Phoronix

The NVIDIA 396.24.02 Linux driver is available today and while it's a beta update, it ends up being quite an exciting release thanks to new Vulkan extensions...

Feral Interactive's Linux system tuning daemon, GameMode since being introduced earlier this year has primarily offered the ability to easily change the CPU scaling governor when gaming but not much more. Though a new feature is now in the works for GameMode...

Last week was the main AMDGPU features update for Linux 4.18 via DRM-Next while today a secondary pull request of further feature work has been submitted...

With the Linux 4.15 kernel there was the introduction of the Thunderbolt networking driver but support was still needed in user-space for making this peer-to-peer Thunderbolt networking support a reality...

While the recently released X.Org Server 1.20 has initial support for XWayland with EGLStreams so X11 applications/games on Wayland can still benefit from hardware acceleration, in its current state it doesn't integrate too well with Wayland desktop compositors wishing to support it. That's changing with a new patch series...

The first beta of PostgreSQL 11.0 is now available for testing...

Based off the Gallium3D "mesa_glthread" work for threaded OpenGL that can provide a measurable win in some scenarios, the Intel i965 Mesa driver has implemented this support now too...

With the recent Mesa 18.1 release there is OpenGL 3.1 support with the ARB_compatibility context for the key Gallium3D drivers, but Marek Olšák at AMD continues working on extending that functionality under the OpenGL compatibility context mode...

The UBports team have put out their latest batch of answers to common questions around this project that's still working to maintain the Ubuntu Touch software stack...

Following the news from earlier this month that FreeDesktop.org would move its infrastructure to Gitlab, the Mesa3D project has begun the process of adopting this Git-centered software...

Wine's Direct3D to OpenGL translation layer will now default to using OpenGL 4.4 contexts rather than legacy OpenGL contexts...

The open-source RPCS3 PlayStation 3 emulator will now offer faster performance on modern Intel systems...

While VKD3D 1.0 is out today for Direct3D 12 mapped over Vulkan, the DXVK project for running Direct3D 11 over Vulkan is also out with a new release today...

The Wine project has announced the release of VKD3D 1.0, the first official release of this Direct3D 12 over Vulkan layer primarily developed at CodeWeavers. VKD3D is the approach Wine is pursuing for getting Direct3D 12 games from Windows working on Wine under Linux or also under macOS when paired with MoltenVK...

For those wanting to use the open-source ROCm Radeon Open Compute stack on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, it will be supported by the next release...

Given recent improvements to AMD Zen (znver1) with LLVM, the new AMD AOCC 1.2 compiler release, and GCC 8.1 having premiered just weeks ago, here is a fresh look at the performance of six different C/C++ code compilers when testing the performance of the resulting binaries on an AMD Threadripper 1950X system.

Adding to the list of changes coming to Linux 4.18 are updates to CPUFreq's "Schedutil" CPU frequency scaling governor...

While DragonFlyBSD 5.3/5.4 is exciting on the performance front for those making use of the stable DragonFly operating system releases, DragonFlyBSD 5.2.1 is available this week...

While Mesa 18.1 just officially shipped last week, Mesa 18.2 as next quarter's open-source 3D OpenGL/Vulkan graphics driver stack update is scheduled for release in mid-August...

There's a suggestion/proposal to disable the Spectre Variant Two and Meltdown mitigation by default with the Linux kernel for in-order CPUs...

Just over one month after there were 2,000 Vulkan-mentioning projects on GitHub, the 2,100 project milestone has been breached...

PostgreSQL 11 is the next major feature release of this open-source database SQL server due out later in 2018. While it's not out yet, their release notes were recently updated for providing an overview of what's coming as part of this next major update...

Yesterday the latest Spectre vulnerability was disclosed as Spectre Variant 4 also known as "Speculative Store Bypass" as well as the less talked about Spectre Variant 3A "Rogue System Register Read". Here are my initial tests of a patched Linux kernel on AMD hardware for Spectre V4.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has today released the Linux 4.9.102, 4.14.43, and 4.16.11 kernels. Most notable about these stable release updates is Spectre Variant Four mitigation...

Back in December was the announcement of Intel's Clear Containers being spun into a new project called Kata Containers in collaboration with other organizations. Kata Containers has now reached their version 1.0 milestone...

Following the Intel/AMD Spectre Variant 4 mitigation landing yesterday with "Speculative Store Bypass Disable" (SSBD) and then the POWER CPU mitigation landing today, ARM developers have posted their set of patches for 64-bit ARM CPUs to mitigate against this latest Spectre vulnerability around speculative execution...

Thanks to the work done by Christoph Haag on a SteamVR plug-in for OpenHMD, the PlayStation VR (PSVR) head-mounted display is working out for handling Steam VR Linux games like Dota 2...

FLAC and Ogg now have faster audio encoding and decoding capabilities thanks to recent code improvements...

The developers working on the combined Razor-qt and LXDE desktop effort, LXQt, have rolled out their newest feature release...

The Qt Company has managed to release Qt 5.11 one week ahead of schedule compared to its original road-map, which is quite a feat considering some of the past Qt5 release delays. Beyond that, Qt 5.11.0 is offering a big slab of improvements...

Back in February the folks at Feral Interactive announced Thrones of Britannia would be coming to Linux, the latest in the Total War game franchise. They have confirmed today the Linux port will be out in June...

Within the libinput world, the 1.11 development cycle has been going on long with Libinput 1.10 having debuted in January. But this long development cycle is bringing with it many changes...

Following yesterday's public disclosure of Spectre Variant Four, a.k.a. Speculative Store Bypass, the Intel/AMD mitigation work immediately landed while overnight the POWER CPU patch landed...

Purism has published their nearly final specifications on their limited-run Librem 5 Dev Kit. The cutoff for ordering a developer kit is next week as they are placing their hardware order and planning on only this single, limited run of the developer kit prior to the phones becoming available next year...

If you have been experiencing rendering issues with the Vulkan-over-Direct3D "DXVK" layer while playing games on Wine and are using the RADV Vulkan driver, you may want to upgrade to the latest Git...

Spectre Variants 3A and 4 are now public as the newest speculative execution vulnerabilities affecting many CPUs and with the mitigations also expected to affect performance. Initial Linux kernel patches are available...

Lennart Poettering has announced the call for presentations of this year's All Systems Go! conference, what was born out of the earlier systemd.conf conference...

Given that DragonFlyBSD recently landed some SMP performance improvements and other performance optimizations in its kernel for 5.3-DEVELOPMENT but as well finished tidying up its Spectre mitigation, this weekend I spent some time running some benchmarks on DragonFlyBSD 5.2 and 5.3-DEVELOPMENT to see how the performance has shifted for an Intel Xeon system.

There still are several weeks to go until the Linux 4.17 kernel will be officially released and for that to initiate the Linux 4.18 merge window, but we already know some of the features coming to this next kernel cycle as well as an idea for some other work that may potentially land...

With the recently minted Linux 4.17 kernel there was initial USB Audio Class 3.0 support for this audio-over-USB specification while with Linux 4.18 that UA3 support will be further enhanced...

With the Linux benchmarks of the Ryzen 7 2700 last week I included a few Linux gaming benchmarks, but for those evaluating CPU options for your next Intel/AMD Linux gaming system upgrade, here is a much more thorough set of benchmarks from a wide variety of OpenGL and Vulkan powered Linux games. The Ryzen 7 2700, Ryzen 7 2700X, and Core i7 8700K processors were tested for this Ubuntu gaming comparison while testing with both a Radeon RX Vega 64 and GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.

With development on Phoronix Test Suite 8.0 wrapping up for release in the coming weeks, here is a recap of some of the prominent changes for this huge update to our open-source, cross-platform benchmarking software...

Taking place last week in Oxford, UK was IWOCL 2018: the International Workshop on OpenCL. For those that couldn't make this compute conference, session videos have begun appearing online...

Linux 4.17 is up to its sixth weekly release candidate ahead of the official release expected by mid-June...

Just shy of one month since the long-awaited debut of GIMP 2.10, the first stable point release is now available...

Anyone happening to have an ATI Mach 64 graphics card from the mid-90's or a 3Dfx-competitor Rendition graphics card also from the 90's can now enjoy the benefits of the recently released X.Org Server 1.20...

Last month AMD released the AOCC 1.2 compiler for Zen systems. This updated version of their branched LLVM/Clang compiler with extra patches/optimizations for Zen CPUs was re-based to the LLVM/Clang 6.0 code-base while also adding in experimental FLANG support for Fortran compilation and various other unlisted changes to their "znver1" patch-set. Here's a look at how the performance compares with AOCC 1.2 to LLVM Clang 6.0 and GCC 7/8 C/C++ compilers.

The Linux 4.18 kernel will feature the initial Steam Controller kernel driver that works without having to use the Steam client or using third-party user-space applications like the SC-Controller application...

The second beta release of FreeBSD 11.2 is now available for weekend testing...

Ensuring your CPU microcode is kept up-to-date for Zen processors is now a little bit easier with the microcode files being added to the linux-firmware.git collection...