Phoronix

For our Russian readers who are fans of the KDE desktop, ROSA Desktop Fresh R10 was released this week as one of the notable Russian Linux distributions that is aligned with a KDE desktop. ROSA Desktop Fresh continues offering both KDE 4 and KDE Plasma 5 desktop options...

Debian 9.3 is the latest update to "Stretch" to provide various bug fixes and security updates while Debian 8.10 was also released today as the newest version of their older "Jessie" release...

With just seven lines of new code, Intel's ANV Vulkan driver is a few percent faster in some Linux games...

Just as planned, the first release candidate for Wine 3.0 and it also marks the project's code/feature freeze...

For those bound to using Microsoft Windows but needing to access EXT4/Btrfs/XFS partitions, the commercial Linux File Systems for Windows eases the headache of using Windows...

There's a little more than two years left until Python 2 will be officially discontinued by upstream and Ubuntu is preparing accordingly for this end of life...

While a few months ago we could have written off Mir as a dead project following the Unity 8 abandonment, Canonical is continuing to push it along in its new route of Wayland support...

Delays pushed back the Mesa 17.3 release from November, but this quarterly update to the Mesa 3D graphics stack is now available for users...

Intel continues contributing performance optimizations to the GNU C Library (glibc) for allowing various functions to make use of modern processor instruction set extensions...

The NetBSD operating system has been working on updating their DTrace and ZFS implementations...

The past few weeks Intel developers working on their Mesa open-source graphics driver have been working on the ARB_get_program_binary OpenGL extension so it actually works for applications wanting to use this extension to retrieve a compiled shader/program by the driver...

While the LLVM 5.0.1 bug-fix release was originally expected last month, after going through three release candidates the stable version is now expected to arrive next week...

Keith Packard has sent out his latest X.Org Server side patches for the improvements he's been working on the past year for improving the SteamVR / VR HMD support on the Linux desktop...

NVIDIA has launched their latest TITAN ultra high-end graphics card, the TITAN V, which they say is the most powerful PC GPU ever created. The TITAN V is based upon their Volta architecture and will set you back $2,999 USD...

Back in October is when GCC began prepping C17 support patches for their compiler as a minor update to the C programming language. LLVM's Clang compiler has now landed its initial support for C17...

Last week Intel submitted their first batch of i915 DRM driver changes to DRM-Next that in turn is slated for Linux 4.16. Today they sent in their second round of feature updates...

Hans Wennborg as the continuing LLVM release manager has begun drafting plans for the LLVM 6.0 release process...

This week marked the release of the long-awaited POCL 1.0 release candidate. For the uninformed POCL, or the Portable Computing Language, is a portable implementation of OpenCL 1.2~2.0 that can run on CPUs with its LLVM code generation and has also seen back-ends for its OpenCL implementation atop AMD HSA and even NVIDIA CUDA. I've been trying out POCL 1.0-RC1 on various Intel and AMD CPUs.

With the latest AGESA update for Ryzen-based systems, AMD is reportedly allowing the Platform Security Processor (PSP) to be disabled. The AMD PSP akin to Intel's Management Engine...

Phoronix Test Suite 7.6.0-Alvdal is now available as the latest quarterly feature update to our cross-platform, open-source benchmarking software...

Today marks the release of GNU Guix 0.14 as well as the GNU Guix SD (System Distribution) that is the Linux-based operating system built around this package manager...

Qt 5.10 is now officially out as the half-year update to the Qt5 tool-kit...

This year on Phoronix has been more than 290 original news articles pertaining to advancements and changes within the Linux kernel. Here are those highlights...

Last month Red Hat developer David Airlie landed shader image support and other GL4 extension work for the R600 Gallium3D driver that is used for older, pre-GCN AMD graphics processors. For those still relying upon these aging GPUs, David Airlie is continuing with improvements on R600g this month...

Alex Deucher of AMD sent in today their first batch of feature updates for Radeon/AMDGPU/TTM feature code for DRM-Next, which has already been queued, and will in turn land next year with the Linux 4.16 kernel...

Back in September there were developers from Samsung's Open-Source Group adding initial OpenGL ES 3.0 support to Cairo. The GLESv3 upbringing in Cairo is still ongoing and not yet fully vetted, but Bryce Harrington of Samsung OSG has now blogged about this effort...

The Debian project has issued the second alpha release of the Debian Installer that eventually will be used by Debian 10.0 "Buster"...

Valve has decided to stop supporting Bitcoin for settling transactions on Steam...

Back in October I did some basic tests of the BSDs on AMD EPYC while now with having more of our extensive Linux testing of AMD EPYC complete, I went back and did a few fresh tests of the BSDs with an AMD EPYC 7601 processor housed within the Tyan Transport SX TN70A-B8026.

One of the most exciting open-source OpenCL projects we have been following in recent years is POCL as "Portable C" for having an LLVM-based portable OpenCL implementation to run on CPUs as well as GPUs now via AMD HSA back-end and a new experimental NVIDIA CUDA back-end. The POCL 1.0 release is finally near...

SYCL as a reminder is Khronos' higher-level OpenCL programming model based on C++. It's been a while since the last update, but a new point release is now available...

When we heard of RHEL deprecating Btrfs with Red Hat losing hope in this feature-focused Linux file-system, we were relayed word that Red Hat was planning for their own Stratis project for next-gen Linux storage. Stratis is now expected to ship in preview form for Fedora 28...

At the end of 2013 we wrote about a new Qt5 web-browser inspired by Opera and in 2014 it entered alpha form. But since then we hadn't heard much of that browser, Otter, until a Phoronix reader brought it up in our forums today...

At the end of October ReactOS 0.4.7-RC1 was released as the newest test release for this open-source operating system project continuing to work on re-implementing the Windows APIs. That official v0.4.7 release is now available...

It's always great waking up to new features landing in Mesa Git...

Back in early November Intel finally landed its shader cache support for allowing GLSL shaders to be cached on-disk similar to the RadeonSI shader caching that has been present since earlier in the year. But this functionality isn't yet enabled by default as it still needs more testing...

For those wanting to easily browse the source-code to all Debian packages, it can now be trivially done so from your hardware...

Over the past week I have carried out some Radeon and NVIDIA Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux benchmarks. While not quite as interesting as those discrete GPU comparisons, while having the Windows 10 Pro x64 Fall Creator's Update around and testing from the Core i7 8700K, I also ran some Windows vs. Linux tests for the integrated UHD Graphics.

Last week marked the official release of PHP 7.2 that besides offering new features does provide minor performance boosts to PHP7...

Being announced from Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit today is the HP Envy x2 and ASUS NovaGo, interesting ARM-powered laptops...

Open-source graphics driver contributor for Valve, Samuel Pitoiset, has been working on clearing up some remaining issues with the RADV Vulkan driver's support for the RX Vega graphics cards...

CodeWeavers has announced the release of their Wine-based CrossOver 17.0 software for macOS and Linux...

While kernel side there's been Memory Protection Keys support since Linux 4.9 and work has already landed in GCC and Clang, the glibc GNU C Library is finally adding support for MPK...

It's been a while since last having anything to report on with Loop-AES as a long-standing means for offering transparent data encryption in the form of a loopback device. The project is now out with a new release providing out-of-tree compatibility with Linux 4.14/4.15 kernels...

For those wanting to run with AMD EPYC processors in the cloud, it's now possible with Microsoft Azure...

Kata Containers is the latest tech in the container space and is an effort hosted by the OpenStack Foundation in conjunction with many participating organizations. The underlying tech for Kata Containers originated from the Intel / Clear Linux Clear Containers project...

It's been thirteen months since the release of X.Org Server 1.19 and there is no expedited effort to get the next major release out the door, but X.Org Server 1.20 is still expected to happen in the months ahead...

Are you still using the Vivaldi web browser? If so, you can now use it on ARM devices like the Raspberry Pi...

It's been another interesting year of Microsoft open-source/Linux announcements...

OpenMW remains as the open-source game engine project re-implementing the code to power Elderscrolls III: Morrowind, the popular 2002 RPG game from Bethesda. OpenMW 0.43 is now available as the latest release...