Phoronix

NVIDIA has released their first beta driver in the long-awaited 390 series...

With more developers returning to their activities after the holidays, feature work on Fedora 28 is heating up...

For those of you riding the Mesa 17.3 stable train, the second point release is expected for release this weekend with many fixes...

Just ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Dell has unveiled a new XPS 13 high-end laptop...

Broadcom open-source driver developer Eric Anholt has written his first status update on the VC5 driver activities of the new year...

ARM Holdings has submitted patches implementing support for the ARMv8.4-A instruction set update for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)...

Mario Kleiner's work on plumbing Mesa for handling 10-bit colors has landed in Mesa 17.4-dev Git...

Lucas Stach has submitted the DRM driver updates for Etnaviv that are requested to be pulled for Linux 4.16...

Besides the already-merged Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) patches, other Linux kernel patches are coming out now in light of the recent Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities...

RADV developer Bas Nieuwenhuizen has wired in support for ETC2 texture compression to this Mesa-based, open-source Radeon Vulkan driver...

Continuing on with our Linux Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) performance testing are some benchmark results when running tests within a virtual machine on Xeon class hardware.

Not only is Purism working on their Librem 5 smartphone this year with hopes of still readying the software and hardware for shipping to consumers in 2019, but they are also planning to unveil their tablet this year...

We're finally getting actual technical details on the CPU vulnerability leading to the recent race around (K)PTI that when corrected may lead to slower performance in certain situations. Google has revealed they uncovered the issue last year and have now provided some technical bits...

2018 has been off to a busy start with all the testing around the Linux x86 PTI (Page Table Isolation) patches for this "Intel CPU bug" that potentially dates back to the Pentium days but has yet to be fully disclosed. Here is the latest.

While at the moment with the mainline Linux kernel Git tree AMD CPUs enable x86 PTI and are treated as "insecure" CPUs, the AMD patch for not setting X86_BUG_CPU_INSECURE will end up being honored...

Last summer the embedded Linux OpenWRT and LEDE projects voted in favor of re-merging their efforts while now in 2018 that effort is coming back together now that the logistics have been addressed...

LLVM/Clang 6.0 has been branched, thus making LLVM/Clang 7.0 open for development on master...

The Calamares project as a reminder aims to be the universal installer framework for Linux systems that is distribution-agnostic and already used by Manjaro and KaOS and OpenMandriva. Calamares 3.2 is being worked on as the installer framework's next major release...

One of the new features being worked on by KDE developers in the new year is better desktop integration with web browsers...

DragonFlyBSD should now have initial support for Intel's latest-generation "Coffee Lake" graphics...

GNOME's BuildStream project has declared its first stable release, v1.0, after being in development for the past year...

Right now with the big mysterious security vulnerability causing the rush of the x86 Page Table Isolation work that landed in the Linux kernel days ago, it's believed to be a problem only affecting Intel CPUs. But at least for now the mainline kernel is still treating AMD CPUs as "insecure" and is too taking a performance hit...

With the recently published Initial Benchmarks Of The Performance Impact Resulting From Linux's x86 Security Changes, one of the common questions that came up is whether gaming performance is adversely affected by the x86 Page Table Isolation changes recently merged to the Linux kernel...

Over the past day you've likely heard lots of hysteria about a yet-to-be-fully-disclosed vulnerability that appears to affect at least several generations of Intel CPUs and affects not only Linux but also Windows and macOS. The Intel CPU issue comes down to leaking information about the kernel memory to user-space, but the full scope isn't public yet until the bug's embargo, but it's expected to be a doozy in the data center / cloud deployments. Due to the amount of interest in this issue, here are benchmarks of a patched kernel showing the performance impact of the page table isolation patches.

The Flashrom utility that's associated with the Coreboot project for reading/writing/erasing/verifying flash chips commonly for motherboard BIOS/UEFI/firmware chips has reached its long-awaited v1.0 milestone...

While Wine 3.0 is expected to be released later this month, Wine 2.0.4 is available right now as the current stable release for running Windows programs on Linux...

Remember Linspire? The Linux distribution formerly known as "Lindows" is back from the dead.....

Systemd had a busy 2017 and its code-base is now up to over one million lines...

With LLVM 6.0 being branched this week and that marking the end of feature development on this next compiler update before its stable debut in February, here are some benchmarks of the very latest LLVM Clang 6.0 compiler on AMD's EPYC 7601 32-core / 64-thread processor as we see how well the AMD Zen "znver1" tuning is working out.

Qt 6.0 planning has begun and we should be hearing more about this next major tool-kit update as the year goes on. Here's some of what we can expect from Qt in the near future...

During the recent holidays when running light on benchmarks to run, I was toying around with LLVMpipe in not having run this LLVM-accelerated software rasterizer in some time. I also ran some fresh tests of Intel's OpenSWR OpenGL software rasterizer that has also been living within Mesa...

For those wondering Mesa's rate of change last year while adding in many OpenGL 4.5~4.6 features, a lot of Vulkan driver activity, countless performance optimizations, and the plethora of other work that took place in 2017, here are some numbers...

The OpenShot open-source non-linear video editor is planning for many improvements this year...

With PUBG popularity appearing to decline a bit during December, the Steam Survey results for December 2017 show an increase in the Linux percentage,..

CIB is a new hobby project getting the full-blown Clang C/C++ compiler to run within a web browser as a technical feat...

Making the news rounds again is word of Zhaoxin Semiconductor that is jointly owned by VIA working on modern and competitive x86 processors...

Here are some numbers on the Linux kernel development trends for 2017...

Aside from our 2017 year-end recap, if you were busy reliving the favorite moments of last year and missed some of our original content in December, here's a look back at the top highlights of last month...

Released nearly one year ago was the experimental NVIDIA VkHLF project as a high-level framework for Vulkan. It's been a while since last hearing anything about it, but some new code was just merged...

We end 2017 on Phoronix with 3,390 original news posts on Phoronix this year and 369 featured articles/reviews...

Linus Torvalds has released the sixth weekly release candidate of the upcoming Linux 4.15 kernel...

Here are some other end-of-year benchmarks I had been working on in looking at the current performance of Mesa 17.2.2 versus 17.3.1 versus 17.4-devel Git with RadeonSI OpenGL on three different graphics cards...

While AMD developers worked on the Radeon Gallium3D "Clover" OpenCL support for some time, that really hasn't been the case in years with the AMD's open-source OpenCL effort these days being focused upon their ROCm compute platform. Some within the community though still work on this OpenCL Gallium3D state tracker from time to time and this New Year's weekend is an interesting project pairing Clover with AMD's proprietary OpenCL compiler...

While Haiku OS is incredibly close to delivering their long-awaited beta, it didn't end up materializing in 2017 but they still made much headway into this open-source BeOS-inspired operating system...

The open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver project providing independent, reverse-engineered 3D graphics driver support for GeForce GPUs made a lot of progress in 2017 although not as great as many would have hoped for. But 2018 will hopefully prove to be more interesting...

As shown in recent benchmarks of the RADV Vulkan driver, while the Radeon RX Vega GPU support is now considered conformant and fully-functioning, it's not yet as well optimized as earlier generations of GPUs with this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver. Fortunately, it looks like Bas Nieuwenhuizen is working on more performance optimizations...

DRM subsystem contributor Noralf Trønnes is proposing a patch-set to provide generic FBDEV emulation support in DRM drivers via exportable dumb buffers...

With the Mesa-based RADV Vulkan driver having just landed a significant performance optimization you may be wondering whether RADV Vulkan now leads to faster gaming frame-rates than using the mature RadeonSI OpenGL driver... I was curious so I ran some fresh benchmarks using the newest Mesa Git code.

With the LLVM Clang 6.0 code branching and feature freeze coming up on 3 January, here's a recap of some of the most interesting new features and changes to find with the LLVM 6.0 compiler infrastructure and Clang 6.0 C/C++ front-end...

Alex Deucher of AMD has sent in the last feature updates to DRM-Next of new AMDGPU material to be queued for the Linux 4.16 kernel cycle that will begin later in January...