Phoronix

With Q1'2018 wrapping up in the week ahead, here's a look back at our more than 856 original news articles and 76 featured benchmark articles / Linux hardware reviews this quarter...

GNOME contributor Yussuf Khalil has managed to uncover and resolve a bug in Clutter that was hurting GNOME's performance...

DigiKam 5.9.0 is now available for this KDE-aligned open-source photo management software...

The second development release of Phoronix Test Suite 8.0-Aremark is now available for your open-source benchmarking needs on Linux, macOS, BSD, Solaris, and Windows. As you've likely heard already, one of the big focuses this development cycle is on Windows support improvements with completely rewritten handling for that OS...

If you are looking for a tiny Linux PC and happen to be a Linux Mint user, the MintBox Mini 2 is now available...

The first release candidate of the Debian-based Slax Linux distribution is now available...

As a more modern and feature alternative to the DriConf configuration program for tweaking Mesa driver settings, a few months back we featured ADRICONF as the Advanced DRI Configuration. Recently this GUI program has picked up a few more features...

When having the Microsoft Windows 10 Professional x64 installation on the Core i7 8700K "Coffee Lake" system this week I also took the opportunity to run some fresh OpenGL benchmarks on Windows compared to Linux...

Following this month's successful launch of GNOME 3.28, the release team has now assembled the schedule for the GNOME 3.30.0 release and the 3.29 development milestones...

Back in February was the exciting AMD Raven Ridge desktop APU launch with the Zen CPU cores and Vega graphics. Sadly, however, the Raven Ridge Linux support still appears to be a bit problematic but there have been improvements in recent weeks...

One of the subtle changes that seemed to have been made during the Ubuntu 18.04 development cycle is automatic suspend now being enabled by default on desktop systems...

CodeWeavers' Józef Kucia has sent out a set of patches today against Winevulkan in shifting around some code in preparing to allow for the eventual Direct3D 12 support that's implemented on top of Vulkan by the external VKD3D library...

When it comes to RAW image editing on Linux, Darktable is what most often is talked about for its photography workflow and RAW image processing features. But another open-source alternative for RAW image processing is out with its latest release, RawTherapee...

Bootlin (formerly Free Electrons) continues making progress on their goal to have working and upstream open-source video encode/decode support for the Allwinner VPU...

It's been a while since last having anything new to report with the mainline Linux kernel's livepatching infrastructure, but some improvements are in the works...

Public details are still scarce about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, but it's looking like the alpha release might not be too far out...

Karol Herbst, who is a long-time Nouveau contributor who joined Red Hat at the end of last year, along with other hat-wearing Linux developers continue working on Nouveau compute support for this open-source NVIDIA driver...

The latest in our Windows versus Linux benchmarking is looking at the relative performance impact on both Linux and Windows of their Spectre and Meltdown mitigation techniques. This round of tests were done on Windows 10 Pro, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, and Clear Linux when having an up-to-date system on each OS where there is Spectre/Meltdown protection and then repeating the same benchmarks after reverting/disabling the security functionality.

The latest OpenBenchmarking.org milestone has now been crossed with a short time ago this component to the Phoronix Test Suite having served its 30 millionth test profile / test suite for running by our open-source benchmarking software...

Yesterday in our Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ benchmarks we looked at the faster Cortex-A53 CPU cores of this new $35 USD ARM SBC as well as its much faster Ethernet and better thermal management over earlier Raspberry Pi boards. The other area improved with the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ is the WiFi/WLAN wireless networking, which is what we have benchmarks of today.

AMD developers have already submitted a few rounds of feature work to DRM-Next for Linux 4.17, including enabling DC for all supported GPUs while now they have sent in a last-minute pull request in aiming to get their newly-published "Vega 12" GPU support into the Linux 4.17 kernel...

With Wayland appearing in more places from automobile in-vehicle infotainments to planes to smartphones, having a good touchscreen calibration system is certainly important. Collabora developers have been working on a new touchscreen calibrator and new protocol extension for Weston...

Here are our latest Windows 10 versus Linux benchmarks for the week. This benchmarking dance is looking at the Windows performance compared to Ubuntu, Clear Linux, Fedora, Antergos, and Solus Linux in various workloads. Among the tests this time around were looking at the performance with Go, Java, Perl, Python, FFmpeg, and more.

The RADV Vulkan driver performance on the latest Mesa Git code is already looking quite good compared to the NVIDIA Vulkan Linux performance and even the Vulkan driver on Radeon Software under Windows. But the game is not over for the never-ending process of tuning the driver for optimal performance...

For all the fans out there of the Rust programming language and/or micro-kernels, a new version of Redox OS is now available, the Rust-written from-scratch OS...

When carrying out this week's Windows vs. Linux gaming tests with AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce GPUs on the latest drivers, I also took the opportunity to run some fresh OpenCL benchmarks on Windows and Linux with the competing GPU vendors...

After a one month development hiatus, Mesa 18.0 is due to be released today as the first major Mesa 3D release of 2018...

The Blender 2.8 3D modeling software update isn't even reaching beta until likely the second half of this calendar year, but it's going to be a darn exciting update once it finally ships...

Crytek last year announced they would release the source code to their Sandbox editor; that goal has now been realized...

It's time for the Fedora 28 release dance and to place your bets if F28 will be released on time or is another Fedora release challenged by release delays...

The open-source driver developers responsible for the reverse-engineered, open-source Vivante GC graphics driver "Etnaviv" have sent in the pull request of their updates for DRM-Next that is of material to be found in the upcoming Linux 4.17 development cycle...

One day after AMD posted the big patch set providing Vega 12 GPU support for the Linux kernel's AMDGPU driver, a patch has emerged now adding Vega 12 support to the RadeonSI Gallium3D OpenGL driver...

Last week on Pi Day marked the release of the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ with a slightly higher clocked Cortex-A53 processors, dual-band 802.11ac WiFi, faster Ethernet, and other minor enhancements over its predecessor. I've been spending the past few days putting the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ through its paces the past few days with an array of benchmarks while comparing the performance to other ARM SBCs as well as a few lower-end Intel x86 systems too. Here is all you need to know about the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ performance.

While the Yum-successor DNF package manager most commonly associated with Fedora just had its DNF 2.0 release at the end of 2016, DNF 3.0 is now under development...

The widely-used PostgreSQL database software may soon become much faster thanks to a work-in-progress LLVM JIT back-end that has begun to land...

Krita 4.0 is now available as the latest major release for this KDE-aligned, open-source digital painting program...

Last month we reported on a kernel driver being worked on for Valve's Steam Controller but it wasn't coming from Valve developers but rather an independent member of the community. That hid-steam driver continues to be hacked on...

If you are a member of the X.Org Foundation, it's important to get out to vote now...

An independent contributor to Mesa has posted a set of patches for implementing NVIDIA's OpenGL conservative rasterization extensions...

Wayfire is a new independent Wayland compositor project built atop libweston. Wayfire supports compositor plug-ins to offer a desktop cube and more, so you can relive the old days when having a spinning desktop cube was all the rage in the early days of Compiz/Beryl...

It's been a while since last hearing about any Linux game ports by Aspyr Media, but Civilization VI: Rise and Fall is now out for Linux and macOS...

Given how fiercely the latest open-source AMD Linux driver code is running now up against NVIDIA's long-standing flagship Linux GPU driver, you might be curious how well that driver stacks up against the Radeon Software driver on Windows? Well, you are in luck as here are some fresh benchmarks of the Radeon RX 580 and RX Vega 64 as well as the GeForce GTX 1060 and GTX 1080 Ti while being tested both under Microsoft Windows 10 Pro x64 and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS while using the latest AMD/NVIDIA drivers on each platform.

Following the Chrome 65 release earlier this month, Google developers have now catapulted the Chrome 66 beta...

While Mesa 18.0 should finally be out on Friday as the major quarterly update to the Mesa 3D drivers, Mesa 17.3.7 is out today and it's a rather big update for being just another point release to last month's 17.3 series...

There were various calls by independent end-users voicing their two cents that Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" should ship with Linux 4.16 instead of Linux 4.15, but that isn't going to happen...

Nearly one and a half months since Mesa 18.0-RC4 and nearly one month since last seeing any Git activity on the "18.0" Mesa Git branch, it's finally been updated today with the availability of Mesa 18.0-RC5...

Google's Sean Paul has sent in the final drm-misc-next pull request to DRM-Next of new feature material for the upcoming Linux 4.17 kernel cycle...

It's been a while since last hearing anything about the rumored "Vega 12" GPU but coming out this morning are a set of 42 patches providing support for this unreleased GPU within the mainline Linux kernel...

As a win for ARM single board computers and other systems relying upon U-Boot as the bootloader, iSCSI support is now available...

JDK 10 has reached general availability as the first Java release under Oracle's new six-month release model...