Phoronix

Earlier this month the Laminar Research crew responsible for the realistic, cross-platform X-Plane flight simulator presented at the FlightSimExpo about their work on porting the flight simulator to Vulkan and other ongoing improvements...

One of the additions we have been looking forward to seeing in the mainline Linux kernel in 2018 is WireGuard. WireGuard is the open-source, performance-minded, and secure VPN tunnel. WireGuard is designed to be run within the Linux kernel but has also been ported to other platforms...

While the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has supported a shader cache going back to early 2017 for helping out Linux game load times and performance, OpenGL compute shaders up to now were not handled by this shader cache...

With the first half of the year just about in the books, here is a recap of the most popular open-source/Linux news, benchmarks, and Linux hardware reviews so far for H1'2018...

Intel open-source graphics driver developer Jason Ekstrand has published a set of patches that help with playing Skyrim Special Edition with Intel graphics hardware under Linux when using the DXVK layer...

While Intel's Clear Linux platform has already been making use of GCC 8.1 since shortly after its release in early May, one of their developers has now published a blog post highlighting three performance and security features enjoyed and that helps benefit their performance-oriented Linux distribution...

It was just four days ago that Valve Linux GPU driver developer Timothy Arceri was thinking it could take a while before having OpenGL 4.4 compatibility profile support for RadeonSI, but tonight that milestone is checked off the list...

It has been a while since last having anything to report on the Nouveau Gallium3D driver's effort to support the NIR intermediate representation as part of their effort to re-use existing code-paths for helping to bring-up SPIR-V compute support for this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver and ultimately working towards Vulkan support. But the latest version of these Nouveau NIR patches are now available and almost ready to be mainlined...

A few weeks back I posted benchmarks of EXT4 fscrypt vs. eCryptfs vs. LUKS dm-crypt benchmarks for showing the EXT4 file-system performance encryption performance for these kernel-based approaches. That testing was done with a SATA 3.0 SSD while in this article is a look at the performance in another popular choice: if using a USB 3.0 external enclosure with a hard drive.

For those planning to enjoy some Linux games this weekend while using the RadeonSI / RADV / Intel / Nouveau drivers, Mesa 18.1.3 is now out as the newest stable point release...

NetworkManager 1.12 is now available as the latest stable release of this widely-used Linux network management software...

Given Clear Linux is a "rolling release" Linux distribution with new releases often being put out multiple times per day, and a lot of the emphasis by Intel on their open-source Linux distribution being performance, I decided it would be fun to start providing a monthly look at how their performance has been evolving...

The Linux Mint crew has delivered on their goal of shipping Linux Mint 19 "Tara" in June...

Last week I posted a number of Wine vs. Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux benchmarks focusing mostly on the CPU/system performance for various cross-platform applications/programs. For those interested in the graphics/gaming performance, here are a number of Direct3D and OpenGL benchmarks...

Canonical's Alan Griffiths has just announced the release of the huge Mir 0.32 update...

One of the advantages of the LLVM Clang compiler has been better integration with Bash completion support, but now the GCC compiler supports a --completion argument for feeding into the Bash completion script with better matching of supported options/values when typing into a supported terminal...

If you are looking for a new Linux-native game to enjoy this weekend, the Croteam Incubator project I Hate Running Backwards is now available...

The Raspberry Pi folks have released a new version of their Debian-based Raspbian Linux distribution to end out June...

It's been another busy week in compiler land for ARM...

One month has passed since PostgreSQL 11 Beta 1 while today the second beta has succeeded it...

Unknown individuals were able to gain access to the Gentoo repositories on GitHub, including the modification of said repositories...

Here are our latest benchmark numbers for looking at the performance of Windows 10 vs. Linux for OpenGL/Vulkan graphics driver performance for both NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon hardware using the latest drivers as of June 2018 for OpenGL and Vulkan.

DXVK 0.61 is out today as the newest version of this Direct3D 11 over Vulkan translation layer to help with running Windows D3D11 games on Wine...

On GNOME 3.26~3.28, if attaching a monitor to the system while suspended -- such as when setting up for a presentation with a laptop and projector/monitor -- when resuming the system, GNOME Shell would likely crash. That rather glaring bug has now been fixed in the newest Mutter code...

ARM Linux developer Quentin Perret has sent out the latest set of kernel patches for implementing Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS)...

Timothy Arceri at Valve has been working a lot lately on improving the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver's OpenGL compatibility profile support. While he just posted GL 4.0 compatibility profile patches when he thought it would take a while before getting OpenGL 4.4 compatibility support in order, it turns out it wasn't as bad as anticipated...

Two interesting mainboards are now supported by mainline Coreboot Git...

For those sticking to the Mesa stable releases, Mesa 18.1.3 is expected to be out by this weekend and features a few dozen changes...

KDE e.V. has published their annual report for 2017 to cover the software advancements made for this open-source desktop environment, highlight their financial health, etc...

For those still holding out hope for the Reiser4 file-system, it's now been ported to work with the Linux 4.17 kernel...

Python 3.7 is now available as the latest major release to Python 3 with new features, performance optimizations, and other enhancements...

With last week's release of systemd 239 one of the key new features is the introduction of Portable Services. Systemd Portable Services is a new concept that is akin to Linux containers while at this stage is considered still a preview/experimental feature...

Collabora has announced their latest project as Debos, a new way for building Debian operating system images...

Announced back in March was the MintBox Mini 2 as a collaboration project by CompuLab and Linux Mint. That tiny Linux PC is now available for order given the imminent release of Linux Mint 19 "Tara"...

Following yesterday's release of Firefox 61, Mozilla pumped Firefox 62 into the beta channel...

FreeBSD 11.2 is ready to set sail as the first significant FreeBSD update since last July's 11.1 release...

NetworkManager now has support for 6LoWPAN devices...

While DNF has been serving as the "next-gen Yum" by default since Fedora 22, Yum 3 has still been present in releases since. But with Fedora 29 they are looking to deprecate and remove Yum...

Those working on GNOME's Shotwell image/photo manager and organizer are baking a number of improvements and new features for the next release...

Independent Linux kernel hacker Con Kolivas has published his latest kernel patch-set, Linux 4.17-ck1, which most notably includes the latest version of the Multiple Queue Skiplist Scheduler...

Fedora 29 is shaping up to be a very exciting release with many changes from the desktop/workstation front to low-level improvements. Not only is the operating system itself getting many improvements, but the Anaconda installer is also seeing some continued enhancements...

The latest milestone has been reached for OpenBenchmarking.org: overnight it served its 32 millionth test profile / test suite download to Phoronix Test Suite users...

Krita 4.1 is now the latest stable version of this open-source digital painting program...

Last week AMD released the Radeon Software 18.20 driver "AMDGPU-PRO" with support for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. If you are curious how their closed-source OpenGL and Vulkan driver performance is comparing to the latest Mesa-based open-source driver, here are performance metrics using the latest drivers.

As the next step towards GTK4, GTK+ 3.94 is available today as the newest development release for this open-source toolkit...

At the start of 2017 Microsoft open-sourced their new DirectX shader compiler and now thanks to the work of some Google engineers this shader compiler is working on Linux...

Phoronix Test Suite 8.0.1 is now available as the first and only planned point release to Phoronix Test Suite 8.0-Aremark...

Alpine Linux 3.8.0 was released today as the newest installment of this lightweight, security-oriented Linux distribution that is especially popular for containers/Docker use...

While the popularity of Jolla's Sailfish OS seems to be waning, if you are interested in their Linux-based, partially open-source software stack, it's now available on the Gemini PDA device...

Eric Anholt continues leading the charge on open-source Broadcom VideoCore graphics driver support for Linux...