Phoronix

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...

With the in-development Linux 4.16 kernel there are improvements to note for both AMD and Intel users...

Valve has onboarded another open-source Linux graphics driver developer...

Google's cpu_features library makes it easier for detecting modern CPU capabilities like FMA, SSE, and AVX extensions when writing hand-tuned code...

The long sought after VLC 3.0 multimedia player release will be here anytime now...

Many of you have been anxious to get ROCm/OpenCL compute working with the open-source Radeon Linux driver on modern GPUs while using a mainline kernel and that day continues inching closer...

Maintainers of openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling-release packages continue in being very punctual with their package updates...

Back in 2016 AMD introduced WattMan to their Radeon Software driver to allow for fine-tuning of GPU voltage, engine clocks, memory clocks and more. An incarnation of that is now approaching their open-source Linux driver...

Oracle's Mark Reinhold spoke at last weekend's FOSDEM conference about the state of OpenJDK for open-source Java...

RADV, the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver, now has external memory host support via the VK_EXT_external_memory_host extension that was recently introduced in the Vulkan 1.0.66 update...

With the NVIDIA proprietary driver continuing to only support EGLStreams for their Wayland support until the new "Unix device memory allocator" project pans out, one of the big limitations has been no XWayland support for running X11 applications. Fortunately, that's now changing...

The second release candidate of LLVM 6.0 has been tagged...

While initial RISC-V support was added to Linux 4.15, it was only the architecture code and not any device drivers. With Linux 4.16, the RISC-V developers admit this time around they didn't get as many changes in as they were hoping for, but they do have some improvements to land this cycle...

The SDL library that's most commonly associated with being an abstraction layer used by Linux games now has Wayland XDG-Shell support...

Intel today lifted the lid on the Xeon D-2100 series, what used to be known as Skylake-D...

After nearly one year in development, lead MATE developer Martin Wimpress has announced version 1.20 of this GNOME2-forked desktop environment...

KMyMoney, the KDE personal finance manager program, has reached version 5.0 and with that big "5" release it's been ported to KDE Frameworks 5...

The Qt Company this morning announced the beta availability of the Qt Creator 4.6 integrated development environment...

While the Linux 4.16 merge window is nearing the end of the line, there still are some feature updates still being sent in, including a big batch of media subsystem changes sent in on Tuesday...

GStreamer core developer Tim-Philipp Müller has provided some insight about some current and upcoming happenings for the GStreamer multimedia framework project. He also addressed the recurring comment of "write it in Rust!" for better security/safety/reliability...

MySQL 8.0 should presumably appear this year although no public release date has been set. At last weekend's FOSDEM conference in Brussels were many talks about developers and database administrators eager for MySQL 8.0, well, at least for those not on the MariaDB bandwagon...

The GCC 8 stable compiler (GCC 8.1) should be officially released in the next month or two and Linux 4.16's gcc-plugins infrastructure is picking up support for this annual update to the GNU Compiler Collection...

What you won't find landing in the current in-development Linux 4.16 kernel is BUS1, the in-kernel IPC mechanism built out of the failure of KDBUS to reach the mainline kernel. While BUS1 isn't ready for mainline yet, D-Bus Broker continues moving along as a D-Bus compatible message bus delivering higher performance and reliability...

Darren Hart of VMware's Open-Source Technology Center sent out the platform-drivers-x86 updates today for the Linux 4.16 kernel...

Last week Ingo Molnar sent in the main batch of scheduler updates for the Linux 4.16 kernel merge window, which included smarter task migration to try to yield better scalability, while today a second set of updates were sent in with an additional SMP optimization...

The ownCloud-forked Nextcloud software for file hosting and communication is out with their latest major release...

More video acceleration related commits landed in the Mesa 18.1-dev Git tree this week...

KDE Plasma 5.12.0 is now available that also serves as the second long-term support release for the Plasma 5 desktop...

Going back about two years has been work towards supporting atomic mode-setting on Weston and we are finally seeing this support land for Wayland's reference compositor...

MenuLibre is the menu editor program supporting FreeDesktop.org's Desktop Entry Specification and supports most desktop environments out there for customizations of their menus...

Yesterday I wrote about GTK4 dropping the Mir display back-end in favor of the Wayland back-end. Additionally, the "big GDK lock" was also stripped out. The latest is some additional cleaning to lighten the tool-kit code-base by about seven thousand lines of code...

Over the past few months Hans de Goede of Red Hat has been focusing on Linux power improvements, in particular to extend the battery life of laptops running Fedora Linux. As indicated by his presentation this past weekend at FOSDEM 2018, he's making great strides in that effort...

ZFS On Linux 0.7.6 was released overnight as the latest release for these out-of-tree modules supporting the ZFS file-system natively on the Linux kernel via the OpenZFS code-base...

Last week the main pull request of XFS file-system driver updates for the Linux 4.16 was sent in and referred to by XFS maintainer Darrick Wong as having great scads of new stuff. The Oracle engineer has now sent in a secondary pull request of XFS for Linux 4.16...

The third development release of the upcoming Phoronix Test Suite 7.8-Folldal release is now available for our cross-platform, open-source automated benchmarking software and framework...

LizardFS for those unaware is yet another distributed file-system project with this MooseFS fork focusing on POSIX compliance, multi-platform support and aims to be fault-tolerant...

Last minute work ahead of the imminent UI/feature freeze for GNOME 3.28 landed on Monday for the GNOME Shell...

The PCI subsystem updates for the Linux 4.16 kernel are a bit livelier than usual with a number of notable additions...

Among the many interesting presentations at this year's FOSDEM event included an update on the AV1 royalty-free, open-source video codec by Mozilla/Xiph.Org's Tim Terriberry...

Xorgproto had its inaugural release today as the collection of all the X.Org Server protocol headers formerly distributed as separate, standalone packages...

Ring that joined the GNU project in late 2016 to focus on decentralized, multi-device communication has high hopes for 2018...

System76's Pop!_OS started off mostly as a re-branded spin of Ubuntu for the company's pre-loaded Linux laptops/desktops, but lately they have been venturing to more interesting changes at varying levels of the stack...

Palmer Dabbelt who maintains the RISC-V ports of GCC, Binutils, Linux, and glibc while working at RISC-V company SiFive spoke at FOSDEM 2018 this weekend about the software/hardware state of this royalty-free open-source CPU ISA...

Last week I provided some benchmarks showing how the RADV and RadeonSI performance changed with Mesa 18.0 while in this comparison is a look at how the Mesa 18.0 performance has evolved since Mesa 12.0 for Radeon open-source Linux graphics driver performance.

The OverlayFS union mount file-system of the Linux kernel gains a big new feature in Linux 4.16...

Intel Coffee Lake CPUs began shipping in October and while their UHD Graphics are effectively re-branded Kabylake graphics, it's taken until today to get mainline support for Coffee Lake OpenCL support on Linux with Beignet...

In addition to Igalia developers being at FOSDEM 2018 to talk about their work on Chromium porting for Wayland, Alejandro Piñeiro of this Spain consulting firm talked about their contributions towards SPIR-V support within Mesa and particularly for the Intel i965 OpenGL driver...

Added to AMD's proprietary Windows/Linux OpenGL driver last August was a AMD_gpu_shader_half_float_fetch GL extension while today the documentation has been published and already merged into the Khronos registry...