on (#3DEP2)
Epic Games has rolled out their public preview build of the upcoming Unreal Engine 4.19 game engine update...
Phoronix
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| Updated | 2026-06-23 23:15 |
on (#3DE6P)
Valve has pushed out a new SteamOS Beta build for the Debian Jessie-based "Brewmaster" series...
on (#3DDYM)
Mesa 17.3.3 should be released later this week with nearly three dozen fixes over the previous Mesa 17.3 point release...
on (#3DDW7)
Patches are being prepped to improve the OverDrive overclocking/underclocking support within the AMDGPU DRM driver and for allowing voltage controls...
on (#3DDT3)
An independent open-source developer has announced "Advanced DRI Configurator" in what he's hoping could eventually replace DriConf for configuring Mesa parameters...
on (#3DDT4)
The backporting of -mindirect-branch, -mindirect-return and -mindirect-branch-register, a.k.a. the GCC "Retpoline" patches, have been back-ported and merged into the GCC 7 branch...
on (#3DDP8)
Microsoft made many upstream contributions to the Git version control system over the past year to improve its performance and they plan to continue contributing to the project...
on (#3DDM6)
Yet more functionality to find with the upcoming Linux 4.16 kernel is the first bits of Jailhouse hypervisor functionality being mainlined...
on (#3DDJP)
While BPF has been under the spotlight recently in light of Spectre, with the upcoming Linux 4.16 cycle this in-kernel virtual machine and originally packet filter will be picking up new features...
on (#3DCMJ)
In improving the power-savings of NVIDIA GeForce 600/700 "Kepler" GPUs running on the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver, Red Hat developer Lyude Paul has published a set of patches allowing for full clock-gating with these older graphics cards...
on (#3DCAT)
Ahead of the official release expected in February, the KDE Plasma 5.12 Beta is available today as the latest step forward for the KDE desktop...
on (#3DC21)
Last week I provided a fresh look at the NVIDIA GeForce vs. AMD Radeon Linux gaming performance using the latest drivers at the start of 2018. That testing included the latest NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, but for those curious how these numbers compare for older NVIDIA GPUs, here's a look with the Kepler and Maxwell graphics cards added to the comparison.
on (#3DBZK)
The upcoming Linux 4.16 kernel cycle will be mainlining the VirtualBox Guest "vboxguest" kernel driver...
on (#3DBX5)
While initial support for Retpoline was merged into the Linux 4.15 Git kernel last week and is now being backported to some supported Linux kernel series, there is still additional work ongoing for properly mitigating Spectre v2 on Intel Skylake CPUs and newer...
on (#3DBHQ)
Igalia has sent out the fourth version of their patches for wiring in ARB_gl_spirv support into the Mesa OpenGL driver. This extension is the last main blocker from Intel having OpenGL 4.6 support and allows for SPIR-V ingestion support for better interoperability between OpenGL and Vulkan...
on (#3DBBG)
Coming just over one week since Vulkan 1.0.67 is now the Vulkan 1.0.68 graphics/compute programming specification update...
on (#3DBBH)
Mir's Wayland support continues being hacked on and now being tackled is support for the XDG-Shell protocol...
on (#3DBBJ)
An Intel open-source developer has sent out a set of patches implementing the EGL ANDROID_blob_cache extension for Mesa...
on (#3DB3R)
Retpoline support for mitigating the Spectre vulnerabilities will soon be present in the Linux 4.9 and 4.14 stable kernels...
on (#3DAZG)
While solid-state drives have generally been quite reliable in recent years and even with all the benchmarking I put them through have had less than a handful fail out of dozens, whenever there's a bargain on NVMe SSDs, it's hard to resist. The speed of NVMe SSDs has generally been great and while it's not a key focus on Phoronix (and thus generally not receiving review samples of them), I upgrade some of the server room test systems when finding a deal. The latest is trying an ADATA XPG SX6000 NVMe SSD I managed to get for $49.99 USD.
on (#3DAVP)
Coreboot 4.7 is now available as the latest release of this free and open-source BIOS/UEFI replacement...
on (#3DAT9)
The first release candidate of Samba 4.8 is now available for this popular open-source project implementing the SMB/CIFS protocols...
on (#3DATA)
The GCC 8 compiler is on to its last stage of development...
on (#3D9TN)
Linus Torvalds has released Linux 4.15-rc8 as the last planned release candidate prior to officially debuting Linux 4.15 next weekend...
on (#3D9NR)
Freedreno lead developer Rob Clark has landed initial support for texture tiling with Qualcomm Adreno A5xx graphics hardware...
on (#3D9D6)
Just one week after Phoronix Test Suite 7.8 Milestone 1, the second development release of 7.8-Folldal is now available for testing...
on (#3D94D)
The crew responsible for the open-source Godot cross-platform game engine have announced the 3.0 Release Candidate ahead of the imminent stable release of this major update...
on (#3D906)
A new Phoronix Premium member was hypothesizing in the forums whether Ubuntu's low-latency kernel would be performing better in the wake of the Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) support in the kernel for fending off the Meltdown CPU vulnerability. With always aiming to deliver on test requests by premium members, I ran some benchmarks of the Ubuntu low-latency vs. generic kernels and I also tossed in the Liquorix kernel for benchmarking too.
on (#3D8WS)
Hitting the GCC 8 compiler Git/SVN code this Sunday morning are the changes needed compiler-side for CVE-2017-5715 / Spectre mitigation...
on (#3D8NW)
Earlier this week ongoing Wayland/Weston release manager Bryce Harrington at Samsung laid out plans for Wayland 1.15 and Weston 4.0. There's been some push-back on the proposed dates to try to allow some more work to land in these upcoming six month releases to Wayland/Weston, but long story short, these next releases will be here in the near future...
on (#3D8MD)
The latest Coreboot Git code now has support for the ASUS AM1I-A motherboard...
on (#3D8JQ)
With the Linux 4.15-rc8 kernel that is expected for release today as the final step before Linux 4.15, it's still seeing continued security improvements in the wake of the Spectre CPU vulnerabilities...
on (#3D8H8)
Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) landed at the start of the year for x86/x86_64 systems for fending off the much talked about CPU attacks while the AMD64 / 64-bit ARM code is still a work-in-progress but looks like it will be squared away for the upcoming Linux 4.16 kernel cycle...
on (#3D7T2)
It seems to be a busy weekend for KDE news... The latest is that the Flatpak app sandboxing support formerly known as XDG-App is considered production ready within KDE Discover...
on (#3D7RZ)
KDE Frameworks 5.42.0 was released today as the latest monthly feature update to this collection of add-on KDE libraries complementing Qt5...
on (#3D7AB)
The KDE-developed, Qt-powered digiKam photo management software is out with its first feature update of 2018...
on (#3D6WX)
Even with the overhead of having both KPTI and Retpoline kernel support in place, our recent Linux distribution benchmarks have shown Intel's Clear Linux generally outperforming the more popular distributions. But if applying some basic performance tweaks, can Ubuntu 17.10 perform like Clear Linux? Here are some benchmarks looking at a few factors.
on (#3D6GH)
Now that Firefox's GTK3 support is finally into shape, Firefox 59 will be doing away with GTK2 tool-kit support...
on (#3D6GJ)
LittleFS is a lightweight file-system that's being developed for embedded systems...
on (#3D6F6)
At the beginning of January I posted some early LLVM Clang 6.0 benchmarks on AMD EPYC while in this article is comparing the tentative Clang 6.0 performance to that of the in-development GCC 8.0. Both compilers are now into their feature freeze and this testing looked at the performance of generated binaries both for generic x86_64 as well as being tuned for AMD's Zen "znver1" microarchitecture.
on (#3D6C7)
Yesterday I posted some Linux hardware statistics going back to 2011 using data collected by the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org. Those yearly metrics hadn't contained any GPU/driver data, but here are those numbers...
on (#3D6AR)
The past few months Fedora Linux has been working on shipping free software AAC audio codec support and that's moved ahead but at least initially they are calling the AAC decoder "crippled."..
on (#3D698)
Ubuntu 17.10.1 ISOs are now available as well as for most of the *buntu derivatives. The Ubuntu 17.10.1 ISO re-spin is for disabling the SPI kernel driver to avoid messing up select laptops...
on (#3D57C)
With Linux distributions being patched since last week's Meltdown and Spectre disclosure, here are benchmarks on some of the prominent distributions looking at their performance impact since being patched. Tested from an Intel Core i7 8700K system was CentOS, Clear Linux, Debian, openSUSE, and Ubuntu.
on (#3D4W3)
The sixth weekly release candidate of the upcoming Wine 3.0 is now available for testing...
on (#3D4JQ)
The work on adding optional Meson build system support to the Linux graphics stack and other key open-source projects continues.....
on (#3D46H)
The next release of systemd, v237, will introduce support for WireGuard. WireGuard as a reminder is the effort to provide a fast, modern and secure VPN tunnel that eventually plans to be part of the mainline Linux kernel...
on (#3D411)
The PackageKit-Qt project that provides Qt bindings for PackageKit has simultaneously released versions v0.10 and v1.0...
on (#3D3YM)
The multi-platform, professional-grade Lightworks non-linear video editing system is getting close to releasing version 14.1...
on (#3D3SB)
Last week in light of the Spectre disclosure. AMD believed they were at "near zero risk" to Variant Two / Branch Target Injection. But now the company confirmed last night that's not the case: they are at least potentially vulnerable...