Phoronix

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...

Among many other improvements, KDE's upcoming Plasma 5.13 release is bringing new log-in and lock screens for the desktop...

Hitting mainline LLVM and Clang compilers today were support for Vega 12 "GFX904" and Vega 20 "GFX906" graphics processors...

AzCopy is the latest software Microsoft has brought to Linux and is now generally available, but not entirely a surprise or unexpected...

Just in time for ending out April, Microsoft is today beginning to ship the "Windows 10 April 2018 Update" what was previously known as the "Spring Update" and "Redstone 4". Of course, we're mentioning this for what Linux and other operating systems now have to compete against and as a prelude for some forthcoming benchmarks on Phoronix...

Following the release of Chrome 66 earlier this month, Google developers working on the Chrome/Chromium web-browser have officially promoted Chrome 67 to beta...

Based off the new Ubuntu 18.04 as a base, Linux PC vendor System76 released this weekend Pop!_OS 18.04...

AMD quietly released their Radeon Software for Linux 18.10 driver. This was what was basically referred to as "AMDGPU-PRO" but is now part of the "Radeon Software" branding especially with this driver package continuing to offer the option of an "AMDGPU All-Open" stack to complement the PRO components...

As part of our ongoing benchmarks of the recently released Ubuntu 18.04, here is a look at the performance of Ubuntu Linux on the same laptop while testing all Long-Term Support releases from 12.04 to 18.04 for seeing how the Ubuntu performance has evolved over the past six years on this Intel laptop.

USB 3.2 was announced last summer as an incremental update to the USB standard to double the bandwidth for existing USB Type-C cables...

The Linux Mint project has published their monthly recap of activities going on for April with this popular desktop Linux distribution...

The GCC 8 compiler will likely be introduced as stable this week or next in the form of the GCC 8.1 premiere release. Here's a look at the prominent changes for this annual update to the GNU Compiler Collection...

The Linux 4.16.6 kernel was released on Sunday and besides various other fixes, AMD Ryzen 7 2700X corrected temperature reporting is among the changes...

Linus Torvalds announced just now the latest installment of the "Fearless Coyote"... The Linux 4.17-rc3 kernel is now available...

Besides other promising Linux 4.17 power saving improvements, a separate fix was queued today for potentially helping AMD systems conserve power...

Libplacebo is an effort to shift the MPlayer2-forked MPV media player's core rendering code into a reusable library. The libplacebo library can allow for cleaning up MPV's APIs in the process as well as providing a standard library for GPU-accelerated video and image processing...

On Saturday was the latest code drop for the XGL component update to the AMDVLK open-source Linux Vulkan driver, which incorporates the work done internally by AMD developers on their official Vulkan driver code-base over the past number of days...

Google's WebP image format officially reached version 1.0 to seemingly no fanfare...

Following Friday's release of Wine 3.7, the developers maintaining the experimental Wine-Staging build today released their version 3.7 re-base...

AMD has released a new update to their AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler (AOCC)...

Mesa 18.0.2 is now the latest stable release for Mesa3D while those wishing to ride the bleeding-edge version for these OpenGL/Vulkan drivers can try Mesa 18.1-RC2...

The OpenSolaris-derived Illumos-based OpenIndiana operating system is out with their first Hipster update of the year...

Karol Herbst and others at Red Hat continue working on improving the open-source GPU compute for Linux, particularly for the Nouveau open-source reverse-engineered NVIDIA driver...

The RadeonSI compiler queue can now run across more CPU cores/threads of modern systems though it appears this will primarily just benefit those running the shader-db shader test cases...

Yesterday I wrote about GCC developers moving to drop Intel MPX support and now the Linux kernel developers are looking at dropping the Memory Protection Extensions support too, thereby rendering this modern CPU feature unsupported by Linux...

Wine 3.7 is out today as the latest bi-weekly development release of Wine that will culminate next year with the Wine 4.0 debut...

It's been over a half-decade since the GIMP 2.8 stable debut and today marks the long-awaited release of GIMP 2.10...

Last year Canonical began developing a new Ubuntu Server installer and while it was quite rough at first, it got into shape in subsequent months and is used by default for the newly-released Ubuntu Server 18.04...

While OpenMP 4 supports accelerators like GPUs and DSPs, HardCloud is a new initiative focused on OpenMP offloading for FPGAs and with an emphasis on speeding up cloud computing...

Last year we reported on GCC deprecating Intel Memory Protection Extensions (MPX) and now it looks like with GCC 9 they will be dropping the support entirely...

The visually stunning and technically advanced Unigine 2 engine that is well supported on Linux is out with a new release, Unigine 2.7. Unigine 2.7 rolls out with updated SDK offerings of Unigine 2 Entertainment, Unigine 2 Engineering, and Unigine 2 Sim depending upon your commercial needs...

The Arcan Display Server that is the display stack built off (in part) a game engine and also developing the Durden desktop and most recently developing a "Safespaces" VR Linux desktop has also been working on porting the code from Linux to OpenBSD...

While we are still waiting for Intel Cannonlake CPUs with "Gen 10" graphics to formally launch (which looks like may not happen now until very late 2018 or early 2019, with the recent Intel earnings call indicating no 10nm volume production until 2019), open-source Intel developers continue their work on the Linux bring-up of Icelake "Gen 11" graphics...

Former Valve developer and texture compression wizard Rich Geldreich has open-sourced the "bc7enc16" BC7/BPTC texture encoder...

Juan Suarez Romero who is maintaining the Mesa 18.0 stable series today announced the 18.0.2 release candidate as what will be the second point release...

Ubuntu 18.04, the Bionic Beaver release, is now available as Canonical's latest Long-Term Support (LTS) release...

While Fedora had been notorious for releasing often weeks behind schedule, they've been working on improving their release process management and bug handling and it's paid off. Fedora 28 will be shipping on-time for its final release next week!..

A guest post on AMD's GPUOpen blog outlines the overhead issues with using the Vulkan loader library and possible performance advantages to using vkGetDeviceProcAddr or more easily via a little heard of project called Volk...

I can't imagine many Linux desktop users are interested in a closed-source, commercial-driven password manager for their systems, but for those that are, Keeper launched a new version of its Keeper Password Program Manager for Linux...

With Red Hat deprecating Btrfs in RHEL7 with that "next-gen" Linux file-system not having panned out like many had hoped for or expected, Red Hat has been investing in their new "Stratis" storage project. More details on Stratis have now come to light...

Landing today within the Coreboot Git tree is support for the RISC-V based SiFive Freedom Unleashed 540 System-on-a-Chip and SiFive's Unleashed mainboard making use of this SoC built around the royalty-free and open processor ISA...

While openSUSE Leap 15 is coming next month that hasn't slowed down openSUSE developers from continuing to update the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed platform...

Here are our latest Linux gaming benchmarks comparing the Intel Core i7 8700K to the newly-released Ryzen 7 2700X. The focus in this article is on the Rise of the Tomb Raider Linux port released last week by Feral Interactive and powered by Vulkan.

LibreOffice 6.1 Alpha 1 was tagged overnight as the first development release towards this next updated open-source office suite release succeeding the big LibreOffice 6.0...

GNOME Mutter 3.29.1 has been released as the first development snapshot of this window manager / compositor in the trek towards GNOME 3.30...

Legendary CPU designer Jim Keller has reportedly joined Intel following his brief stint at Tesla after leading the Zen team at AMD...

Earlier this month Vega M support came to RadeonSI OpenGL, with Vega M being the Radeon graphics found within Intel's Kabylake G processors. There was then Vega M support for the RADV Vulkan driver but these user-space drivers won't work without the kernel bits and now there is that support with 32 AMDGPU DRM patches...

Just a week after the NVIDIA 396.18.02 Linux driver beta is an updated Linux driver build (and for Windows too)...

With the recent release candidates to the long overdue X.Org Server 1.20, OpenGL rendering has been broken when using DDX drivers like Intel and Nouveau rather than the generic xf86-video-modesetting. That was fixed today...