The march to QEMU 3.0 is now underway following discussions at the end of last year for jumping to the v3.0 milestone after the long-running v2.x series. The first release candidate is now available and marks a hard feature freeze for the QEMU 3.0 milestone...
Being roughly mid-way through the Linux 4.18 kernel development cycle, I spent some time this weekend running benchmarks of the AMDGPU DRM driver on Linux 4.18 Git compared to Linux 4.17 stable on three different Radeon graphics cards while using the Mesa 18.1.3 based drivers.
Version 2018.2 of the Unity Game Engine is now available as the latest quarterly update to this widely-used, cross-platform engine. Unity 2018.2 is quite exciting and does include some Vulkan and Linux changes...
If the Lynx open-source text-based browser isn't satisfying your needs with viewing modern web sites via the terminal, Browsh is a new entrant into the text-based web-browser space that seeks to support modern web standards...
Thanks to Facebook / Open Compute Project, the Octeon CN81xx SoCs are now supported by upstream Coreboot and happen to be the first Cavium ARM SoCs supported by this project...
One of the most exciting Google Summer of Code 2018 projects is Vulkan-Virgl for supporting this modern graphics/compute API within virtual machines...
It's an exciting day in RADV land as in addition to work on the new Vulkan 1.1.80 extensions, David Airlie landed a patch he's been baking for speeding up the shader compilation performance for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver within Mesa...
The folks at iX Systems have announced their first public beta of FreeNAS 11.2, their downstream of FreeBSD 11.2 focused on supporting network-attached storage (NAS) systems...
After converting the GNU Emacs repository to Git a few years back, Eric S Raymond has been working on the massive undertaking of transferring the GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) repository in full over to Git. But the transition to GCC Git is being hampered since due to the massive size of the repository, Raymond's system is running under extreme memory pressure with 64GB of RAM...
Canonical today released new Ubuntu Minimal images for cloud computing. The new images are half the size of the traditional Ubuntu Server and are said to boot up to 40% faster, so I decided to run a quick Amazon EC2 Linux distribution boot time comparison today.....
A new pull request has been submitted to MoltenVK, the open-source project for mapping the Vulkan graphics/compute API over Apple's Metal to run on iOS/macOS. This pull request is working to address the issue that caused at least one MoltenVK-using iPhone/iPad game to be rejected from the Apple App Store...
Canonical today announced the new Minimal Ubuntu, which is a "tiny" package set focused for speed, performance, and stability of Ubuntu in cloud deployments...
Chances are if you are spending more than $400 USD to have the Intel Core i7 8086K, the limited edition processor that is Intel's first to have a turbo frequency at 5.0GHz (and can easily overclock on all cores to 5.0+ GHz), you probably care a great deal about your system's performance. For squeezing extra performance out of the hardware, there is a wide variety of software optimizations available. Many of those software optimizations can be found within Intel's own Clear Linux distribution as previously shown while for this i7-8086K benchmarking is a look at how nine Linux distributions compare out-of-the-box when tested on this Coffeelake CPU and all CPU cores overclocked to 5.0GHz.
Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's open-source Linux GPU driver team has been particularly busy in recent days with "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver enhancements...
Taking place last week in The Hague, Netherlands, was the WineConf 2018 conference. This year's WineConf -- on top of the usual annual discussions about this open-source project for running Windows games/applications on Linux/macOS -- took the time to celebrate the project's 25th anniversary...
One of three new Vulkan extensions introduced in this weekend's Vulkan 1.1.80 specification update is VK_KHR_8bit_storage for providing 8-bit types is now available in patch form for the Intel open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver...
If you are still running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 or one of the downstreams like CentOS, Scientific Linux, or Oracle Linux, these benchmarks are for you in showing the performance of Scientific Linux 6.9 vs. 6.10 vs. 7.5 for getting an idea about the current performance of EL6/EL7.
The latest hardware at Phoronix for testing is the Dell XPS 13.3-inch (XPS9370) with Intel Core i7-8550U Kabylake-R processor featuring UHD Graphics 620. A number of interesting Linux benchmarks are currently being worked on, including Windows versus various Linux distribution performance tests as well as power consumption, etc. For some initial figures for your viewing pleasure this weekend are some of the gaming/graphics tests between Windows 10 and Ubuntu Linux.
The open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver continues to be largely a community affair aside from occasional code/documentation dumps (and hardware supplies) from NVIDIA and then Red Hat also employing a few of the key contributors to the Nouveau DRM kernel driver and Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D within Mesa. When it comes to Red Hat's Nouveau developers like Ben Skeggs and Karol Herbst, they started out as community contributors over the years to this driver. Fortunately, this year has brought another new contributor to the Mesa driver stack...
Released yesterday was Vulkan 1.1.80 that offers three new extensions while the Intel ANV open-source driver has begun rolling out patches for supporting this latest Vulkan specification update...
Back in January there were Xilinx developers who posted a DRM/KMS driver for their DisplayPort subsystem as part of the ZynqMP SoC. It looks like the driver for this display pipeline may soon be ready for mainline...
Back in February MoltenVK was open-sourced as part of The Khronos Group and Valve working harder to get Vulkan working on macOS/iOS by mapping it through to using Apple's Metal Graphics/Compute API. The most notable user of MoltenVK on macOS to date is the Vulkan Dota 2 on Mac, but for those looking to use this Vulkan-to-Metal framework on iOS, it looks like Apple might be clamping down...
While GNOME's Wayland support has been in great shape with the Mutter compositor, it has depended upon X11/XWayland code even when starting with pure Wayland support. That's now changing and there is also now the optional "--no-x11" flag for starting the compositor without X11 support...
The Facebook developers working on the Zstandard "Zstd" compression technology released their latest update a few days ago, v1.3.5 that is codenamed the "Dictionary Edition" given its dictionary compression performance improvements...
For those compiling code on AArch64 (64-bit ARM) systems with LLVM Clang and tuning for your particular SoC, the Clang compiler now supports -mcpu=native...
After a number of recent Vulkan 1.1 point releases being rather mundane, Vulkan 1.1.80 is out this morning and on top of documentation updates also brings three notable new Vulkan extensions...
Keith Packard doing his contract work for Valve to improve the Linux display infrastructure for VR head-mounted displays has been wrapping up his efforts with recently landing the Vulkan bits into Mesa and now the necessary xf86-video-amdgpu patches also are set to be merged there in the days ahead...
Intel announced the limited edition Core i7 8086K processor in June to celebrate 40 years since the introduction of the original 8086 processor that ushered in the x86 architecture. The Core i7 8086K is now widely available albeit with an apparent limited time available. This celebratory CPU is built off Intel's existing Coffeelake CPU micro-architecture but with an elevated CPU base frequency and a turbo frequency that tops out at 5.0GHz to make it the company's highest-performing mainstream desktop CPU to date.
GNU Guix 0.15 is out today as the latest feature update to this transactional package manager and is joined by an updated Guix System Distribution (GuixSD) release too as the GNU Linux-libre distribution built around it...
While the GCC compiler merged its RISC-V port last year, among its limitations have been not supporting the Ada compiler. That's now changing thanks to new patches posted today...
Based off last month's Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.10 update, CentOS 6.10 is available this week while also the Scientific Linux 6.10 release candidate has also been made available...
Towards the end of June an initial batch of AMDGPU updates were sent in to DRM-Next for targeting the Linux 4.19 kernel. Now a second round of updates have been submitted of the AMDGPU/Radeon kernel for this next kernel series...
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