Phoronix

Ending out November were 301 original news articles and 32 featured articles/reviews with most of the excitement pertaining to the Linux 4.14 kernel release, early excitement around the Linux 4.15 kernel, Linux distribution performance, and the continued advancements of the open-source AMD driver...

Ending out November is a new release of Alpine Linux, the distribution that prides itself as being small, simple, and secure with using the musl libc and Busybox...

With a NVIDIA Linux developer having confirmed a current driver performance regression affecting driver releases since the 378 series and not being worked around until the yet-to-be-released 390.xx beta driver, I decided to carry out some tests...

The last major item for GCC's libstdc++ standard library for C++17 support is supporting the technical specification around parallelism and Intel is hoping to land their implementation of it for both libstdc++ and libc++...

Following the recent Intel Management Engine (ME) vulnerabilities combined with some engineering work the past few months on their end, System76 will begin disabling ME on their laptops...

Following NVIDIA's call for feedback on their effort to create a new device memory allocator API that would be of equal use to the upstream open-source drivers and potentially replace (or indirectly used by) the Wayland compositors in place of the existing GBM API and NVIDIA's failed EGLStreams Wayland push, their next steps continue to be formulated...

If you have one of the industrial-grade Intense-PC computers manufactured by CompuLab, there is now mainline Coreboot support!..

Genode is the open-source operating system framework designed for "highly secure" special-purpose operating systems from embedded platforms to desktops while subscribing to a Unix philosophy and going for an L4 micro-kernel approach. The Genode OS 17.11 represents another quarter's worth of changes...

With macOS High Sierra finally ditching the HFS+ file-system and switching all macOS users over to Apple's new file-system, APFS, you may find the need to read a APFS file-system from another non-macOS device. Now it's possible with an APFS Linux file-system driver, but it's closed-source and doesn't yet have write capabilities...

Development on the Godot 3.0 game engine has been happening for the better part of two years while today it reached its much anticipated beta milestone that also marks the feature freeze for this open-source game engine release...

The Qt Company is today shipping Qt 3D Studio, its new 3D user-interface authoring system for both developers and designers...

AMD's embargo has just expired over the name of their new driver...

If you think recent NVIDIA Linux driver releases have been slowing down your games, you are not alone, especially if you are running with a GeForce graphics card having a more conservative vRAM capacity by today's standards...

Former Valve developer Rich Geldreich who was responsible for a lot of the Linux/OpenGL work at Valve in the earlier days of Linux gaming and who has also spent time at Unity, Microsoft, and other companies before starting his own consulting firm, has second thoughts about open-sourcing in the game industry...

Jolla CEO and co-founder Sami Pienimäki has provided an update about the company's ongoing efforts around their Sailfish OS Linux mobile operating system...

PHP 7.2 has made it out on time as the latest annual feature update to the PHP7 programming language...

There were many sizable open-source Radeon Linux driver accomplishments this year. It was this year in which the RadeonSI OpenGL driver matured enough to compete with -- and sometimes surpass -- the Radeon Windows driver when talking raw OpenGL performance, RadeonSI can also outperform the AMDGPU-PRO OpenGL hybrid driver in many Linux gaming tests, the RADV Vulkan driver matured a lot, and many other milestones were reached...

Igalia developers have published their latest version of the big patch-set implementing 16-bit support within Intel's Vulkan driver and supporting the necessary 16-bit storage SPIR-V changes...

Sure to ruffle some feathers, a Google/ChromeOS developer is looking for comments on the company's patches to add HDCP - High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection - to Intel's open-source Linux kernel graphics driver...

As part of the push for upstreaming VirtualBox guest driver support in Linux, not only are kernel drivers being upstreamed driver-by-driver, but their DDX driver has now done its official X.Org christening...

As we end out November, here is a fresh look at the current Windows 10 Pro Fall Creator's Update versus Ubuntu 17.10 with the latest Linux 4.15 kernel and Mesa 17.4-dev Radeon graphics driver stack as we see how various games compete under Windows 10 and Linux with these latest AMD drivers on the Radeon RX 580 and RX Vega 64 graphics cards.

Yesterday it was confirmed that Wine 3.0 will enter its code freeze next week and begin with the release candidates until the official v3.0.0 milestone is ready sometime around mid-January. Here's a recap of all the Wine developments for 2017 if you are curious about all the features and improvements to be found in this big update...

After recently getting some older Radeon GPUs to OpenGL 4.2 with new R600g patches and making other improvements to R600g, David Airlie has now sent out a set of patches for getting compute shaders and GLSL 4.30 working for some older pre-GCN GPUs with the R600 Gallium3D driver...

Following Red Hat promoting Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 for ARM under general availability, Oracle with their RHEL7-derivative, Oracle Linux 7, also now supports ARM...

Earlier this month Intel open-source developers posted their patches for implementing OpenGL's ARB_get_program_binary extension, which basically allows games/applications to get and set their own compiled programs. This work has now been revised and extended to also support the Gallium3D drivers...

Marek has volleyed onto the Mesa mailing list a set of patches providing RadeonSI with a "huge cleanup" for this Gallium3D OpenGL driver used by Radeon HD 7000 series "GCN" / "Southern Islands" graphics cards and newer...

RISC-V has a big new hardware backer... Western Digital...

A few of you within the forums have talked of regressions and other bugs when trying out the new AMDGPU DC display stack in the Linux 4.15 kernel, particularly on pre-Vega GPUs where it's disabled by default. The good news is that more fixes are on the way...

For those curious about the current benefits of AVX-512, here are some benchmarks using a recent snapshot of the GCC 8 compiler and comparing the performance of the generated binaries for the skylake and skylake-avx512 targets...

The HDMI Forum has announced HDMI 2.1 as the latest version of their high definition audio/video interface...

It's been a few months since last running a Linux distribution / operating system comparison on Amazon's EC2 public cloud, but given the ever-advancing state of Linux, here are some fresh benchmarks when testing the Amazon Linux AMI, Clear Linux, Debian 9.2, Gentoo, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4, SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 SP3, and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

Wine creator Alexandre Julliard has laid out plans for the Wine 3.0 code freeze to begin next week...

Ubuntu's Mir display server stack is now available in the Fedora archive for Fedora Rawhide, Fedora 27, and Fedora 26 packages are also on the way...

The UPower power management abstraction layer for Linux systems is out with another pre-1.0 release...

While Linux 4.15 is going to be a mega kernel update with its major new features and changes as we have been covering for the past two weeks, there is some functionality that has yet to see the light of day in mainline...

Earlier this month I reported on Intel's plans for removing Cilk Plus from GCC 8 since this parallel programming effort of theirs was depreciated in GCC 7 and hadn't seen much adoption. It's now official with the code being stripped out of the GCC 8 code-base...

Linux input expert and libinput creator Peter Hutterer of Red Hat is working on support for libinput to handle natively recording and replaying of input events...

AMD has sent out 14 new patches today for the AMDKFD HSA kernel driver in material that should be targeting Linux 4.16...

The libmicrohttpd GNU project is the C library that makes it easy to run an HTTP web-server as part of another application while being as small as about ~32k compiled...

AMD's GPUOpen team has announced the release of Compressonator 2.7, the newest version of their tools for dealing with compressed assets and for testing the impact of different compression techniques...

Since this year's KDE Akademy conference, KDE developers have been plotting their vision for the next few years and recently wrapped up voting on what should be their three main goals to focus on over the next few years...

Fedora Rawhide ahead of Fedora 28 has begun offering more packaged Rust applications...

When carrying out the 11-way Linux distribution boot time tests I also used that as an opportunity for some fresh OpenGL graphics tests with the Intel system on the variety of Linux distributions benchmarked.

For those that may enjoy the rolling-release nature of openSUSE Tumbleweed but want to be a bit more conservative with the updates, Tumbleweed now supports the concept of snapshots...

Qt 5.10 RC was expected back on 16 November but only this morning is making its debut...

Mozilla engineers aren't letting up after their Quantum work in Firefox 57 that made the browser much faster. Next they have been improving WebRender and can be tested easily with Firefox Nightly...

Recently a number of patches have been floating around the kernel mailing list for prepping "KAISER" in what will likely be merged come Linux 4.16. KAISER is a new security feature for the Linux kernel...

The out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system driver has been updated with compatibility for the latest Linux 4.14 stable series. Besides reworking the code to run on Linux 4.14, this controversial file-system has also added support for Zstd file-system compression...

While there's long been VK9 as an effort to get Direct3D 9 running atop Vulkan and Wine developers planning VKD3D for Direct3D 12 over Vulkan, now coming in between is DXVK for Direct3D 11 support...

Vulkan 1.0.66 was released this morning as the newest version of the Vulkan 1.0 graphics and compute specification...