Phoronix

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...

Lead Mir developer Alan Griffiths has spent the time getting the Mir display server running on Fedora. This is part of a broader feature request of getting Mir running on more Linux distributions than just Ubuntu...

As D-Bus Broker from the BUS1 project continues to mature as delivering faster performance and more reliability than D-Bus itself, D-Bus itself isn't letting up...

Intel Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) support has begun landing within the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for this code safety feature...

For those wanting to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 within a GNOME Boxes driven virtual machine, you can do so for free now with Fedora Workstation 27...

Given the Ubuntu 17.10 release this week and its massive desktop changes from GNOME Wayland to Mesa/kernel upgrades, we've been busy benchmarking this new Ubuntu OS release. Complementing the Radeon Ubuntu 17.04 vs. 17.10 gaming comparison are now some OpenGL/Vulkan benchmarks when using Intel Kabylake graphics hardware on Ubuntu 17.04, 17.10 with X.Org and Wayland, and the performance if upgrading against Linux/Mesa Git.

For those relying upon the Wine 2.0.x stable releases rather than the bi-weekly development releases, Wine 2.0.3 is now the latest stable version...

With the Mesa 17.3 branching being imminent, it's a very busy week for open-source graphics driver developers from all the major organizations as they try to land their last-minute improvements for this next quarterly and final Mesa stable update for 2017...

Landing in Mesa Git this morning ahead of the imminent 17.3 branching is support for OpenGL occlusion queries...

Jani Nikula has sent in another drm-intel-next update for David Airlie's DRM-Next tree. They continue prepping more updates to their Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) for targeting the upcoming Linux 4.15 cycle...

With Mesa 17.3 expected to be branched this weekend and this marking the end of feature development for this last stable Mesa series of 2017, the RADV Radeon Vulkan drivers in particular have been busy landing a lot of last minute code...

Intel compiler engineers have begun landing "GFNI" support within the GNU Compiler Collection as one of the new ISA extensions not expected until the Icelake processor debut...

Besides Keith Packard working on the concept of resource leasing for the X.Org Server and resource leasing support for RandR, he's also now proposing a "NonDesktop" property for the Resize and Rotate protocol...

Adding to the excitement of Linux 4.15, AMD has queued some more changes that were sent in today for DRM-Next...

Purism has announced today all laptops to be shipping from their company will now have the Intel Management Engine (ME) disabled...

Earlier this week we looked at the EPYC 7251 Linux performance as AMD's lowest-cost server CPU from this latest generation of Zen-based processors. That eight core / sixteen thread CPU packed a nice amount of performance considering its hitting the $500 price point, but if you are looking for a single socket system and have $750 USD to lay out on a CPU, the AMD EPYC 7351P packs in even more value.

While Samsung Galaxy smartphones may not be as open or free spirited as the proposed Librem 5 smartphone, there is a new alternative for those wanting to run a traditional Linux distribution on their Samsung Galaxy smartphone...

Mesa 17.2.3 is now available as the latest bi-weekly update for this current stable driver series...

The official Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" spins are now available...

The long ongoing work to implement an OpenGL/GLSL shader cache for the Intel Mesa driver has been revised once more with 32 new patches hitting the mailing list today...

The kernel bits for Keith Packard's work around "DRM leasing" for improving virtual reality (VR) support on Linux will land for Linux 4.15...

Peter Hutterer has today released libinput 1.9.0 as the latest version of this library used by both Wayland and X11 systems for unified input handling...

Abandoning their convergence dream earlier this year and with that the sun-setting of the Unity desktop environment and Mir display server, Ubuntu 17.10 is shipping today with its new GNOME-powered desktop backed by Wayland.

With Ubuntu 17.10 set to ship tomorrow that features just not an upgraded Linux kernel and Mesa 3D stack but also transitions from Unity 7 + X.Org to GNOME Shell + Wayland, here are some comparison gaming benchmarks on a few different AMD Radeon graphics cards.

Matthias Clasen has today released GTK+ 3.92 as the latest test release in the long road towards the major GTK4 tool-kit update...

It was more than one year ago that VirtualBox 5.1 was released while today it's finally been succeeded by a new feature release...

AMD's GPUOpen initiative has put out a new release of their Windows and Linux supported Radeon GPU Profiler program for profiling Vulkan (and Direct3D 12) games...

Besides Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" launching tomorrow, System76 is also expected to issue their first official release of the Ubuntu-derived Pop!_OS operating system they plan to begin shipping on their laptops/desktops. Curious about their modifications to Ubuntu 17.10, I decided to give the latest snapshot of it a ride.

Google has released Chromium/Chrome 62 as the latest update to its widely-used web browser...

The AMDKFD kernel driver that is a component of HSA support on Linux for Radeon GPUs is seeing more upstreaming work in Linux 4.15, but only for older APUs...

Fleet Commander is now declared "production ready" by the Red Hat developers working on this software project for easing the process of deploying and managing Fedora/Red Hat desktops across a large number of systems...

Just a quick public service announcement if you rely upon AppArmor for security on your Linux distribution like Ubuntu/Debian and plan to soon upgrade to the Linux 4.14 kernel.....

Fedora 27 is now under its final freeze for release in the next few weeks so here's a recap of the prominent changes coming to this next installment of the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution...

Landing in the Chromium browser code-base this morning is a JPEG encode accelerator interface...

For users of the Xfce4 desktop environment, a new release of xfce4-notifyd 0.4 is now available as the project's newest feature release...

AMD this week has quietly released an updated AMDGPU-PRO 17.40 hybrid driver targeting mining and GPGPU compute Linux customers...

The Etnaviv Gallium3D driver that provides reverse-engineered, open-source graphics support for Vivante graphics hardware is almost to exposing OpenGL 2.0...

Today marks the final freeze for Fedora 27 with hopes of shipping the official release soon...

Recently making waves in our forums was talk of a kernel patch to address a case where the AMD CPB (Core Performance Boost) isn't being exposed by Ryzen processors. Here's more details on that and some benchmarks...

Mutter 3.27.1 has just been released as the first development release for the GNOME 3.28 cycle of this compositor / window manager...

Croteam has just released The Talos Principle VR, the virtual reality edition of their award-winning The Talos Principle puzzle game. SteamOS/Linux with the HTC Vive is supported alongside Windows...

We have been delivering a number of EPYC 7601 Linux benchmarks since receiving this 32 core / 64 thread high-end server processor a little more than one month ago. Recently we received some additional EPYC processors from AMD for testing and for this next batch of benchmarking decided to begin with the EPYC 7251, which is the current lowest-end EPYC part. For priced at under $500 USD, this eight core / 16 thread processor has a lot to offer.

While the AMDGPU DC code is expected to land for Linux 4.15 with goodies like Vega display support, HDMI/DP audio, and atomic mode-setting, one of the sought after display features won't be initially supported: FreeSync or the VESA-backed AdaptiveSync...

At the end of September initial Meson support landed in Mesa while hitting 17.3-devel Git now is support for more of the Mesa drivers under this new build system...

Following last week's look at using the new "Coffee Lake" Intel Core i3 / i5 / i7 CPUs for Linux gaming comparison among our other ongoing tests of these new "8th Gen" processors, a frequent request has been a closer look at the gaming performance between the Core i7 8700K and the Ryzen 7 1800X. Here's a look with two AMD Radeon graphics cards and two NVIDIA GeForce offerings.

Epiphany 3.27.1 was released a short time ago as the first development release of this web-browser for the GNOME 3.28 cycle...

Today marks the official availability of DragonFlyBSD 5.0...

KDE Frameworks 5.39.0 was released this weekend as the latest complementary add-ons/libraries to Qt...