Phoronix

With Mesa 17.3 now having been branched for its stable release next month and that bringing much improved RADV Radeon Vulkan performance and more mature RX Vega support along with a ton of other improvements, here is a fresh comparison of the newest open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver code compared to the latest NVIDIA Linux driver on a range of graphics cards.

Google today has pushed out Android Studio 3.0 as the latest stable release of this integrated development environment for their mobile operating system...

While Plymouth has become widely-used as a bootsplash screen on most Linux systems these days and is much better off than the RHGB days, SUSE has sent out initial patches as part of their proposal for having a new in-kernel bootsplash system...

For those looking at assembling a new system around Intel's 8th Gen Core "Coffee Lake" CPUs, the motherboard I've been conducting most of my Linux tests from has been the ASUS PRIME Z370-A. A few weeks of use with this motherboard, I'm happy with this Intel Z370 motherboard.

The Linux Mint crew has confirmed today they will be discontinuing future releases of their KDE spin following next month's Linux Mint 18.3 release...

As further sign of Feral Interactive continuing to pursue Vulkan for their Linux games, a Feral developer today posted a patch for implementing the brand new AMD_shader_info extension for the RADV Mesa driver...

Qt 5.10 is up to its second beta milestone ahead of its expected stable debut by the end of November...

When glibc 2.26 was released in August it was a noteworthy release with plenty of optimizations and introduced its own per-thread cache. With the next installment of the GNU C Library there will also be many more optimizations...

There's been a theme recently with the open-source graphics drivers of working on priority scheduling support from AMDGPU priority scheduling for VR use-cases and tied into RADV to Intel also allowing context priority support that in turn is exposed through EGL. The Freedreno driver has also been working on a context priority implementation...

Mesa's support for the OpenGL KHR_no_error extension is now treated as "done" for all drivers...

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, the recently named "Bionic Beaver", will most likely be shipping with a Linux 4.15-based kernel...

At the OpenZFS Developer Summit today besides an Oracle engineer talked of hope for upstreaming ZFS in Linux, another interesting session was showcasing Open ZFS running under Windows...

SQLite 3.21 is now out as the newest feature release for this widely-used embedded database library...

For many years Linux storage enthusiasts have dreamed of having the ZFS file-system part of the mainline Linux kernel. But since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems that outlook has looked much more bleak that they would re-license the ZFS kernel code under a license compatible with the upstream GPLv2 Linux kernel. But an Oracle engineer presented today that the ZFS Linux dream might still come true...

Yesterday I posted some fresh benchmarks of the RX Vega between the AMDGPU+RadeonSI/RADV open-source vs. AMDGPU-PRO drivers, which showed the pure open-source driver stack performing admirably well for the latest-generation AMD graphics architecture and the community-driven RADV Vulkan driver was even performing nicely. Due to how well RADV has matured during the Mesa 17.3 cycle, here are some benchmarks using a Radeon RX 580 "Polaris" graphics card showing off its more mature support for Vulkan.

Epic Games has today released Unreal Engine 4.18 as the newest version of their cross-platform game engine...

Aspyr Media has released Observer for Linux and macOS as their newest game port...

Next month's Mesa 17.3 release won't have OpenGL 4.6 that debuted this summer, but they are getting close to supporting this latest version of the OpenGL graphics API...

We've been looking at the interesting AMD EPYC server processors recently from the high-end EPYC 7601 to the cheapest EPYC 7251 at under $500 as well as the EPYC 7351P that offers 16 cores / 32 threads for only about $750. The latest EPYC processor for testing at Phoronix has been the EPYC 7401P, a 24 core / 48 thread part that is slated to retail for around $1075 USD.

Mark Shuttleworth has just revealed the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS codename.....

Intel has published more patches for supporting new instruction set extensions that will debut with "Ice Lake" processors when launched in late 2018 or early 2019...

GNOME developer Adrien Plazas has written a blog post about some of the big work items he's engaged in for retro-gtk, the GNOME user-interface for running various libretro cores / game emulators...

With Mesa 17.3 having been branched yesterday and the first release candidate issued for this quarterly feature update, here's a look at some of the development numbers for this Q4'17 Mesa update...

Well known open-source AMD graphics driver developer Marek Olšák has sent out patches offering ARB_compatibility support with OpenGL 3.1...

Just one month ago was the big SDL 2.0.6 feature update that had been baking for about one year while now it's already been succeeded by SDL 2.0.7...

For those wondering how the RadeonSI and RADV open-source driver performance is fairing for the Radeon RX Vega 64 compared to the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver, here are some fresh benchmarks.

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) today merged their initial support for the C++17 file-system technical specification!..

Warzone 2100, the real-time strategy/tactics game released for Windows back in 1999 and then brought to Linux after the commercial game was open-sourced several years later, is now seeing a Vulkan renderer in the works...

Mesa 17.3 has been branched ahead of its expected stable debut in mid-to-late November...

Red Hat's Matthias Clasen has written a blog post concerning the changes found in the big GTK+ 3.92 development release that is pushing towards the GTK4 tool-kit release...

Intel has already landed a lot of new Intel DRM code in DRM-Next for the upcoming Linux 4.15 cycle while one final batch is now ready for testing...

Linus Torvalds released the Linux 4.14-rc6 kernel this Monday morning rather than on his usual Sunday cadence due to Internet connection woes. RC6 is also bigger than he would prefer...

The first release candidate is now available for the upcoming Xen 4.10 hypervisor update...

Last week AMD released an AMDGPU-PRO 17.40 beta driver for miners. Thomas Frech is now back with another installment of his articles about mining performance on AMD hardware, continuing from Mining Monero On The CPU and Ethereum On The GPU and Mining Ethereum With AMD Threadrippers Paired With Four RX Vega 64 GPUs...

The annual systemd conference, All Systems Go!, that is also about other user-space Linux technologies, has wrapped up in Berlin...

The Android-x86 project derived from Google's Android Open-Source Project code-base remains officially at Android 6.0, but there is an Android 7.1 "Nougat" build available for testing...

Intel's Jordan Justen has sent out his third revision to the recently renewed patches for allowing an OpenGL on-disk shader cache for the "i965" Mesa driver...

The GNU C Library, glibc, has picked up support for some additional functions as FMA-optimized versions...

Taking place this weekend in Prague has been the 8th annual GStreamer Conference, which is preceding next week's Linux Foundation Embedded Linux Conference Europe...

Tomorrow marks the end of the crowdfunding campaign for Purism's Librem 5 smartphone campaign...

A few days back I wrote about Intel's work on Control-flow Enforcement Technology beginning to land in GCC. This "CET" work for future Intel CPUs has now landed in full for GCC 8...

The AMDGPU DC display code has a final batch of feature updates that were sent in this weekend for DRM-Next staging and is the last set besides fixes for the "DC" code for the 4.15 target...

LXQt 0.12 is now available as this Qt5-powered desktop environment born from the efforts of LXDE and Razor-qt aims towards its eventual v1.0 milestone...

GNOME 3.27.1 is out as the first development milestone in the road to next March's GNOME 3.28 desktop update...

Following his recent article about Mining Ethereum With AMD Threadrippers Paired With Four RX Vega 64 GPUs, Phoronix German reader Thomas Frech is back with another guest post. This time he's talking about his adventures about mining the Monero crypto-currency on the CPU while using the GPUs for Ethereum mining...

Building off last week's Wine 2.19 development update is now a new version of Wine-Staging that includes its wide assortment of extra experimental/testing patches...

ZenStates is an independent effort to offer P-States-based overclocking from the Linux desktop of AMD Ryzen processors and other tuning...

While the Jetson TX2 has been out since this past March and it's a phenomenal ARM development board, sadly the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver support for it still isn't ready with the mainline Linux kernel...

Squeezing into Mesa Git ahead of the Mesa 17.3 branching is support for the EXT_global_priority extension within the RADV Vulkan driver...

Vulkan 1.0.64 is out this weekend as the newest specification refinement to this high-performance graphics/compute API...