Phoronix

Eric Anholt of Broadcom's latest open-source Linux driver work hasn't been on their BCMV Vulkan driver or their newer VC5 Gallium3D driver, but rather improving the multimedia stack for existing Raspberry Pi devices...

Mesa 18.0 had been due for release around mid-February, but that didn't happen and there hasn't even been a release candidate in more than one month...

DragonFFI is a foreign function interface (FFI) built using the LLVM and Clang compiler stack to provide a library calling C functions and C data structures that can be used from any other programming language...

The Samba open-source SMB/CIFS networking implementation is having a bad security day...

Version 3.6 of Tails, the security and privacy minded live USB/DVD Linux distribution derived from Debian, is now available...

Just two months after the big Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities were disclosed, Israeli security researchers have published 13 security vulnerabilities claiming to affect AMD Ryzen and EPYC product lines...

While the belated X.Org Server 1.20 is onto the release candidate stage, there still are some feature patches expected to land and among them is the per-window flipping support in the Present extension with support wired through for XWayland...

Purism is reporting they have been able to get KDE Plasma Mobile in its current development state running on their initial Librem 5 smartphone development platform...

Mozilla's Firefox 59.0 is now available to download from the FTP server ahead of the official announcement...

Yesterday we wrote about David Airlie working on a fresh push to get "soft FP64" support in Mesa for allowing some older graphics cards on the R600g driver to then have OpenGL 4 support thanks to this double-precision floating-point support being their last blocker. That code is moving forward...

Following the very bumpy Mesa 17.3 releases, Mesa developers are currently discussing ideas for improving the release process moving forward...

NVIDIA has just published the 390.42 Linux graphics driver as their latest maintenance update in this long-lived driver series...

Karton is a Docker-based solution for running Linux programs on macOS or other Linux distributions as well as different architectures...

The developers behind the Rust programming language have put out a road-map for the year as well as details on the forthcoming "Rust 2018" Edition that succeeds the 1.x release series...

If you are a university student and would like to pursue a career in Linux/open-source software development, a great way to get a jump-start on that is through Google's annual Summer of Code program. Student applications for GSoC 2018 are now being accepted...

Controversial open-source figure Eric S. Raymond is hoping to begin work on an open-source, open hardware design for an uninterruptible power supply (UPS)...

While Austrian PC cooling manufacturer Noctua is mostly known for their high-end enthusiast/gamer oriented cooling products, they do offer a line-up of heatsinks for both AMD Ryzen Threadripper and EPYC server processors. In this article we are trying out the NH-U9 TR4-SP3, NH-U12S TR4-SP3, and NH-U14S TR4-SP3 heatsinks on a 32-core / 64-thread AMD EPYC platform for seeing how well these air coolers will do with AMD's promising server platform.

While the Linux 4.16 kernel release is still three weeks or so away, the Linux 4.17 kernel is already shaping up to be another exciting cycle...

KDE's KEXI database creator program that is akin to Microsoft Access is out with their first major release in months and also restores support for Microsoft Windows alongside Linux and macOS...

Support for Zstd-compressed Debian packages was worked on last week by some Canonical/Ubuntu developers and already by the end of the year they are looking at potentially using it by default...

There's been work going on for years of "soft" FP64 support to allow emulated support for the double-precision floating-point data types for GPUs not otherwise inherently supporting this capability. The soft support would allow for some older GPUs to then advertise OpenGL 4.0+ support now that ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 support could be enabled. That day looks like it's finally coming for mainline Mesa...

Now that the OpenChrome DRM driver is hoping to go mainline in 2018 now that it can handle run-time resolution changes without crashing the X.Org Server, the project's lone developer Kevin Brace has published a TODO list of other code changes he has planned prior to getting this open-source VIA x86 graphics driver into the mainline Linux kernel...

Following more Wine Vulkan code being merged and the first milestone being achieved of vulkaninfo working, Roderick Colenbrander has submitted his latest patches in the bring-up of Vulkan support under Wine...

Development on the Linux 4.16 kernel continues moving along smoothly and tonight the 4.16-rc5 kernel is released...

Oded Gabbay sent in his pull request today of the AMDKFD driver updates targeting the Linux 4.17 kernel. Notably this includes the long-awaited dGPU support in inching AMD/GPUOpen ROCm compute support with OpenCL off a mainline kernel for select discrete GPUs...

While SilverStone is mostly known for their beautifully crafted computer cases, in addition to their range of power supplies and other enthusiast products they have also offered a number of cooling products over the years. Their latest addition to their cooling product line is the TP02-M2 that is an aluminum alloy heatsink for cooling M.2 solid-state drives.

Assuming no last minute snafu, the GNOME 3.28 desktop environment will see its official release happen on 14 March, incorporating the past six months worth of improvements to this open-source desktop stack...

The OpenChrome KMS/DRM driver can finally handle run-time resolution changes without crashing. The developer now hopes to be able to mainline this driver into the Linux kernel in 2018...

It looks like current Debian Project Leader Chris Lamb will be serving another term...

Netrunner 18.03 "Idolon" has been released as the latest version of this KDE-focused desktop Linux distribution derived from Debian's testing repository...

Oracle published a SPARC and Solaris road-map updated for March 2018...

Today marks the first release of the i3 tiling window manager in 2018...

A few days back I provided some fresh Linux 4.16 kernel benchmarks compared to recent stable kernel releases while also toggling the KPTI and Retpoline security features on Linux 4.16 Git for seeing the impact of the Spectre and Meltdown mitigation techniques on this latest kernel while using Intel Xeon hardware. For this latest round of tests is a similar comparison while using an AMD EPYC system.

There is just one month to go until the official debut of the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" release and Canonical's Mir team is busy as ever on the home stretch of final changes for this next release...

Debian 9.4 is now available as the latest maintenance release for the Stretch release series...

The latest work by Roderick Colenbrander on "winevulkan" was merged to mainline Wine Git on Friday and also marks their first self-appointed milestone in bringing up Vulkan API support within Wine...

Of the many features coming to X.Org Server 1.20 there is now Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3 (DRI3) versions 1.1 and 1.2. Mesa has now received its patches for making use of the new functionality...

A few weeks back many of you were excited by the prospects of the Airtop2 Inferno PC that is a completely fanless PC with up to a Core i7 CPU and GTX 1080 GPU. This well-built, industrial-grade computer with CompuLab's custom-engineered natural airflow technology is now a step closer to the market...

It's been a while since we last have seen any new Heterogeneous Memory Management patches even after its mainline introduction in Linux 4.14. But Jerome Glisse who masterminded HMM at Red Hat is now out with some Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) patches for Nouveau...

The KDE developers working on the Amarok music player released version 2.9.0 this week as their last expected release atop the aging KDE 4 libraries and Qt4...

Mozilla's Servo team is being absorbed by the company's Mixed Reality Team...

Fedora is planning to make a seemingly tardy entrance into the "Internet of Things" space with a new Fedora IoT Edition on the way...

Today marks the first beta release of opt-in flavors participating for the Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" development cycle...

POCL, the Portable Computing Language, that aims to be a portable and open-source OpenCL implementation that can run on CPUs as well as AMD HSA targets and more, is out with a new feature release...

There is less than one week to go until the GNOME 3.28 release while today the second release candidate is now available that serves as the final step before the stable debut...

Over the past decade we have looked at many interesting PCs from CompuLab, a vendor capable of delivering Linux-friendly PCs that are originally designed and often catered to meet demanding industrial requirements. The latest Linux PC we have been putting through its paces the past several weeks has been the Fitlet2, which CompuLab describes as being designed "from the ground-up to minimize size and maximize capabilities, durability and thermal performance." After running our plethora of benchmarks on this mini Linux PC, we can say with confidence they have succeeded in their mission.

For those relying upon GTK applications like LibreOffice, GIMP, and GNOME programs from the KDE desktop, the integration is taking a step forward with Plasma 5.13...

The Qt Company developers are soliciting feedback from developers and the community about what they would like to see out of WebAssembly support for the tool-kit...

With today's Mesa 18.1-devel Git code, the last of the Tegra/Nouveau code has landed where it's now rounded off for offering a completely open-source and accelerated graphics stack that works well on the Tegra210 (Tegra X1) SoC...

Intel open-source developers are preparing the last of their feature work for the i915 DRM driver with the upcoming Linux 4.17 kernel cycle...