Phoronix

Ahead of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS next month the Mir developers are working to release Mir version 0.31...

Facebook developers working on the HHVM Hack/PHP language stack have released version 3.25 of the HipHop Virtual Machine...

The Qt Company has some new software development releases available in time for weekend testing...

Daniel Schürmann continues hacking on the sub-group patch-set for the RADV Vulkan driver to expose this important feature of the recent Vulkan 1.1 release...

Red Hat's David Malcom has outlined some of the usability improvements coming with the imminent release of GCC 8...

Chris Wilson of Intel's Linux graphics driver team posted a big set of 36 patches on Wednesday for their DRM kernel driver...

A few years back was the news of Russia wanting to get into the CPU business and at the time were aiming for ARM-based processors but ended up settling for MIPS. It turns out those "Baikal" processors are still around and being worked on as indicated by some fresh benchmarks this week...

A Phoronix Premium supporter recently requested some Windows vs. Linux networking performance benchmarks. That is being done as part of a larger comparison also featuring the popular BSDs, but for some initial measurements, here are some Netperf networking performance metrics on Microsoft Windows Server 2016 and various Linux distributions...

The GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers have been working on Icelake CPU support for a while now as just the "icelake" target but now it's being separated into "icelake-client" and "icelake-server" as the CPU feature differences between the desktop-class processors and Xeon server chips become more clear for this succeeding generation to Cannonlake...

With Ubuntu 18.04 LTS set to be released next month and its final package configuration quickly falling into place, we have begun firing up some benchmarks for seeing how this Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" release is comparing to various other Linux distributions. Up first as part of this series of benchmarks is using an AMD EPYC workstation/server for seeing how the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS performance compares to six other Linux distributions.

Roderick Colenbrander and those working with him on "Winevulkan" to provide a clean Vulkan implementation for Wine supporting the Vulkan ICD concept, etc, rather than the old hacked together code in Wine-Staging have done a great job. With Roderick's latest Winevulkan patches, this new implementation is considered usable...

The Linux Foundation's Embedded Linux Conference 2018 and OpenIoT Summit wrapped up on Wednesday in Portland, Oregon. For those that couldn't make the event, PDF slide decks for many of the presentations are now available...

The Linux 4.16 kernel is at least two or three weeks out from being released, but Intel has already submitted their i915 DRM driver feature changes for Linux 4.17 and are now beginning to think about their feature changes for Linux 4.18...

Valve still hasn't acquired RAD Game Tools, but their close relationship still continues to be paying off with good Linux support out of RAD's game development tools for those developers wishing to target Linux...

While there doesn't appear to be too many Intel BayTrail users out there running systems with Coreboot, this generation of hardware that's been a bit notorious with Linux users due to varying issues can now find at least a bit better graphics support with the latest Coreboot code...

Mesa 18.0's delay of more than one month and without any new release candidate came while the open-source Intel developers were hunkered down to clear the remaining blocker bugs...

Cedric Bail of Samsung's Open-Source Group presented today at the Embedded Linux Conference on EFL 2.0 as part of the Enlightenment project's long-standing goal to provide a new and unified API...

With Firefox 59 having shipped that means Firefox 60 is now officially in beta...

Imad Sousou, Intel's GM of the Open-Source Technology Center, had some interesting remarks to make during his keynote today as part of this week's Embedded Linux Conference in Portland...

As a nice Pi Day surprise and a week ahead of the Game Developers' Conference (GDC 18) is a new Unreal Engine 4 release from Epic Games...

The GNOME project has managed its Pi Day release of GNOME 3.28...

Since last week's big release of LLVM 6.0 along with Clang 6.0, I have been carrying out some fresh compiler benchmarks of the previous Clang 5.0 to this new stable release that switches to C++14 by default, among many other changes to LLVM itself and this C/C++ compiler front-end.

GNU's GRUB bootloader has picked up another feature ahead of the GRUB 2.04 release expected later this year...

While still working on A Total War Saga: THRONES OF BRITANNIA and Rise of The Tomb Raider to Linux this spring, Feral Interactive has now confirmed another port coming to Linux (and macOS)...

While Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" is just one month away from release, the developers working on the Mir display server code are still working to get an example desktop session into this release...

Timothy Arceri of Valve's open-source Linux GPU driver team is out with his latest set of patches to further enhance the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is celebrating Pi day (March 14) by launching their latest Raspberry Pi ARM SBC. This though isn't with some new Broadcom chipset with VC5 graphics, sadly, but a slightly revised variant of the Raspberry Pi 3. Meet the Raspberry Pi 3B+...

Just a little more than one week past the GStreamer 1.14 RC1 release, the second and final release candidate of the upcoming GStreamer 1.14 is now available for testing...

While LLVM 6.0 is now available and it includes the Retpoline compiler-side support for Spectre V2 mitigation, an LLVM 5.0.2 point release is coming to back-port it to their previous stable series...

Intel has published the Intel Processor Microcode Package for Linux 20180312 release with the latest improvements around the microcode-based approach for Spectre CPU vulnerability mitigation, succeeding their microcode updates from earlier in the year...

Eric Anholt of Broadcom's latest open-source Linux driver work hasn't been on their BCMV Vulkan driver or their newer VC5 Gallium3D driver, but rather improving the multimedia stack for existing Raspberry Pi devices...

Mesa 18.0 had been due for release around mid-February, but that didn't happen and there hasn't even been a release candidate in more than one month...

DragonFFI is a foreign function interface (FFI) built using the LLVM and Clang compiler stack to provide a library calling C functions and C data structures that can be used from any other programming language...

The Samba open-source SMB/CIFS networking implementation is having a bad security day...

Version 3.6 of Tails, the security and privacy minded live USB/DVD Linux distribution derived from Debian, is now available...

Just two months after the big Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities were disclosed, Israeli security researchers have published 13 security vulnerabilities claiming to affect AMD Ryzen and EPYC product lines...

While the belated X.Org Server 1.20 is onto the release candidate stage, there still are some feature patches expected to land and among them is the per-window flipping support in the Present extension with support wired through for XWayland...

Purism is reporting they have been able to get KDE Plasma Mobile in its current development state running on their initial Librem 5 smartphone development platform...

Mozilla's Firefox 59.0 is now available to download from the FTP server ahead of the official announcement...

Yesterday we wrote about David Airlie working on a fresh push to get "soft FP64" support in Mesa for allowing some older graphics cards on the R600g driver to then have OpenGL 4 support thanks to this double-precision floating-point support being their last blocker. That code is moving forward...

Following the very bumpy Mesa 17.3 releases, Mesa developers are currently discussing ideas for improving the release process moving forward...

NVIDIA has just published the 390.42 Linux graphics driver as their latest maintenance update in this long-lived driver series...

Karton is a Docker-based solution for running Linux programs on macOS or other Linux distributions as well as different architectures...

The developers behind the Rust programming language have put out a road-map for the year as well as details on the forthcoming "Rust 2018" Edition that succeeds the 1.x release series...

If you are a university student and would like to pursue a career in Linux/open-source software development, a great way to get a jump-start on that is through Google's annual Summer of Code program. Student applications for GSoC 2018 are now being accepted...

Controversial open-source figure Eric S. Raymond is hoping to begin work on an open-source, open hardware design for an uninterruptible power supply (UPS)...

While Austrian PC cooling manufacturer Noctua is mostly known for their high-end enthusiast/gamer oriented cooling products, they do offer a line-up of heatsinks for both AMD Ryzen Threadripper and EPYC server processors. In this article we are trying out the NH-U9 TR4-SP3, NH-U12S TR4-SP3, and NH-U14S TR4-SP3 heatsinks on a 32-core / 64-thread AMD EPYC platform for seeing how well these air coolers will do with AMD's promising server platform.

While the Linux 4.16 kernel release is still three weeks or so away, the Linux 4.17 kernel is already shaping up to be another exciting cycle...

KDE's KEXI database creator program that is akin to Microsoft Access is out with their first major release in months and also restores support for Microsoft Windows alongside Linux and macOS...

Support for Zstd-compressed Debian packages was worked on last week by some Canonical/Ubuntu developers and already by the end of the year they are looking at potentially using it by default...