15.2 stable kernel atop a daily snapshot of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS...

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) updates have finally been submitted for the Linux 4.16 kernel, which were delayed due to an illness by the subsystem's maintainer...

Canonical's Mir developers are working on getting Mir 0.30 release out the door. There has been no public communication whether they will attempt a Mir 1.0 release this cycle after deciding against it the last minute for Ubuntu 17.10 due to their shift in focus...

As part of his ongoing contract work for improving virtual reality head-mounted display (VR HMD) support on the Linux desktop, now that his DRM leasing and other X.Org Server / kernel level work is getting in order, Keith Packard sent out a set of patches implementing direct display extensions for Mesa's Radeon RADV and Intel ANV Vulkan drivers...

With the Gallium3D OpenGL on-disk shader cache most notably used right now by the RadeonSI driver, TGSI is the intermediate representation currently being cached to the disk for speeding up game load times, etc. Given the RadeonSI NIR back-end continuing to mature, Timothy Arceri of Valve has added NIR caching support...

For the Linux 4.16 merge window ARM submitted Spectre and Meltdown mitigation for the 64-bit ARM architecture while now those security changes are being called for backporting to the Linux 4.15 stable series...

LunarG today has begun shipping an updated version of their SDK based against the upstream and current Vulkan 1.0.68 specification...

Valve has added support for the AMD/GPUOpen TrueAudio Next within the latest beta of SteamAudio 2.0...

With many of you likely upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS upon release and the recommendation to use disk encryption as important as ever on any important system especially laptops/ultrabooks, here are some fresh benchmarks using a development snapshot of Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" and looking at the current performance overhead of using the current "home directory encryption" and "full disk encryption" options available to Ubuntu Linux users.

Taking care of a nearly eight year old feature request, GNOME Shell's Alt-Tab switcher has picked up the ability to close applications, similar to the functionality Apple offers with macOS...

Even IBM System/390 "Linux on z" systems are prone to the Spectre security vulnerability. But with Linux 4.16, s390 is getting its initial Spectre Variant One and Two mitigation...

As expected, the VLC 3.0 media player is now available!..

Fedora Atomic Workstation is beginning to come together for allowing the core operating system to update atomically as a whole while the desktop applications are expected to be Flatpaks...

Last week the big DRM feature update for Linux 4.16 was sent in that included many AMDGPU updates, AMDKFD HSA updates, better Intel Cannonlake graphics support, Jetson TX2 display support, MSM DEVFREQ handling, and much more. But missing were any open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver changes. There is now a secondary DRM pull request with Nouveau updates...

Mesa 18.0, the first new Mesa 3D release of 2018, is coming up quite soon while today brings the fourth release candidate...

KDAB, the Qt-focused consulting firm, has released GammaRay 2.9. GammaRay is their project allowing for introspection of Qt applications, similar in nature to the GTK Inspector...

If you are a KDE user and haven't yet upgraded to Plasma 5.12, you may want to do so soon, or one of the recent point releases -- especially if your system is potentially accessible by others to insert rogue flash/memory devices...

Steve Langasek of Canonical has laid out a draft proposal about allowing Snaps to be shipping by default with the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release...

Google released the latest beta of the Chrome/Chromium web-browser today. Chrome 65 Beta isn't as exciting as some past browser updates, but there are still some new additions to note...

The KDE community and the Odin Group have announced a new version of the Slimbook, the KDE-branded laptop running Neon. While it's an improvement over last year's model, it's still a tough sell against other laptops/ultrabooks...

Last week was the updates providing initial Spectre Variant Two and Meltdown mitigation for 64-bit ARM hardware on the Linux 4.16 kernel. This week as the Linux 4.16 merge window nears the end, Spectre Variant One mitigation has come for ARM64 as well as other Spectre V2 / Meltdown updates...

This summer's release of openSUSE Leap 15 that is currently in beta and built off the sources of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 will feature a KDE Plasma on Wayland option...

PostgreSQL 10.2 is now available as the latest point release to PostgreSQL 10...