Phoronix

KDE saw more than one dozen student developers interact on various projects this summer thanks to the Google Summer of Code 2017...

Another GSoC 2017 project worth highlighting now that Google's annual Summer of Code has finished is the AVX2 optimizations being done to the VP9 decoder within FFmpeg...

Thanks to this year's Google Summer of Code, there is a branch pending for allowing game controllers to be re-assigned within GNOME Games...

Student developer Jente Hidskes' work this summer on improving the Piper GTK3 user-interface for configuring gaming mice on Linux via libratbag is now the latest example of a very successful Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project...

For those looking for a very capable ARM developer board but have previously been put off by the Jetson TX1 at $579 USD, they now have a $199 developer board...

System76 continues working on their Ubuntu fork called Pop!_OS that they intend to ship on their future laptops and desktops. They have now decided on some of the default applications as well as the decision to not yet ship Wayland by default...

Ubuntu 17.10, the Artful Aardvark, has crossed into the feature freeze this week...

One of the Google Summer of Code projects this summer for the BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system was on porting the Btrfs file-system...

Qt/KDE developer Daniel Nicoletti has written "Sticklyst" to show how KDE Frameworks 5 code can be used to construct web sites/applications...

The QupZilla open-source web-browser built using Qt WebEngine and in development for the past seven years is now part of the KDE project and has renamed itself to Falkon...

It's only the in-progress SPIR-V and KHR_no_error work left preventing the RadeonSI and Intel OpenGL drivers in Mesa from exposing OpenGL 4.6...

Will Cooke of Canonical is out with another weekly update on the latest happenings for the Ubuntu 17.10 desktop as the "Artful Aardvark" release continues getting closer...

RadeonSI developers have been working on supporting the NIR intermediate representation within their Gallium3D driver as a means to support ARB_gl_spirv for being able to load SPIR-V shaders in OpenGL and interact with the RADV Vulkan driver code paths, which is making use of NIR. It's looking like in the future the RadeonSI driver could end up using NIR completely by default...

As some more Linux phone news this week besides Android Oreo and Purism's Librem 5 smartphone effort, Jolla has just announced their plans for shipping Sailfish X...

Yesterday along with the completely Linux-trouble-free Ryzen 7 (it indeed went overnight without any issues coming up via the kill-ryzen script), I finally got my hands on the AMD Threadripper. In particular, the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X that features sixteen physical cores yielding 32 threads via SMT, 3.4GHz base frequency, 4.0GHz boost clock frequency, and quad-channel DDR4 support. This Threadripper 1950X is a beast but will set you back $999 USD and has a 180 Watt TDP. I'll have my much more thorough AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X Linux review next week including many more benchmarks, performance-per-dollar, and system power use / performance-per-Watt metrics, but here are some very early results for those anxious to see this HEDT PC on Linux.

The Simple DirectMedia Library (SDL) now has initial support for the KHR_no_error extension that was included in this summer's release of OpenGL 4.6...

Self-appointed OpenChrome project maintainer Kevin Brace who for the past year or so has been single-handedly managing the open-source VIA "OpenChrome" graphics driver code-base, is still working towards getting the work-in-progress Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver working on newer builds of the Linux kernel...

Version 1.9 of Google's Go programming language is now available for developers...

Mozilla had several student developers contributing to their next-gen Servo engine via this year's Google Summer of Code. Overall the work appears to be a big success and boost for Servo...

Today is the day most commonly associated as the birthday of Linux. Happy 26th birthday Linux!..

As a quick update to the AMD Linux "Performance Marginality Problem" affecting some early Ryzen processors under heavy load, today I received a new Ryzen 7 processor and indeed it's been running strong now for the past few hours under demanding load and has yet to hit the compiler segumentation fault bug.

We are one step closer to the long-awaited GIMP 2.10 update with today seeing the newest development release, GIMP 2.9.6...

Intel has quietly killed off its line-up of Xeon Phi 7200 "Knights Landing" co-processor PCI-E cards...

16-bit "half-float" support is a popular topic among Mesa developers in recent days...

LLVM 6.0 SVN/Git now has landed a Synopsys DesignWare ARC processor back-end...

Georges Stavracas has announced that for GNOME 3.25.91 they have finished up work on their new GNOME Settings user-interface, a.k.a. the redesign to the GNOME Control Center...

While Red Hat is backing away from Btrfs support in favor of their next-gen Stratis project and mature Linux file-systems like EXT4 and XFS, SUSE is reaffirming their support for Btrfs...

After two successful crowdfunding campaigns for producing security-focused Linux laptops while aiming to be as open-source as possible and now shipping with Coreboot, Purism is aiming for their most ambitious project yet... the smartphone. Can Purism succeed where Ubuntu Mobile, Firefox OS, OpenMoko, and others have not lasted? They think so, but it will take crowdfunding again and the finished device likely won't surface until at least 2019.

Mesa's DRM library, libdrm, that sits between the Linux kernel DRM and Mesa among other possible user-space components, is out with a new release today...

Intel's open-source developer crew is now working on VK_EXT_debug_report as the latest Vulkan extension for their "ANV" Linux driver...

Adding to the DRM changes for Linux 4.14 is a late pull request for adding the Freedreno MSM DRM driver changes for Qualcomm hardware...

Debian developer and LLVM/Clang enthusiast Sylvestre Ledru has provided an update regarding the build results for trying to compile the Debian archive using this GCC compiler alternative...

RADV co-founder Bas Nieuwenhuizen has today posted patches for supporting the VK_KHX_multiview extension within this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver...

The Ubuntu 17.10 Artful Aardvark has finally moved past the Linux 4.11 kernel and now has a 4.12-based kernel in its main archive...

Building off last weekend's Wine 2.15 development release is now a re-based Wine-Staging version that also includes some new testing/experimental patches...

It's now a little bit easier getting the Radeon Vega graphics cards working under Linux with the open-source driver stack...

Last week I began testing the Tyan GT24E-B7106, a 1U barebones server designed for Intel's new Xeon Scalable processors. I am still carrying out many benchmarks of the Tyan GT24E-B7106 paired with two of the Xeon Gold 6138 CPUs, but for those curious about the Linux performance potential of this server when slotting in 96GB of DDR4-2666 RDIMMs and these two CPUs that yield a combined total of 40 cores / 80 threads, here are some initial benchmarks.

For those having issues with the "i965" OpenGL or "ANV" Vulkan drivers within Mesa, Intel open-source developers have now setup the #intel-3d IRC for discussions around these Intel Mesa 3D drivers...

While BUS1 continues to be developed as a new in-kernel IPC mechanism following the failing of KDBUS, there is some new interesting D-Bus news in user-space. Linux developer David Herrmann has today announced the D-Bus Broker project...

While the Radeon HD 5000/6000 series were advertised as supporting up to OpenGL 4.4 and are supported that way by the Catalyst / Radeon Software proprietary driver, the Mesa R600g driver has only exposed OpenGL 3.3 (with the exception of the HD 5800 / 6900 series) due to lacking FP64 support. That emulated FP64 support is now stepping ahead for the R600g driver...

With the Linux 4.13-rc6 kernel now being out for a few days, we're now past the timeframe for which DRM subsystem maintainer David Airlie allows new feature code to be staged in DRM-Next. Thus we have a pretty solid look at the highlights of the new Direct Rendering Manager features/changes coming for the Linux 4.14 kernel...

It has been several months since last hearing anything about inputfd, the proposed direct input access protocol for Wayland. This protocol extension would make it to be able to better support different gaming devices under Wayland, among other use-cases...

For those making use of Red Hat's oVirt as a virtualization management platform, there should be better performance now when using the Gluster network-attached file-system...

The changes for the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver are now queued in the DRM-Next tree as new material for Linux 4.14...

Google has today announced Chrome Enterprise as a subscription service to take Chrome OS and Chromebooks into more work environments...

A new release is available for the Radeon GPU Profiler, AMD/GPUOpen's new low-level optimization tool for game/application developers...

Since the end of July Stylo has been available via Firefox Nightly as the Rust-written Servo CSS style system. For those curious about this modern CSS system and the broader effort as part of bringing Servo/Quantum components to Firefox, Mozilla has out an interesting blog post...

NVIDIA today released the 384.69 Linux driver as their latest release in the 384 "long-lived" series...

Two weeks back I picked up the ASRock AB350 Pro4 for a low-end AMD Ryzen motherboard for use with some of the Ryzen 3 CPUs and it's been working out well for those wanting a Ryzen Linux system and not looking to spend much money. With it working out well for my purposes and currently being on sale, I figured I'd pass along this quick recommendation for those wanting to assemble a budget Ryzen Linux system.

For those curious about the performance impact of the different CPUFreq governors on a low-end Ryzen 3 processor, here are some benchmarks...