Phoronix

With the start of a new month comes the usual updated usage statistics for Valve's Steam gaming service, which for the past month represents an increase in Linux gamers...

If you need some integrated multimedia capabilities while you are editing your text files with GNU Emacs, Emms 5.0 is available as a big update to the Emacs Multimedia System...

Back in February Feral Interactive announced they were bringing Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia to Linux. While the game is being released for Windows this week, the Linux port is coming in the next month or two...

While there is VK9 for getting Direct3D 9 implemented over Vulkan and then the very successful DXVK for running Direct3D 11 over Vulkan with a focus on Wine games and then also the less mature VKD3D for Direct3D 12 over Vulkan, there hasn't been a solution for those wanting Direct3D 10 accelerated by Vulkan. But an indirect solution is now in the works via DXUP...

UBports developer Marius Gripsgard is working on adding X11 support to Mir by means of XWayland...

Fedora 28 is now officially out, the first on-time release in many years. This is a great update with GNOME 3.28 on Wayland on the desktop side while also a lot to get excited about on the server-side too...

The rolling-release Void Linux independent OS known for its XBPS package manager, use of Runit as an init system rather than systemd, LibreSSL rather than OpenSSL, and other offerings making this Linux distribution fairly different is in a bit of a trouble. The project leader of Void Linux is missing in action, making much of the project's infrastructure inaccessible...

Fedora 28 debuts today and it's a terrific update to this Linux distribution. I've been running Fedora Workstation 28 and Fedora Server 28 on a number of systems so far and it's been working out quite nicely during the development phase, many visible and both underlying improvements, and also significant is they are now releasing on-time without sacrificing quality thanks to release management improvements...

Following last week's huge GIMP 2.10 release, it looks like the next stable version will indeed be the long-desired GIMP 3.0...

Independent Linux kernel hacker Con Kolivas today released the Linux 4.16-ck1 stable kernel as his collection of kernel patches applied atop the vanilla Linux 4.16 upstream code-base. Most notable to that patch-set is the updated MuQSS 0.171 scheduler, which is also available for download on its own for patching against your own kernel build...

Landing just prior to the official Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" release was the controversial Ubuntu software/hardware survey functionality. When announcing their plans to incorporate an optional survey process into the installation process, Canonical said they would be making this survey data public. They are doing so, but it will be a while before it's accessible...

Zchunk is a new file format aiming to be highly "delta-able" while maintaining a good compression ratio...

Work continues in an expedited manner on the "V3D" DRM driver formerly known as VC5 for supporting next-generation graphics hardware found on Broadcom SoCs...

Happy May Day to those celebrating any events today, but as usual with the end of a month comes our recaps of the most popular Linux/open-source news over the month prior...

UEFI SecureBoot support didn't make it for Debian 9.0 "Stretch" but progress is now being made on this "security" feature and it's looking like it could be squared away for the Debian 10.0 release expected next year...

Among many other improvements, KDE's upcoming Plasma 5.13 release is bringing new log-in and lock screens for the desktop...

Hitting mainline LLVM and Clang compilers today were support for Vega 12 "GFX904" and Vega 20 "GFX906" graphics processors...

AzCopy is the latest software Microsoft has brought to Linux and is now generally available, but not entirely a surprise or unexpected...

Just in time for ending out April, Microsoft is today beginning to ship the "Windows 10 April 2018 Update" what was previously known as the "Spring Update" and "Redstone 4". Of course, we're mentioning this for what Linux and other operating systems now have to compete against and as a prelude for some forthcoming benchmarks on Phoronix...

Following the release of Chrome 66 earlier this month, Google developers working on the Chrome/Chromium web-browser have officially promoted Chrome 67 to beta...

Based off the new Ubuntu 18.04 as a base, Linux PC vendor System76 released this weekend Pop!_OS 18.04...

AMD quietly released their Radeon Software for Linux 18.10 driver. This was what was basically referred to as "AMDGPU-PRO" but is now part of the "Radeon Software" branding especially with this driver package continuing to offer the option of an "AMDGPU All-Open" stack to complement the PRO components...

As part of our ongoing benchmarks of the recently released Ubuntu 18.04, here is a look at the performance of Ubuntu Linux on the same laptop while testing all Long-Term Support releases from 12.04 to 18.04 for seeing how the Ubuntu performance has evolved over the past six years on this Intel laptop.

USB 3.2 was announced last summer as an incremental update to the USB standard to double the bandwidth for existing USB Type-C cables...

The Linux Mint project has published their monthly recap of activities going on for April with this popular desktop Linux distribution...

The GCC 8 compiler will likely be introduced as stable this week or next in the form of the GCC 8.1 premiere release. Here's a look at the prominent changes for this annual update to the GNU Compiler Collection...

The Linux 4.16.6 kernel was released on Sunday and besides various other fixes, AMD Ryzen 7 2700X corrected temperature reporting is among the changes...

Linus Torvalds announced just now the latest installment of the "Fearless Coyote"... The Linux 4.17-rc3 kernel is now available...

Besides other promising Linux 4.17 power saving improvements, a separate fix was queued today for potentially helping AMD systems conserve power...

Libplacebo is an effort to shift the MPlayer2-forked MPV media player's core rendering code into a reusable library. The libplacebo library can allow for cleaning up MPV's APIs in the process as well as providing a standard library for GPU-accelerated video and image processing...

On Saturday was the latest code drop for the XGL component update to the AMDVLK open-source Linux Vulkan driver, which incorporates the work done internally by AMD developers on their official Vulkan driver code-base over the past number of days...

Google's WebP image format officially reached version 1.0 to seemingly no fanfare...

Following Friday's release of Wine 3.7, the developers maintaining the experimental Wine-Staging build today released their version 3.7 re-base...

AMD has released a new update to their AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler (AOCC)...

Mesa 18.0.2 is now the latest stable release for Mesa3D while those wishing to ride the bleeding-edge version for these OpenGL/Vulkan drivers can try Mesa 18.1-RC2...

The OpenSolaris-derived Illumos-based OpenIndiana operating system is out with their first Hipster update of the year...

Karol Herbst and others at Red Hat continue working on improving the open-source GPU compute for Linux, particularly for the Nouveau open-source reverse-engineered NVIDIA driver...

The RadeonSI compiler queue can now run across more CPU cores/threads of modern systems though it appears this will primarily just benefit those running the shader-db shader test cases...

Yesterday I wrote about GCC developers moving to drop Intel MPX support and now the Linux kernel developers are looking at dropping the Memory Protection Extensions support too, thereby rendering this modern CPU feature unsupported by Linux...

Wine 3.7 is out today as the latest bi-weekly development release of Wine that will culminate next year with the Wine 4.0 debut...

It's been over a half-decade since the GIMP 2.8 stable debut and today marks the long-awaited release of GIMP 2.10...

Last year Canonical began developing a new Ubuntu Server installer and while it was quite rough at first, it got into shape in subsequent months and is used by default for the newly-released Ubuntu Server 18.04...

While OpenMP 4 supports accelerators like GPUs and DSPs, HardCloud is a new initiative focused on OpenMP offloading for FPGAs and with an emphasis on speeding up cloud computing...

Last year we reported on GCC deprecating Intel Memory Protection Extensions (MPX) and now it looks like with GCC 9 they will be dropping the support entirely...

The visually stunning and technically advanced Unigine 2 engine that is well supported on Linux is out with a new release, Unigine 2.7. Unigine 2.7 rolls out with updated SDK offerings of Unigine 2 Entertainment, Unigine 2 Engineering, and Unigine 2 Sim depending upon your commercial needs...

The Arcan Display Server that is the display stack built off (in part) a game engine and also developing the Durden desktop and most recently developing a "Safespaces" VR Linux desktop has also been working on porting the code from Linux to OpenBSD...

While we are still waiting for Intel Cannonlake CPUs with "Gen 10" graphics to formally launch (which looks like may not happen now until very late 2018 or early 2019, with the recent Intel earnings call indicating no 10nm volume production until 2019), open-source Intel developers continue their work on the Linux bring-up of Icelake "Gen 11" graphics...

Former Valve developer and texture compression wizard Rich Geldreich has open-sourced the "bc7enc16" BC7/BPTC texture encoder...

Juan Suarez Romero who is maintaining the Mesa 18.0 stable series today announced the 18.0.2 release candidate as what will be the second point release...

Ubuntu 18.04, the Bionic Beaver release, is now available as Canonical's latest Long-Term Support (LTS) release...