Phoronix

After being twice delayed, the beta of Fedora 27 is cleared for release next week...

Of the many improvements I am excited for with the GTK4 toolkit is the introduction of a Vulkan renderer...

By the end of the calendar year Intel has reiterated the first 10nm Cannonlake devices are expected to market. It's looking like among the first Cannonlake designs will be a new Google Chromebook...

We've known a new DragonFlyBSD release was being worked on for release soon. That release has now been branched, the first release candidate tagged, and it's being marked as version 5.0...

For those not comfortable riding Mesa Git, Mesa 17.2.2 is set to be released early next week as the newest stable update for the open-source 3D graphics driver stack...

For fans of the Outlast first-person survival horror game that was released in 2013 and brought to Linux in 2015, you may get better performance now if using the Mesa drivers thanks to the OpenGL threading being flipped on...

Ending out September is the very exciting news that AMDGPU DC display code will likely land in Linux 4.15. Out of this excitement of finally seeing a mainline Linux kernel with modern Radeon GPUs supporting HDMI/DP audio, atomic mode-setting, and more. I decided to see how well this "drm-next-4.15-dc" code is working out for Radeon RX Vega graphics cards, where attached monitors can finally be driven by this DC code rather than having to rely upon AMDGPU-PRO or other kernel branches. So for ending out this exciting month, here are some fresh benchmarks of the RX Vega 56 / RX Vega 64 and other Radeon GPUs using this kernel paired with Mesa 17.3-dev Git built against LLVM 6.0 SVN compared to various NVIDIA Pascal graphics cards.

If you need an extra reason to celebrate this weekend, next week the notorious S3 Texture Compression (S3TC) patent is set to expire!..

When KDE's KWin is acting as a Wayland compositor, there's now a real-time scheduling policy to ensure the graphical system is always responsive...

Wine 2.18 is now available for those wishing to run Windows games/applications on Linux this weekend...

Adding to the list of Microsoft's Linux actions in 2017 comes a new preview version of the "next-generation" Skype for Linux...

As part of our ongoing AMD EPYC Linux benchmarking, I've been working this week on a cross-distribution GNU/Linux comparison followed by some BSD testing... Of course, I couldn't help but to see if Intel's performance-oriented Clear Linux distribution would run on the AMD EPYC server...

Linux right now offers a "Long Term Support" release where support for the kernel branch is maintained for two years, which is nice compared to kernel releases usually dropping maintenance around N+1.1 after the release. But moving forward, Linux LTS releases will now be maintained for six years...

Just ahead of the weekend, Intel has published a new set of patches up for testing that are expected to then be merged to DRM-Next for Linux 4.15...

The next update to RHEL, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5, is expected to include a Wayland technical preview within its GNOME Shell session...

Red Hat's oVirt virtualization management platform is out with a new development release...

Google's Chrome has offered virtual reality support for a while and most recently will even let you browse the web in VR while the Linux support has lagged behind...

While NVIDIA's Vulkan Linux driver performance has already been very good, it's potentially even better now with the newest NVIDIA Vulkan beta driver...

The annual X.Org Developers' Conference devoted to all things X.Org / Mesa / Wayland / DRM will for the first time be hosted in Spain next year...

Overnight the final beta of Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" was released for Ubuntu proper and its derivative friends...

Yesterday was the very exciting news of the AMDGPU DC code finally being called for pulling to DRM-Next for integration in the Linux 4.15 kernel. So far it's looking like that will indeed happen for Linux 4.15 assuming Linus Torvalds has no objections. If you want to test out this kernel for HDMI/DP audio, Radeon RX Vega display support, atomic mode-setting, or other modern features, here is an Ubuntu kernel spin...

Epic Games this week announced the second preview release of Unreal Engine 4.18. Among the fixes this time around affect Linux and Vulkan...

With the hype this week around Firefox Quantum Beta with its user-interface refinements and more noticeably the performance improvements, I decided to run some benchmarks on my end with a variety of tests comparing Firefox 52 ESR, Firefox 56 stable, Firefox 57 Quantum beta, and Chrome 60. Here are those web browser benchmark results from the Linux x86-64 desktop.

System76 is today announcing the beta release of their Ubuntu-derived Pop!_OS Linux operating system...

We are just hitting the end of Q3, but already this calendar year Microsoft has continued their trend of the past few years of engaging with open-source and Linux in different aspects...

Earlier this week we published our launch-day benchmarks of the Core i9 7960X and Core i9 7980XE. Those Linux benchmarks were done with Ubuntu, but for those wondering what the maximum performance looks like for these high-end desktop processors, here are some comparison results with Intel's own Clear Linux distribution.

Landing in Mesa 17.3-dev Git yesterday is initial support for the Meson build system! Initially, this Meson build support just works for the Intel ANV and Radeon RADV Vulkan drivers...

The final Firefox 56.0 binaries have hit the mirrors ahead of its official announcement to come. Firefox 56.0 brings more improvements while Firefox 57 "Quantum" will be a huge update...

Knoppix 8.1 is now available although no release announcement has yet to hit the wire. As it's been some years since last trying out Knoppix, I decided to fire up this new release...

It's been known another USB spec update was being worked on as "USB 3.2" while a few days ago this specification update was made official...

Ubuntu will no longer be producing a desktop i386 ISO beginning with the soon-to-be-released Ubuntu 17.10...

Apple this week released macOS 10.13 "High Sierra" as the latest version of its operating system. Of course, curiosity got the best of me so here are benchmarks of macOS 10.12.6, macOS 10.13, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 17.10 from a MacBook Air to see how the performance compares.

A new feature being considered for Fedora 28 is Annobin as a new GCC plugin that would implant extra information into generated binaries...

Following my Linux benchmarks of the newly-launched Core i9 7960X and Core i9 7980XE processors, here are benchmarks of the 18 core / 36 thread Extreme Edition processor when running on Linux 4.14...

Less than two months after hitting 25 million benchmark test/suite downloads, OpenBenchmarking.org has crossed the threshold this morning of 26,000,000 downloads!..

More than three years after the initial release of KDE Plasma 5 for Linux, the support on FreeBSD is getting into shape...

Not only is AMDGPU DC finally aligning for Linux 4.15, but the RISC-V Linux kernel port might also be merged for this next kernel cycle...

Peter Hutterer of Red Hat has announced the first release candidate of libinput 1.9, the input handling library now widely used by both Wayland and X11 Linux systems...

AMD is currently looking to hire more LLVM compiler engineers to work on their ROCm open-source compute stack...

Christmas looks like it may be coming early this year for Radeon Linux users... The AMDGPU DC pull request is finally out!..

HHVM 3.22 is now available as this alternative PHP implementation and what serves as the basis for Facebook's Hack programming language...

This shouldn't come as a big surprise given Microsoft's Linux/open-source moves in the past couple of years, including joining the Linux Foundation and more, but their latest sponsorship comes down to joining the Open Source Initiative...

The Spring cross-platform open-source real-time strategy game engine is out with its first major release in more than one year...

Alex Deucher has submitted the initial AMD Direct Rendering Manager updates for pulling into DRM-Next that in turn will hit the Linux 4.15 kernel...

For squeezing maximum performance out of Linux systems with source-based workloads, most of you know there can often be tweaks to be had to the compiler stack for greater performance. As well with the never-ending advancements to the leading open-source code compilers, between releases can be measurable performance benefits but sometimes not without regressions too. With AMD's EPYC line-up still being very fresh and the underlying Zen microarchitecture (or "znver1" as referred to by the compiler toolchains), here are a variety of benchmarks under recent releases of the GCC and LLVM Clang compilers.

It's been one year since last testing BCache as a means in the Linux kernel's block layer to allow an SSD to serve as a cache for a larger but slower rotational hard drive. So I have carried out some fresh benchmarks using the Linux 4.14 Git kernel to provide not only fresh benchmarks of BCache but also MDADM SSD RAID on Linux and some other fresh SSD/HDD benchmarks.

It hasn't been this exciting watching the Mir Bazaar repository since Mir was first announced...

I'm currently running some macOS 10.13 vs. Linux benchmarks for publishing within the next day or two on Phoronix. But so far in my macOS 10.12 Sierra vs. macOS 10.13 High Sierra benchmarks, what has stood out the most is the file-system performance due to HFS+ file-systems automatically being converted to the Apple File-System (APFS)...

NVIDIA has kicked off their GTC world tour and in beginning that, they have launched the CUDA 9.0 toolkit...

It looks like the upstream Linux 4.14 kernel may end up playing nicely with the ROCm OpenCL compute stack, if you are on a Kaveri or Carrizo system...