Phoronix

While Amarok was once KDE's dominant music player, it hasn't seen a new release now in about five years and has yet to see a release based on Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5. But there's hope that might still happen...

A fairly notable update to the Rust programming language compiler and its components is available today...

NVIDIA has begun work on sending out patches for upstreaming Tegra194 "Xavier" SoC support within the Linux kernel...

Canonical's Mir team has released Mir v0.30 as the latest version of this display server that for the past year has been retooling itself with Wayland protocol support...

While Mesa 18.0 should be released in the days ahead as the latest feature release to Mesa 3D, backporting of fixes/improvements to Mesa 17.3 isn't letting up. For those using this stable series from last quarter, Mesa 17.3.4 is out today with nearly 100 changes...

There's been a lot of activity in xorg-server Git the past few days, making it look like the developers may be trying to wrap up the very long X.Org Server 1.20 cycle. The latest major feature work landing is GLXVND...

While we are past the Linux 4.16 merge window, more Spectre and Meltdown related improvements and changes are still being allowed into the kernel, similar to all the KPTI/Retpoline work that landed late in Linux 4.15. On Wednesday was another big batch of KPTI and Spectre work that has already been merged...

Last October well known open-source AMD driver developer Marek Olšák began work on OpenGL compatibility profile support for Mesa. This work is about OpenGL 3.1 with ARB_compatibility support, something generally relevant for workstation OpenGL users and one of the few remaining advantages of AMD's current proprietary OpenGL driver...

Jonas Ã…dahl on Wednesday announced Wayland-Protocols 1.13, the collection of stable and unstable protocols to Wayland...

Open-source Intel driver developer Francisco Jerez has sent out a set of 15 patches implementing a new version of the EXT_shader_framebuffer_fetch OpenGL extension...

While it was a very busy January testing all the fallout from Spectre and Meltdown, February has become just as busy with monitoring all of the Linux 4.16 changes and beginning those benchmarks, all the testing now around the Raven Ridge APUs, and today's release of Phoronix Test Suite 7.8 among a lot of other Linux hardware tests that are ongoing...

The delayed Ubuntu 16.04.4 point release is now expected to become available at the start of March...

Will Cooke, Canonical's Director of Ubuntu Desktop, has announced plans to collect more diagnostics data from Ubuntu installations. This would involve collecting system hardware/software details during the installation process and be uploaded to Ubuntu servers, but users could opt-out of said survey...

The first baby steps towards implementing Direct3D 12 in Wine are now present in the Git code-base for this week's Wine 3.2 release but it won't be anything remotely usable for a while...

Yesterday I posted the initial Ryzen 5 2400G Vega 11 Linux graphics benchmarks while for your viewing please today -- as well as this morning's 21-way Intel/AMD CPU Linux comparison that featured these new Raven Ridge APUs -- the results now completed are initial OpenGL and Vulkan performance figures for the Vega 8 graphics found on the Ryzen 3 2200G.

Following a slight delay, the beta release of GNOME 3.28 is now available ahead of next month's official release...

Yesterday I posted some initial Linux benchmarks of the Ryzen 5 2400G Raven Ridge APU when looking at the Vega 11 graphics, but for those curious about the CPU performance potential of the Ryzen 5 2400G and its ~$100 Ryzen 3 2200G sibling, here are our first CPU benchmarks of these long-awaited AMD APUs. These two current Raven Ridge desktop APUs are compared to a total of 21 different Intel and AMD processors dating back to older Kaveri APUs and FX CPUs and Ivy Bridge on the Intel side.

Phoronix Test Suite 7.8.0-Folldal is now officially available as the first quarterly update to our open-source benchmarking software of 2018 and the last major release prior to the big Phoronix Test Suite 8.0 milestone slated for this summer...

Just like with the recent expiry of the MP3 patents and AC3, the last of the MPEG-2 patents have now expired...

Two years ago we reviewed the CompuLab Airtop as an interesting, industrial-grade, fanless PC that packed in high-end hardware of the time and worked out great initially and continues doing a phenomenal job at passively cooling the PC while running in our benchmark lab. CompuLab has now announced the Airtop2 and Airtop2 Inferno that is an even more impressive cooling feat...

Ubuntu developers are in the process of landing Mesa 18.0 within the "Bionic Beaver" archive for the upcoming 18.04 LTS distribution release. In the process they are also enabling GLVND for allowing the Mesa and NVIDIA proprietary drivers more happily co-exist on the same system...

Now that the Linux 4.16 merge window ended this past weekend, Intel has submitted their first pull request to DRM-Next of material they want to get in for Linux 4.17...

AMD developers working on their official, cross-platform XGL/AMDVLK driver code have pushed out another batch of changes for benefiting their official AMD Vulkan Linux driver...

Initial support for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) with the Intel DRM driver is being called for pulling into DRM-Next that in turn will land with Linux 4.17...

If you are a student interested in working on an open-source project this summer while gaining valuable experience and earning a stipend, it's time to start thinking about the 2018 Google Summer of Code...

Just like the Linux developers, in the wake of the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities DragonFlyBSD developers have also been working on a variety of security improvements...

Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has announced their 2017Q4 graphics stack recipe, which comes down to all of the system components they currently recommend for making a great Intel Linux system...

It's been a while since last having anything to report on Devuan, the Debian derivative focused on "init freedom" by shipping the Debian packages without any dependence on systemd. But just in time for Valentine's Day, Devuan 2.0 Beta is now available...

Here are our initial performance figures for the Vega graphics found on the newly-released Ryzen 5 2400G "Raven Ridge" APU under Linux and testing both OpenGL and Vulkan graphics benchmarks. CPU tests as well as benchmarks of the Ryzen 3 2200G under Linux are forthcoming on Phoronix.

Qualcomm in cooperation with Google developers and Rob Clark of Freedreno/MSM has sent out a set of kernel patches amounting to over 110,000 lines of new kernel code for the MSM DRM driver to bring-up display support for the SDM845...

Valve has made available a new Steam client beta that this time around has some interesting updates on the input side...

One month ago Intel's Open-Source Technology Center began posting the initial Linux driver enablement for Icelake "Gen 11" graphics, the generation succeeding this year's Cannonlake "Gen 10" hardware. That initial work focused on the DRM kernel driver while now they have posted the first Mesa patches...

With the feature-packed X.Org Server 1.20 going to be too late to make it into the April release of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, a new X.Org Server point release is being prepared by an Ubuntu developer that does include some basic new functionality...

The Qt Company has announced the availability of Qt 5.10.1, the first bug-fix release to Qt 5.10 that shipped back in December...

Feral Interactive has announced today that they are porting Rise of the Tomb Raider to Linux...

Over the past week and a half we have highlighted many of the interesting presentations that took place at the annual Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brussels. Here's a look back if you are behind on your Phoronix reading...

Broadcom's Eric Anholt has shared another routine status update about his ongoing work with the open-source VC4 graphics driver supporting current generation Raspberry Pi hardware as well as his work on the next-gen Broadcom VC5 open-source graphics driver...

Many of you have expressed interest in Intel's virtual GPU pass-through support "GVT" and with Linux 4.16 the kernel-side bits have come together for local vGPU display support...

Red Hat's Peter Hutterer has announced the release of libinput 1.10, the latest feature release of this input handling library used by Wayland-based Linux desktops and optionally by those still using the X.Org Server...

Keith Packard has sent out his latest patches for implementing the non-desktop and DRM lease functionality from within the X.Org Server. This work also includes the relevant DDX bits being wired through for the xf86-video-modesetting driver...

With the AMDVLK Radeon Vulkan driver that AMD open-sourced in December continuing to be updated in weekly batches with new Vulkan extensions / features / performance optimizations and the RADV Mesa-based Radeon Vulkan driver continuing to march to its own beat, I have spent the past few days conducting some fresh benchmarks between the AMDVLK and RADV Vulkan drivers with RX 560, RX 580, and RX Vega 64 graphics cards.

Today marks the release of KDE Frameworks 5.43, the latest monthly update to this set of add-on libraries complementing the functionality found in the Qt5 tool-kit...

Following the release of the Linux 4.15 kernel with KPTI and Retpoline introduction, many Phoronix readers were interested in seeing a fresh Linux CPU performance comparison. For those reasons plus in preparing for the Raven Ridge testing, here are benchmarks of 19 different systems when using Ubuntu x86_64 with the Linux 4.15 stable kernel.

Open-source AMD Linux driver developers have started off the week by posting 34 more patches for the "DC" display code stack that was mainlined in Linux 4.15 and further improved with Linux 4.16. With these latest patches that begin the queue for Linux 4.17 there are yet more AMDGPU DC improvements and in particular Raven Ridge fixes...

Last week marked the inaugural release of Xorgproto, a new package consisting of all the X.Org protocol headers rather than being in standalone packages now that X.Org Server development is slowing down and that many of these protocol headers wind up getting updated at the same time. Today marks the Xorgproto 2018.2 release...

Wayland 1.15 and the Weston 4.0 compositor had been planned for release in February but Wayland developers decided there was still enough material on the verge of landing that they decided to delay the release. A new release schedule has now been put forward for getting these updates out in April...

Robert Foss of Collabora has shared some work they are engaged in with Google for virtualizing GPU access and allowing for OpenGL ES 2.0 acceleration for containers...

Tomorrow I will be posting our initial benchmarks of the Ryzen 3 2200G and Ryzen 5 2400G "Raven Ridge" APUs with the Zen CPU cores plus Vega graphics...

Coming later today is a large Intel/AMD CPU comparison using the latest Linux 4.15 stable kernel that is mitigated for Spectre and Meltdown and using around two dozen tests. For the high-end Xeon Gold and EPYC servers, I ran close to 200 tests on those platforms...

A decade ago Linux users were clamoring for Sun Microsystems to bring Solaris' DTrace and ZFS to Linux. While there are still petitions for Oracle to more liberally license ZFS so it could see mainline Linux support, it's been years since hearing much interest in DTrace for Linux. Over time other dynamic tracing implementations have come about and improved in comparison to DTrace, but for those still wanting this dynamic tracing framework that originated at Sun Microsystems, Oracle remains working on the Linux port...