Phoronix

As we end out November, here is a fresh look at the current Windows 10 Pro Fall Creator's Update versus Ubuntu 17.10 with the latest Linux 4.15 kernel and Mesa 17.4-dev Radeon graphics driver stack as we see how various games compete under Windows 10 and Linux with these latest AMD drivers on the Radeon RX 580 and RX Vega 64 graphics cards.

Yesterday it was confirmed that Wine 3.0 will enter its code freeze next week and begin with the release candidates until the official v3.0.0 milestone is ready sometime around mid-January. Here's a recap of all the Wine developments for 2017 if you are curious about all the features and improvements to be found in this big update...

After recently getting some older Radeon GPUs to OpenGL 4.2 with new R600g patches and making other improvements to R600g, David Airlie has now sent out a set of patches for getting compute shaders and GLSL 4.30 working for some older pre-GCN GPUs with the R600 Gallium3D driver...

Following Red Hat promoting Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 for ARM under general availability, Oracle with their RHEL7-derivative, Oracle Linux 7, also now supports ARM...

Earlier this month Intel open-source developers posted their patches for implementing OpenGL's ARB_get_program_binary extension, which basically allows games/applications to get and set their own compiled programs. This work has now been revised and extended to also support the Gallium3D drivers...

Marek has volleyed onto the Mesa mailing list a set of patches providing RadeonSI with a "huge cleanup" for this Gallium3D OpenGL driver used by Radeon HD 7000 series "GCN" / "Southern Islands" graphics cards and newer...

RISC-V has a big new hardware backer... Western Digital...

A few of you within the forums have talked of regressions and other bugs when trying out the new AMDGPU DC display stack in the Linux 4.15 kernel, particularly on pre-Vega GPUs where it's disabled by default. The good news is that more fixes are on the way...

For those curious about the current benefits of AVX-512, here are some benchmarks using a recent snapshot of the GCC 8 compiler and comparing the performance of the generated binaries for the skylake and skylake-avx512 targets...

The HDMI Forum has announced HDMI 2.1 as the latest version of their high definition audio/video interface...

It's been a few months since last running a Linux distribution / operating system comparison on Amazon's EC2 public cloud, but given the ever-advancing state of Linux, here are some fresh benchmarks when testing the Amazon Linux AMI, Clear Linux, Debian 9.2, Gentoo, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4, SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 SP3, and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

Wine creator Alexandre Julliard has laid out plans for the Wine 3.0 code freeze to begin next week...

Ubuntu's Mir display server stack is now available in the Fedora archive for Fedora Rawhide, Fedora 27, and Fedora 26 packages are also on the way...

The UPower power management abstraction layer for Linux systems is out with another pre-1.0 release...

While Linux 4.15 is going to be a mega kernel update with its major new features and changes as we have been covering for the past two weeks, there is some functionality that has yet to see the light of day in mainline...

Earlier this month I reported on Intel's plans for removing Cilk Plus from GCC 8 since this parallel programming effort of theirs was depreciated in GCC 7 and hadn't seen much adoption. It's now official with the code being stripped out of the GCC 8 code-base...

Linux input expert and libinput creator Peter Hutterer of Red Hat is working on support for libinput to handle natively recording and replaying of input events...

AMD has sent out 14 new patches today for the AMDKFD HSA kernel driver in material that should be targeting Linux 4.16...

The libmicrohttpd GNU project is the C library that makes it easy to run an HTTP web-server as part of another application while being as small as about ~32k compiled...

AMD's GPUOpen team has announced the release of Compressonator 2.7, the newest version of their tools for dealing with compressed assets and for testing the impact of different compression techniques...

Since this year's KDE Akademy conference, KDE developers have been plotting their vision for the next few years and recently wrapped up voting on what should be their three main goals to focus on over the next few years...

Fedora Rawhide ahead of Fedora 28 has begun offering more packaged Rust applications...

When carrying out the 11-way Linux distribution boot time tests I also used that as an opportunity for some fresh OpenGL graphics tests with the Intel system on the variety of Linux distributions benchmarked.

For those that may enjoy the rolling-release nature of openSUSE Tumbleweed but want to be a bit more conservative with the updates, Tumbleweed now supports the concept of snapshots...

Qt 5.10 RC was expected back on 16 November but only this morning is making its debut...

Mozilla engineers aren't letting up after their Quantum work in Firefox 57 that made the browser much faster. Next they have been improving WebRender and can be tested easily with Firefox Nightly...

Recently a number of patches have been floating around the kernel mailing list for prepping "KAISER" in what will likely be merged come Linux 4.16. KAISER is a new security feature for the Linux kernel...

The out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system driver has been updated with compatibility for the latest Linux 4.14 stable series. Besides reworking the code to run on Linux 4.14, this controversial file-system has also added support for Zstd file-system compression...

While there's long been VK9 as an effort to get Direct3D 9 running atop Vulkan and Wine developers planning VKD3D for Direct3D 12 over Vulkan, now coming in between is DXVK for Direct3D 11 support...

Vulkan 1.0.66 was released this morning as the newest version of the Vulkan 1.0 graphics and compute specification...

While when releasing Linux 4.14 Linus Torvalds mentioned 4.15-rc1 might be delayed due to his US holiday travels, Linux 4.15-rc1 has been released on time to conclude the two week merge window process...

As a flashback to the past, hitting the LLVM Git/SVN code today were improvements for those still running with processors supporting AMD's 3DNow! extensions...

The merge window is effectively over for Linux 4.15 with it being the 14th day of the process, although 4.15-rc1 might not end up coming out today due to Linus Torvalds' traveling around the US Thanksgiving holiday. But with Torvalds tending to not approve major last minute additions to new kernels, we don't anticipate any last minute surprises and therefore here is our feature overview of the changes and new features of Linux 4.15. This is arguably the most exciting and feature-packed kernel update ever.

In addition to the GCC plugin support on Windows/MinGW, there are more compiler happenings this weekend...

While the VirtualBox DRM/KMS driver was merged for Linux 4.13 as one step towards improving the out-of-the-box support for Linux guests on Oracle VM VirtualBox, other drivers remain out-of-tree still, but that is slowly changing...

A late addition for the GCC 8 code compiler is adding support for plug-ins to Windows/MinGW...

Given the release of a new Blender "Barbershop" benchmark file, I decided to test this new scene plus the other benchmark files with Blender 2.79 on a variety of Intel/AMD CPUs for some fresh results of how various newer CPUs compare for this open-source 3D modeling software.

This week Con Kolivas updated his MuQSS scheduler patch-set for the Linux 4.14 kernel. This is the scheduler that was born out of his earlier work on BFS...

The 3.27 development series for the GNOME Builder integrated development environment is picking up a number of interesting features that is making sure Builder is an awesome update as part of the GNOME 3.28 release in March...

When Ilia Mirkin isn't busy being one of the key contributors to the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver stack, he's often working on the Freedreno driver stack for the open-source Qualcomm Adreno support...

While the release of the belated Mesa 17.3 is imminent, Mesa 17.2.6 is now available as the current latest stable release...

Today the branching of LibreOffice 6.0 from Git master took place as well as tagging the first beta...

For those looking for some technical talks to listen to this weekend, audio recordings of the Linux Plumbers Conference 2017 are now available...

Following my recent tests of looking at the Ubuntu boot times from Linux 4.6 to 4.15 kernels, a request came in to look at the out-of-the-box boot performance on various Linux distributions. Here is a look at how the out-of-the-box Linux boot performance compares for 11 different distributions.

Making the rounds this weekend online as a "new" ARM Mali open-source driver is what we wrote about back in June as A New Mali-400 Open-Source Graphics Driver Is In Development...

The digital artists working on the Blender 3D modeling software have released a new benchmark file for stressing CPUs and GPUs by rendering an advanced scene...

Topi Pohjolainen of Intel has been working on adding proper FP16/half-precision support to Mesa's GLSL code...

Building off the work by Mario Kleiner, AMD developer Marek Olšák has been working on 10-bit color visual support within Mesa/Gallium3D...

Intel UMIP support landed in Linux 4.15 as part of the x86 updates. User-Mode Instruction Prevention is for preventing certain instructions from being executed outside of ring level zero and will be supported by future Intel CPUs. Support for UMIP within the KVM virtualization space though will have to wait until Linux 4.16...

Wine 2.22 is now available as the latest development release of this program to run Windows games/applications on Linux and other operating systems...