Phoronix

AmanithVG is a new library implementing the Khronos OpenVG 1.1 vector graphics 2D API. This library supports OpenVG rendering using a software/CPU-based approach or in turn using OpenGL / OpenGL ES 1.1...

Last week I was able to finally get my hands on a Threadripper 1950X system thanks to AMD for being able to deliver some Linux tests from this high-end desktop platform. The Threadripper 1950X as a reminder is a 16-core processor with 32 threads via SMT, 3.4GHz base frequency, 4.0GHz boost frequency, quad-channel DDR4 support, and support for 64 PCI-E lanes. Threadripper sits between the Ryzen 7 desktop processors and the AMD EPYC server/workstation processors, which are still soon to be tested at Phoronix. The Ryzen Threadripper 1950X will set you back $999 USD, but compared to the Core i9 7900X at the same price, has six more cores / 12 threads and a slightly higher base clock frequency of 3.4GHz vs. 3.3GHz but a lower boost frequency of 4.0GHz vs. 4.3GHz.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has been working to firm up the release schedule for the Fedora 28 Linux operating system update due out in Q2'2018...

Werner Koch has announced the release of GNU Privacy Guard's GnuPG 2.2 stable series...

Last month in LLVM there was new Sandy Bridge scheduler information to improve the instruction scheduling and other hardware detail changes so LLVM can generate more efficient code for those older CPUs. At that time we learned Intel developers were also planning improvements too for LLVM with newer Haswell / Broadwell / Skylake / Skylake-X CPUs. Improvements have now landed for Haswell...

Landing within the SDL (Simple DirectMedia Library) code-base over night is initial Vulkan API support...

Just days after Linux turned 26 years old, Linus Torvalds has announced the seventh weekly test candidate of the upcoming Linux 4.13 kernel...

While we've seen the Radeon Linux OpenGL driver get competitive to the Windows Radeon OpenGL driver and the NVIDIA Windows/Linux OpenGL binary drivers have long been on a level playing field, how's the Intel HD Graphics performance? Here are some quick and fresh benchmarks this weekend.

While there has been VirGL as one of the options for allowing 3D/OpenGL acceleration of Linux guests within QEMU/KVM virtual machines to allow the calls to be directed to the host system's OpenGL driver, that support hasn't been available when Windows is running as QEMU/KVM guest. That is changing though thanks in large part to this year's Google Summer of Code...

Following the news this week that RadeonSI may switch to NIR completely in the future, in the forums a number of questions were raised about why the Linux graphics drivers are using multiple forms of intermediate representation and whether this would still make RadeonSI a Gallium3D driver if it doesn't default to TGSI...

With testing out a Tyan 1U server featuring dual Intel Xeon Gold 6138 CPUs, one of the uncommon test requests we have received but understandable given our audience is curiosity about the performance of OpenGL software rendering on this 40 core / 80 thread Xeon Scalable server when making use of Mesa's LLVMpipe software rasterizer and the newer OpenSWR driver from Intel.

This week Purism announced their plans for the Librem 5 smart-phone as a GNU/Linux smartphone that is privacy-respecting, as open as possible, and costs $599 USD. The company believes they can have the phone ready for release by early 2019 if they raise $1.5 million USD over the next two months. In just about three days they have raised nearly $100,000, but it's not clear if the pacing will continue to reach the milestone in time...

Not only is GSoC wrapping up now as school nears for many of the involved student developers, but the Outreachy internship program is also ending this coming week...

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.