Phoronix

While when releasing Linux 4.14 Linus Torvalds mentioned 4.15-rc1 might be delayed due to his US holiday travels, Linux 4.15-rc1 has been released on time to conclude the two week merge window process...

As a flashback to the past, hitting the LLVM Git/SVN code today were improvements for those still running with processors supporting AMD's 3DNow! extensions...

The merge window is effectively over for Linux 4.15 with it being the 14th day of the process, although 4.15-rc1 might not end up coming out today due to Linus Torvalds' traveling around the US Thanksgiving holiday. But with Torvalds tending to not approve major last minute additions to new kernels, we don't anticipate any last minute surprises and therefore here is our feature overview of the changes and new features of Linux 4.15. This is arguably the most exciting and feature-packed kernel update ever.

In addition to the GCC plugin support on Windows/MinGW, there are more compiler happenings this weekend...

While the VirtualBox DRM/KMS driver was merged for Linux 4.13 as one step towards improving the out-of-the-box support for Linux guests on Oracle VM VirtualBox, other drivers remain out-of-tree still, but that is slowly changing...

A late addition for the GCC 8 code compiler is adding support for plug-ins to Windows/MinGW...

Given the release of a new Blender "Barbershop" benchmark file, I decided to test this new scene plus the other benchmark files with Blender 2.79 on a variety of Intel/AMD CPUs for some fresh results of how various newer CPUs compare for this open-source 3D modeling software.

This week Con Kolivas updated his MuQSS scheduler patch-set for the Linux 4.14 kernel. This is the scheduler that was born out of his earlier work on BFS...

The 3.27 development series for the GNOME Builder integrated development environment is picking up a number of interesting features that is making sure Builder is an awesome update as part of the GNOME 3.28 release in March...

When Ilia Mirkin isn't busy being one of the key contributors to the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver stack, he's often working on the Freedreno driver stack for the open-source Qualcomm Adreno support...

While the release of the belated Mesa 17.3 is imminent, Mesa 17.2.6 is now available as the current latest stable release...

Today the branching of LibreOffice 6.0 from Git master took place as well as tagging the first beta...

For those looking for some technical talks to listen to this weekend, audio recordings of the Linux Plumbers Conference 2017 are now available...

Following my recent tests of looking at the Ubuntu boot times from Linux 4.6 to 4.15 kernels, a request came in to look at the out-of-the-box boot performance on various Linux distributions. Here is a look at how the out-of-the-box Linux boot performance compares for 11 different distributions.

Making the rounds this weekend online as a "new" ARM Mali open-source driver is what we wrote about back in June as A New Mali-400 Open-Source Graphics Driver Is In Development...

The digital artists working on the Blender 3D modeling software have released a new benchmark file for stressing CPUs and GPUs by rendering an advanced scene...

Topi Pohjolainen of Intel has been working on adding proper FP16/half-precision support to Mesa's GLSL code...

Building off the work by Mario Kleiner, AMD developer Marek Olšák has been working on 10-bit color visual support within Mesa/Gallium3D...

Intel UMIP support landed in Linux 4.15 as part of the x86 updates. User-Mode Instruction Prevention is for preventing certain instructions from being executed outside of ring level zero and will be supported by future Intel CPUs. Support for UMIP within the KVM virtualization space though will have to wait until Linux 4.16...

Wine 2.22 is now available as the latest development release of this program to run Windows games/applications on Linux and other operating systems...

For those using the NVIDIA 387 "short-lived" driver series, the 387.34 release is now available with just three changes noted...

The Oracle developers behind VM VirtualBox have released a new maintenance build in the VirtualBox 5.2 series that is a bit more exciting than their usual point releases...

While Canonical abandoned their work on the Unity desktop environment in favor of the Unity-inspired customized GNOME Shell that debuted in Ubuntu 17.10, some within the community have remained interested in maintaining Unity 7 and even getting it into an official spin/flavor of Ubuntu...

For those that may be looking at purchasing an AMD Threadripper this holiday season, especially with the recent price drops, here are some fresh memory tests on the Threadripper 1950X while running Debian GNU/Linux.

Not only is AMD Stoney Ridge audio (finally) being supported by the Linux 4.15 kernel, but it also looks like Raven Ridge audio should now be working too...

Normally I don't bother mentioning new Linux kernel point releases on Phoronix unless there are some significant changes, as is the case today with Linux 4.14.2...

While the massive AMDGPU DC infrastructure has been merged for Linux 4.15, the flow of improvements to this display code continues and it looks like the next few kernel cycles at least could be quite busy on the AMD front...

While Mesa 17.3 is imminent and should be released as stable within the next few days, Mesa 17.2.6 is being prepped for release as the current point release...

There are a lot of reasons to love Munich from Augustiner to the wiesn and Bavarian culture, but their leading use of Linux / open-source software via their LiMux initiative that began in 2003 is no more...

It's the Christmas shopping season and in the US there is Thanksgiving and the Black Friday and Cyber Monday events... Here's a Phoronix Premium special and a few reminders...

A Mozilla engineer has put out a prototype library in working on the Vulkan Portability Initiative for allowing low-level 3D graphics support that's backed by Vulkan / Direct3D 12 / Metal...

Earlier today I wrote about the experimental HTML5 Wayland compositor. While that may be more like an experimental toy at this point, for those wanting to run GTK3/GTK4 applications within a web-browser, there's the longstanding Broadway HTML5 back-end to the GTK tool-kit. Broadway received a number of significant improvements for GTK4 today...

Intel's SA-00086 Detection Tool has Linux support and will confirm whether your system is vulnerable to the recently published Management Engine (ME) security issues...

Besides a lot of NVDEC code landing for the next FFmpeg release, there's also been a number of OpenCL improvements that were just committed to this multimedia library's codebase...

Earlier this year we covered the Westfield project as Wayland for HTML5/JavaScript by providing a Wayland protocol parser and generator for JavaScript. Now that code has morphed into Greenfield to provide a working, in-browser HTML5 Wayland compositor...

Canonical developers working on the Mir display server want feedback from the community about the direction Mir should pursue in the future now that it's getting basic Wayland support in place...

Currently if plugging in the HTC Vive for a virtual reality experience on Linux, the head-mounted display (HMD) is treated just as a conventional display. But now with a new set of changes for Linux 4.15, the kernel will know it's a "non-desktop" display...

Updated firmware files for the command processor (CP) on AMD Polaris graphics cards have landed in linux-firmware.git...

While the Radeon RX Vega discrete graphics cards are making use of the ultra-fast HBM2 memory, it appears the newly-launched AMD "Raven Ridge" APU featuring Zen CPU cores and Vega graphics is not using HBM2 memory...

The TrueOS BSD folks working on their Qt5-powered Lumina Desktop Environment have issued a new feature update of their open-source desktop...

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon has been enjoying its time on Linux 4.15. In addition to the recent boot time tests and kernel power comparison, here are some raw performance benchmarks looking at the speed from Linux 4.10 through Linux 4.15 Git...

Earlier this month the FFmpeg project landed its initial NVDEC NVIDIA video decoding support after already supporting NVENC for video encoding. These new NVIDIA APIs for encode/decode are part of the company's Video Codec SDK with CUDA and is the successor to the long-used VDPAU video decoding on NVIDIA Linux boxes. That NVDEC support has continued getting into shape...

The Qt Company has issued Qt 5.9.3 as the latest tool-kit update in the Qt 5.9 Long-Term Support series...

With AMDGPU DC having been merged a few days ago for the Linux 4.15 merge window, it's now possible to run the Radeon RX Vega graphics cards with display support using the mainline kernel without having to resort to using a patched/third-party kernel build or using the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver. Here are some tests I have carried out with the Radeon RX Vega 56, RX Vega 64, and other graphics cards from Linux 4.15 Git compared to a few NVIDIA GPUs.

Free software developer Roderick Colenbrander has made public his Wine-Vulkan repository that he is using to stage his work around better Vulkan support within Wine...

With GCC 8 feature development over and onto bug fixing, here is a look at some of the changes to find with the GCC 8 compiler stack that will be released as stable early next year in the form of GCC 8.1...

While LibreOffice Calc for a while now has been offering OpenCL support for speeding up spreadsheet computations, with not all drivers/GPUs supporting OpenCL, this Microsoft Office alternative is finally receiving proper multi-threading support...

Following in the steps of Ubuntu 17.10 dropping 32-bit desktop images and other Linux distributions also lessening their focus on 32-bit support, OpenMandriva has issued its final i586 release...

In addition to looking at system boot times from Linux 4.6 to Linux 4.15, while doing this kernel testing session on the Lenovo ThinkPad I also took some battery power consumption measurements...

If you are looking out for a SATA 2.5-inch HDD/SSD to USB3 adapter, the Sabrent EC-SS31 is quite simple, works with Linux, supports USB 3.1, and retails for about $10 USD...