Phoronix

Next month's Mesa 17.3 release won't have OpenGL 4.6 that debuted this summer, but they are getting close to supporting this latest version of the OpenGL graphics API...

We've been looking at the interesting AMD EPYC server processors recently from the high-end EPYC 7601 to the cheapest EPYC 7251 at under $500 as well as the EPYC 7351P that offers 16 cores / 32 threads for only about $750. The latest EPYC processor for testing at Phoronix has been the EPYC 7401P, a 24 core / 48 thread part that is slated to retail for around $1075 USD.

Mark Shuttleworth has just revealed the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS codename.....

Intel has published more patches for supporting new instruction set extensions that will debut with "Ice Lake" processors when launched in late 2018 or early 2019...

GNOME developer Adrien Plazas has written a blog post about some of the big work items he's engaged in for retro-gtk, the GNOME user-interface for running various libretro cores / game emulators...

With Mesa 17.3 having been branched yesterday and the first release candidate issued for this quarterly feature update, here's a look at some of the development numbers for this Q4'17 Mesa update...

Well known open-source AMD graphics driver developer Marek Olšák has sent out patches offering ARB_compatibility support with OpenGL 3.1...

Just one month ago was the big SDL 2.0.6 feature update that had been baking for about one year while now it's already been succeeded by SDL 2.0.7...

For those wondering how the RadeonSI and RADV open-source driver performance is fairing for the Radeon RX Vega 64 compared to the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver, here are some fresh benchmarks.

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) today merged their initial support for the C++17 file-system technical specification!..

Warzone 2100, the real-time strategy/tactics game released for Windows back in 1999 and then brought to Linux after the commercial game was open-sourced several years later, is now seeing a Vulkan renderer in the works...

Mesa 17.3 has been branched ahead of its expected stable debut in mid-to-late November...

Red Hat's Matthias Clasen has written a blog post concerning the changes found in the big GTK+ 3.92 development release that is pushing towards the GTK4 tool-kit release...

Intel has already landed a lot of new Intel DRM code in DRM-Next for the upcoming Linux 4.15 cycle while one final batch is now ready for testing...

Linus Torvalds released the Linux 4.14-rc6 kernel this Monday morning rather than on his usual Sunday cadence due to Internet connection woes. RC6 is also bigger than he would prefer...

The first release candidate is now available for the upcoming Xen 4.10 hypervisor update...

Last week AMD released an AMDGPU-PRO 17.40 beta driver for miners. Thomas Frech is now back with another installment of his articles about mining performance on AMD hardware, continuing from Mining Monero On The CPU and Ethereum On The GPU and Mining Ethereum With AMD Threadrippers Paired With Four RX Vega 64 GPUs...

The annual systemd conference, All Systems Go!, that is also about other user-space Linux technologies, has wrapped up in Berlin...

The Android-x86 project derived from Google's Android Open-Source Project code-base remains officially at Android 6.0, but there is an Android 7.1 "Nougat" build available for testing...

Intel's Jordan Justen has sent out his third revision to the recently renewed patches for allowing an OpenGL on-disk shader cache for the "i965" Mesa driver...

The GNU C Library, glibc, has picked up support for some additional functions as FMA-optimized versions...

Taking place this weekend in Prague has been the 8th annual GStreamer Conference, which is preceding next week's Linux Foundation Embedded Linux Conference Europe...

Tomorrow marks the end of the crowdfunding campaign for Purism's Librem 5 smartphone campaign...

A few days back I wrote about Intel's work on Control-flow Enforcement Technology beginning to land in GCC. This "CET" work for future Intel CPUs has now landed in full for GCC 8...

The AMDGPU DC display code has a final batch of feature updates that were sent in this weekend for DRM-Next staging and is the last set besides fixes for the "DC" code for the 4.15 target...

LXQt 0.12 is now available as this Qt5-powered desktop environment born from the efforts of LXDE and Razor-qt aims towards its eventual v1.0 milestone...

GNOME 3.27.1 is out as the first development milestone in the road to next March's GNOME 3.28 desktop update...

Following his recent article about Mining Ethereum With AMD Threadrippers Paired With Four RX Vega 64 GPUs, Phoronix German reader Thomas Frech is back with another guest post. This time he's talking about his adventures about mining the Monero crypto-currency on the CPU while using the GPUs for Ethereum mining...

Building off last week's Wine 2.19 development update is now a new version of Wine-Staging that includes its wide assortment of extra experimental/testing patches...

ZenStates is an independent effort to offer P-States-based overclocking from the Linux desktop of AMD Ryzen processors and other tuning...

While the Jetson TX2 has been out since this past March and it's a phenomenal ARM development board, sadly the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver support for it still isn't ready with the mainline Linux kernel...

Squeezing into Mesa Git ahead of the Mesa 17.3 branching is support for the EXT_global_priority extension within the RADV Vulkan driver...

Vulkan 1.0.64 is out this weekend as the newest specification refinement to this high-performance graphics/compute API...

Lead Mir developer Alan Griffiths has spent the time getting the Mir display server running on Fedora. This is part of a broader feature request of getting Mir running on more Linux distributions than just Ubuntu...

As D-Bus Broker from the BUS1 project continues to mature as delivering faster performance and more reliability than D-Bus itself, D-Bus itself isn't letting up...

Intel Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) support has begun landing within the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for this code safety feature...

For those wanting to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 within a GNOME Boxes driven virtual machine, you can do so for free now with Fedora Workstation 27...

Given the Ubuntu 17.10 release this week and its massive desktop changes from GNOME Wayland to Mesa/kernel upgrades, we've been busy benchmarking this new Ubuntu OS release. Complementing the Radeon Ubuntu 17.04 vs. 17.10 gaming comparison are now some OpenGL/Vulkan benchmarks when using Intel Kabylake graphics hardware on Ubuntu 17.04, 17.10 with X.Org and Wayland, and the performance if upgrading against Linux/Mesa Git.

For those relying upon the Wine 2.0.x stable releases rather than the bi-weekly development releases, Wine 2.0.3 is now the latest stable version...

With the Mesa 17.3 branching being imminent, it's a very busy week for open-source graphics driver developers from all the major organizations as they try to land their last-minute improvements for this next quarterly and final Mesa stable update for 2017...

Landing in Mesa Git this morning ahead of the imminent 17.3 branching is support for OpenGL occlusion queries...

Jani Nikula has sent in another drm-intel-next update for David Airlie's DRM-Next tree. They continue prepping more updates to their Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) for targeting the upcoming Linux 4.15 cycle...

With Mesa 17.3 expected to be branched this weekend and this marking the end of feature development for this last stable Mesa series of 2017, the RADV Radeon Vulkan drivers in particular have been busy landing a lot of last minute code...

Intel compiler engineers have begun landing "GFNI" support within the GNU Compiler Collection as one of the new ISA extensions not expected until the Icelake processor debut...

Besides Keith Packard working on the concept of resource leasing for the X.Org Server and resource leasing support for RandR, he's also now proposing a "NonDesktop" property for the Resize and Rotate protocol...

Adding to the excitement of Linux 4.15, AMD has queued some more changes that were sent in today for DRM-Next...

Purism has announced today all laptops to be shipping from their company will now have the Intel Management Engine (ME) disabled...

Earlier this week we looked at the EPYC 7251 Linux performance as AMD's lowest-cost server CPU from this latest generation of Zen-based processors. That eight core / sixteen thread CPU packed a nice amount of performance considering its hitting the $500 price point, but if you are looking for a single socket system and have $750 USD to lay out on a CPU, the AMD EPYC 7351P packs in even more value.

While Samsung Galaxy smartphones may not be as open or free spirited as the proposed Librem 5 smartphone, there is a new alternative for those wanting to run a traditional Linux distribution on their Samsung Galaxy smartphone...

Mesa 17.2.3 is now available as the latest bi-weekly update for this current stable driver series...