Phoronix

The NetBSD project has issued an update concerning recent security efforts for this popular BSD operating system...

Besides talking about GNU Hurd in 2018 one of the other interesting talks in FOSDEM's micro-kernel track this year was on an Intel GPU resource multiplexer being developed by the Genode project...

Yesterday at FOSDEM 2018 Hurd developer Samuel Thibault talked about the work done on this GNU kernel for a PCI arbiter to allow different user-land drivers to access PCI devices concurrently. During this PCI arbiter talk he also went over the current state of the hardware support and recent achievements for GNU Hurd...

Last week Meltdown/Spectre patch wrangler Thomas Gleixner sent in various code clean-ups for Retpolines and KPTI with Linux 4.16 while today more feature work has been submitted. This includes initial mitigation work for Spectre v1 as well as IBPB support...

Albert Chu of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced the release this weekend of FreeIPMI, the GNU project implementing Intelligent Platform Management Interface v1.5/2.0 support...

Red Hat's Lyude Paul has been spending the past number of weeks working out clock-gating support for NVIDIA Kepler GPUs with the open-source Nouveau DRM kernel driver...

GFX-RS has been the Rust programming language project for a high-performance, portable graphics API that can map to Vulkan, Apple's Metal, Direct3D, etc from a single Rust API...

At this weekend's FOSDEM event in Brussels, Martijn Kaijser of the Kodi project provided an update on their current activities for 2018...

With this week's ARM SoC/platform updates for Linux 4.16 it was revealed the next kernel cycle might introduce i.MX8 SoC support...

A European cloud and dedicated server provider that designs their own servers is now designing their own BIOS using Coreboot and using this in production on thousands of servers...

Igalia has been one of the companies working on improving Chromium's support for Wayland and they shared their story about it at this weekend's FOSDEM 2018 event in Brussels...

It's been nine months since the release of GRUB 2.02 while the GRUB 2.04 stable release should be out by year's end...

Ted Ts'o sent in the pull request today of EXT4 file-system driver changes for the Linux 4.16 kernel...

In addition to the Nouveau driver crew talking about their Vulkan plans and other open-source work, Nicolai Hähnle of AMD represented the company's work on their Radeon Linux graphics driver stack(s) and the work they have going on for improving their GPU driver support...

Back in November I wrote about a GCC patch for the Intel Icelake CPU target and now that code has finally been merged for the GNU Compiler Collection ahead of the upcoming GCC 8.1 release...

Open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver developers Martin Peres, Pierre Moreau, and Karol Herbst took to the FOSDEM 2018 conference today to share a status update on their reverse-engineering and open-source driver writing work around this unofficial NVIDIA Linux driver...

There is no shortage of different KDE music/media player projects over the years but one of the most promising in recent times is Elisa. This week marks the second alpha release for the Elisa music player...

A few days back I wrote about how GTK+ 4.0 is being talked about for release this year and now a bit more specific timeline is in place...

For the better part of a year NVIDIA developers and Adam Jackson at Red Hat have been working on "server-side GLVND" and this new X.Org Server feature might finally be close to landing...

The GStreamer multimedia framework now has mainline support for WebRTC...

Keith Packard's latest work for Valve on improving the Linux display stack is on what he's exploring around "semi-automatic compositing" but at this point it's still a risky bet with the new protocol yet to be written...

The past few weeks I've had the pleasure of testing the Tyan Tempest S32272NR-C950 motherboard with Atom C3950 "Denverton" processor. Yes, it's been a real pleasure as it's been a few years since last touching an Atom system and this current combination allows for a mighty competent configuration with the C3950 server processor featuring 16 physical cores (no HT) running at a 1.7GHz base frequency and 2.2GHz turbo frequency all while having a 24 Watt TDP.

With two weeks having passed since the big Wine 3.0 release, the Wine crew is back to their bi-weekly development releases...

For those using Ubuntu Minimal images for containers/Docker, assembling your own base distribution, setting up an embedded Linux environment, or related use-cases, the minimal images for the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release will be even smaller...

Yesterday we heard of Purism's plans to support desktop diversity but by default for their Librem 5 smartphone they will likely be using GNOME in order to maintain a unified experience across their devices. The latest now is they might develop a new Wayland compositor in line with GNOME...

The POWER architecture code updates were sent in this Friday for the Linux 4.16 kernel and brings a few goodies if you happen to be using any modern PPC hardware...

Timothy Arceri of Valve's Linux GPU driver team continues getting the RadeonSI NIR support up to scratch...

Canonical's Tiago Daitx has laid out a proposal today for having an OpenJDK stable release update exception for the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" to reduce their long-term maintenance burden...

Adding to the list of big feature additions for Linux 4.16 is the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) pull request that has already been honored by Linus Torvalds...

Being released right on time is Glibc 2.27, version 2.27 of the GNU C Library...

Arnd Bergmann sent in his several pull requests on Thursday providing new ARM SoC platform support, driver updates, and DeviceTree bits for bringing up some new ARM hardware support within the mainline Linux kernel...

The GNOME 3.28 beta (v3.27.90) is due to happen next week that also marks a number of freezes for the desktop components ahead of the official release next month...

It's a bit late to make arrangements if you already weren't planning on it, but this weekend is FOSDEM in Brussels. FOSDEM remains one of the best open-source/Linux events in the world...

At least on a percentage basis, the Steam Linux marketshare grew slightly for January 2018...

After sending in the many networking subsystem updates yesterday, veteran kernel developer David Miller today sent in the SPARC architecture updates for Linux 4.16 that includes a new Oracle DAX driver...

For those making use of laptop-mode-tools as one of several Linux power saving tools with this one designed to improve Linux laptop battery life, version 1.72 is now available after more than one year of development...

Building the kernel beginning with Linux 4.16 now requires two more dependencies: Bison and Flex...

We are less than half-way into the Linux 4.16 kernel merge window and it's already proven to be a very busy cycle with significant additions to the Linux code-base...

A majority of last month was spent looking at and testing/benchmarking the Linux code to mitigate the much talked about Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities...

Purism has been supporting both the GNOME and KDE projects with their mobile ambitions and looking to have both desktop environments feature their wares on the in-development Librem 5 smartphone. But as far as the default user experience/interface goes on the Librem 5, they are leaning towards GNOME...

David Airlie has announced his plans to begin mainlining some early infrastructure work on the "soft" FP64 code into Mesa Git. This doesn't yet allow for soft FP64 on older GPUs lacking the hardware capability to do this otherwise, but will help in another area and can make for easier mainlining of the actual soft FP64 support in the future...

Red Hat developer Hans de Goede has recently been on a mission to improve Linux battery life on Fedora. Now that SATA link power management is better handled and other tweaks, his latest target is on getting Intel's Panel Self Refresh (PSR) support enabled...

As noted when covering the news yesterday of Khronos launching the OpenGL 4.6 Adopters Program, the NVIDIA proprietary driver and Intel's open-source Linux driver are the first OpenGL drivers considered 4.6 compliant. But on the Intel Linux side, the OpenGL 4.6 work has yet to be all upstreamed into Mesa...

Greg Kroah-Hartman's pull request of the char/misc driver work usually isn't too exciting each kernel cycle, but for Linux 4.16 it's definitely on the heavier side with introducing three new subsystems for different hardware busses...

Last July marked the release of MythTV 29 as the latest release of this once super popular Linux DVR/PVR software. Today marks the availability of MythTV 29.1...

Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in pull requests this morning for the various subsystems he oversees for the mainline Linux kernel, including the staging area...

Recently I wrote about Qualcomm's Code Aurora working on Adreno A6xx GPU support and sure enough that has panned out with the initial patch series being posted for this latest-generation Qualcomm GPU architecture...

The KDE Calligra graphics/office suite forked from KOffice is up to version 3.1...

With this morning's debut of the openSUSE Leap 15.0 public beta that is derived from the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 source code, I was curious to check it out and also run some benchmarks. For seeing how the current beta performance is stacking up I ran some benchmarks against openSUSE Leap 42.3, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Clear Linux, and a daily snapshot of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

While the Linux 4.15 kernel introduces AMDGPU DC display code support and is currently enabled just by default for RX Vega GPUs and newer, a lot of work continues going into this new display code stack...