Phoronix

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...

Red Hat's betting big on the container game getting bigger with making public this afternoon their agreement to acquire CoreOS for $250 million USD...

After all the Oracle/Solaris controversies last year, it's good to see Oracle today releasing their first public beta of Solaris 11.4 as an update to the Solaris 11 operating system...

The 64-bit ARM (ARM64 / AArch64) architecture code changes were mailed in a short time ago for the Linux 4.16 kernel and it includes mitigation work for Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities...

A few days ago we found out that at the end of 2017 AMD quietly released their AOCC 1.1 C/C++ compiler. AOCC is AMD's compiler succeeding AMD Open64 that existed years ago as their optimized Fortran/C/C++ compiler for past CPU microarchitectures while the "AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler" is designed for current-generation Zen processors. Here are benchmarks of the new AMD AOCC 1.1 release compared to GCC 7, GCC 8, Clang 5.0, Clang 6.0, and Clang 7.0 SVN.

The Free Software Foundation's largest-ever single contribution came in the form of one million dollars worth of Bitcoin...

The Khronos Group has published their tentative list of sessions behind held at their Developer Day event coinciding with the Game Developers Conference in March...

With Mesa 18.0 now well into its feature freeze and this quarterly update to Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers bringing many new features and improvements as covered in our Mesa 18.0 feature overview here are some benchmarks comparing the Mesa 18.0 RadeonSI/RADV driver performance to the current 17.3 stable series and the older 17.2 series as well.

Herbert Xu has submitted the crypto subsystem updates for the Linux 4.16 kernel. This time around there are a number of ARM/ARM64 related improvements...

Tuhi is a new open-source project started by Red Hat's Peter Hutterer and Benjamin Tissoires to support Wacom SmartPad devices on Linux...

The latest work by Fedora developers on feature work for Fedora 28 is shipping with VA-API 1.0 support for updated capabilities around the Video Acceleration API...

With the in-development Linux 4.16 kernel there is now support for PCID with Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization guests...

The Btrfs file-system updates were mailed in and subsequently pulled today to the mainline tree for the Linux 4.16 kernel merge window...

The open-source game engine developers behind the huge Godot 3.0 update out before the end of January as planned...

The block subsystem updates have now landed in Linus Torvalds' Git tree during the first full day of the Linux 4.16 kernel merge window...

With Linux 4.16 is initial support for the Jailhouse hypervisor to support native Linux guests in non-root cells...

After rolling out the 390.12 beta Linux driver in early January as the first public driver in the 390 series, NVIDIA is ending January by the first 390 stable release: 390.25...

While using Vulkan lowers the CPU utilization compared to OpenGL, in our testing of NVIDIA versus the open-source Radeon drivers we generally have found the red team's drivers to consume more CPU resources. Thus it's good to hear that RADV co-conspirator Bas Nieuwenhuizen is working on reworking how this Radeon Vulkan driver handles pipeline emitting...

After hitting the RC phase a few weeks ago, OPNsense 18.1 has been officially released as the latest version of this pfSense-forked network/router-oriented BSD operating system...

Once again being punctual with their releases, the GNU Linux-libre volunteers managed to release the GNU Linux-libre 4.15-gnu kernel a short time after Linus Torvalds on Sunday released the official Linux 4.15 kernel...

After the page table isolation (K)PTI support was added late in the Linux 4.15 kernel cycle in light of the Meltdown CPU vulnerability, improvements to this code are on the way with Linux 4.16...

It has been more than two years since the release of Ncurses 6.0 as the GNU project for developing terminal-independent text-based user-interfaces while this weekend marked the availability of the big Ncurses 6.1 update...

Emil Velikov announced the release today of Mesa 18.0-RC3 with 50+ changes comprising of many Intel ANV and Radeon RADV Vulkan driver fixes...

Ingo Molnar began sending in his various Git pull requests this morning for targeting the Linux 4.16 kernel merge window, including the scheduler updates...

This weekend I wrote how the AMDKFD discrete GPU support should be in place for the next kernel cycle, Linux 4.17. This is going to allow discrete Radeon GPUs to have ROCm working off the mainline kernel for OpenCL/compute support, but for 4.17 it's unlikely RX Vega GPUs will have compute working...

L2 Code and Data Prioritization (L2 CDP) is a feature of Intel's Resource Director Technology (RDT) that will now be supported with the Linux 4.16 kernel...

One of the security improvements to Linux 4.16 is improving the default behavior for restricted access to /dev/mem for x86/x86_64 and ARM64 systems...

AOCC 1.1 is the second public release of the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler designed for Ryzen/Threadripper/EPYC processors...

As a follow-up to the article a few days ago about nearly complete OpenGL 4.4~4.5 support for R600g, this pre-GCN older Radeon Gallium3D driver has landed in Mesa 18.1-dev Git support for its final OpenGL 4.4 extension...

While the just-released Linux 4.15 kernel brings AMD Zen CPU temperature reporting support for Ryzen/Threadripper/EPYC processors, an oversight in the k10temp driver code is yielding an incorrect temperature for the Threadripper 1900X...

Linus Torvalds has released the Linux 4.15.0 kernel after nine release candidates...

Famed GNOME developer Matthias Clasen of Red Hat provided an update on the state of the GTK4 tool-kit during this week's DevConf.cz event in Brno...

Not only is Linux 4.15 coming today but the first systemd stable release of 2018 is also now available...

Adding to the list of features for the long overdue GIMP 2.10 release is better debugging support...

After going through nine weekly release candidates, the Linux 4.15 kernel is set to be released today as the first major stable update of 2018...

Mesa 18.0 is currently being prepared for release by mid-February and is yet another feature-packaged, quarterly update to this open-source 3D graphics driver stack with significant improvements for OpenGL and Vulkan support and performance.

While we are seeing exciting projects at the moment about mapping Direct3D 11 over Vulkan (as well as D3D9 and D3D12 over Vulkan projects too), there are new open-source projects for mapping Vulkan over Direct3D 12 and Metal...

From the mid-2000's to 2011 Allwinner was marketing their F-Series processors with ARM9 32-bit RISC processors while finally in 2018 these SoCs might have upstream Linux kernel support...

The Solus Project this week released Linux Driver Management 1.0, a library created by this innovative Linux distribution for enumerating system components and detecting matches between said components and packages/drivers providing additional functionality...

SUSE's Richard Brown has issued a status update around openSUSE's ongoing mitigation of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities...

Released this weekend is Binutils 2.30 as the latest collection of these GNU utilities important to the open-source ecosystem...

If the extremely fast Intel Optane SSD 900p is out of your budget with its 3D XPoint memory, this week Intel rolled out the SSD 760p series with 64-layer TLC 3D NAND memory. For less than $100 USD you can get the 256GB capacity Intel 760p SSD, which is what we are benchmarking today under Ubuntu Linux.

Sent out Friday night were the latest patches for getting the discrete GPU support within the AMDKFD HSA kernel driver up to scratch for allowing the ROCm compute stack working off a mainline kernel...

Ubuntu-focused Linux PC vendor System76 who has also been working on their own Pop!_OS distribution is looking at enabling disk encryption by default...

KDE KWin window manager / compositor maintainer Martin Flöser has penned a brief response to the recent GNOME developer's CSD Initiative in trying to get all applications to pursue client-side decorations and abandon title bars in favor of header bars...

Google's WebM folks quietly released libvpx 1.7.0 earlier this week as the latest version of their VP8/VP9 encoder/decoder library...

For those still in search of a KDE-focused Linux distribution that's rolling-release and desktop-friendly, Netrunner Rolling 2018.01 has been released...

Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS had been scheduled to ship mid-February as the latest point release for this Long Term Support release, but unfortunately that is not going to happen as planned due to the Canonical kernel developers being overloaded by Spectre and Meltdown mitigation work...

Keith Packard who has been doing contract work for Valve the past year on improving the support for virtual reality head-mounted displays (VR HMDs) shares a status update on his work at this week's Linux.Conf.Au in Sydney...