Phoronix

Just shy of two weeks since PHP 7.3 went into alpha, the second alpha release of this upcoming annual feature release to the PHP programming language is now available...

The KDE/Qt-aligned Krita digital painting program has published the first beta of their next feature release, Krita 4.1...

Oracle has promoted its Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 5 to general availability for x86_64 and ARM64 (AArch64) architectures...

Equus Compute Solutions has announced the release of their new WHITEBOX OPEN server platform that is intended to be cost-optimized and an open hardware platform...

GlusterFS. the network-attached storage file-system focused on cloud computing and more that is developed by Red Hat, is up to version 4.1 as its newest release...

At the recent Qt Contributors' Summit as previously covered on Phoronix were some early discussions over plans to release Qt 6.0 in 2020. A few more tidbits of information have come to light on these interesting tool-kit plans...

KDE's Elisa music player is just over one year old and with a few months having passed since the Elisa 0.1 inaugural release, succeeding that today is the beta for the upcoming Elisa 0.2...

The AMDGPU DRM driver appears to finally be crossing the milestone of exposing the current GPU load (as a percentage) in a manner that can be easily queried via sysfs...

The Radeon Software "AMDGPU-PRO" 18.20 hybrid driver stack is now available with official support for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 17.20...

GNOME 3.29.3 is out today as the latest development release in the road to this September's GNOME 3.30 desktop update...

Not to be confused with Fedora Core going back to the early days of Fedora as a Red Hat project, but Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller has just announced Fedora CoreOS...

Following the news yesterday of OpenBSD disabling Intel Hyper Threading by default within its OS over security concerns and plans to disable Simultaneous Multi Threading for other processors/architectures too, here are some fresh Intel HT benchmarks albeit on Ubuntu Linux. The OpenBSD developer involved characterized HT/SMT as "doesn't necessarily have a positive effect on performance; it highly depends on the workload. In all likelihood it will actually slow down most workloads if you have a CPU with more than two cores." So here are some benchmarks using a current-generation Intel Core i7 8700K six-core processor with Hyper Threading.

For users of openSUSE's Tumbleweed rolling-release Linux distribution, it's been a very busy month on the update front...

While Spectre and Meltdown mitigation has been available to RHEL6 users via kernel upgrades, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.10 is out today as the newest release while its bundled kernel features Retpolines and KPTI for mitigating against these CPU vulnerabilities...

Intel's Chen Yu has sent out a set of patches providing experimental support for in-kernel encryption support for hibernation...

Red Hat / GNOME developer veteran Matthias Clasen has recently begun a series of blog posts going in-depth with Flatpaks for those wondering how this application deployment technology is taking over the Linux desktop...

Laminar Research has published their latest usage statistics on the incredible X-Plane flight simulator software...

Coreboot's latest development code now supports parsing and booting of FIT payloads. FIT in this context is a Flattened Image Tree that leverages DeviceTree...

There hasn't been a new AMDGPU DC code drop in a while as AMD developers work to improve their internal processes, but hitting the wire today is a set of 51 new patches for this "display code" stack that work on a variety of improvements...

Keith Packard's long in development work for improving the Linux display stack infrastructure for better dealing with VR head-mounted displays is about rounded out with the new Vulkan extension support being merged into Mesa...

Security oriented BSD operating system OpenBSD is making the move to disable Hyper Threading (HT) on Intel CPUs and more broadly moving to disable SMT (Simultanious Multi Threading) on other CPUs too...

The UBports community has announced the first release candidate of their long-awaited Ubuntu Touch OTA-4 update...

The third alpha release of the Debian Installer to be used by Debian 10 "Buster" is now available for testing...

With not being able to deliver a 100% fully free software / libre system, the Librem 5 smartphone will rely upon a secondary processor for dealing with the necessary binary blobs for hardware initialization to keep them out of touch from the U-Boot boot-loader and Linux kernel...

The initial list of sponsors have been announced for the annual X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC2018) where Wayland, Mesa, and the X.Org Server tend to dominate the discussions for improving the open-source/Linux desktop...

The release of the Sway 1.0 Wayland compositor is inching closer with the recent third alpha release. Sway for the uninformed is a very promising i3-compatible Wayland compositor...

For coinciding with the start of the Computer Vision and Patern Recognition conference starting this week in Utah, NVIDIA has a slew of new software announcements...

Qt 5.11 was released just under one month ago while debuting today is the first point release with over 150 bug fixes...

Back in early May was the announcement of the Silverblue project as an evolution of Fedora Atomic Workstation and trying to get this atomic OS into shape by Fedora 30. Beginning with Fedora 29, the plan is to officially rename Fedora Atomic Workstation to Fedora Silverblue...

Intel developers working on the GVT-g graphics virtualization technology have published their latest batch of Linux kernel driver changes...

It's been a while since last having anything to report on the SysVinit init system for those wishing to live in a systemd-free world, but a new release is now available...

Epiphany 3.29.3 is now available as the latest version of this GNOME Web Browser...

Thanks to work done over the past few months by AMD's Marek Olšák on improving Mesa's OpenGL compatibility profile support and then today carried over the final mile by Valve's Timothy Arceri, Mesa 18.2 now exposes OpenGL 3.3 under the compatibility context...

Just over one month after the release of HHVM 3.26 that introduced the new HackC compiler front-end for Hack and PHP languages, HHVM 3.27 is now available...

DragonFlyBSD 5.2.2 is now available as the latest stable release to this popular BSD operating system...

KDE Wayland developer Roman Gilg who started contributing to Wayland via last year's Google Summer of Code is proposing a new Wayland protocol for dealing with desktop session suspension and restoration...

Several months back LibreOffice developers began working on better integration with KDE Plasma 5 and that has advanced again today with now having a native file picker...

Just a heads up that Phoronix Test Suite 8.0.1 is slated for release next week if there are any last minute bug reports or requests...

While Microsoft is working on low-level improvement to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to yield better I/O performance, it is possible to dramatically increase some disk workloads by removing a number of running Windows services via the independent W10Privacy application. Here are some benchmarks of W10Privacy on the overall performance impact to Microsoft Windows 10 Pro x64 itself and of Ubuntu 18.04 running on the Windows 10 installation via WSL.

Vulkan 1.1.78 is now available as the newest version of the Vulkan specification...

Feral Interactive has announced this morning that they will be bringing Total War: WARHAMMER 2 to Linux this year as the latest Total War game seeing a native Linux port...

Back in 2012 when talking with Gabe Newell of Valve about open-source/Linux challenges one of the topics he was awed about was patents encumbering the open-source graphics driver progress. Six years later, Timothy Arceri working on the Valve Linux graphics driver team has freed Mesa's ARB_texture_float support from being built conditionally due to these patent fears...

Given the recent advancements of the EXT4 file-system with its native file-system encryption support provided by the fscrypt framework, here are benchmarks comparing the performance of an EXT4 file-system with no encryption, fscrypt-based encryption, eCryptfs-based encryption, and a LUKS dm-crypt encrypted volume.

You have likely heard by now about Ubuntu maker Canonical planning to do an initial public offering (IPO) at some point in the not too distant future to become a publicly-traded company. The latest sign of that is Canonical has now shifted its corporate calendar...

Remember the Zapcc compiler that focused on lightning fast compiler times? It's now been open-sourced...

There are many changes and new features for Linux 4.18 with the merge window having just closed on this next kernel version, but still there are some prominent features that have yet to work their way to the mainline tree...

Canonical's Engineering Tech Lead, Gavin Guo, has passed along a big slide deck on a presentation he is preparing about the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities...

Sculpt OS is striving to become a general purpose operating system built off the Genode OS framework. The second release of Sculpt OS is now available and it's much easier now to try out...

As another step towards the long-awaited Xfce 4.14 desktop environment release, Xfdesktop 4.13.2 is now available as the latest development release for this important piece of the Xfce desktop stack...

With the early release of Linux 4.18-rc1, feature development on Linux 4.18 is over and it's onto roughly eight weeks worth of testing and bug fixes. For those that are behind in their Phoronix reading with our extensive and original reporting on the Linux 4.18 merge window happenings, here is our recap of the big changes that made it into Linux 4.18. We are also in the process of firing off the start of our Linux 4.18 kernel benchmarks.