Phoronix

There are several Launchpad PPA options for Ubuntu users wanting to update their Mesa-based drivers. For those curious about the state of these different third-party repositories, here are a few words on them and benchmarks.

Emil Velikov of Collabora has just announced the fourth weekly release candidate of the upcoming Mesa 17.3...

It's arriving only two weeks late but today marks the official debut of Fedora 27 as the latest major update for this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution...

The KTechLab integrated development environment for electronics and microcontrollers no longer depends upon the vintage KDE3 and Qt3 libraries but has been ported to KDE4/Qt4...

As expected, the Linux 4.15 merge window is proving to be very action-packed with a lot of new code being queued for this next kernel release and we are less than 48 hours into this two week cycle...

Rafael Wysocki of Intel has mailed in the power management updates for the current Linux 4.15 kernel merge window...

A few days back I wrote about FFmpeg picking up NVDEC-accelerated H.264 video decoding and since then more FFmpeg improvements have landed...

Intel's Kevin Rogovin has been working on a "BatchBuffer Logger" for the Intel graphics driver that offers some useful possibilities for assisting in debugging/analyzing problems or performance penalties facing game/application developers...

There's potentially a lot happening within the open-source RISC space for the Linux 4.15 kernel merge window...

File-system pull requests today for Linux 4.15 not only included Btrfs compression-related improvements, an overhaul to the AFS driver, and EXT4 corruption fixes but there is also a very significant set of updates to the XFS file-system...

Well known AMD open-source driver developer Marek Olšák has ruthlessly been optimizing the Radeon Mesa driver stack for years. With RadeonSI getting fine-tuned and already largely outperforming the AMDGPU-PRO OpenGL driver and most of the big ticket improvements complete, it appears his latest focus is on further optimizing the AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end...

Not to be confused with PowerVR SGX, the Intel SGX driver was revised with new patches published today but it doesn't look like it will land for Linux 4.15...

Of the many new features in Linux 4.14, one of the prominent additions is initial support for Zstd compression that is initially wired in for transparent file-system compression with SquashFS and Btrfs. Here are some benchmarks of Zstd Btrfs compression compared to the existing LZO and Zlib compression mount options.

Jonas Adahl of Red Hat has volleyed his initial proposals for how a "future" GNOME Shell could be architected on a page entitled GNOME Shell 4. This GNOME Shell 4 would potentially break compatibility with GNOME Shell 3 extensions while being more designed around Wayland rather than X11...

Jason Ekstrand of Intel who contributes significantly to the development of their open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver has prepped a new patch series...

The USB Type-C port manager that originally premiered in Linux 4.12 will be promoted out of staging with the Linux 4.15 kernel...

Red Hat developers have been working on an overhaul of the AFS file-system's kernel driver for the just-opened Linux 4.15 kernel merge window...

David Sterba of SUSE has submitted the Btrfs file-system feature changes queued for the Linux 4.15 kernel...

Red Hat now considers their ARM support on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL7) to be supported under general availability "GA" terms...

AMD has unveiled the Radeon Open Compute platform (ROCm) 1.7 release as part of their wares at this week's Supercomputing 17 (SC17) conference in Denver...

Miguel de Icaza has announced the latest big project with Mono: a new .NET interpreter...

Firefox 57.0 is being officially released this week and its stable download is now available...

In the x86 realm for linux 4.15 are many exciting feature improvements for newer/future Intel and AMD CPUs...

Feral developer Alex Smith is requesting commit rights to the Mesa code-base...

With PHP 7.2 due for release before month's end and the final release candidate (RC6) already available that in essence is very close to the final build, here are some fresh benchmarks from PHP 5.3 through PHP 7.2 RC6 while using an AMD EPYC Tyan server...

The Free Software Foundation Latin America team are once again punctual in delivering their updated GNU Linux-libre kernel...

Ted Ts'o was quick to send in the EXT4 file-system and fscrypt file-system encryption framework changes for the just-opened Linux 4.15 merge window...

We've been expecting it to happen for weeks while indeed the hwmon pull request was indeed sent in today exposing AMD Ryzen / Threadripper / EPYC temperature reporting on Linux...

The Linux 4.14 kernel is now official!..

The KDE camp this weekend has released KDE Frameworks 5.40 as their latest feature update to this collection of add-on libraries complementing Qt5...

Two and a half years ago was the start of the continually evolving effort around turning a basement into a big Linux server room and last year having shared a one year redux in the effort but having been late in a second year redux into this effort and how the systems are configured for our Linux/BSD/open-source benchmarking at scale, here is an update.

While it was just days ago Intel got around to posting the patch for introducing -march=cannonlake support for GCC, this weekend they already posted the patch for its successor with the new Icelake target...

One of the approaches Intel's Clear Linux distribution uses for achieving greater performance is by shipping AVX2 (and even now AVX-512) optimized libraries with their OS that are then automatically used if the detected host CPU is AVX equipped. Solus is making use of this approach now for striving for better Linux gaming performance...

This week marked the sixth and final planned release candidate for PHP 7.2...

NVIDIA has been shifting their focus from VDPAU for GPU-accelerated video decoding to instead the NVIDIA Video Codec SDK that offers NVENC for encoding and NVDEC for video decoding. FFmpeg has landed initial NVDEC support...

With the recent testing of the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti being our new graphics card up for Linux benchmarking as well as having a new NVIDIA Linux graphics driver release, hare are OpenCL benchmarks of 12 graphics cards using the latest AMDGPU-PRO 17.40 and NVIDIA 384.98 Linux drivers on Ubuntu x86_64.

Longtime Intel open-source graphics driver developer Ian Romanick has posted his initial set of patches for what he calls "the first of the real SPIR-V work."..

WireGuard is the effort led by Jason Donenfeld to provide a next-gen secure network tunnel for the Linux kernel. Jason has laid out plans and next steps for getting this interesting project merged into the upstream Linux kernel...

The fifth point release to Mesa 17.2 is now available with the latest fixes while the Mesa 17.3 official release is imminent...

The Outreachy participants for the Winter 2017 internship program for "underrepresented people in tech" have been named...

Alexandre Julliard has released the latest bi-weekly development snapshot of Wine as this project approaches its Wine 3.0 release around the end of the year...

German Phoronix reader Thomas Frech is back with another guest post on the topic of ETH/XMR mining under Linux. This time around he's sharing some power efficiency numbers using a new G-Homa WiFi smart meter. See his past articles in this series here...

NetworkManager 1.10 was released today as the newest version of this commonly used Linux network management utility...

Linux 4.14 isn't even out the door yet but with the DRM-Next feature period over in preparation for the Linux 4.15 merge window, Intel open-source developers are already prepping code improvements that will in turn target Linux 4.16...

At the end of last year we had a brief encounter with the new at the time MacBook Pro with Touchbar to see how well it would run under Linux. It was a mess with SSD difficulties, non-working touchpad/keyboard, WiFi issues, and more. It's a bit better using the newly-released Ubuntu 17.10, but would still advise against Linux for the Apple MacBook Pro Late-2016 model / Mac-A5C67F76ED83108C / MacBookPro 13,3 model.

November is off to a good start for Linux gaming with Feral's port of F1 2017, Croteam releasing Serious Sam 3 VR: BFE, and now the debut of Football Manager 2018...

The latest open-source game project working on an open-source engine re-implementation of a popular game is FreeCS that is aiming to be a free software re-implementation of Counter-Strike...

A new version of time is now available...

On Thursday Croteam released Serious Sam 3 VR: BFE as the newest SteamVR title for Windows and Linux...

AMD this year has been developing a NIR back-end for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver in part for supporting the ARB_gl_spirv extension in being able to re-use/share some code with the RADV Vulkan driver that obviously already deals with SPIR-V and relies on NIR for its intermediate representation. Now support for geometry shaders is coming to RadeonSI NIR...