Phoronix

If you were hoping to build the newly-released X.Org Server 1.20 on your system(s) this weekend, be forewarned that a number of the DDX drivers haven't yet been updated for supporting the API/ABI changes of this big server update...

Testing of the release candidate earlier this month went well and out now is the official Scientific Linux 7.5 release...

FreeBSD 11.2 has reached the beta milestone to succeed FreeBSD 11.1 from last year and ahead of FreeBSD 12.0 that is expected this November...

This week the latest open-source drama was a differing of opinions between Richard Hughes of Red Hat who maintains Fwupd and LVFS for Linux firmware updating from the desktop and that of Linux PC vendor System76...

The NVIDIA 396.18.11 Vulkan beta driver for Linux was released on Friday as pulling in the latest upstream fixes to the Vulkan beta driver branch for Windows and Linux...

One month ago Linux game porter Feral Interactive introduced GameMode as a utility/service for dynamically optimizing the Linux system performance when running games. The initial focus on GameMode was on ensuring the CPU scaling governor was in its performance mode while today brought the GameMode v1.1 release...

While Mesa 18.0 debuted just about one and a half months ago, the fourth and final release candidate of Mesa 18.1 is now available for testing as the next quarterly feature installment to these primarily OpenGL/Vulkan open-source drivers...

Wine 3.8 is now available as the latest bi-weekly development release of this program to run Windows applications/games on Linux and macOS...

Purism has been working on reverse-engineering the Intel Firmware Support Package (FSP) module but it looks like that work may have taken a turn...

In addition to the potentially performance-doubling AMD Kaveri fix landing yesterday in Mesa 18.2 Git, also hitting this next version of Mesa is Enhanced Quality Anti-Aliasing (EQAA) support for Radeon GCN graphics processors...

While Purism had already been shipping Coreboot on their Librem 15 v2 laptop two years ago and has already succeeded by their third revision that does have mainline Coreboot support, the support was merged today to Coreboot proper for the Librem 15 v2...

Mir developers have been working on support for systemd's Logind and there is a "mess of a branch" that is nearly functionally complete and could soon be merged...

When using the latest Git/development code of Mesa 18.2 on Kaveri APUs you may find up to a 2x increase in performance if you are using the AMDGPU DRM driver rather than the default Radeon DRM driver...

Red Hat Summit 2018 in San Francisco has now wrapped up, marking Red Hat's 25th year hosting the event of customers and partners. Virtualization and containers continued being among the most discussed topics at the tech event...

The Purism crew working on the privacy-minded Librem 5 GNU/Linux smartphone have shared off their latest design plans...

The second and final planned point/bug-fix release to GNOME 3.28 is now available...

Following the slew of recent AMD/Radeon Linux driver updates, the ROCm 1.8.0 release was issued today for the Radeon Open Compute stack...

AMD has carried out their quarterly Radeon Pro Software driver update designated for their Radeon Pro professional/workstation graphics drivers with these updates having received additional QA for certified workloads. The Radeon Pro Software 18.Q2 Linux driver made it out alongside their Windows update...

Rust 1.26 is out today as the newest version of this popular systems programming language...

After more than one and a half years in development that is well off their past six-month release cadence, the long-awaited X.Org Server 1.20 has finally been released as this stable X11 implementation for Linux desktop systems not yet prepared to migrate to Wayland...

With GCC 8.1 having been officially released last week, I have spent the past number of days running a variety of compiler benchmarks comparing this initial GCC8 stable release to the previous GCC 7.3 stable compiler release. Tests were done on five different Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Linux systems running very different AMD and Intel processors.

Intel's performance-oriented Clear Linux operating system is already preparing to ship GCC 8.1 as the default compiler and over the days ahead will be rebuilding all of their packages under GCC8...

CentOS 7 1804 is now available as the latest release of this leading "community spin" of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The 1804 update to CentOS 7 is based on last month's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5...

While the Ubuntu desktop official images are no longer 32-bit/i386 and more Ubuntu derivatives are dropping their 32-bit x86 installers, not all 32-bit images/installers have been discontinued and the i386 package archive / port remains. That matter though is back to being debated...

It's been a while since last seeing any interesting products out of VIA with having been focusing on digital signage solutions and fabricating some basic ARM boards. The company has been exploring deep learning and AI and today announced the VIA Edge AI Developer Kit...

The code to the AMDVLK official open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux has received a big code update, syncing up the public tree from their internal development trees with about two weeks worth of changes...

While we have seen AMD GCN and HSA support in the past for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) we have unfortunately not heard of it being used much, but now CodeSourcery / Mentor Graphics has been working on a new/updated AMD GCN port for execution on Radeon GPUs that allows for OpenMP and OpenACC offloading...

The latest feature update is now available to AMD's TrueAudio Next solution for delivering advanced audio effects using OpenCL kernels without relying upon any dedicated DSP hardware...

While Peter Hutterer has been involved with the X.Org Server's input code and related projects for the past decade now and has spearheaded the projects around Multi Pointer X, X Input 2, and the Wayland/Xorg-using Libinput libraries, he's still had a tough time grasping the X.Org Server's pointer acceleration code...

Libdrm 2.4.92 is now available as the newest version of the Mesa DRM library that most notably sits between the Mesa drivers and the Linux kernel Direct Rendering Manager code...

Devuan remains the prominent Debian fork that is focused on "init freedom" by stripping out Debian's dependence on systemd...

Rounding out today's Firefox 60 release comes with promoting Firefox 61 to beta...

Complementing GNOME's involvement in Google Summer of Code and Outreachy, the GNOME Foundation has announced a new internship program aimed for more complex projects...

Elie Tournier, the former GSoC student developer who was working on soft FP64 support and then joined Collabora, has shared a status update on the consulting firm's work in the GPU virtualization space...

Valve has just announced they are rolling out some new Steam Apps in the coming weeks for Android and iOS mobile devices...

Calxeda as the first interesting ARM-based servers didn't pan out and the company went bust, attempts by the likes of AMD at ARM server CPUs so far have not panned out, and now today is a report that Qualcomm is looking to end its Centriq server CPU line or sell off that division...

With Ubuntu 18.04 LTS out as well as System76's Pop!_OS updated against the Bionic Beaver, System76 is in the process of rolling out some new/updated systems. Last week they began teasing the Oryx Pro as their new "thin machine learning laptop" while today we have a better look at it...

EVERSPACE, the Unreal Engine 4 powered, Kickstarter-backed single-player space-themed combat game has rolled out official Linux support today...

Firefox 60.0 is out this morning and it's quite a big update while also being Mozilla's newest ESR release for extended support...

Kent Overstreet who has been spending the past few years working on the Bcachefs file-system born out of the BCache block cache technology is now starting work on upstreaming the code to the mainline kernel...

While ROCm 1.7.2 is the latest stable release for this Radeon GPU compute stack, there are 1.8.0 beta packages available for testing...

With Mark Shuttleworth yesterday having announced the Cosmic Cuttlefish, the development cycle for Ubuntu 18.10 is formally open...

Besides kernels being addressed for the newly-disclosed CVE-2018-8897 vulnerability, users of Xen para-virtualization should also run a patched Xen system right away...

A little more than one month since crossing 30 million test/suite downloads, OpenBenchmarking.org as of this evening has delivered over its 31 millionth test profile / test suite download to Phoronix Test Suite users...

Alongside a plethora of other announcements in kicking off Google's 2018 I/O event, following recent rumors and indications in their dev channel, Google has officially confirmed support for "Linux Apps" on Chrome OS...

DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has just pushed out DragonFly's Spectre mitigation code as well as fixing "CVE-2018-8897" which is what might be the recently rumored "Spectre-NG" vulnerabilities...

CodeWeavers has rolled out their newest version of their Wine-based commercial software for running Windows programs on Linux and macOS systems...

Following Microsoft adding the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) for running Linux programs on Windows 10 and most recently adding Tar and OpenSSH support to the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, their latest Linux-friendly initiative targeting administrators/developers is supporting Unix/Linux line-endings within Notepad...

Mark Shuttleworth has announced Ubuntu 18.10 is the Cosmic Cuttlefish...

While last week I published some initial Radeon Software 18.10 vs. Mesa benchmarks there was interest by some premium supporters in seeing a three-way comparison of Mesa RADV versus AMDGPU-PRO / Radeon Software 18.10 PRO components vs. the official open-source AMDVLK driver. Here are those results using both Polaris and Vega graphics cards.