After more than one and a half years in development that is well off their past six-month release cadence, the long-awaited X.Org Server 1.20 has finally been released as this stable X11 implementation for Linux desktop systems not yet prepared to migrate to Wayland...
With GCC 8.1 having been officially released last week, I have spent the past number of days running a variety of compiler benchmarks comparing this initial GCC8 stable release to the previous GCC 7.3 stable compiler release. Tests were done on five different Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Linux systems running very different AMD and Intel processors.
Intel's performance-oriented Clear Linux operating system is already preparing to ship GCC 8.1 as the default compiler and over the days ahead will be rebuilding all of their packages under GCC8...
CentOS 7 1804 is now available as the latest release of this leading "community spin" of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The 1804 update to CentOS 7 is based on last month's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5...
While the Ubuntu desktop official images are no longer 32-bit/i386 and more Ubuntu derivatives are dropping their 32-bit x86 installers, not all 32-bit images/installers have been discontinued and the i386 package archive / port remains. That matter though is back to being debated...
It's been a while since last seeing any interesting products out of VIA with having been focusing on digital signage solutions and fabricating some basic ARM boards. The company has been exploring deep learning and AI and today announced the VIA Edge AI Developer Kit...
The code to the AMDVLK official open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux has received a big code update, syncing up the public tree from their internal development trees with about two weeks worth of changes...
While we have seen AMD GCN and HSA support in the past for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) we have unfortunately not heard of it being used much, but now CodeSourcery / Mentor Graphics has been working on a new/updated AMD GCN port for execution on Radeon GPUs that allows for OpenMP and OpenACC offloading...
The latest feature update is now available to AMD's TrueAudio Next solution for delivering advanced audio effects using OpenCL kernels without relying upon any dedicated DSP hardware...
While Peter Hutterer has been involved with the X.Org Server's input code and related projects for the past decade now and has spearheaded the projects around Multi Pointer X, X Input 2, and the Wayland/Xorg-using Libinput libraries, he's still had a tough time grasping the X.Org Server's pointer acceleration code...
Libdrm 2.4.92 is now available as the newest version of the Mesa DRM library that most notably sits between the Mesa drivers and the Linux kernel Direct Rendering Manager code...
Complementing GNOME's involvement in Google Summer of Code and Outreachy, the GNOME Foundation has announced a new internship program aimed for more complex projects...
Elie Tournier, the former GSoC student developer who was working on soft FP64 support and then joined Collabora, has shared a status update on the consulting firm's work in the GPU virtualization space...
Calxeda as the first interesting ARM-based servers didn't pan out and the company went bust, attempts by the likes of AMD at ARM server CPUs so far have not panned out, and now today is a report that Qualcomm is looking to end its Centriq server CPU line or sell off that division...
With Ubuntu 18.04 LTS out as well as System76's Pop!_OS updated against the Bionic Beaver, System76 is in the process of rolling out some new/updated systems. Last week they began teasing the Oryx Pro as their new "thin machine learning laptop" while today we have a better look at it...
Kent Overstreet who has been spending the past few years working on the Bcachefs file-system born out of the BCache block cache technology is now starting work on upstreaming the code to the mainline kernel...
Besides kernels being addressed for the newly-disclosed CVE-2018-8897 vulnerability, users of Xen para-virtualization should also run a patched Xen system right away...
A little more than one month since crossing 30 million test/suite downloads, OpenBenchmarking.org as of this evening has delivered over its 31 millionth test profile / test suite download to Phoronix Test Suite users...
Alongside a plethora of other announcements in kicking off Google's 2018 I/O event, following recent rumors and indications in their dev channel, Google has officially confirmed support for "Linux Apps" on Chrome OS...
DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has just pushed out DragonFly's Spectre mitigation code as well as fixing "CVE-2018-8897" which is what might be the recently rumored "Spectre-NG" vulnerabilities...
Following Microsoft adding the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) for running Linux programs on Windows 10 and most recently adding Tar and OpenSSH support to the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, their latest Linux-friendly initiative targeting administrators/developers is supporting Unix/Linux line-endings within Notepad...
While last week I published some initial Radeon Software 18.10 vs. Mesa benchmarks there was interest by some premium supporters in seeing a three-way comparison of Mesa RADV versus AMDGPU-PRO / Radeon Software 18.10 PRO components vs. the official open-source AMDVLK driver. Here are those results using both Polaris and Vega graphics cards.
While the current generation Raspberry Pi boards with their VideoCore IV graphics processor only supports OpenGL ES 2.0 and is generally quite slow, there is an experimental/work-in-progress Vulkan driver being worked on...
Taking place last month in Bristol (UK) was the 2018 European LLVM Developers Meeting. The session videos from the EuroLLVM event are now being uploaded...
FreeDesktop.org that is home to the X.Org Server and Mesa development along with Wayland/Weston and other projects like LibreOffice and GStreamer is working on migrating their services to GitLab...
Last week Unity Tech began shipping Unity 2018.1 while now the beta is out for Unity 2018.2 as the next quarterly installment to this widely-used, cross-platform game engine...
2018 appears to be the year of ray-tracing with the major hardware vendors, game engines, and others all working on modern ray-tracing efforts with the GPUs becoming powerful enough to handle this alternative to rasterized rendering, etc. While Microsoft has out the DirectX Raytracing API for D3D12, NVIDIA has been working on extending Vulkan to also suit ray-tracing use-cases...
While Mesa 18.1 is coming soon, the current stable release series for now is Mesa 18.0 with the 18.0.3 being released today as the newest point release...
Linus Torvalds has released Linux 4.17-rc4 as the latest weekly test release of this in-development kernel and he has also finally bumped the codename...
DXVK 0.50 has been released this weekend as the latest version of the open-source project implementing Direct3D 11 over the cross-platform Vulkan graphics API primarily for the benefit of Wine/Linux gamers...