Phoronix

One of the nice elements of KDE Plasma 5.12 is that it starts up faster, particularly when running on Wayland, but with Plasma 5.13 it's looking like it will be an even faster experience getting to the Plasma desktop...

With the upcoming Linux 4.17 kernel cycle there is initial support for Radeon Wattman with the AMDGPU kernel driver and modern Radeon graphics processors. "Automan" is now the latest being worked on for Vega GPUs...

LLVM 6 is running a few days behind scheduled for its release along with Clang 6 for the C/C++ compiler, but this latest big update to this open-source compiler stack should still be on the ways in the days ahead...

A premium member this week had requested some benchmarks of openSUSE Tumbleweed when looking at the performance of KDE Plasma vs. GNOME Shell in some open-source graphics/gaming tests while also looking at the Wayland vs. X.Org Server performance...

The Sun4i DRM driver work has been progressing a lot since its mainline introduction two years ago with Linux 4.7. With the Linux 4.17 cycle, the A83T SoC will have initial HDMI output support...

Back in December I wrote about passively cooling a Radeon RX 480 by means of the after-market Accelero S3 passive cooler. That passive GPU cooler worked well but under demanding loads did get a bit hot, but what I came to realize after buying that cooler is the height requirements exceeded that of a 4U rackmount chassis... So recently I decided to switch to using the Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo III...

Earlier this month AMD developers landed VCN-powered video encode support for the HEVC main format while now this has come to the UVD engine so it will work with pre-Raven GPUs...

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus makes use of the Vulkan graphics API on the id Tech 6 engine but sadly remains Windows-only aside from the consoles. While it runs with Wine, there are some bugs when using the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver but fortunately one of Valve's Linux developers is working on some improvements...

Earlier this week I delivered a number of benchmarks comparing Amazon EC2 instances to bare metal Intel/AMD systems. Due to interest from that, here is a larger selection of cloud instance types from the leading public clouds of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine.

Noralf Trønnes has spent the past few months working on generic FBDEV emulation for Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers and this week he volleyed his third revision of these patches, which now includes a new in-kernel API along with some clients like a bootsplash system, VT console, and fbdev implementation...

Released at the beginning of February was Glibc 2.27 and it's comprised of a lot of new features and performance improvements. But what's the best of Glibc 2.27?..

This last week marked two years since the debut of Vulkan 1.0, you can see our our original launch article. My overworked memory missed realizing it by a few days, but it's been a pretty miraculous two years for this high-performance graphics and compute API...

Linux developers and enthusiasts on x86_64 have long enjoyed the ability to use the -march=native option for having the GCC compiler attempt to auto-detect the CPU and set the appropriate microarchitecture flags. That support is finally being offered up for ARM with GCC 8...

University student Andrew Comminos wasn't too familiar with Direct3D or Wine development, but out of a desire for better World of Warcraft performance on Linux, he figured out the code-base and a means of enhancing the WineD3D code...

AMD's Alex Deucher today sent in the first pull request to DRM-Next of AMDGPU (and Radeon) DRM driver feature material that will in turn be merged with the Linux 4.17 kernel down the road. There's some fun features for AMDGPU users coming with this next kernel!..

Going back to last October, Marek of AMD's open-source driver team has been working on ARB_compatibility support for Mesa with a focus on RadeonSI/Gallium3D. Today that work was finally merged...

With Mir focusing on Wayland compatibility now, toolkits and other software making direct use of Mir's APIs can begin making use of any existing Wayland back-end instead. GTK4 drops the Mir back-end since the same can be achieved with the Wayland compatibility and now SDL is now making a similar move...

We've known that Pengutronix developers had been working on i.MX8M / GC7000 graphics support within their Etnaviv open-source driver stack from initial patches posted in January. Those patches back at the start of the year were for the DRM kernel driver, but it turns out they have already got basic 3D acceleration working...

With having around a Windows 10 installation this week for the latest Windows 10 WSL vs. Linux benchmarking, I also carried out some fresh benchmarks of the Radeon gaming performance between Windows 10 and Ubuntu Linux using the very latest drivers on each platform. This time around a Radeon RX 580 and RX Vega 64 were used for this benchmarking.

The glxinfo utility is handy for Linux users in checking on their OpenGL driver in use by their system and related information. But it's not often that glxinfo itself gets updated, except that changed today with the release of mesa-demos-8.4.0 as the package providing this information utility...

After sitting in Bionic-Proposed the past week, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS has officially moved from the Artful Aardvark's Linux 4.13 kernel to now running on Linux 4.15...

I was surprised to learn that up until this week, Mir's initial Wayland support didn't allow for windows of Wayland clients to be moved around the screen...

Igalia's Jose Maria Casanova Crespo sent out a set of patches today for fixes that allow for the enabling of the VK_KHR_16bit_storage extension within Intel's ANV Vulkan driver...

Now that the dust is beginning to settle around the Meltdown and Spectre mitigation techniques on the major operating systems, in the weeks and months ahead we are likely to see more performance optimizations come to help offset the performance penalties incurred by mitigations like kernel page table isolation (KPTI) and Retpolines. This week a new patch series was published that may help with KPTI performance...

A year and a half ago I wrote about a start-up working on dynamically-tuned, self-optimizing Linux servers. That company is now known as Concertio and they just launched their "AI powered" toolkit for IT administrators and performance engineers to optimize their server performance...

Nix 2.0 is now available as the latest major update to this functional package manager most commonly associated with the NixOS Linux distribution...

Purism has released updated Coreboot images for their Librem 13 v2 and Librem 15 v3 laptops...

Back in December was our most recent round of Windows Subsystem for Linux benchmarking with Windows 10 while since then both Linux and Windows have received new stable updates, most notably for mitigating the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities. For your viewing pleasure today are some fresh benchmarks looking at the Windows 10 WSL performance against Linux using the latest updates as of this week while also running some comparison tests too against Docker on Windows and Oracle VM VirtualBox.

It's been a busy past week for open-source GPU compute with Intel opening up their new NEO OpenCL stack, Karol Herbst at Red Hat posting the latest on Nouveau NIR support for SPIR-V compute, and now longtime Nouveau contributor Pierre Moreau has presented his latest for SPIR-V Clover support...

Besides bringing Ubuntu Touch to new mobile devices, the UBports team has also managed to continue their community-driven work on advancing the Unity 8 convergence desktop after Canonical abandoned work on it last year. They now have Unity 8 working on top of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS...

NVIDIA developer Thierry Reding on Wednesday posted a series of patches for providing NVIDIA Tegra support in Mesa in conjunction with the Nouveau DRM driver...

Tuukka Turunen of The Qt Company has shared some of the company's plans for the Qt toolkit in 2018. There is a lot ahead for this open-source, cross-platform toolkit in 2018 with another long-term support release later this year, new Qt Python bindings, a safety-critical renderer and more...

Intel's next-generation Cannonlake processors with "Gen 10" graphics will be considered good to go with the next kernel cycle, Linux 4.17. The alpha/preliminary hardware support flag is being removed for these CPUs expected later this year...

If you happen to have laying around a Moto G Gen 2 (Moto G 2014) device, it can have a second-life now running UBPorts' Ubuntu Touch software stack...

If you are making use of the Mesa 17.3 releases, have you found them to be buggier than normal for this open-source 3D graphics driver stack? There remains a higher than average amount of bugs still outstanding that have plagued Mesa 17.3, even with being up to 17.3.5...

Wine-Staging has been a flavor of Wine popular with Linux gamers for often carrying bleeding-edge patches and other experimental work prior to being mainlined. But over two months ago, Wine-Staging went silent without any further updates. A few days ago the original maintainers announced they parted ways with the work due to lack of time and would not be issuing any new releases. Now there are new developers taking over...

A few days back FreeBSD 11 stable was mitigated for Meltdown (and Spectre vulnerabilities), which came more than one month after these nasty CPU vulnerabilities were disclosed while DragonFlyBSD was quickly mitigated and the first of the BSDs to do so. While OpenBSD is known for its security features and focus, only today did it land its initial Meltdown mitigation...

For those curious about the state of Intel's open-source Mesa OpenGL driver relative to the company's closed-source Windows OpenGL driver, here are some fresh benchmark results when making use of an Intel Core i7 8700K "Coffee Lake" processor with UHD Graphics 630 and testing from Windows 10 Pro x64 against Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS, Ubuntu with the Linux 4.16 Git kernel and Mesa 18.1-dev, and then Intel's own Clear Linux distribution.

While we all know that APUs crave as fast as system memory as possible, with DDR4 memory kits these days easily costing more than the Ryzen 3 2200G and even the Ryzen 5 2400G, here are some reference results when testing the Ryzen 5 2400G under Linux with memory speeds from DDR4-2133MHz to DDR4-3600MHz...

The Mesa-based open-source "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver has new patches pending for AMD_gcn_shader support...

Last year we covered the work on the project "Chai" as an open-source, reverse-engineered driver for Mali T700 series. After a hiatus, the lead developer is back working on the project...

Longtime Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst joined Red Hat at the end of last year where his current task is on NIR intermediate representation support for Nouveau as part of bringing SPIR-V compute support to this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver...

Google's "Auto Ads" now make use of machine learning for the placement and selection of ads on the site...

While Python 3 has been around now for a decade, most Linux distributions are still working towards moving away from Python 2 and that includes Intel's Clear Linux distribution...

AMD is taking their Zen microarchitecture to the embedded space now with the announcement of the AMD Launches EPYC Embedded 3000 and Ryzen Embedded V1000 series...

For Mesa 18.0 is the initial Intel shader cache support for archiving compiled GLSL shaders on-disk to speed up the load times of subsequent game loads and other benefits. For the Mesa 18.0 release the functionality isn't enabled by default but it will be for Mesa 18.1...

Besides x86_64, we have seen Spectre mitigation work happen recently for ARM, POWER, and IBM s390, but no prominent MIPS activity to report until now...

With the recent release of Godot 3.0 there is an OpenVR module, but that's just the beginning of this open-source 3D game engine in supporting virtual reality...

Xorgproto debuted earlier this month as a centralized package of all X.Org protocol headers that used to be versioned and developed independently. Given the slower development now of the xorg-server and lots of the protocols being intertwined, they are now all bundled together. Tuesday marked the 2018.3 release with the new additions for Keith Packard's SteamVR Linux infrastructure work...

Right now to make most use of the Steam Controller on Linux you need to be using the Steam client while there have been independent user-space programs like SC-Controller to enable Steam Controller functionality without the Steam client running. A new and independent effort is a Linux kernel driver for the Steam Controller...