Phoronix

Landing in Linux 4.15 was performance counters support in the Etnaviv DRM driver as the low-level bits for exposing the hardware counters with this reverse-engineered, open-source Vivante graphics driver. The user-space/Mesa side code has now landed too...

Landing in Linux 4.15 was performance counters support in the Etnaviv DRM driver as the low-level bits for exposing the hardware counters with this reverse-engineered, open-source Vivante graphics driver. The user-space/Mesa side code has now landed too...

Last month Intel launched the Optane SSD 800P series as a step below the ultra-fast Optane 900P solid-state drives but still a big step ahead of other SSD options like the Intel 760p series. Here are our first Linux performance benchmarks of the Optane 800p series with testing the 118GB SSDPEK1W120GA 800p SSD on Ubuntu.

Greg Kroah-Hartman today released the first stable point update to the Linux 4.16 kernel that debuted one week ago...

We are now through the first week of the two week long Linux 4.17 kernel merge window process for introducing the new features/functionality to this next big kernel release...

For fans of the HandBrake open-source, cross-platform video transcoder software, a big post-1.0 update is now available...

For fans of the FreeCAD open-source 3D CAD modeling software, a new major release is now available -- the first update in almost two years...

The Sway Wayland Compositor that is known for its compatibility and inspiration from the i3 tiling window manager is nearly out with its version 1.0 release...

In addition to Linux 4.17 dropping eight obsolete CPU architectures, this next kernel release is also doing away with POWER4 CPU support...

Our latest Windows vs. Linux benchmarking interest has been seeing how the AMD Ryzen 7 performance compares with the latest operating systems / Linux distributions. We have recently posted some Windows 10 vs. Windows WSL vs. Windows Linux benchmarks, relative Spectre/Meltdown mitigation impact tests on Windows vs. Linux, and other benchmarks but has mostly been done with Intel or server hardware. For those curious, today's tests were done with an AMD Ryzen 7 1700 platform.

NVIDIA is in the process of retiring GeForce 400/500 "Fermi" GPU support from their mainline graphics drivers on Windows and Linux/BSD/Solaris...

We are at the end of the first (and busiest) week of the two-week long Linux 4.17 kernel merge window. There have been many articles on Phoronix about the big highlights of this next kernel version while here are some of the smaller change-sets that came about this week...

The latest nifty open-source Vulkan project we have come across worthy of a shout-out is VKVG. VKVG is short for Vulkan Vector Graphics and is a C library for drawing 2D vector graphics using the Vulkan graphics API...

Desktop-based instant messaging clients are becoming increasingly rare in the age of mobile apps and browser-based alternatives, but Pidgin formerly known as GAIM continues moving along albeit slowly. Recently the Pidgin 2.13.0 release happened without much attention...

Greg Kroah-Hartman's char/misc pull this week included a fair amount of Thunderbolt support improvements for the forthcoming Linux 4.17 kernel...

The Forge, a cross-platform rendering framework developed by Confetti, a graphics research think-tank and consulting company, has rolled out Linux and Vulkan support...

The open-source Haiku operating system that is still striving for compatibility with BeOS had another busy month...

Today was another weekly Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo). We had been looking forward to this meeting for a decision on the GNOME auto-suspend by default behavior but there wasn't a quorum and that topic was then diverted until next week. But there were also early Fedora 29 features approved this week...

With plans to officially ship KDE Applications 18.04 later this month, the release candidate is out today for this collection of K* applications...

Vulkan 1.1.72 is now available, which for simple terms is really "Vulkan 1.1.2" except for the patch number having not been reset when Vulkan 1.1 was launched last month...

A number of improvements to Coreboot were merged to Git master overnight...

The final beta release of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" is now ready for testing ahead of the official launch expected at the end of April...

A long available tool has been AMD's ROCm HIP that allows converting CUDA code to portable C++ code that in turn can be executed on Radeon GPUs. There is now work on getting the upstream LLVM Clang compiler's CUDA toolchain support to also support HIP...

There's a lot of ARM work that has built up for the Linux 4.17 development cycle...

DXVK 0.41 is now available as the library for Wine users to have Direct3D 11 implemented over Vulkan for generally allowing higher performance than Wine's own D3D11-over-OpenGL layer...

From several of the pull requests covered on Phoronix this week for the in-progress Linux 4.17 kernel, there are many areas seeing improved hardware/device support with this next kernel upgrade, including the input drivers...

While Ubuntu developers have decided to no longer enable auto-suspend by default as set with the new GNOME 3.28 desktop when running on AC power, Fedora developers are still debating the issue...

After being at Canonical for a decade (aside from a brief stint at Gazzang), Dustin Kirkland who most recently served as the company's VP of Product, is joining Google...

When it comes to our AMD EPYC Linux testing the past number of months, one of the most common test requests was to test the Gigabyte MZ31-AR0 motherboard, which is more workstation oriented than traditional server with plenty of PCI Express slots for suiting multiple graphics cards, etc. Over the past month I have been testing out this single-socket AMD EPYC motherboard and overall it has worked out fairly well.

The HID subsystem updates have been submitted for the Linux 4.17 merge window and that set of driver updates includes a variety of new product support...

NVIDIA has released a new version of their Video Codec SDK that serves as CUDA-based, cross-platform video encode and decode functionality that ultimately succeeds their VDPAU Linux video decode stack for GPU video coding needs...

For fans of the NixOS Linux distribution that makes use of the Nix package manager, version 18.03 "Impala" is now available...

The explicitly flash-focused F2FS file-system is the latest noteworthy pull request on its way to the mainline Linux 4.17 kernel...

Longtime Linux sound system maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE has sent in his album of updates for the Linux 4.17 kernel...

Alyssa Rosenzweig who has been leading the charge recently on the open-source Mali T700 GPU driver that was called "Chai" but has been renamed to "Panfrost" is now pursuing a "half-way driver" approach to testing their knowledge of the hardware's command stream...

A few days back we covered the heated exchange on the kernel mailing list over the path being pursued by the Linux kernel "lockdown" patches. Those back and forth messages between Google's Matthew Garrett and Linus Torvalds have now spilled over into a blog post by Garrett...

If you have been a Phoronix reader for any decent amount of time, you have likely seen how well Intel's Clear Linux distribution continues to run in our performance comparisons against other distributions. The developers behind this Linux distribution have begun a new blog series on "behind the magic" for some of the areas they are making use of for maximizing the out-of-the-box Linux performance...

While the Linux 4.17 kernel is getting much larger in some areas like the sizable additions to DRM this cycle, when it comes to the kernel's staging area where new/experimental code gets vetted before being officially mainline, it's lost tens of thousands of lines of code this cycle...

The initial RISC-V architecture support landed in Linux 4.15 and now this open-source, royalty-free processor ISA is seeing further improvements with the Linux 4.17 cycle...

Intel published new ISA documentation today where the "Tremont" architecture is a major addition to this documentation update...

Given the booming popularity of Linux containers, it's little surprise but unfortunate that Linux file-systems are having to protect against specially-crafted file-system images by malicious actors looking to exploit vulnerabilities in the code...

For several days we've had remote access to one of the brand new Raptor Talos II Workstations that is powered by POWER9 processors and open-source down through the firmware. For those curious how these latest POWER processors compare to AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon processors, here are some benchmarks comparing against of the few other systems in house while all testing was done from Debian GNU/Linux.

The Mesa-based RADV Vulkan driver has landed initial support for out-of-rasterization support, but it's currently disabled by default...

The Linux 4.17 kernel is bringing further improvements to USB Type-C support...

The latest batch of AMDGPU DC display code patches were posted last night on the mailing list. These 32 patches touching around three thousand lines of code have more fixes and also work on the FreeSync module...

Last week David Airlie sent in the big DRM feature update for Linux 4.17 prior to going on holiday. For those wondering whether there was going to be any drama with the DRM updates increasing the size of the Linux kernel by another one hundred thousand lines of code, in large part due to Vega 12 header additions, Linus pulled it in without any fuss...

With Linux suspend/resume support still sometimes being problematic, it's great to hear Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has a team working on continuing to improve the Linux support for this power-saving functionality...

The Linux 4.17 kernel cycle is in full swing with many large pull requests pending...

While there was a lot of hoopla recently about Valve removing the "Steam Machines" link from their main navigation on their website, Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais has written a public post to reaffirm the company's commitment to Linux and SteamOS...

The kernel lockdown feature further restricts access to the kernel by user-space with what can be accessed or modified, including different /dev points, ACPI restrictions, not allowing unsigned modules, and various other restrictions in the name of greater security. Pairing that with UEFI SecureBoot unconditionally is meeting some resistance by Linus Torvalds...