Phoronix

The Linux 4.17 kernel cycle is in full swing with many large pull requests pending...

While there was a lot of hoopla recently about Valve removing the "Steam Machines" link from their main navigation on their website, Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais has written a public post to reaffirm the company's commitment to Linux and SteamOS...

The kernel lockdown feature further restricts access to the kernel by user-space with what can be accessed or modified, including different /dev points, ACPI restrictions, not allowing unsigned modules, and various other restrictions in the name of greater security. Pairing that with UEFI SecureBoot unconditionally is meeting some resistance by Linus Torvalds...

Last month I wrote how Ubuntu 18.04 began enabling "automatic suspend" by default on new installations where after 20 minutes systems were suspending without notice and in some cases still causing issues trying to resume with modern x86 hardware in 2018... Fortunately, Ubuntu developers are reverting that behavior when on AC power...

For those waiting until v18.0.1 before upgrading to the Mesa 18.0 series, Mesa 17.3.8 is now available as the latest release off this stable series from the end of 2017...

David Sterba sent in the Btrfs file-system updates today for the Linux 4.17 kernel merge window...

Mozilla has today announced Firefox Reality as "a new kind of web browser that has been designed from the ground up to work on stand-alone virtual and augmented reality (or mixed reality) headsets."..

The beta of the much anticipated Fedora 28 beta release is now available for testing...

As part of the remote testing of the Raptor Talos II Workstation that is comprised of fully free software down to the firmware and powered by high-end POWER9 processors, over Easter weekend I carried out some GCC vs. Clang benchmarks...

With the Linux 4.17 kernel the s390 architecture updates include more mitigation work around the Spectre Variant One and Two vulnerabilities...

It's been just about twenty-four hours that Linus Torvalds has been accepting new material for the Linux 4.17 mainline kernel and it's looking indeed like it will be another very busy kernel update...

It's roughly once a week that AMD updates their external and public facing AMDVLK/PAL source tree for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver while following last week's significant update with Wayland support and more, they have quickly issued another update to this RADV driver alternative...

GnuCash 3.0 is now available for those looking for a free and open-source accounting program with a focus on personal and small business accounting...

Darrick Wong has submitted the XFS file-system updates targeting the Linux 4.17 kernel. It's a bit lighter than 4.15 and 4.16 that brought "great scads of new stuff", but there still is a fair amount of feature work taking place...

RadeonSI Gallium3D has caught up to the fellow Intel i965 and Nouveau NVC0 drivers in supporting the OpenGL KHR_blend_equation_advanced extension...

Not only is there a new X.Org Server 1.20 release candidate today but the folks managing Wayland/Weston development have today announced the first release candidates of Wayland 1.15 and the Weston 4.0 reference compositor...

The lengthy X.Org Server 1.20 development cycle continues with today Adam Jackson of Red Hat having put out a third release candidate...

As we have covered previously, the annual X.Org Developers Conference (XDC) for 2018 is being organized by the folks at consulting firm Igalia and will be hosted in A Coruña, Spain at the local university. This event is taking place from 26 to 28 September and they have now issued their call for papers...

The PowerBook 100 sub-notebook launched in 1991 with a 16MHz Motorola 68000 processor and up to 8MB of memory. In 2018, the Linux kernel is still receiving fixes/improvements for the PowerBook 100 series...

Marek Olšák of AMD has done some spring cleaning to the RadeonSI Gallium3D code in what he's calling a mega cleanup with 55 patches...

OpenBSD 6.3 hadn't been due until the middle of the month, but the official release of this popular BSD operating system is available today...

The folks maintaining the GNU Linux-Libre downstream of the Linux kernel have released their kernel 4.16 release that pulls in yesterday's Linux 4.16 kernel but strips out parts that aren't entirely free software and eliminates support for loading binary-only modules, etc...

Rafael Wysocki of Intel has already submitted the power management and ACPI updates for the newly-opened Linux 4.17 kernel merge window...

The Everspace single-player 3D space shooter game has unofficially been available for Linux the past few months but the official Linux release is finally right around the corner...

With the start of a new month comes the latest figures from Valve about the OS marketshare on Steam...

As expected, the Linux 4.17 kernel will move ahead with dropping support for older/unmaintained CPU architectures...

Back during GDC when everyone was talking about ray-tracing and Microsoft's DirectX Ray-Tracing API for DX12, but NVIDIA has now confirmed they will be soon releasing ray-tracing extensions for Vulkan. Additionally, the company has now thoroughly gone over their new OptiX API for CUDA-based ray-tracing...

A new "subsystem" going into the Linux 4.17 kernel is LKMM, the Linux Kernel Memory Consistency Model...

For fans of Latte Dock, the KDE Plasma aligned desktop "dock", is out with a big development release ahead of the Latte Dock 0.8 release that will be coming up soon...

While Linux 4.17 is set to drop support for some older/unmaintained CPU architectures, it looks like it will land at least one new port for Linux 4.17 for the Andes NDS32 CPU architecture...

Either as an elaborate April Fool's Day prank or the start of something more, longtime kernel developer David Howells of Red Hat has posted 45 patches that begin the work on porting the Linux kernel to build under a C++ compiler rather than C...

Linus Torvalds has gone ahead and released Linux 4.16 as an Easter and April Fool's Day kernel update...

For reasons unknown, Apple is looking to hire Linux kernel developers in both Texas and California...

There are no April Fool's Day surprises on Phoronix, but considering the occasion and the otherwise slow Easter weekend, I figured it would be fun to discuss some of the grandest open-source/Linux letdowns or failures from over the years... Here's a trip back down memory lane for some once promising projects and goals...

With the first quarter of 2018 now in the books, I ran GitStats on the current Mesa code-base as of this morning to see how things are looking for the year to date...

After writing yesterday about the Broadcom VC5 DRM driver potentially re-using the AMDGPU scheduler code, a Phoronix reader pointed out that the out-of-tree Linux-Lima driver has begun using this scheduler too...

Given all the interest in ray-tracing and related announcements for Windows from last month's Game Developers Conference, I decided to spend some time on this holiday weekend looking at some of the Vulkan ray-tracing projects...

Kevin Brace is the sole developer left working on the OpenChrome DRM driver for supporting integrated graphics from the days of VIA x86 hardware. He's hoping to mainline the driver in the Linux kernel but it still is lacking proper 2D acceleration and more...

This month on Phoronix has been more than 320 original news stories and 22 featured Linux hardware reviews. Here's a look at what has been exciting readers the most this month, which includes the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ launch, Linux 4.16 maturing and Linux 4.17 being around the corner, Windows vs. Linux benchmarks, and much more...

The VK9 project began more than one year ago as an attempt to implement the Direct3D 9 API atop the modern Vulkan API. The project continues progressing and has this weekend hit its 25th milestone...

Following Friday's debut of Wine 3.5, a new Wine-Staging release is now available that continues to carry close to one thousand patches on top of the upstream Wine code...

We've known that Mir developers have been trying to get a Mir example desktop session going in time for Ubuntu 18.04. More details on that are now coming to light as we meet the EGMDE desktop environment...

Last week I posted an article looking at the Relative Spectre/Meltdown Mitigation Costs On Windows vs. Linux. Today from a different system and using Windows Server 2016 rather than Windows 10 are some fresh benchmarks doing a similar comparison with different hardware and also looking at the Spectre and Meltdown mitigation performance impact again on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and Clear Linux...

With Vulkan 1.1 it should be possible to write a pure Vulkan Wayland compositor while a Phoronix reader has tipped us off to a developer starting work on a proof-of-concept Vulkan window compositor...

A few days back we wrote about Valve to open-source their Steam networking sockets library and now that source code release has occurred...

NVIDIA on Friday released an updated Vulkan driver for Windows and Linux with their latest feature work...

Eric Anholt of Broadcom is looking at making use of the AMDGPU DRM scheduler within the VC5 direct rendering manager driver...

In going through the GDC 2018 videos and slides now available, one of the most interesting sessions is Alen Ladavac of Croteam talking about frame stuttering and in particular how his company is working to overcome it thanks in part to Vulkan's VK_GOOGLE_display_timing extension...

If you are looking for some deep technical content to watch this weekend, the video recordings from this month's Game Developers Conference 2018 (GDC 18) are now available...

Wine 3.5 is now available as the latest bi-weekly release for this popular program to run Windows games/programs on Linux...