Phoronix

After rolling out the 390.12 beta Linux driver in early January as the first public driver in the 390 series, NVIDIA is ending January by the first 390 stable release: 390.25...

While using Vulkan lowers the CPU utilization compared to OpenGL, in our testing of NVIDIA versus the open-source Radeon drivers we generally have found the red team's drivers to consume more CPU resources. Thus it's good to hear that RADV co-conspirator Bas Nieuwenhuizen is working on reworking how this Radeon Vulkan driver handles pipeline emitting...

After hitting the RC phase a few weeks ago, OPNsense 18.1 has been officially released as the latest version of this pfSense-forked network/router-oriented BSD operating system...

Once again being punctual with their releases, the GNU Linux-libre volunteers managed to release the GNU Linux-libre 4.15-gnu kernel a short time after Linus Torvalds on Sunday released the official Linux 4.15 kernel...

After the page table isolation (K)PTI support was added late in the Linux 4.15 kernel cycle in light of the Meltdown CPU vulnerability, improvements to this code are on the way with Linux 4.16...

It has been more than two years since the release of Ncurses 6.0 as the GNU project for developing terminal-independent text-based user-interfaces while this weekend marked the availability of the big Ncurses 6.1 update...

Emil Velikov announced the release today of Mesa 18.0-RC3 with 50+ changes comprising of many Intel ANV and Radeon RADV Vulkan driver fixes...

Ingo Molnar began sending in his various Git pull requests this morning for targeting the Linux 4.16 kernel merge window, including the scheduler updates...

This weekend I wrote how the AMDKFD discrete GPU support should be in place for the next kernel cycle, Linux 4.17. This is going to allow discrete Radeon GPUs to have ROCm working off the mainline kernel for OpenCL/compute support, but for 4.17 it's unlikely RX Vega GPUs will have compute working...

L2 Code and Data Prioritization (L2 CDP) is a feature of Intel's Resource Director Technology (RDT) that will now be supported with the Linux 4.16 kernel...

One of the security improvements to Linux 4.16 is improving the default behavior for restricted access to /dev/mem for x86/x86_64 and ARM64 systems...

AOCC 1.1 is the second public release of the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler designed for Ryzen/Threadripper/EPYC processors...

As a follow-up to the article a few days ago about nearly complete OpenGL 4.4~4.5 support for R600g, this pre-GCN older Radeon Gallium3D driver has landed in Mesa 18.1-dev Git support for its final OpenGL 4.4 extension...

While the just-released Linux 4.15 kernel brings AMD Zen CPU temperature reporting support for Ryzen/Threadripper/EPYC processors, an oversight in the k10temp driver code is yielding an incorrect temperature for the Threadripper 1900X...

Linus Torvalds has released the Linux 4.15.0 kernel after nine release candidates...

Famed GNOME developer Matthias Clasen of Red Hat provided an update on the state of the GTK4 tool-kit during this week's DevConf.cz event in Brno...

Not only is Linux 4.15 coming today but the first systemd stable release of 2018 is also now available...

Adding to the list of features for the long overdue GIMP 2.10 release is better debugging support...

After going through nine weekly release candidates, the Linux 4.15 kernel is set to be released today as the first major stable update of 2018...

Mesa 18.0 is currently being prepared for release by mid-February and is yet another feature-packaged, quarterly update to this open-source 3D graphics driver stack with significant improvements for OpenGL and Vulkan support and performance.

While we are seeing exciting projects at the moment about mapping Direct3D 11 over Vulkan (as well as D3D9 and D3D12 over Vulkan projects too), there are new open-source projects for mapping Vulkan over Direct3D 12 and Metal...

From the mid-2000's to 2011 Allwinner was marketing their F-Series processors with ARM9 32-bit RISC processors while finally in 2018 these SoCs might have upstream Linux kernel support...

The Solus Project this week released Linux Driver Management 1.0, a library created by this innovative Linux distribution for enumerating system components and detecting matches between said components and packages/drivers providing additional functionality...

SUSE's Richard Brown has issued a status update around openSUSE's ongoing mitigation of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities...

Released this weekend is Binutils 2.30 as the latest collection of these GNU utilities important to the open-source ecosystem...

If the extremely fast Intel Optane SSD 900p is out of your budget with its 3D XPoint memory, this week Intel rolled out the SSD 760p series with 64-layer TLC 3D NAND memory. For less than $100 USD you can get the 256GB capacity Intel 760p SSD, which is what we are benchmarking today under Ubuntu Linux.

Sent out Friday night were the latest patches for getting the discrete GPU support within the AMDKFD HSA kernel driver up to scratch for allowing the ROCm compute stack working off a mainline kernel...

Ubuntu-focused Linux PC vendor System76 who has also been working on their own Pop!_OS distribution is looking at enabling disk encryption by default...

KDE KWin window manager / compositor maintainer Martin Flöser has penned a brief response to the recent GNOME developer's CSD Initiative in trying to get all applications to pursue client-side decorations and abandon title bars in favor of header bars...

Google's WebM folks quietly released libvpx 1.7.0 earlier this week as the latest version of their VP8/VP9 encoder/decoder library...

For those still in search of a KDE-focused Linux distribution that's rolling-release and desktop-friendly, Netrunner Rolling 2018.01 has been released...

Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS had been scheduled to ship mid-February as the latest point release for this Long Term Support release, but unfortunately that is not going to happen as planned due to the Canonical kernel developers being overloaded by Spectre and Meltdown mitigation work...

Keith Packard who has been doing contract work for Valve the past year on improving the support for virtual reality head-mounted displays (VR HMDs) shares a status update on his work at this week's Linux.Conf.Au in Sydney...

Here is a look at how the Linux kernel performance has evolved since the release of Linux 3.17 in October 2014. With all the major kernel releases over the past 3+ years, here is how the performance compares using two very different Intel Gulftown and Haswell systems.

GNOME developer Tobias Bernard has announced "The CSD Initiative" in a push for more applications to support client-side decorations and as part of that to abandon boring title bars in favor of modern header bars...

PipeWire was announced last year as a new Red Hat projects with aspirations to be to video as PulseAudio is to audio on the Linux desktop. Other PipeWire goals include professional audio support equal to or better than JACK, full Wayland/Flatpak support, and more. Red Hat is making a lot of progress on PipeWire, but it's not yet ready to be the default on the Linux desktop...

As we have shown in past benchmarks, while current generation Linux games with current Linux GPU drivers using the Vulkan API rather than OpenGL may not be significantly faster with higher-end hardware right now, the impact of this newer Khronos graphics API tends to be more profound on lower-end hardware, especially when it comes to lightening the load on the CPU. Following the recent Pentium vs. Ryzen 3 Linux gaming tests, I carried out some fresh benchmarks looking at OpenGL vs. Vulkan on the Ryzen 3 1200 quad-core CPU with NVIDIA and Radeon graphics.

While Ubuntu 17.10 defaults to using the Wayland session on supported GPUs/drivers when using the default GNOME Shell based session, Canonical has decided for Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" LTS that it will use the X.Org Server by default...

Glibc 2.27 will be released as soon as next week as the latest half-year update to the GNU C Library...

GLAMOR as a means of providing 2D acceleration over OpenGL in X.Org Server 1.20 will support for 30-bit RGB colors...

One of the last minute changes sneaking into the Linux 4.15 kernel is support for PDP Xbox One controllers...

Earlier this month a Red Hat developer managed to achieve full clock-gating for NVIDIA Kepler GPUs using the open-source Nouveau DRM driver. Today the second version of these patches were published...

At the same time as adding HiDPI monitor support for Windows 10, Valve has added a "2X-scaling mode" for the Steam client to satisfy modern high resolution monitors...

For those planning to pick up a Raven Ridge laptop or the forthcoming desktop APUs, the Mesa driver now has patches for enabling H.265/HEVC video encode support for VCN 1.0 on Raven hardware...

Earlier this week I posted some benchmarks looking at Intel Pentium vs. AMD Ryzen 3 performance for Linux gaming. Those tests on the Pentium and Ryzen systems were done with both NVIDIA and AMD Radeon graphics for seeing how the gaming performance compares in the spectrum of sub-$100 CPUs and cheap graphics cards. But for those that were just curious about the CPU performance, here are some benchmarks I also carried out with the Pentium G4600 Kabylake and AMD Ryzen 3 1200.

Not to be confused with Coreboot or its former name of LinuxBIOS, the Linux Foundation today announced LinuxBoot as a new initiative for replacing system firmware with the Linux kernel/drivers...

The progress is stunning made by a lone developer on the DXVK project for mapping the Direct3D 11 graphics API on top of Vulkan for allowing better performance/support for D3D11 games on Wine...

Taking place this week in Sydney, Australia is the 2018 Linux.Conf.Au conference. For those that can't make the event, there's a livestream, but if the time difference impacts you, the recordings are now beginning to trickle in via YouTube...

GNOME developer Adrien Plazas has joined Purism as part of their effort of getting GTK+ applications on the Librem 5 smart-phone...

While we frequently do Linux OS/distribution performance comparisons on the latest Intel desktop and server hardware, some requests came in recently about looking closer at the fastest Linux distribution(s) when running on AMD's Ryzen desktop processors. Here are benchmarks of ten popular Linux distributions tested out-of-the-box on Ryzen 7 1800X and Threadripper 1950X systems.