Phoronix

Last summer the embedded Linux OpenWRT and LEDE projects voted in favor of re-merging their efforts while now in 2018 that effort is coming back together now that the logistics have been addressed...

LLVM/Clang 6.0 has been branched, thus making LLVM/Clang 7.0 open for development on master...

The Calamares project as a reminder aims to be the universal installer framework for Linux systems that is distribution-agnostic and already used by Manjaro and KaOS and OpenMandriva. Calamares 3.2 is being worked on as the installer framework's next major release...

One of the new features being worked on by KDE developers in the new year is better desktop integration with web browsers...

DragonFlyBSD should now have initial support for Intel's latest-generation "Coffee Lake" graphics...

GNOME's BuildStream project has declared its first stable release, v1.0, after being in development for the past year...

Right now with the big mysterious security vulnerability causing the rush of the x86 Page Table Isolation work that landed in the Linux kernel days ago, it's believed to be a problem only affecting Intel CPUs. But at least for now the mainline kernel is still treating AMD CPUs as "insecure" and is too taking a performance hit...

With the recently published Initial Benchmarks Of The Performance Impact Resulting From Linux's x86 Security Changes, one of the common questions that came up is whether gaming performance is adversely affected by the x86 Page Table Isolation changes recently merged to the Linux kernel...

Over the past day you've likely heard lots of hysteria about a yet-to-be-fully-disclosed vulnerability that appears to affect at least several generations of Intel CPUs and affects not only Linux but also Windows and macOS. The Intel CPU issue comes down to leaking information about the kernel memory to user-space, but the full scope isn't public yet until the bug's embargo, but it's expected to be a doozy in the data center / cloud deployments. Due to the amount of interest in this issue, here are benchmarks of a patched kernel showing the performance impact of the page table isolation patches.

The Flashrom utility that's associated with the Coreboot project for reading/writing/erasing/verifying flash chips commonly for motherboard BIOS/UEFI/firmware chips has reached its long-awaited v1.0 milestone...

While Wine 3.0 is expected to be released later this month, Wine 2.0.4 is available right now as the current stable release for running Windows programs on Linux...

Remember Linspire? The Linux distribution formerly known as "Lindows" is back from the dead.....

Systemd had a busy 2017 and its code-base is now up to over one million lines...

With LLVM 6.0 being branched this week and that marking the end of feature development on this next compiler update before its stable debut in February, here are some benchmarks of the very latest LLVM Clang 6.0 compiler on AMD's EPYC 7601 32-core / 64-thread processor as we see how well the AMD Zen "znver1" tuning is working out.

Qt 6.0 planning has begun and we should be hearing more about this next major tool-kit update as the year goes on. Here's some of what we can expect from Qt in the near future...

During the recent holidays when running light on benchmarks to run, I was toying around with LLVMpipe in not having run this LLVM-accelerated software rasterizer in some time. I also ran some fresh tests of Intel's OpenSWR OpenGL software rasterizer that has also been living within Mesa...

For those wondering Mesa's rate of change last year while adding in many OpenGL 4.5~4.6 features, a lot of Vulkan driver activity, countless performance optimizations, and the plethora of other work that took place in 2017, here are some numbers...

The OpenShot open-source non-linear video editor is planning for many improvements this year...

With PUBG popularity appearing to decline a bit during December, the Steam Survey results for December 2017 show an increase in the Linux percentage,..

CIB is a new hobby project getting the full-blown Clang C/C++ compiler to run within a web browser as a technical feat...

Making the news rounds again is word of Zhaoxin Semiconductor that is jointly owned by VIA working on modern and competitive x86 processors...

Here are some numbers on the Linux kernel development trends for 2017...

Aside from our 2017 year-end recap, if you were busy reliving the favorite moments of last year and missed some of our original content in December, here's a look back at the top highlights of last month...

Released nearly one year ago was the experimental NVIDIA VkHLF project as a high-level framework for Vulkan. It's been a while since last hearing anything about it, but some new code was just merged...

We end 2017 on Phoronix with 3,390 original news posts on Phoronix this year and 369 featured articles/reviews...

Linus Torvalds has released the sixth weekly release candidate of the upcoming Linux 4.15 kernel...

Here are some other end-of-year benchmarks I had been working on in looking at the current performance of Mesa 17.2.2 versus 17.3.1 versus 17.4-devel Git with RadeonSI OpenGL on three different graphics cards...

While AMD developers worked on the Radeon Gallium3D "Clover" OpenCL support for some time, that really hasn't been the case in years with the AMD's open-source OpenCL effort these days being focused upon their ROCm compute platform. Some within the community though still work on this OpenCL Gallium3D state tracker from time to time and this New Year's weekend is an interesting project pairing Clover with AMD's proprietary OpenCL compiler...

While Haiku OS is incredibly close to delivering their long-awaited beta, it didn't end up materializing in 2017 but they still made much headway into this open-source BeOS-inspired operating system...

The open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver project providing independent, reverse-engineered 3D graphics driver support for GeForce GPUs made a lot of progress in 2017 although not as great as many would have hoped for. But 2018 will hopefully prove to be more interesting...

As shown in recent benchmarks of the RADV Vulkan driver, while the Radeon RX Vega GPU support is now considered conformant and fully-functioning, it's not yet as well optimized as earlier generations of GPUs with this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver. Fortunately, it looks like Bas Nieuwenhuizen is working on more performance optimizations...

DRM subsystem contributor Noralf Trønnes is proposing a patch-set to provide generic FBDEV emulation support in DRM drivers via exportable dumb buffers...

With the Mesa-based RADV Vulkan driver having just landed a significant performance optimization you may be wondering whether RADV Vulkan now leads to faster gaming frame-rates than using the mature RadeonSI OpenGL driver... I was curious so I ran some fresh benchmarks using the newest Mesa Git code.

With the LLVM Clang 6.0 code branching and feature freeze coming up on 3 January, here's a recap of some of the most interesting new features and changes to find with the LLVM 6.0 compiler infrastructure and Clang 6.0 C/C++ front-end...

Alex Deucher of AMD has sent in the last feature updates to DRM-Next of new AMDGPU material to be queued for the Linux 4.16 kernel cycle that will begin later in January...

Remember Arcan? The Linux display server built off a game engine. The project is ending 2017 with the release of the Arcan 0.5.4 display server and its associated Durden v0.4 desktop...

I would like to wish all Phoronix readers a happy new year and hopeful that 2018 will be even better for Phoronix and all open-source/Linux communities...

Glade 3.21 was released today as the latest development release of this tool for quickly designing GTK3/GNOME user-interfaces...

Ahead of next week's LLVM 6.0 feature freeze / code branching, the Clang C/C++ compiler front-end has picked up support for the concept of configuration files...

Here's a look back at the most popular Linux gaming news on Phoronix this calendar year...

I've been working on some AMD EPYC virtualization tests on and off the past few weeks. For your viewing before ending out the year are some initial VirtualBox vs. Linux KVM benchmarks for seeing how the guest VM performance compares.

Five years ago today I wrote about The Problems Right Now For Gaming On Linux with regards to challenges for Linux gaming when it comes to the software and hardware. In the five years since and with seeing thousands of more games be made available for Linux, the situation still is not ideal but it's much better than at the end of 2012...

2017 was easily the most pivotal year for the Ubuntu Linux distribution in years with Canonical having decided to end Unity 8 development in favor of moving to a GNOME Shell Wayland session. There was also the decision to develop a new server installer that is still under development, Snaps and its underlying tech continues to be worked on as an alternative to Flatpak, and Ubuntu continues to dominate the cloud landscape...

Just hours ago was a new patch series being merged to Mesa Git by RADV co-founder Bas Nieuwenhuizen to allow for correct DCC usage. I have just finished up my initial benchmarks of those RADV changes and they indeed help the few Radeon GPUs tested.

The fourth weekly release candidate of Wine 3.0 is now available for testing...

AMD/Radeon had a stellar 2017 for Linux most notably with delivering working Radeon RX Vega open-source driver support at launch, AMDGPU DC finally being merged to the mainline Linux kernel, and the official "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver now being open-source. Besides never-ending performance tuning, there's really just one major feature/area where the Radeon Linux graphics driver support is missing...

The KDE-aligned Krita digital painting software has published a retrospective of 2017 and a look ahead to 2018...

Wayland had a very successful year with Ubuntu 17.10 now using it by default, more niche/hobbyist Wayland compositors making progress, KDE Plasma on Wayland becoming more usable for day-to-day use, more applications/libraries natively supporting Wayland, GTK4's Vulkan renderer becoming very usable, and other advancements...

Not only is Vega now Vulkan 1.0 conformant with RADV, but it's also much faster if pulling down the very latest Mesa bits...

Since October RADV has officially become a Vulkan 1.0 conformant driver for Volcanic Islands GPUs while Sea Islands and Polaris hardware has also been on this same support level. RADV support for the newer Vega GPUs had been lagging behind, but these latest-generation AMD GPUs are now also effectively conformant...