Phoronix

After going through nine weekly release candidates, the Linux 4.15 kernel is set to be released today as the first major stable update of 2018...

Mesa 18.0 is currently being prepared for release by mid-February and is yet another feature-packaged, quarterly update to this open-source 3D graphics driver stack with significant improvements for OpenGL and Vulkan support and performance.

While we are seeing exciting projects at the moment about mapping Direct3D 11 over Vulkan (as well as D3D9 and D3D12 over Vulkan projects too), there are new open-source projects for mapping Vulkan over Direct3D 12 and Metal...

From the mid-2000's to 2011 Allwinner was marketing their F-Series processors with ARM9 32-bit RISC processors while finally in 2018 these SoCs might have upstream Linux kernel support...

The Solus Project this week released Linux Driver Management 1.0, a library created by this innovative Linux distribution for enumerating system components and detecting matches between said components and packages/drivers providing additional functionality...

SUSE's Richard Brown has issued a status update around openSUSE's ongoing mitigation of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities...

Released this weekend is Binutils 2.30 as the latest collection of these GNU utilities important to the open-source ecosystem...

If the extremely fast Intel Optane SSD 900p is out of your budget with its 3D XPoint memory, this week Intel rolled out the SSD 760p series with 64-layer TLC 3D NAND memory. For less than $100 USD you can get the 256GB capacity Intel 760p SSD, which is what we are benchmarking today under Ubuntu Linux.

Sent out Friday night were the latest patches for getting the discrete GPU support within the AMDKFD HSA kernel driver up to scratch for allowing the ROCm compute stack working off a mainline kernel...

Ubuntu-focused Linux PC vendor System76 who has also been working on their own Pop!_OS distribution is looking at enabling disk encryption by default...

KDE KWin window manager / compositor maintainer Martin Flöser has penned a brief response to the recent GNOME developer's CSD Initiative in trying to get all applications to pursue client-side decorations and abandon title bars in favor of header bars...

Google's WebM folks quietly released libvpx 1.7.0 earlier this week as the latest version of their VP8/VP9 encoder/decoder library...

For those still in search of a KDE-focused Linux distribution that's rolling-release and desktop-friendly, Netrunner Rolling 2018.01 has been released...

Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS had been scheduled to ship mid-February as the latest point release for this Long Term Support release, but unfortunately that is not going to happen as planned due to the Canonical kernel developers being overloaded by Spectre and Meltdown mitigation work...

Keith Packard who has been doing contract work for Valve the past year on improving the support for virtual reality head-mounted displays (VR HMDs) shares a status update on his work at this week's Linux.Conf.Au in Sydney...

Here is a look at how the Linux kernel performance has evolved since the release of Linux 3.17 in October 2014. With all the major kernel releases over the past 3+ years, here is how the performance compares using two very different Intel Gulftown and Haswell systems.

GNOME developer Tobias Bernard has announced "The CSD Initiative" in a push for more applications to support client-side decorations and as part of that to abandon boring title bars in favor of modern header bars...

PipeWire was announced last year as a new Red Hat projects with aspirations to be to video as PulseAudio is to audio on the Linux desktop. Other PipeWire goals include professional audio support equal to or better than JACK, full Wayland/Flatpak support, and more. Red Hat is making a lot of progress on PipeWire, but it's not yet ready to be the default on the Linux desktop...

As we have shown in past benchmarks, while current generation Linux games with current Linux GPU drivers using the Vulkan API rather than OpenGL may not be significantly faster with higher-end hardware right now, the impact of this newer Khronos graphics API tends to be more profound on lower-end hardware, especially when it comes to lightening the load on the CPU. Following the recent Pentium vs. Ryzen 3 Linux gaming tests, I carried out some fresh benchmarks looking at OpenGL vs. Vulkan on the Ryzen 3 1200 quad-core CPU with NVIDIA and Radeon graphics.

While Ubuntu 17.10 defaults to using the Wayland session on supported GPUs/drivers when using the default GNOME Shell based session, Canonical has decided for Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" LTS that it will use the X.Org Server by default...

Glibc 2.27 will be released as soon as next week as the latest half-year update to the GNU C Library...

GLAMOR as a means of providing 2D acceleration over OpenGL in X.Org Server 1.20 will support for 30-bit RGB colors...

One of the last minute changes sneaking into the Linux 4.15 kernel is support for PDP Xbox One controllers...

Earlier this month a Red Hat developer managed to achieve full clock-gating for NVIDIA Kepler GPUs using the open-source Nouveau DRM driver. Today the second version of these patches were published...

At the same time as adding HiDPI monitor support for Windows 10, Valve has added a "2X-scaling mode" for the Steam client to satisfy modern high resolution monitors...

For those planning to pick up a Raven Ridge laptop or the forthcoming desktop APUs, the Mesa driver now has patches for enabling H.265/HEVC video encode support for VCN 1.0 on Raven hardware...

Earlier this week I posted some benchmarks looking at Intel Pentium vs. AMD Ryzen 3 performance for Linux gaming. Those tests on the Pentium and Ryzen systems were done with both NVIDIA and AMD Radeon graphics for seeing how the gaming performance compares in the spectrum of sub-$100 CPUs and cheap graphics cards. But for those that were just curious about the CPU performance, here are some benchmarks I also carried out with the Pentium G4600 Kabylake and AMD Ryzen 3 1200.

Not to be confused with Coreboot or its former name of LinuxBIOS, the Linux Foundation today announced LinuxBoot as a new initiative for replacing system firmware with the Linux kernel/drivers...

The progress is stunning made by a lone developer on the DXVK project for mapping the Direct3D 11 graphics API on top of Vulkan for allowing better performance/support for D3D11 games on Wine...

Taking place this week in Sydney, Australia is the 2018 Linux.Conf.Au conference. For those that can't make the event, there's a livestream, but if the time difference impacts you, the recordings are now beginning to trickle in via YouTube...

GNOME developer Adrien Plazas has joined Purism as part of their effort of getting GTK+ applications on the Librem 5 smart-phone...

While we frequently do Linux OS/distribution performance comparisons on the latest Intel desktop and server hardware, some requests came in recently about looking closer at the fastest Linux distribution(s) when running on AMD's Ryzen desktop processors. Here are benchmarks of ten popular Linux distributions tested out-of-the-box on Ryzen 7 1800X and Threadripper 1950X systems.

The first systemd update of 2018 should soon be here...

Besides Firefox 59 being the release doing away with GTK2 support, this next Mozilla web-browser release might be the one to achieve working native Wayland support...

SUSE's libstorage-ng back-end for YaST's new low-level storage library is now active within the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed distribution...

While it feels like Qt 5.10 was just released a short time ago, the scheduled feature freeze and branching for Qt 5.11 is imminent...

A new Coreboot frame-buffer driver has been published for the Linux kernel that allows reusing of the frame-buffer setup by Coreboot during the hardware initialization process...

Movit, the "Modern Video Toolkit", that aims to provide high-quality, high-performance GPU-based video filters is out with a new release...

GNU Compiler Collection 7.3 is now available as the latest GCC7 point release and the prominent changes being support for helping mitigate Spectre variant two using some new compiler switches...

It didn't happen in time for the upcoming Mesa 18.0, but the R600 Gallium3D driver for supporting pre-GCN AMD Radeon graphics processors is now nearly at OpenGL 4.5 compliance! A needed OpenGL 4.4 extension is now scratched off the list completing the necessary extensions to effectively have GL 4.5, assuming it can pass the conformance test suite...

Thanks to several efforts coming together, there's now an Epiphany Technology Preview project delivering you a bleeding-edge GNOME web-browser in a sane and easily deployable manner...

If the release of Firefox 58 yesterday didn't excite you, Google has today rolled out to stable channel the Chrome 64.0 web-browser...

The long-in-development X.Org Server 1.20 has yet another XWayland addition: XDG-Output protocol support...

It's been a while since last hearing of Huawei's efforts around protectable memory support for the Linux kernel that seems to provide safe read-only protection for dynamically allocated data. The eleventh version of these "pmalloc" patches are now available...

Last week Purism shared a progress update on the Librem 5 smartphone project where they outlined their plans to continue pursuing the i.MX8M SoC and other plans. They've kept up their word of delivering weekly status updates and out today is their latest summary of work...

With today's debut of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 Beta they have made Wayland support available in tech preview form...

Our latest in benchmarking the Linux 4.15 kernel is seeing how the performance has changed since Linux 4.0 and all subsequent releases on the same system. Here are those tests driven by curiosity, especially in light of the performance changes as a result of KPTI page table isolation and Retpoline additions.

Red Hat has made public today their first beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 as the next installment to RHEL7...

While GNOME upstream is removing support for desktop icons with that code having fallen into an unmaintained state over the years, KDE Plasma developers are reaffirming their commitment to supporting desktop icons...

The PowerVR Series8XT GT8540 is the latest graphics processor from Imagination Technologies and is designed to drive up to six 4K screens at 60 FPS...