Phoronix

The third weekly release candidate of the forthcoming Mesa 18.1 quarterly driver release update is now available for testing...

Given last week's release of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and then Fedora 28 having debuted earlier this week, I decided to see how these popular tier-one Linux distributions now compare to Intel's own Clear Linux platform. This three-way Linux distribution comparison was carried out on six systems comprising both of Intel and AMD CPUs.

Following controversies the past few weeks about their GeForce Partner Program (GPP), NVIDIA is today ending the initiative...

Just days ago AMD rolled out the Radeon Software 18.10 Linux driver that brought support for Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS but hadn't supported the newly-released Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver", but that has now changed...

While Mesa 18.0 was just released a little over one month ago, Mesa 18.1 is already gearing up for release this month after going through two release candidates already. Here's a look at the new features of this second quarter 2018 Mesa 3D update...

The Linux kernel scheduler optimization work continues and it looks like for Linux 4.18 there will be at least another optimization to help out vCPUs in a virtualized environment...

While this week brought the NVIDIA 396.24 stable Linux driver, for those Vulkan developers/gamers there is a new beta release that is actually version 396.18.07 but contains their very latest Vulkan changes...

Maarten Lankhorst has sent in a pile of updates from the drm-misc-next tree today of new feature material to queue in DRM-Next in turn for Linux 4.18...

While the debut of GCC 8.1 was the GNU Project's biggest software release of the week, GNU Octave 4.4 also crept out as the latest feature release...

Following the renaming of the VC5 DRM driver to "V3D" and the new driver on its way to the mainline Linux 4.18 kernel, Eric Anholt is now renaming the user-space VC5 Gallium3D driver to V3D and is also ready to enable it by default...

A bit more than one month ago I wrote about AMD developers working on updated color management support for their AMDGPU X.Org driver. Today a significantly updated patch-set is available...

Last week AMD released Radeon Software 18.10 as their latest official Linux driver release for what previously was referred to as "AMDGPU-PRO" while now also offers the "All-Open" driver option too. For our latest Linux GPU benchmarking is a look at how Radeon Software 18.10 with its closed-source OpenGL/Vulkan driver builds compare to that of the RadeonSI and RADV open-source drivers when testing from the Mesa 18.2-devel state.

Following years of work in bringing the KDE Plasma 5 desktop to FreeBSD, it's getting into shape and the x11/kde5 package is now in the ports tree for easing the process of setting up the modern KDE desktop stack...

With the release of the long-awaited X.Org Server 1.20 finally being imminent, here is a look at the many features that were merged over the past year and a half for this long drawn out release process. While more of the Linux desktop continues moving towards Wayland, X.Org Server continues evolving as shown by the 1.20 release and as part of that is also plenty on the XWayland side...

As of this morning Intel's "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver now has 16-bit integer support for shaders (shaderInt16) as one more feature to cross-off the TODO list...

Earlier this week MIPS Technologies announced their new MIPS I7200 processor core built on the new nanoMIPS ISA. A day after they unveiled their new GCC port to this much-changed nanoMIPS instruction set and now today they sent out their initial Linux kernel patch for bringing up this new MIPS version that is coming with a new/updated kernel ABI...

Following last month's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5, the Scientific Linux community is preparing to release their re-based downstream of RHEL...

At the end of March there was the roll-out of EGMDE as the example Mir desktop environment and since then it's continued picking up features as part of a learning exercise for getting new contributors/developers interested in Mir and how to deal with the Mir Abstraction Layer (MirAL)...

X.Org Server 1.19 was released 18 months ago and in the days ahead will finally be succeeded by the long-awaited X.Org Server 1.20 release...

If you happen to have a Switch Pro controller for Nintendo's Switch gaming system, it's now natively supported by Steam...

Rafael Avila de Espindola is the fifth most active contributor to LLVM with more than 4,300 commits since 2006, but now he has decided to part ways with the project...

NVIDIA has introduced their first stable driver in the 396 driver series for Linux, the 396.24 release...

Continuing on with our benchmarking of the recently released Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, here are some reference benchmarks on a total of six systems with AMD and Intel hardware while looking to see how the out-of-the-box performance compares to the previous Long Term Support release, Ubuntu 16.04.

Red Hat's Matthias Clasen has announced to the Fedora Council members that the Fedora Atomic Workstation is now known as "Team Silverblue", while the name is a bit awkward and abstract, they do have plans for making Silverblue into great shape for the Fedora 29 and 30 cycles...

Ahead of the upcoming Linux Mint 19 release that's re-based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS as well as the upcoming Linux Mint Debian Edition 3 release based on Stretch, the Cinnamon 3.8 desktop environment is now officially available...

Unity Technologies has unveiled Unity 2018.1 as the latest stable release of their cross-platform, widely-used commercial game engine...

Version 8.1 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) was released today as the major update for the year of this important free software compiler...

MIPS Technologies has unveiled a new processor and one that is built on nanoMIPS, a significantly redesigned MIPS instruction set architecture and the first major product launch since Imagination Technologies sold off MIPS last year...

CVE-2018-8781 was made public today as a new local privilege escalation vulnerability in the mainline Linux kernel that has been present since the Linux 3.4 kernel release six years ago...

The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver now has patches available for Enhanced Quality Anti-Aliasing (EQAA) that is also known as Flexible MSAA...

Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers today submitted their first batch of feature updates to DRM-Next of new material that in turn they are aiming for the Linux 4.18 merge window...

The Mesa-based RADV Radeon Vulkan driver is enabling out-of-order rasterization by default for a small but consistent performance gain...

When it comes to original open-source games, The Battle for Wesnoth remains one of the premiere choices that has now been in development for the past 15 years and is GPL licensed...

The 2018 Vulkan Developer Day event was held earlier this week at the Ubisoft offices in Montreal, Canada...

As of writing, Mark Shuttleworth has yet to formally introduce the Ubuntu 18.10 cycle, but it's fairly sure the "Cosmic Canimal."..

With the start of a new month comes the usual updated usage statistics for Valve's Steam gaming service, which for the past month represents an increase in Linux gamers...

If you need some integrated multimedia capabilities while you are editing your text files with GNU Emacs, Emms 5.0 is available as a big update to the Emacs Multimedia System...

Back in February Feral Interactive announced they were bringing Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia to Linux. While the game is being released for Windows this week, the Linux port is coming in the next month or two...

While there is VK9 for getting Direct3D 9 implemented over Vulkan and then the very successful DXVK for running Direct3D 11 over Vulkan with a focus on Wine games and then also the less mature VKD3D for Direct3D 12 over Vulkan, there hasn't been a solution for those wanting Direct3D 10 accelerated by Vulkan. But an indirect solution is now in the works via DXUP...

UBports developer Marius Gripsgard is working on adding X11 support to Mir by means of XWayland...

Fedora 28 is now officially out, the first on-time release in many years. This is a great update with GNOME 3.28 on Wayland on the desktop side while also a lot to get excited about on the server-side too...

The rolling-release Void Linux independent OS known for its XBPS package manager, use of Runit as an init system rather than systemd, LibreSSL rather than OpenSSL, and other offerings making this Linux distribution fairly different is in a bit of a trouble. The project leader of Void Linux is missing in action, making much of the project's infrastructure inaccessible...

Fedora 28 debuts today and it's a terrific update to this Linux distribution. I've been running Fedora Workstation 28 and Fedora Server 28 on a number of systems so far and it's been working out quite nicely during the development phase, many visible and both underlying improvements, and also significant is they are now releasing on-time without sacrificing quality thanks to release management improvements...

Following last week's huge GIMP 2.10 release, it looks like the next stable version will indeed be the long-desired GIMP 3.0...

Independent Linux kernel hacker Con Kolivas today released the Linux 4.16-ck1 stable kernel as his collection of kernel patches applied atop the vanilla Linux 4.16 upstream code-base. Most notable to that patch-set is the updated MuQSS 0.171 scheduler, which is also available for download on its own for patching against your own kernel build...

Landing just prior to the official Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" release was the controversial Ubuntu software/hardware survey functionality. When announcing their plans to incorporate an optional survey process into the installation process, Canonical said they would be making this survey data public. They are doing so, but it will be a while before it's accessible...

Zchunk is a new file format aiming to be highly "delta-able" while maintaining a good compression ratio...

Work continues in an expedited manner on the "V3D" DRM driver formerly known as VC5 for supporting next-generation graphics hardware found on Broadcom SoCs...

Happy May Day to those celebrating any events today, but as usual with the end of a month comes our recaps of the most popular Linux/open-source news over the month prior...

UEFI SecureBoot support didn't make it for Debian 9.0 "Stretch" but progress is now being made on this "security" feature and it's looking like it could be squared away for the Debian 10.0 release expected next year...