Phoronix

While Ubuntu 17.10 defaults to using the Wayland session on supported GPUs/drivers when using the default GNOME Shell based session, Canonical has decided for Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" LTS that it will use the X.Org Server by default...

Glibc 2.27 will be released as soon as next week as the latest half-year update to the GNU C Library...

GLAMOR as a means of providing 2D acceleration over OpenGL in X.Org Server 1.20 will support for 30-bit RGB colors...

One of the last minute changes sneaking into the Linux 4.15 kernel is support for PDP Xbox One controllers...

Earlier this month a Red Hat developer managed to achieve full clock-gating for NVIDIA Kepler GPUs using the open-source Nouveau DRM driver. Today the second version of these patches were published...

At the same time as adding HiDPI monitor support for Windows 10, Valve has added a "2X-scaling mode" for the Steam client to satisfy modern high resolution monitors...

For those planning to pick up a Raven Ridge laptop or the forthcoming desktop APUs, the Mesa driver now has patches for enabling H.265/HEVC video encode support for VCN 1.0 on Raven hardware...

Earlier this week I posted some benchmarks looking at Intel Pentium vs. AMD Ryzen 3 performance for Linux gaming. Those tests on the Pentium and Ryzen systems were done with both NVIDIA and AMD Radeon graphics for seeing how the gaming performance compares in the spectrum of sub-$100 CPUs and cheap graphics cards. But for those that were just curious about the CPU performance, here are some benchmarks I also carried out with the Pentium G4600 Kabylake and AMD Ryzen 3 1200.

Not to be confused with Coreboot or its former name of LinuxBIOS, the Linux Foundation today announced LinuxBoot as a new initiative for replacing system firmware with the Linux kernel/drivers...

The progress is stunning made by a lone developer on the DXVK project for mapping the Direct3D 11 graphics API on top of Vulkan for allowing better performance/support for D3D11 games on Wine...

Taking place this week in Sydney, Australia is the 2018 Linux.Conf.Au conference. For those that can't make the event, there's a livestream, but if the time difference impacts you, the recordings are now beginning to trickle in via YouTube...

GNOME developer Adrien Plazas has joined Purism as part of their effort of getting GTK+ applications on the Librem 5 smart-phone...

While we frequently do Linux OS/distribution performance comparisons on the latest Intel desktop and server hardware, some requests came in recently about looking closer at the fastest Linux distribution(s) when running on AMD's Ryzen desktop processors. Here are benchmarks of ten popular Linux distributions tested out-of-the-box on Ryzen 7 1800X and Threadripper 1950X systems.

The first systemd update of 2018 should soon be here...

Besides Firefox 59 being the release doing away with GTK2 support, this next Mozilla web-browser release might be the one to achieve working native Wayland support...

SUSE's libstorage-ng back-end for YaST's new low-level storage library is now active within the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed distribution...

While it feels like Qt 5.10 was just released a short time ago, the scheduled feature freeze and branching for Qt 5.11 is imminent...

A new Coreboot frame-buffer driver has been published for the Linux kernel that allows reusing of the frame-buffer setup by Coreboot during the hardware initialization process...

Movit, the "Modern Video Toolkit", that aims to provide high-quality, high-performance GPU-based video filters is out with a new release...

GNU Compiler Collection 7.3 is now available as the latest GCC7 point release and the prominent changes being support for helping mitigate Spectre variant two using some new compiler switches...

It didn't happen in time for the upcoming Mesa 18.0, but the R600 Gallium3D driver for supporting pre-GCN AMD Radeon graphics processors is now nearly at OpenGL 4.5 compliance! A needed OpenGL 4.4 extension is now scratched off the list completing the necessary extensions to effectively have GL 4.5, assuming it can pass the conformance test suite...

Thanks to several efforts coming together, there's now an Epiphany Technology Preview project delivering you a bleeding-edge GNOME web-browser in a sane and easily deployable manner...

If the release of Firefox 58 yesterday didn't excite you, Google has today rolled out to stable channel the Chrome 64.0 web-browser...

The long-in-development X.Org Server 1.20 has yet another XWayland addition: XDG-Output protocol support...

It's been a while since last hearing of Huawei's efforts around protectable memory support for the Linux kernel that seems to provide safe read-only protection for dynamically allocated data. The eleventh version of these "pmalloc" patches are now available...

Last week Purism shared a progress update on the Librem 5 smartphone project where they outlined their plans to continue pursuing the i.MX8M SoC and other plans. They've kept up their word of delivering weekly status updates and out today is their latest summary of work...

With today's debut of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 Beta they have made Wayland support available in tech preview form...

Our latest in benchmarking the Linux 4.15 kernel is seeing how the performance has changed since Linux 4.0 and all subsequent releases on the same system. Here are those tests driven by curiosity, especially in light of the performance changes as a result of KPTI page table isolation and Retpoline additions.

Red Hat has made public today their first beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 as the next installment to RHEL7...

While GNOME upstream is removing support for desktop icons with that code having fallen into an unmaintained state over the years, KDE Plasma developers are reaffirming their commitment to supporting desktop icons...

The PowerVR Series8XT GT8540 is the latest graphics processor from Imagination Technologies and is designed to drive up to six 4K screens at 60 FPS...

Landing today in GNOME's Mutter Git tree are some longstanding patches by Collabora's Daniel Stone for supporting the Generic Buffer Manager (GBM) with buffer modifiers for DRM...

For those that may be looking to assemble a new low-end Linux gaming system in early 2018, here is a look at the Linux gaming performance of an Intel Pentium (Kabylake) processor to an AMD Ryzen 3 while testing with the GeForce GTX 1050 and Radeon RX 560 graphics cards.

LunarG has rolled out their "DevSim" device simulator for Vulkan so developers can easily test their applications/games in varying configurations without actually changing out the underlying Vulkan driver or graphics processor...

Earlier this month Intel open-source driver developers posted the initial graphics enablement for Icelake, the "Gen 11" graphics coming after the yet-to-be-launched "Gen 10" Cannonlake processors. The latest patches in this series have now been published for allowing initial Icelake display support...

It's unfortunately too late for the upcoming LibreOffice 6.0 open-source office suite that was branched two weeks ago, but its next release will feature a KDE5 desktop back-end...

Feature development on Mesa 18.0 has now ended with the release today of 18.0-RC1 following the code-base being branched...

The past month or so on my main production workstation I have been using two 28-inch 4K displays in a stacked configuration rather than side-by-side. The workflow has been working out nicely and I just wanted to relay some thoughts.

Mozilla has set free Firefox 58.0 today as their latest "Firefox Quantum" release that continues work on being a performant web browser...

With Qt 5.9 being a Long-Term Support (LTS) release, it's seeing frequent bug-fix releases and today marks the latest point release...

Feral Interactive is asking the community what Linux (and macOS) game ports you would like to see this year...

SQLite 3.22 is now available as the latest version of this widely-used, embedded database library...

The Qualcomm-aligned Code Aurora is working on supporting the latest-generation Adreno A6xx graphics hardware with the open-source Freedreno+MSM driver stack...

Last May we reported on a Nouveau developer adding SPIR-V support to Gallium3D's OpenCL state tracker. Finally the better part of one year later, Pierre Moreau is ready with the second version of these patches to accept this IR associated with Vulkan / OpenCL 2.1+ within Clover...

It was just a few days ago that Valve Linux developer Timothy Arceri enabled GLSL 4.50 support for RadeonSI's NIR back-end after previously taking care of tessellation shaders and other requirements. Now he has taken to implementing some other extensions in RadeonSI's NIR code-path...

I have spent some time this weekend trying out the DRM-Next code slated for inclusion in Linux 4.16 when its merge window opens next week. The DRM-Next state of the AMDGPU driver appears to be in good shape, at least for the RX 580 and RX Vega cards used for my initial testing...

The LLVM code has been merged to mainline for the Retpoline x86 mitigation technique for Spectre Variant 2. This will be back-ported to LLVM 6.0 and also LLVM 5.0 with an immediate point release expected to get this patched compiler out in the wild...

Nearly a decade ago Canonical/Ubuntu developers had a goal of a 10 second boot time. They made good on that for their netbook focus at the time, but in the years since their boot time has slowed down and we haven't seen any concerted effort on improving their boot speed again...

There is yet another change for X.Org Server 1.20 that has now been in development for more than one year...

It's been one year since last talking about Castle Game Engine, the open-source, cross-platform engine written in Object Pascal. But this weekend marked the release of Castle Game Engine 6.4...