Phoronix

For months we have been looking forward to ROCm 1.9 as the latest feature update to the Radeon Open Compute stack while on Friday that big release finally took place. This ROCm update for GPU compute purposes has a lot of new features...

Following the release candidate last week, NetworkManager 1.14 is now officially available as the latest feature release to this widely-used Linux networking software component...

While Wine 3.0.3 was released this week as the newest stable release of this program for handling Windows games/applications on Linux and other operating systems, out now is Wine 3.16 if you prefer something a bit more lively...

Just in time for the weekend Linux gamers, DXVK 0.72 has been released as the newest version of this Direct3D 10/11 to Vulkan API translation layer that is used by Wine and also now by Steam Play / Proton...

At the European Open-Source Firmware Conference happening this week in Erlangen, Intel announced the open-source "Slimbootloader" (also referred to as Slim Bootloader) project that is quite exciting...

AMD has issued rare updates today to their xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-amdgpu DDX drivers for use with the X.Org Server...

While AMD has been sending out Linux enablement patches for the yet-to-be-released Vega 20 for months now, what didn't see any work until today was for the AMDKFD driver support so this expected 7nm Vega GPU can work with their ROCm/OpenCL compute stack...

Next week is when the GeForce RTX 2080 "Turing" graphics cards will begin to ship while today is when NVIDIA lifted the embargo on "unboxing" videos/pictures and talking more about this new GPU microarchitecture...

Samuel Pitoiset working for Valve's Linux GPU driver team has now sent out shaderInt16 support for the RADV driver...

Multiple individuals are reporting that they have been just recently banned by Blizzard for playing their games -- seemingly Overwatch is the main title -- when using Wine with the DXVK D3D11-over-Vulkan translation layer...

Last week SiFive published their HiFive Unleashed open-source boot-loader code for this first RISC-V SoC on their Linux-friendly development board. This code being open-sourced has already helped improve the support for the FU540 SoC within Coreboot...

One of the notable additions to the Linux 4.19 kernel is the initial VKMS driver for "virtual kernel mode-setting" that in the long run should be significant for headless Wayland/X.Org systems. The driver is still in its early stages but continuing to be improved...

Following last week's Chrome 69 release, Chrome 70 is now in beta as the latest feature-update to Google's browser...

As happens almost every Fedora Linux release cycle, the initial development release has been pushed back...

The KDE community has released the beta of the upcoming Plasma 5.14 desktop update...

One of the Mozilla technologies we have been most excited about in recent years is WebRender, the Rust-written restructuring of the graphics/GPU code...

Released this past weekend was Vulkan 1.1.84 and one of the newly introduced extensions was..

Feral Interactive released today Life is Strange: Before the Storm for Linux and macOS...

The first public beta of the Unity 2018.3 game engine is now available for testing and evaluation...

Sam Spilsbury who was the former Compiz lead developer at Canonical and involved in the Unity desktop shell development is creating a new library spun out of Compiz...

YouTube has begun transcoding videos into the new royalty-free AV1 video codec...

Lots of changes are happening in the Lubuntu camp...

If you are a user of the Wine stable releases rather than the bi-weekly Wine development releases or Wine-Staging (or now Proton too), Wine 3.0.3 is out today as the latest version...

Just one day after releasing Phoronix Test Suite 8.2, our "cloud" component to this open-source benchmarking software served up its 34 millionth test profile / test suite download to Phoronix Test Suite users...

NVIDIA used their GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in Japan that's happening this week to announce a slew of new offerings and technology advancements...

The RADV Mesa-based Radeon Vulkan driver is picking up support for another extension...

The Wine project's Direct3D 12 to Vulkan API translation layer has implemented a basic Vulkan pipeline cache that may help with performance...

Adding to the exciting week for AMD open-source Linux graphics is that in addition to the long-awaited patch update for FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync/VRR, patches for the Linux kernel were sent out prepping the graphics upbringing for the unreleased "Picasso" APUs...

HHVM that started out as Facebook's project for a high-performance PHP implementation and morphed into the basis of their Hack programming language will cease to support PHP...

While Jolla's Linux-based Sailfish OS mobile operating system hasn't turned out to be as great as many anticipated, today the Finnish company released Sailfish OS 2.2.1 under the Nurmonjoki codename...

For your Linux benchmark viewing pleasure today are test results from twenty-two distinct Intel / AMD systems when running a recent release of the performance-optimized Clear Linux distribution and the hardware spanning from old AMD FX and Intel Core i3 Haswell CPUs up through the high-end desktop Core i9 and Threadripper processors.

With Q3 coming towards an end, here is a fresh look at the Mesa Git development trends for the year-to-date. Mesa on a commit basis is significantly lower than in previous years, but there is a new top contributor to Mesa...

The European Union funded LPGPU2 initiative for helping to extend the mobile battery life of systems by delivering more power efficient code for GPUs has formally announced their open-source tool-set today...

The AMD developers maintaining their "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver have pushed out their latest batch of code comprising this driver including the PAL abstraction layer, XGL Vulkan bits, and LLPC LLVM-based compiler pipeline...

Firefox nightly builds are now built with the LLVM Clang compiler on all major platforms and the Linux build in particular is also now utilizing PGO optimizations too. Faster Firefox is coming thanks to this compiler work...

Taking place last weekend over in Manchester was the annual GNU Tools Cauldron conference where toolchain developers spent a few days discussing the latest open-source compiler work...

There is one week to go until NVIDIA begins shipping the GeForce RTX 2080 "Turing" series but while waiting for that hardware, here is a look back at how various graphics cards are performing for Linux games from the GTX 1000 Pascal series back through the GTX 600 Kepler series. On the AMD side in this comparison is also going from Vega back to the GCN 1.0 Southern Islands. The Vulkan/OpenGL Linux gaming performance is being looked at as well as the overall system power consumption and performance-per-Watt.

While the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics stack has gotten into particularly good shape the past two years or so, one of the areas that has left the red Linux gamers unsatisfied is the lack of FreeSync support (or DisplayPort Adaptive-Sync / HDMI Variable Refresh Rate) when using the fully open-source stack. It looks like that could be changing soon with the new set of patches under review...

The OpenSSL team has announced the OpenSSL 1.1.1 stable release today that's been two years in the making and most notably has TLS 1.3 support...

Phoronix Test Suite 8.2.0-Rakkestad is officially shipping today as the latest quarterly feature release to our open-source, cross-platform automated benchmarking software. In addition to the Phoronix Test Suite 8.2 itself, there is the first official release of the newly-introduced "phoronix/pts" Docker image on Docker Hub for easily carrying out the benchmarks with the pre-seeded image.

Last week I reported on Code Sourcery / Mentor Graphics posting their new AMD GCN port to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). This GPU back-end for the widely-used GCC compiler is hoped for merging ahead of the GCC 9 stable release expected in early 2019. At this past weekend's GNU Tools Cauldron 2018 conference was a briefing by Mentor Graphics on undertaking funded by AMD...

Peter Hutterer announced the release today of libinput v1.12 as the widely used Linux input handling library on Wayland/Mir/X.Org desktops...

Following the release of ZFS On Linux 0.7.10, the developers went ahead and released the big v0.8 release candidate. ZFS On Linux 0.8 is bringing a lot of new functionality...

Given last week's big GNOME 3.30 release I was eager to test the updated desktop environment with its Mutter compositor improvements on Wayland as well as seeing how its performance under the conventional X.Org Server. Here are some of these benchmarks of various graphics applications and games tested under both GNOME 3.28.3 and GNOME 3.30.0 with both Wayland and X.Org sessions.

Version 14 of the ownCloud-forked Nextcloud personal "cloud" client-server software is now available...

Git 2.19 was released today as the latest stable feature release to this widely-used distributed version control system...

With Khronos' Vulkan working group yesterday having released Vulkan 1.1.84 that introduces new extensions, the NVIDIA driver team today released a new beta that incorporates support for some of these extensions...

VMware has landed more than fifty Mesa patches today adding a lot of new functionality to its "SVGA" Gallium3D driver that is used for providing OpenGL/GPU acceleration to guest virtual machines with its virtualization products...

While only two release candidates were on the schedule for LLVM 7.0, release manager Hans Wennborg today opted for a third RC that he intends to be the final test version before officially releasing the LLVM 7.0.0 collection...

Following weeks of leaks about these new processors targeting OEMs and system integrators, AMD today officially announced the Ryzen 3 2300X and Ryzen 5 2500X processors...