Phoronix

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...

Prominent Etnaviv driver developer Lucas Stach for working on open-source, reverse-engineered Vivante graphics support has posted initial patches for the GC7000L support as found on the i.MX8M SoC...

Linux's POWER code with the upcoming Linux 4.16 cycle will introduce support for PowerPC Memory Protection Keys. With the current Linux 4.15 cycle is also initial Meltdown mitigation for these CPUs too...

The GFS2 file-system with the upcoming Linux 4.16 kernel cycle will add hole-punching support...

It's been one month now since AMD open-sourced their official Vulkan driver code and the associated XGL code-base. There has been about weekly code drops of new AMDVLK/XGL code over the past month while the separate, community-driven Mesa-based RADV Vulkan driver continues being developed as well...

The liburcu Userspace RCU data synchronization library should be significantly faster when built with a modern Linux kernel release...

SUSE's Richard Biener is making preparations for officially releasing GCC 7.3.0 on Thursday, 25 January...

Open-source contributor Mario Kleiner has continued his work on deep color support for the Radeon Linux driver...

Peter Hutterer of Red Hat has announced the first release candidate of libinput 1.10 today, which isn't a big feature release but rather incorporates a few new features with many bug fixes for this input handling library used by X.Org and Wayland systems...

Linux 4.15 isn't happening today as planned: there's simply too much recent activity and some bugs known to be outstanding. As such, we're up to the ninth weekly release candidate...

For those wondering how the Intel (U)HD Graphics compare for games and other graphical benchmarks between desktop environments in 2018, here are some fresh benchmarks using GNOME Shell on X.Org/Wayland, KDE Plasma 5, Xfce, Unity 7, and LXDE.

While Linux has been playing happily with Ryzen CPUs as long as you weren't affected by the performance marginality problem where you had to swap out for a newer CPU (and Threadripper and EPYC CPUs have been running splendid in all of my testing with not having any worries), it seems the BSDs (at least FreeBSD) are still having some quirks to address...

Linux 4.15 will hopefully be released later today and that will kick off the start of the Linux 4.16 kernel merge window. Here's some of what is coming to this next kernel cycle...

Given the very strong Vulkan vs. OpenGL performance in the recent low-end/older Linux gaming GPU tests with discrete graphics cards, I was curious to run some benchmarks seeing the current state of Intel's open-source OpenGL vs. Vulkan performance. With the Mesa 18.0 release to be branched soon, it was a good time seeing how the Intel i965 OpenGL and ANV Vulkan drivers compare.

The DXVK project that started towards the end of 2017 for implementing Direct3D 11 over Vulkan with a focus on improving the D3D11 Wine support is already beginning to run some titles...

When using Intel Skylake X / Xeon Scalable chips right now under Linux the ACPI CPUFreq driver is responsible for the CPU frequency scaling decisions. But with the upcoming Linux 4.16 kernel cycle, Intel's P-State driver will add support for Skylake X...

After going through release candidates the past eight weeks, the Linux 4.15 kernel is expected to be released later today by Linus Torvalds...

The Linux 4.16 kernel will feature Spectre Variant One "Bounds Check Bypass" mitigations...

The Genode open-source operating system framework project has shared some of their planned goals for 2018...

The latest in our benchmarking with KPTI and Retpoline for Meltdown and Spectre mitigation is comparing the performance of the EXT4, XFS, Btrfs and F2FS file-systems with and without these features enabled while using the Linux 4.15 development kernel.

Besides Intel and Radeon OpenGL/Vulkan driver improvements squeezing into Mesa Git ahead of the imminent Mesa 18.0 code branching, the Intel-developed OpenSWR has landed its latest improvements...

GNOME developers have been working on a new Wayland protocol, the "gtk_text_input" protocol, which now is implemented in their Mutter compositor...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) approved of a number of feature requests for the Fedora 28 release due out in May...

An Intel open-source driver developer has posted preliminary patches taking Cgroups v2 to DRM driver management...

A request came in this week to look at how low-end and older graphics cards are performing with current generation Linux games on OpenGL and Vulkan. With ten older/lower-end NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards, here is a look at their performance with a variety of native Linux games atop Ubuntu using the latest Radeon and NVIDIA drivers.

Due to longtime SUSE developer Takashi Iwai going on holiday the next few weeks, he has already sent in the sound driver feature updates targeting the upcoming Linux 4.16 kernel cycle...

With yesterday's successful launch of Wine 3.0 I was curious how the past year of development on Wine compared to years prior, etc. Here are some Wine development statistics...

With the Linux 4.16 kernel cycle that is expected to begin immediately following the Linux 4.15 kernel debut on Sunday, AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) technology supported by their new EPYC processors will be mainline...

For the Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) support currently within the Linux kernel for addressing the Meltdown CPU vulnerability it's currently limited to 64-bit on the x86 side, but for the unfortunate souls still running x86 32-bit operating systems, SUSE is working on such support...

There are updated AMDGPU microcode/firmware files now available for recent Radeon GPUs...

OpenSUSE has continued rolling in the new year with several key package updates in January...

Harry Wentland of AMD has sent out the latest batch of patches for the AMDGPU DC display code stack. Fortunately it lightens up the DRM driver by about six thousand lines thanks to removing some unused code...

Most pre-GCN AMD graphics cards are still limited to OpenGL 3.3 support at this time due to not supporting FP64. Only the HD 5800/6900 series on R600g currently have real double-precision floating-point support working right now so at present they are on OpenGL 4.3 rather than 3.3, but those other generations may be catching up soon thanks to the "soft" FP64 code...

Mesa 17.3.3 is now available as the latest point release for the Mesa 17.3 stable series...

Towards the end of December AMD quietly released ROCm 1.7.60 as the newest version of their Radeon Open Compute stack complete with their maturing OpenCL implementation. With the improvements there plus NVIDIA recently introducing their 390 Linux driver series (390.12 Beta currently), I ran some fresh Linux OpenCL GPU compute benchmarks on a variety of AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards for those curious how the current performance stacks up.

In 2018 the X.Org Server will introduce better support for 16:9 and 16:10 ratio monitors!..

The Wine camp has officially released Wine 3.0 as their annual feature update to this program for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other operating systems...

The Unity game engine has a New Year's resolution of improving its graphics renderer abilities in 2018...

Canonical has rolled out Spectre Variant One and Spectre Variant Two mitigation to their proposed repository with updated kernels for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS / 16.04 LTS / 17.10. These kernels with IBRS and IBPB added in will be sent down as stable release updates next week...

After abandoning their Fedora Server 27 Modular Edition work last year, Fedora developers interested in modularizing Fedora packaging have drawn up new plans that are now approved by the Fedora Council...

MenuLibre is an advanced menu editor that supports not just one desktop environment but GNOME, LXDE, Xfce, Cinnamon, and Unity Linux systems...

For those that were excited over the months of ongoing work by SUSE to bring up an in-kernel boot splash system that could be better than Plymouth for at least some use-cases and was interesting many readers, unfortunately it's not panning out for mainline...

These days when Dave Airlie isn't busy managing the DRM subsystem or hacking on the RADV Vulkan driver, he's been spending a fair amount of time on some OpenGL improvements to the aging R600 Gallium3D driver. That's happened again and he's landed some more improvements just ahead of the imminent Mesa 18.0 feature freeze...

With the Linux 4.17 kernel (not the upcoming 4.16 cycle) there is likely to be added initial HDCP support to Intel's Direct Rendering Manager driver. Ahead of that this High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection support continues getting improved upon...

Git maintainer Junio Hamano has released version 2.16.0 of this distributed revision control system...

Last week when sharing the results of tweaking Ubuntu 17.10 to try to make it run as fast as Clear Linux, it didn't take long for Phoronix readers to share their opinions on Arch Linux and the request for some optimized Arch Linux benchmarks against Clear Linux. Here are some results of that testing so far in carrying out a clean Arch Linux build with some basic optimizations compared to using Antergos Minimal out-of-the-box, Ubuntu Server, and Clear Linux.

Endless OS developer Philip Chimento has developed Flapjack as a means of helping developers work on Flatpak...

While LLVM/Clang 6.0 was branched earlier this month and under a feature freeze with master/trunk moving to LLVM 7.0, two weeks later the first release candidate is now available...

With the next update to X-Plane 11 introducing VR support, I have renewed interest in this realistic, cross-platform flight simulator. It's been a few years since we last delivered any benchmarks with X-Plane, but for your viewing please today is an assortment of 24 graphics cards both old and new, low-end to high-end from NVIDIA and AMD in looking at how this flight simulator is running on Ubuntu Linux.