Phoronix

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...

Last year Canonical announced work on a new text-based server installer for Ubuntu. It's come a long way over the past year and will be the default server installer with 18.04 LTS...

While the newly-released Raven Ridge APUs could make for nice HTPC systems given the number of compatible mini-ITX/micro-ATX motherboards and these 65 Watt APUs offering Zen CPU cores with Vega graphics, besides the current problematic Raven Ridge graphics support, there are still some broader AMDGPU DC audio problems for newer graphics cards...

There is an experimental branch of KDE's KWin window manager / compositor with support for Vulkan compositing...

Roderick Colenbrander's Wine-Vulkan work for Vulkan infrastructure support under Wine has been updated and is ready for review, making these initial bits a candidate for soon being incorporated into mainline Wine...

The Performance Co-Pilot open-source cross-platform monitoring/visualizing stack has reached version 4.0 as its first major version hike in almost ten years...

Given the recent performance changes following the Spectre/Meltdown CPU vulnerability mitigation and having just wrapped up some fresh CPU bare metal benchmarks as part of that testing as well as the recent AMD Raven Ridge launch, I've carried out a fresh round this week of benchmarks on various Amazon EC2 on-demand instance types compared to a number of bare metal Intel and AMD processors in looking at how the compute performance compares.

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve has worked through the last of the Dawn of War 3 issues for Radeon Vega GPUs with the RADV Vulkan driver...

While waiting to see what Khronos could have in store for GDC 2018 next month around Vulkan, today marks the Vulkan 1.0.69 point release availability...

Hitting right on time even when the branching was running one week late is the first alpha release for the upcoming Qt 5.11 tool-kit update...

Earlier this month Valve Linux GPU driver developer Timothy Arceri landed NIR shader caching support within the Gallium3D Mesa state tracker as an alternative to the existing TGSI IR caching support. Arceri has now worked through implementing this NIR cache support for the RadeonSI driver...

For those still interested in Jolla's Linux-based but locked down Sailfish mobile operating system, the Sailfish OS 2.1.4 release is now available to early access users...

While Mesa 17.3.4 was just released a few days ago with 90+ changes, Mesa 17.3.5 is now available as a quick follow-up release due to a serious bug...

Here are some preliminary benchmarks of the Linux 4.16 development kernel compared to Linux 4.15 stable on five different systems.

SuiteCRM 7.10 is now available as the latest major feature release to this customer relationship management (CRM) software forked from SugarCRM's last open-source release...

One of the discussion items in the forums this week was about the video memory allowance for the Vega graphics on Raven Ridge APUs as well as efficiences or inefficiencies around the TTM memory manager as used by the AMDGPU kernel driver. Here are some vRAM size tests with the Ryzen 3 2200G...

After announcing last week that they are bringing Rise of the Tomb Raider to Linux, Feral Interactive announced this morning they are also bringing A Total War Saga: THRONES OF BRITANNIA to Linux...

With my launch testing of the Raven Ridge desktop APUs with the Ryzen 5 2400G and Ryzen 3 2200G there were some stability issues to report and some hangs within games and mode-setting issues. It appears those issues are exacerbated with some motherboards: the past few days with two different AMD B350 motherboards have been a real pain getting the current AMDGPU driver stack working -- and even Linux 4.17 AMDGPU WIP code -- on either of these Raven Ridge APUs...

Linus Torvalds has announced the second weekly release candidate of the in-development Linux 4.16 kernel...

It's now possible to use the graphics/drm-next-kmod port on FreeBSD 11 stable...

While Canonical is no longer involved in Unity 8 development, the community-driven UBports team continues working on their "Unity 8" and "Ubuntu Touch" efforts with a hope to deliver a developer ISO soon...

Friday's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) approved of VA-API 1.0 video acceleration for this spring's Fedora 28 release...

VGA_Switcheroo is the Linux kernel component for dealing with MUX'ed and MUX-less hybrid graphics laptops/systems for switching between GPUs. A new patch series is working to modernize and improve VGA Switcheroo...

Yesterday well known open-source AMD developer Marek Olšák landed his RadeonSI 32-bit pointers support for freeing up some scalar general purpose registers (SGPRs) and he's continued with a new patch series to alleviate register usage even more...

Marek Olšák on Saturday released the big libdrm 2.4.90 DRM library update that sits between Mesa and other GPU user-space components and the kernel's Direct Rendering Manager code...

While we're still waiting on an AMD-powered Chromebook as well as for Cannonlake to materialize, it appears Google is prepping support for a Geminilake Chromebook as well...

Back for Mesa 18.0 there was OpenGL bindless textures for Kepler GPUs on the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver while now for Mesa 18.1 that support is in place for Maxwell GPUs and newer...

Besides Mir 0.30 being released this week, other Mir progress was also made by these Canonical developers working on forging Mir into a viable Wayland compositor...

Con Kolivas announced the release today of his patched Linux 4.15 kernel that includes the MuQSS scheduler, his successor to the BFS scheduler...

Landing in FreeBSD today was the mitigation work for the Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities...

At the start of the new year Marek Olšák of AMD posted a set of patches for 32-bit GPU pointers in RadeonSI. That work has now landed in mainline Mesa Git...

Wine-Staging as many of you have known it for the past four years is unfortunately no more. We'll see if other reliable folks step up to maintain this experimental version of Wine but the original developers have sadly stepped away...

This week Google announced the participating organizations for GSoC 2018 for students wishing to get involved with open-source/Linux development. Also happening this week is the application period opened for those wishing to participate in the summer 2018 paid internship program...

Greg Kroah-Hartman released a slew of stable point releases today to supported Linux kernel series. For the 4.14 and 4.15 branches this includes Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) for AArch64 hardware...

Should you find yourself using the xf86-video-vesa DDX for one reason or another, a new release is now available and it's the first in three years...

The OpenSolaris/Illumos-based OpenIndiana operating system has finally moved past GCC 4.9 as its base user-land compiler and is now using GCC 6.4...

Not only is there a new Rust release this week but the Google developers have put out the Go 1.10 update...

The latest bi-weekly Wine development release is now available...

A few days back I reported on Intel Icelake patches for the i965 Mesa driver in bringing up the OpenGL support now that several kernel patch series have been published for enabling these "Gen 11" graphics within the Direct Rendering Manager driver. This Icelake support has been quick to materialize even with Cannonlake hardware not yet being available...

Introduced as part of LunarG's recent Vulkan SDK update is the VLF, the Vulkan Layer Factory...

This week we have delivered the first Linux benchmarks of the OpenGL/Vulkan graphics capabilities of AMD's new Raven Ridge desktop APUs with the Vega 8 on the Ryzen 3 2200G an the Vega 11 on Ryzen 5 2400G. Those tests have included comparisons to the integrated graphics capabilities of Intel processors as well as older AMD Kaveri APUs. For those interested in seeing how the Raven Ridge Vega graphics compare to lower-end Radeon and GeForce discrete graphics cards, here are those first Linux benchmarks.

Khronos' glTF transmission format for 3D scenes and models continues getting better. This 3D format has seen adoption by countless applications and engines and even usage within Microsoft products. Khronos' latest advancement to glTF 2.0 is a compression extension...

Now it's clear why Intel hasn't been working on the Beignet code-base in months as they have been quietly working on a new and better OpenCL stack and run-time! On open-source Intel OpenCL you can now have OpenCL 2.1 while OpenCL 2.2 support is on the way...

The Solus Linux distribution has offered up some new details this week on their upcoming Solus 4 release...

As a sign that DRI3 v1.1 is hopefully ready to go, Louis-Francis Ratté-Boulianne of Collabora on Friday sent out his latest set of patches adding modifiers and multi-plane support to the Direct Rendering Infrastructure...

Fedora developers are now discussing the possibility of naming a release manager each development cycle as a person in charge of wrangling together each release and seeing that the "Rawhide" development state is kept in better condition. Who knows, this also might actually help Fedora's longtime trouble of delivering releases on time...

AMD on Wednesday released the Radeon Pro Software Enterprise Edition 18.Q1 for Linux driver. It really isn't noticeable for its official changes, but does claim to advertise Vulkan 1.1 support...

While Amarok was once KDE's dominant music player, it hasn't seen a new release now in about five years and has yet to see a release based on Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5. But there's hope that might still happen...

A fairly notable update to the Rust programming language compiler and its components is available today...