Phoronix

For those still holding out the dream for Ubuntu on phones/tablets, the UBports community continues their work in updating their Ubuntu Touch fork to riding off a 16.04 Xenial base rather than the existing Ubuntu 15.04...

While this week's Wine 3.4 release delivers on working Wine Vulkan ICD support for beginning to allow Windows Vulkan programs to work under Wine assuming the host has Vulkan API support, this current implementation still requires the user to install the Windows Vulkan SDK...

Unfortunately the AMDKFD GPUVM support for discrete GPUs isn't looking like it will make it for the Linux 4.17 kernel cycle...

KDE contributor Nathaniel Graham is out with another recap of the usability and productivity improvements made this past week by the KDE community...

Thomas Gleixner who has been wrangling all of the Spectre and Meltdown related patches for the Linux kernel tree has submitted another pull request of more changes to land for the Linux 4.16 cycle that is nearing the end of its development...

Fresh off the release of Wine 3.4 on Friday, the maintainers corralling the Wine-Staging releases have now put out their second modern release...

The latest feature addition to the GCC compiler this week is support for Intel's new "ENCLV"...

The AMD developers working on their official cross-platform "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver have updated their open-source code-base for Linux users...

There are six candidates running for this year's X.Org Foundation Board of Directors with four seats being open this election...

We have been tracking the development of Elisa, one of several KDE music players, since development started about one year ago. Following the recent alpha releases, the KDE Elisa 0.1 stable release is on the way...

The first point release to the Vulkan 1.1 release from earlier this month is now available. Vulkan 1.1 promoted a lot of functionality to core while also officially adding sub-groups and protected content support. This Vulkan 1.1.71 point release adds a new extension and fixes...

Longtime Linux kernel developer Arnd Bergmann is working to drop a number of old and obsolete CPU architectures from the next kernel cycle, Linux 4.17...

GNOME developers previously dropped support for Synaptics and other input drivers from Mutter in favor of the universal libinput stack that is also Wayland-friendly. Canonical developers tried to get Synaptics support on X11 added back into Mutter but it looks clear now that was rejected...

KDE Connect is the exciting project that allows you to leverage your KDE desktop from Android tablets/smartphones for features like sending/receiving SMS messages from your desktop, toggling music, sharing files, and much more. KDE Connect does continue getting even better...

The HAMMER2 file-system has been available with install-time support since DragonFlyBSD 5.0 while the latest Git code continues to revise this next-generation FS for DragonFly. Landing overnight in DragonFlyBSD were several HAMMER and HAMMER2 improvements...

Since the introduction of the AMDGPU DC display code (formerly known as DAL) in Linux 4.15, this modern display stack has just been enabled by default for newer Radeon Vega and Raven Ridge devices. With Linux 4.17 that is changing with AMDGPU DC being enabled by default across the board for supported GPUs...

The latest bi-weekly release of Wine is now available for running your favorite or necessary Windows programs/games on Linux and macOS...

While waiting for Mesa 18.0, the Mesa 17.3.7 point release will soon hit stable users of this open-source, user-space graphics stack...

Linux Mint's GNOME/GTK-derived Cinnamon Desktop Environment will soon be able to launch applications faster...

Michel Dänzer of AMD issued bug-fix updates on Thursday for the xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-amdgpu DDX drivers...

Ahead of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS next month the Mir developers are working to release Mir version 0.31...

Facebook developers working on the HHVM Hack/PHP language stack have released version 3.25 of the HipHop Virtual Machine...

The Qt Company has some new software development releases available in time for weekend testing...

Daniel Schürmann continues hacking on the sub-group patch-set for the RADV Vulkan driver to expose this important feature of the recent Vulkan 1.1 release...

Red Hat's David Malcom has outlined some of the usability improvements coming with the imminent release of GCC 8...

Chris Wilson of Intel's Linux graphics driver team posted a big set of 36 patches on Wednesday for their DRM kernel driver...

A few years back was the news of Russia wanting to get into the CPU business and at the time were aiming for ARM-based processors but ended up settling for MIPS. It turns out those "Baikal" processors are still around and being worked on as indicated by some fresh benchmarks this week...

A Phoronix Premium supporter recently requested some Windows vs. Linux networking performance benchmarks. That is being done as part of a larger comparison also featuring the popular BSDs, but for some initial measurements, here are some Netperf networking performance metrics on Microsoft Windows Server 2016 and various Linux distributions...

The GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers have been working on Icelake CPU support for a while now as just the "icelake" target but now it's being separated into "icelake-client" and "icelake-server" as the CPU feature differences between the desktop-class processors and Xeon server chips become more clear for this succeeding generation to Cannonlake...

With Ubuntu 18.04 LTS set to be released next month and its final package configuration quickly falling into place, we have begun firing up some benchmarks for seeing how this Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" release is comparing to various other Linux distributions. Up first as part of this series of benchmarks is using an AMD EPYC workstation/server for seeing how the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS performance compares to six other Linux distributions.

Roderick Colenbrander and those working with him on "Winevulkan" to provide a clean Vulkan implementation for Wine supporting the Vulkan ICD concept, etc, rather than the old hacked together code in Wine-Staging have done a great job. With Roderick's latest Winevulkan patches, this new implementation is considered usable...

The Linux Foundation's Embedded Linux Conference 2018 and OpenIoT Summit wrapped up on Wednesday in Portland, Oregon. For those that couldn't make the event, PDF slide decks for many of the presentations are now available...

The Linux 4.16 kernel is at least two or three weeks out from being released, but Intel has already submitted their i915 DRM driver feature changes for Linux 4.17 and are now beginning to think about their feature changes for Linux 4.18...

Valve still hasn't acquired RAD Game Tools, but their close relationship still continues to be paying off with good Linux support out of RAD's game development tools for those developers wishing to target Linux...

While there doesn't appear to be too many Intel BayTrail users out there running systems with Coreboot, this generation of hardware that's been a bit notorious with Linux users due to varying issues can now find at least a bit better graphics support with the latest Coreboot code...

Mesa 18.0's delay of more than one month and without any new release candidate came while the open-source Intel developers were hunkered down to clear the remaining blocker bugs...

Cedric Bail of Samsung's Open-Source Group presented today at the Embedded Linux Conference on EFL 2.0 as part of the Enlightenment project's long-standing goal to provide a new and unified API...

With Firefox 59 having shipped that means Firefox 60 is now officially in beta...

Imad Sousou, Intel's GM of the Open-Source Technology Center, had some interesting remarks to make during his keynote today as part of this week's Embedded Linux Conference in Portland...

As a nice Pi Day surprise and a week ahead of the Game Developers' Conference (GDC 18) is a new Unreal Engine 4 release from Epic Games...

The GNOME project has managed its Pi Day release of GNOME 3.28...

Since last week's big release of LLVM 6.0 along with Clang 6.0, I have been carrying out some fresh compiler benchmarks of the previous Clang 5.0 to this new stable release that switches to C++14 by default, among many other changes to LLVM itself and this C/C++ compiler front-end.

GNU's GRUB bootloader has picked up another feature ahead of the GRUB 2.04 release expected later this year...

While still working on A Total War Saga: THRONES OF BRITANNIA and Rise of The Tomb Raider to Linux this spring, Feral Interactive has now confirmed another port coming to Linux (and macOS)...

While Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" is just one month away from release, the developers working on the Mir display server code are still working to get an example desktop session into this release...

Timothy Arceri of Valve's open-source Linux GPU driver team is out with his latest set of patches to further enhance the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is celebrating Pi day (March 14) by launching their latest Raspberry Pi ARM SBC. This though isn't with some new Broadcom chipset with VC5 graphics, sadly, but a slightly revised variant of the Raspberry Pi 3. Meet the Raspberry Pi 3B+...

Just a little more than one week past the GStreamer 1.14 RC1 release, the second and final release candidate of the upcoming GStreamer 1.14 is now available for testing...

While LLVM 6.0 is now available and it includes the Retpoline compiler-side support for Spectre V2 mitigation, an LLVM 5.0.2 point release is coming to back-port it to their previous stable series...

Intel has published the Intel Processor Microcode Package for Linux 20180312 release with the latest improvements around the microcode-based approach for Spectre CPU vulnerability mitigation, succeeding their microcode updates from earlier in the year...