Phoronix

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...

There's been work going on for years of "soft" FP64 support to allow emulated support for the double-precision floating-point data types for GPUs not otherwise inherently supporting this capability. The soft support would allow for some older GPUs to then advertise OpenGL 4.0+ support now that ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 support could be enabled. That day looks like it's finally coming for mainline Mesa...

Now that the OpenChrome DRM driver is hoping to go mainline in 2018 now that it can handle run-time resolution changes without crashing the X.Org Server, the project's lone developer Kevin Brace has published a TODO list of other code changes he has planned prior to getting this open-source VIA x86 graphics driver into the mainline Linux kernel...

Following more Wine Vulkan code being merged and the first milestone being achieved of vulkaninfo working, Roderick Colenbrander has submitted his latest patches in the bring-up of Vulkan support under Wine...

Development on the Linux 4.16 kernel continues moving along smoothly and tonight the 4.16-rc5 kernel is released...

Oded Gabbay sent in his pull request today of the AMDKFD driver updates targeting the Linux 4.17 kernel. Notably this includes the long-awaited dGPU support in inching AMD/GPUOpen ROCm compute support with OpenCL off a mainline kernel for select discrete GPUs...

While SilverStone is mostly known for their beautifully crafted computer cases, in addition to their range of power supplies and other enthusiast products they have also offered a number of cooling products over the years. Their latest addition to their cooling product line is the TP02-M2 that is an aluminum alloy heatsink for cooling M.2 solid-state drives.

Assuming no last minute snafu, the GNOME 3.28 desktop environment will see its official release happen on 14 March, incorporating the past six months worth of improvements to this open-source desktop stack...

The OpenChrome KMS/DRM driver can finally handle run-time resolution changes without crashing. The developer now hopes to be able to mainline this driver into the Linux kernel in 2018...

It looks like current Debian Project Leader Chris Lamb will be serving another term...

Netrunner 18.03 "Idolon" has been released as the latest version of this KDE-focused desktop Linux distribution derived from Debian's testing repository...

Oracle published a SPARC and Solaris road-map updated for March 2018...

Today marks the first release of the i3 tiling window manager in 2018...

A few days back I provided some fresh Linux 4.16 kernel benchmarks compared to recent stable kernel releases while also toggling the KPTI and Retpoline security features on Linux 4.16 Git for seeing the impact of the Spectre and Meltdown mitigation techniques on this latest kernel while using Intel Xeon hardware. For this latest round of tests is a similar comparison while using an AMD EPYC system.

There is just one month to go until the official debut of the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" release and Canonical's Mir team is busy as ever on the home stretch of final changes for this next release...

Debian 9.4 is now available as the latest maintenance release for the Stretch release series...

The latest work by Roderick Colenbrander on "winevulkan" was merged to mainline Wine Git on Friday and also marks their first self-appointed milestone in bringing up Vulkan API support within Wine...

Of the many features coming to X.Org Server 1.20 there is now Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3 (DRI3) versions 1.1 and 1.2. Mesa has now received its patches for making use of the new functionality...

A few weeks back many of you were excited by the prospects of the Airtop2 Inferno PC that is a completely fanless PC with up to a Core i7 CPU and GTX 1080 GPU. This well-built, industrial-grade computer with CompuLab's custom-engineered natural airflow technology is now a step closer to the market...

It's been a while since we last have seen any new Heterogeneous Memory Management patches even after its mainline introduction in Linux 4.14. But Jerome Glisse who masterminded HMM at Red Hat is now out with some Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) patches for Nouveau...

The KDE developers working on the Amarok music player released version 2.9.0 this week as their last expected release atop the aging KDE 4 libraries and Qt4...

Mozilla's Servo team is being absorbed by the company's Mixed Reality Team...

Fedora is planning to make a seemingly tardy entrance into the "Internet of Things" space with a new Fedora IoT Edition on the way...

Today marks the first beta release of opt-in flavors participating for the Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" development cycle...

POCL, the Portable Computing Language, that aims to be a portable and open-source OpenCL implementation that can run on CPUs as well as AMD HSA targets and more, is out with a new feature release...

There is less than one week to go until the GNOME 3.28 release while today the second release candidate is now available that serves as the final step before the stable debut...

Over the past decade we have looked at many interesting PCs from CompuLab, a vendor capable of delivering Linux-friendly PCs that are originally designed and often catered to meet demanding industrial requirements. The latest Linux PC we have been putting through its paces the past several weeks has been the Fitlet2, which CompuLab describes as being designed "from the ground-up to minimize size and maximize capabilities, durability and thermal performance." After running our plethora of benchmarks on this mini Linux PC, we can say with confidence they have succeeded in their mission.

For those relying upon GTK applications like LibreOffice, GIMP, and GNOME programs from the KDE desktop, the integration is taking a step forward with Plasma 5.13...

The Qt Company developers are soliciting feedback from developers and the community about what they would like to see out of WebAssembly support for the tool-kit...

With today's Mesa 18.1-devel Git code, the last of the Tegra/Nouveau code has landed where it's now rounded off for offering a completely open-source and accelerated graphics stack that works well on the Tegra210 (Tegra X1) SoC...

Intel open-source developers are preparing the last of their feature work for the i915 DRM driver with the upcoming Linux 4.17 kernel cycle...

The Android-x86 port of the Android Open-Source Project for running on x86 Intel/AMD PCs and devices is now up to running on the "Nougat" code-base for its stable release...

The first milestone development release of Phoronix Test Suite 8.0-Aremark was tagged in Git on Thursday night as inching towards this next major release of our open-source automated benchmarking platform and this release will also commemorate ten years since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0...

RenderDoc 1.0 has been released, the open-source standalone graphics debugger that supports frame capturing and introspection of Vulkan, D3D11, D3D12, OpenGL, and OpenGL ES APIs across all major platforms...

Longtime Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst who joined Red Hat at the end of 2017 continues working on Nouveau compute support along with fellow hat-wearing open-source graphics driver developer Rob Clark...

With Vulkan 1.1 it should be technically possible to write a driver/vendor-agnostic Wayland compositor using Vulkan thanks to the new core extensions...

The DXVK project that has been making significant progress the past several months in getting Direct3D accelerated via Vulkan for Wine gamers now has a new release available...

Moving forward the Phoronix Test Suite will be offering Microsoft Windows support that's at near feature parity to the automated, reproducible, open-source benchmarking support we have offered the past decade for Linux as well as BSD, macOS, and Solaris platforms. This is brand new, rewritten Windows support with a focus on Windows 10 x64 and Windows Server 2016.

Today marks the long-awaited release of LLVM 6.0 as the slightly late half-year update to this open-source compiler stack and its sub-projects like Clang, LLD, etc...

With the upcoming Linux 4.17 kernel cycle there will be initial support for HDCP with the i915 DRM driver. That High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) support in its initial form is limited to v1.4 on HDMI/DP connectors, but HDCP 2.2 is now being tackled...

Last year AMD's GPUOpen group posted the Vulkan Memory Allocator while coming soon is version 2.0 of this code-base...

More new material has been submitted to DRM-Next for AMDGPU feature improvements in Linux 4.17...

Valve released a new SteamVR update for Linux gamers last night and while there are just two Linux-specific changes, both of them are high impact...

Waking up this morning and preparing for Vulkan 1.1 I wasn't too sure what to expect from the open-source drivers and certainly wouldn't have envisioned in my wildest dreams that by the time of going to sleep there would be initial support merged into Mesa Git on launch-day for a major graphics API update... But open-source developers have achieved just that today...

Microsoft's next installment of Windows 10, the Spring Update, is bringing some interesting changes for those Linux enthusiasts that may be stuck using Windows at times. The experience may be more bearable with more Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) improvements and even native Curl and Tar support coming to the OS...

If you have been affected by AMDGPU DC display code fallout on the Linux 4.16 release candidates up to this point, fortunately there is a big batch of fixes set to land still for this kernel cycle...

While we are past the first release candidate on the X.Org Server 1.20 release, one of the patch series still being wrangled for this update by release manager Adam Jackson is EGLStreams support for XWayland, benefiting the NVIDIA Linux driver...

Today's Vulkan 1.1 release is met by brilliant Linux driver support across the board. Not only is there the NVIDIA Linux driver update we have come to expect but this launch has been met by on-time open-source driver support with the AMDVLK driver and Intel ANV Vulkan driver too having day-one support in source form. But that's not all as Bas and Dave have managed to get day-one conformance too with RADV...

Google today is making available the first public developer preview release of the forthcoming Android P...

Intel has joined the party with NVIDIA and AMD in offering launch-day Linux driver support for the big new Vulkan 1.1 update available today from The Khronos Group...