Phoronix

This weekend I decided to fire up the current Linux 4.19 development kernel on the dual Intel Xeon Gold 6138 test platform based on the wonderful Tyan GT24E-B7106. At least for this system, it's really benefiting from the new kernel that will be released as stable in October...

For those making use of ZFS On Linux to utilize ZFS file-system support on Linux systems, a new ZOL 0.7.10 release along with its SPL layer have been released...

It's running a few days late, but the LLVM 7.0 release along with sub-projects like Clang 7.0 should be released very soon. Here is a look at some of the features coming to this six-month compiler infrastructure update...

AMD's GPUOpen group has announced a new version of their open-source Vulkan Memory Allocator project that seeks to make it easier to deal with memory allocation and management when using this graphics API...

Born out of code open-sourced by NVIDIA, the Qt 3D Studio software suite for designing 3D user-interfaces is out with a beta for its next feature release...

AMD's fully open-source GPU compute stack in the form of ROCm "Radeon Open Compute" is nearing its next milestone with OpenCL 2.0 compliance...

Linus Torvalds has done his usual Sunday evening release dance in issuing the latest test release of the upcoming kernel, Linux 4.19...

Here are the results from some weekend benchmarking looking at the current stage of the AMDGPU + RadeonSI/RADV open-source AMD Linux graphics card performance when using the very latest code from the Linux 4.19 development kernel and Mesa 18.3. It's also an interesting mix of AMD Radeon graphics cards from the HD 7950 through the latest RX Vega 64.

Released this weekend was the monthly update to the KDE Frameworks 5 collection of libraries that complement Qt5...

DOSBox, the DOS emulator used by Wine and also can be run directly on Linux / macOS / Windows / BSD systems, released version 0.74-2 at the end of August with some Wine compatibility improvements...

Covered on Phoronix back during the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window was the new option for distribution vendors or those compiling their own Linux kernel to decide whether you trust the CPU's random number generator. That compile-time functionality has now been re-worked to allow for a boot-time option so users can more easily indicate whether they trust their own processor's RNG...

For fans of the Nano text editor, version 3.0 was released today with some significant performance improvements among other enhancements for this common Linux command-line program...

There's nothing like a new Vulkan spec update to help waking up on a Sunday morning. Vulkan 1.1.84 is out today and is the first since the minor 1.1.83 revision last month at SIGGRAPH...

It's been another busy week for the crew polishing up the Plasma desktop and other KDE components. Say "hi" to HiDPI and hibernation work this week...

Earlier this week I reported on the RadeonSI Gallium3D code being tuned for AMD Zen CPUs in an attempt to deliver greater gaming performance for Ryzen processors. That work has now been merged into Mesa 18.3...

It's been a while since last having major progress to report on the Broadcom VideoCore 4 (VC4) open-source driver stack most notably used by the Raspberry Pi boards or the next-generation Broadcom VideoCore "V3D" driver stack. The lack of recent progress has been due to lead developer Eric Anholt being away on paternity leave, but he is back now with another update on this open-source ARM graphics undertaking...

The latest improvements published by Red Hat's Benjamin Tissoires for bettering the Linux input stack is expanded Logitech support within its HID++ (logitech-hidpp) driver...

Just a few months since NetworkManager 1.12 has passed and the NetworkManager 1.14 feature update is now around the corner...

In addition to Le Potato and Renegade, another line-up of ARM boards being offered by Libre Computer is Tritium. The Libre Computer Tritium boards are Allwinner-based boards with options from the H2+ for IoT use-cases, the H3 as a mid-range offering, or H5 for a better-performing ARM board that is well supported by the open-source Linux community.

This week Intel developers sent in their first batch of drm-intel-next feature changes to DRM-Next of new material that will be merged for the next kernel cycle whether it ends up being called Linux 4.20 or likely Linux 5.0...

While the Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers have matured into great shape particularly over the past two years for vastly improving the Linux gaming experience on Radeon and Intel hardware, with Valve's Steam Play allowing more Windows games on Linux via Proton/Wine has opened up Mesa to needing a lot more optimizations, workarounds, and dealing with other intricacies. The latest receiving the special treatment is Wolfenstein: The Old Blood...

On Intel systems affected by the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, another minor optimization is on its way to the Linux kernel to ever so slightly lower the impact of the kernel-based page table isolation (PTI) mitigation...

The Haiku operating system has been in development since 2002 as an open-source BeOS-inspired platform and nearly a decade since they reached the alpha stage for their first release, they are nearly ready to deliver the beta...

While Canonical divested from their Linux smartphone plans, they continue maintaining the Mir display server as any regular Phoronix reader should know. Mir continues to be developed with Wayland functionality for IoT and desktop use-cases but the

An Amazon developer working on the Linux kernel has posted perhaps their largest feature patch-set for the kernel: implementing co-scheduling support for the Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS)...

Following a few delays that pushed back its release date from August to ultimately today, Mesa 18.2 is out as this third-quarter 2018 update to the Mesa3D graphics driver stack most commonly associated with the Linux desktop's open-source Vulkan/OpenGL drivers for Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau (as well as many smaller drivers)...

A big update to Blade Symphony game is due out later this month that is bringing Linux support to this game...

Google's latest foray into gaming is partnering with Unity Tech for launching an open-source matchmaking project for games...

In addition to Mesa 18.2 expected today, also out this Friday is Mesa 18.1.8 as the latest stable point release for this important piece of the open-source Linux graphics stack...

The last planned development release ahead of the official Phoronix Test Suite 8.2.0 "Rakkestad" quarterly feature release is now available for testing with our open-source benchmarking framework for Linux, macOS, BSD, and Windows operating systems...

After the Jetson Xavier pre-orders started last month, NVIDIA is now shipping their latest developer kit that features eight of their custom Carmel 64-bit ARMv8.2 cores, 512 Volta GPU cores, dual deep learning accelerators, 16GP of LPDDR4x, 32GB of eMMC storage, and a 7-way VLIW vision accelerator...

It turns out some Vulkan stakeholders are working on a transform feedback extension that would help efforts like DXVK and VKD3D in mapping Direct3D to Vulkan...

There is a new public cloud provider that exited beta this past weekend and is exclusively offering Linux instances from Arch Linux to CentOS to Debian and Fedora. In addition to the usual assortment of Intel Xeon powered clouds/VPS instances, they also offer a range of AMD EPYC powered systems too.

In addition to the recently covered work on making FUSE file-systems faster with eBPF, another separate optimization is on the way for the Linux kernel's FUSE bits that allow for file-systems to be implemented in user-space...

The latest "sanitizer" worked on by Google's developers for the LLVM/Clang compiler infrastructure is a Kernel Memory Sanitizer (KMSAN)...

Taking place last month in the beautiful city of Vienna was KDE's annual developer conference, Akademy. Session recordings are now available if you are interested in the latest work happening in the KDE desktop space...

Last month we were the first to point out that Intel is developing a new Gallium3D graphics driver for their recent generations of HD/UHD Graphics and presumably moving forward with their discrete GPU solutions coming out in 2020. This new Intel Gallium3D driver called "Iris" continues making progress though isn't yet ready for end-users...

Back in June we brought up how some of the SiFive HiFive Unleashed initialization code was closed-source for this developer board built around the RISC-V open-source processor ISA. One of the pain points was the DDR memory initialization code being closed-source but then SiFive announced they would allow for a fully open-source boot process. They've now made good on their word with their new open-source project...

Purism announced earlier this week that the Librem 5 smartphone has been delayed to April 2019. In trying to make that date not slip further, which they attributed this three-month delay on NXP hardware errata, they continue working quickly on the software side of this privacy-minded GNU/Linux smartphone puzzle...

We've been looking forward to the OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 release for a number of months now with Lx 3.0 having debuted two years ago. Fortunately, that release is inching closer to release as this week the alpha release is now available for testing...

As promised, following my 10 Reasons Linux Gamers Might Want To Pass On The NVIDIA RTX 20 Series, here are ten reasons on the opposite side for considering these new Turing graphics cards for Linux...

The latest merged feature work for NetworkManager is for supporting LLMNR (Link-Local Multicast Name Resolution) in conjunction with systemd-resolved...

AMD has a few processor announcements this morning that are no longer under embargo...

It's arguably a bit late, but patches are now pending for optimizing the RadeonSI Gallium3D open-source Linux graphics driver for the AMD Ryzen CPU microarchitecture...

If you enjoyed the original Life is Strange that Feral Interactive ported to Linux two years back, Life is Strange: Before the Storm will be released for Linux next week...

With the last of the major GCC 8 build issues of the DragonFlyBSD code-base resolved, this BSD operating system has switched to using this latest stable release of the GNU Compiler Collection by default...

Another drm-misc-next pull request was sent in Wednesday with new feature material slated for the Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel release by way of DRM-Next...

With Chrome 69 out the door and that having marked Chrome's 10th birthday, Google developers have Chrome 70 in their dev channel fresh out of the oven...

There was some NVIDIA signed firmware activity today in the linux-firmware.git tree for Pascal GPUs... Sadly, it's not the long sought after PMU firmware or any breakthrough in allowing the open-source Nouveau driver to properly support re-clocking or other long missing functionality from this open-source NVIDIA driver. Rather, it's just to help out newer laptops with Pascal discrete graphics...

It's been open-source since its inception but is only being promoted now by Google: their Tink cryptography library that aims to be easy-to-use...