Phoronix

Back in November I wrote about a GCC patch for the Intel Icelake CPU target and now that code has finally been merged for the GNU Compiler Collection ahead of the upcoming GCC 8.1 release...

Open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver developers Martin Peres, Pierre Moreau, and Karol Herbst took to the FOSDEM 2018 conference today to share a status update on their reverse-engineering and open-source driver writing work around this unofficial NVIDIA Linux driver...

There is no shortage of different KDE music/media player projects over the years but one of the most promising in recent times is Elisa. This week marks the second alpha release for the Elisa music player...

A few days back I wrote about how GTK+ 4.0 is being talked about for release this year and now a bit more specific timeline is in place...

For the better part of a year NVIDIA developers and Adam Jackson at Red Hat have been working on "server-side GLVND" and this new X.Org Server feature might finally be close to landing...

The GStreamer multimedia framework now has mainline support for WebRTC...

Keith Packard's latest work for Valve on improving the Linux display stack is on what he's exploring around "semi-automatic compositing" but at this point it's still a risky bet with the new protocol yet to be written...

The past few weeks I've had the pleasure of testing the Tyan Tempest S32272NR-C950 motherboard with Atom C3950 "Denverton" processor. Yes, it's been a real pleasure as it's been a few years since last touching an Atom system and this current combination allows for a mighty competent configuration with the C3950 server processor featuring 16 physical cores (no HT) running at a 1.7GHz base frequency and 2.2GHz turbo frequency all while having a 24 Watt TDP.

With two weeks having passed since the big Wine 3.0 release, the Wine crew is back to their bi-weekly development releases...

For those using Ubuntu Minimal images for containers/Docker, assembling your own base distribution, setting up an embedded Linux environment, or related use-cases, the minimal images for the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release will be even smaller...

Yesterday we heard of Purism's plans to support desktop diversity but by default for their Librem 5 smartphone they will likely be using GNOME in order to maintain a unified experience across their devices. The latest now is they might develop a new Wayland compositor in line with GNOME...

The POWER architecture code updates were sent in this Friday for the Linux 4.16 kernel and brings a few goodies if you happen to be using any modern PPC hardware...

Timothy Arceri of Valve's Linux GPU driver team continues getting the RadeonSI NIR support up to scratch...

Canonical's Tiago Daitx has laid out a proposal today for having an OpenJDK stable release update exception for the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" to reduce their long-term maintenance burden...

Adding to the list of big feature additions for Linux 4.16 is the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) pull request that has already been honored by Linus Torvalds...

Being released right on time is Glibc 2.27, version 2.27 of the GNU C Library...

Arnd Bergmann sent in his several pull requests on Thursday providing new ARM SoC platform support, driver updates, and DeviceTree bits for bringing up some new ARM hardware support within the mainline Linux kernel...

The GNOME 3.28 beta (v3.27.90) is due to happen next week that also marks a number of freezes for the desktop components ahead of the official release next month...

It's a bit late to make arrangements if you already weren't planning on it, but this weekend is FOSDEM in Brussels. FOSDEM remains one of the best open-source/Linux events in the world...

At least on a percentage basis, the Steam Linux marketshare grew slightly for January 2018...

After sending in the many networking subsystem updates yesterday, veteran kernel developer David Miller today sent in the SPARC architecture updates for Linux 4.16 that includes a new Oracle DAX driver...

For those making use of laptop-mode-tools as one of several Linux power saving tools with this one designed to improve Linux laptop battery life, version 1.72 is now available after more than one year of development...

Building the kernel beginning with Linux 4.16 now requires two more dependencies: Bison and Flex...

We are less than half-way into the Linux 4.16 kernel merge window and it's already proven to be a very busy cycle with significant additions to the Linux code-base...

A majority of last month was spent looking at and testing/benchmarking the Linux code to mitigate the much talked about Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities...

Purism has been supporting both the GNOME and KDE projects with their mobile ambitions and looking to have both desktop environments feature their wares on the in-development Librem 5 smartphone. But as far as the default user experience/interface goes on the Librem 5, they are leaning towards GNOME...

David Airlie has announced his plans to begin mainlining some early infrastructure work on the "soft" FP64 code into Mesa Git. This doesn't yet allow for soft FP64 on older GPUs lacking the hardware capability to do this otherwise, but will help in another area and can make for easier mainlining of the actual soft FP64 support in the future...

Red Hat developer Hans de Goede has recently been on a mission to improve Linux battery life on Fedora. Now that SATA link power management is better handled and other tweaks, his latest target is on getting Intel's Panel Self Refresh (PSR) support enabled...

As noted when covering the news yesterday of Khronos launching the OpenGL 4.6 Adopters Program, the NVIDIA proprietary driver and Intel's open-source Linux driver are the first OpenGL drivers considered 4.6 compliant. But on the Intel Linux side, the OpenGL 4.6 work has yet to be all upstreamed into Mesa...

Greg Kroah-Hartman's pull request of the char/misc driver work usually isn't too exciting each kernel cycle, but for Linux 4.16 it's definitely on the heavier side with introducing three new subsystems for different hardware busses...

Last July marked the release of MythTV 29 as the latest release of this once super popular Linux DVR/PVR software. Today marks the availability of MythTV 29.1...

Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in pull requests this morning for the various subsystems he oversees for the mainline Linux kernel, including the staging area...

Recently I wrote about Qualcomm's Code Aurora working on Adreno A6xx GPU support and sure enough that has panned out with the initial patch series being posted for this latest-generation Qualcomm GPU architecture...

The KDE Calligra graphics/office suite forked from KOffice is up to version 3.1...

With this morning's debut of the openSUSE Leap 15.0 public beta that is derived from the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 source code, I was curious to check it out and also run some benchmarks. For seeing how the current beta performance is stacking up I ran some benchmarks against openSUSE Leap 42.3, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Clear Linux, and a daily snapshot of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

While the Linux 4.15 kernel introduces AMDGPU DC display code support and is currently enabled just by default for RX Vega GPUs and newer, a lot of work continues going into this new display code stack...

David Miller has presented the set of networking subsystem changes targeting the Linux 4.16 and once again it's on the heavier side...

Back during the Linux 4.15 kernel merge window XFS file-system maintainer Darrick Wong commented there was great scads of new stuff and now with Linux 4.16 he's repeating that line. XFS for Linux 4.16 brings several significant changes to this mature Linux file-system...

Jiri Kosina of SUSE has submitted his feature pull requests today for the Linux 4.16 kernel, including the HID subsystem updates...

The well known FIO benchmark saw a +244% improvement in read bandwidth for one test case as a result of one change to be found in Linux 4.16...

Yesterday I posted some initial benchmarks of Mesa 18.0 on RADV/RadeonSI drivers for AMD GPUs now that feature development is over for this next quarterly installment of Mesa 3D. On the Radeon side there were mostly performance improvements to note with the RADV Vulkan driver, but what about on the Intel side? Today are benchmarks of the Intel i965 OpenGL and ANV Vulkan drivers compared to earlier Mesa releases for seeing how the Intel (U)HD Graphics performance has changed on the Linux desktop.

The Khronos Group today has announced the OpenGL 4.6 Adopters Program with a new open-source conformance test suite (OpenGL CTS) for this latest version of the OpenGL graphics API released last year...

Version 8.1 of the GNU Debugger (GDB) is now available for developers...

Jolla has shared some of their plans for improving Sailfish X, their mobile operating system available for purchase to load on Sony Xperia devices. There are some interesting Sailfish X plans this year with this continuing to be one of Jolla's main focuses...

LibreOffice 6.0 is now officially available!..

The first public beta snapshots have begun for openSUSE Leap 15, the distribution that will be mirroring SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 that is under development for release this summer...

While Clear Linux may be extremely performant as shown in our many benchmarks, its default repository serving "bundles" (their task-based approach to package management) can be a bit light if wanting to use this Intel open-source Linux distribution on the desktop. There has been yum available via a bundle while now next-gen Yum, DNF, is also now available on Clear Linux...

With each Linux kernel cycle the F2FS file-system that has been part of the mainline kernel now for five years, this "Flash-Friendly File-System" gets a bit more mature and featureful...

Andres Rodriguez working for Valve as part of their Linux graphics driver team has begun landing his work around OpenGL semaphores for Mesa/Gallium3D and following through with the necessary bits for RadeonSI with the EXT_semaphore work being needed by SteamVR...

With the RadeonSI NIR back-end continuing to mature with more OpenGL coverage and now supporting GLSL 4.50, I decided to run some tests of Mesa 18.1-dev Git to see the impact when enabling NIR support...