Phoronix

Matthew Dillon has been very busy the past few weeks getting his HAMMER2 file-system ready for an experimental debut in the next DragonFlyBSD release...

For fans of the Qt-powered Digikam photo management software, the 5.7 release is out today with many bug fixes and underlying improvements along with some new user features...

The big undertaking of the rewriting/modernizing of the AMDGPU DRM driver's display code stack has out now another 28 patches...

Emacs 25.3 is now available, but it doesn't offer major new features, rather it fixes a security vulnerability...

Caolán McNamara's hacking around GTK3 support in LibreOffice continues. This time, he's managed flicker-free OpenGL transitions...

Landing today within Mesa Git is a switchover for the AMDGPU winsys layer to using the new command submission (CS) API...

While testing out the near-final GNOME 3.26 this weekend I also ran some benchmarks of it comparing the boot time, memory use, power consumption, and gaming performance when comparing GNOME Shell / Mutter running on Wayland and then an X.Org session.

The Shotwell GNOME photo manager is among the components that added Meson build system support for the GNOME 3.26 cycle...

One of the questions that came up following our GNOME 3.26 feature overview was how GTK4's Vulkan renderer is coming along...

The last planned test/development release of Phoronix Test Suite 7.4-Tynset is now available ahead of the planned stable release in the days to come...

Developer Shane Peelar has come up with a Gentoo Portage configuration for building out the distribution with aggressive compiler optimizations in the name of performance...

Adding to the new features of GNOME 3.26 are many additions found within WebKitGTK+ 2.18, the GNOME port of the WebKit rendering engine used by Epiphany and other GNOME web projects...

Olof Johansson has submitted the pull requests of ARM/ARM64 board/SoC updates for the Linux 4.14 merge window...

With GNOME 3.26 due to be officially released on Wednesday, 13 September, here is a look at the new features to be found in this major desktop update and screenshots from testing the latest GNOME 3.26 packages via Fedora 27's development images.

We are now through week one of the two week kernel merge window for Linux 4.14. Here is a look at the most prominent changes and new features queued so far for the Linux 4.14 kernel...

Last month Raptor Engineering announced the Talos II POWER9-powered workstation that is cheaper than the original Talos Workstation while still aiming to be very free software friendly. The Free Software Foundation will be exploring the possibility of "Respect Your Freedom" certification on this hardware when it's ready to ship...

It's been a while since last having anything to report on with VLC with the VLC 3.0 release still not available, but thanks to this year's Google Summer of Code, there was an interesting project around working on 3D format support...

While Oracle recently laid off a ton of SPARC staff (and Solaris), not everyone was let go and it's still not instantly a dead platform. With Linux 4.14 there are some SPARC improvements for those relying upon this ex-Sun hardware...

One of the interesting Google Summer of Code projects this year associated with the GNOME project was on reworking the Mutter compositor from requiring X11/XWayland code-paths for starting the Wayland compositor...

The Piper mouse configuration interface to libratbag is one of the success stories from this year's Google Summer of Code and fortunately the involved student developer has continued contributing to the project...

This weekend on the Fedora mailing list a debate has begun over whether Fedora's KDE desktop spin is too bloated and what could be done about it...

A Google developer has begun work on extending LLVM Clang's CUDA support to cover CUDA 9...

One of the interesting Google Summer of Code projects within the BSD realm this summer was working on a new boot management tool and library for ZFS on FreeBSD. It's still in the works, but progress is being made...

The KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) and Xen updates have been submitted for the Linux 4.14 kernel merge window...

AMD developer Nicolai Hähnle has published a set of patches today for adding out-of-order rasterization support to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. Long story short, this can boost the Linux gaming performance of GCN 1.2+ graphics cards when enabled...

Earlier this summer we heard how System76 might make their own distribution installer. They indeed are moving forward in this effort to construct their own installer from scratch and it's written in Rust...

While Oracle is slashing Solaris and SPARC jobs, their RHEL-derived Oracle Linux operating system continues getting pushed forward. Oracle Linux 7 Update 4 is now available as their re-based version off Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4...

GSoC 2017 student developer Jacob Lifshay who spent his summer working on Vulkan-CPU as a CPU-based Vulkan software implementation (and recently renamed the project to Kazan) has continued working on his open-source project post-GSoC to make this interesting Vulkan project a reality...

Besides the separate pull request that brought Zstd compression support for Btrfs with the in-development Linux 4.14 kernel, the main Btrfs pull request was also submitted on Friday for updating this Linux file-system...

Mesa 17.1.9 is now available for those sticking to the 17.1 stable releases and aren't yet comfortable moving to the just-released Mesa 17.2...

Like us, many of you have probably been anxious for weeks to see a plethora of benchmarks featuring AMD's EPYC processors. An EPYC-equipped server arrived today courtesy of AMD and TYAN and is now in the process of being tested at Phoronix. Next week we should have some initial comparison numbers to feature of the AMD EPYC 7601 processor under Linux while in the weeks ahead will be more extensive numbers in looking at the Linux performance in different areas followed by FreeBSD/BSD results and other interesting tests. Here's our first look at this Tyan Transport SX TN70A-B8026 server.

As we've been expecting, Zstd compression for Btrfs is coming with the Linux 4.14 along with Zstd support in SquashFS...

Chrome/Chromium supports GPU sandboxing for security purposes and now it will work fine with the AMD graphics on Linux...

Elivepatch is a new means of live kernel patching of Gentoo Linux and works in a distributed manner...

Linux's support for the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor for server virtualization is seeing some performance tuning in the Linux 4.14 kernel...

As we previously reported on, there was a Google Summer of Code project this year optimizing FFmpeg's VP9 decoder particularly around AVX2 instructions and threading. The project was a success and VP9 decoding should be much faster with FFmpeg as a result...

There's more good news about work-in-progress patches for those GCN 1.0 owners that have been looking to get your graphics card running full-featured under the AMDGPU DRM driver rather than the existing Radeon Direct Rendering Manager driver...

Linus Torvalds has pulled in the block layer updates for the Linux 4.14 kernel merge window...

Michel Dänzer of AMD has released updated stable versions of their AMDGPU and Radeon X.Org DDX drivers today...

With the Outreachy Summer 2017 internship period wrapping up, the application period has opened for the Outreachy Winter 2017 internship program...

For those wanting to use the Reiser4 file-system with the just-released Linux 4.13 kernel, patches are already available...

Curious around the GNOME Shell desktop and improvements made during the Ubuntu 17.10 cycle in transitioning away from Unity 7 and X.Org to GNOME and Wayland, I took the recently-reviewed Razer Blade Stealth laptop and tried out the very latest Ubuntu desktop daily ISO on this Intel laptop. Here are my initial impressions of the current Ubuntu 17.10 desktop experience as well as some power/boot/performance benchmarks of 17.10 in its daily state compared to Ubuntu 17.04 on this Kabylake system.

For the many of you Linux users that have been desiring an AMD laptop, things could get interesting with Lenovo having just announced the ThinkPad A-Series...

GNOME 3.25.92 is available today, marking the last development release before the official GNOME 3.26 debut...

After delays pushed its release back by about one month, LLVM 5.0 was just released a few minutes ago along with its associated sub-projects like the Clang 5.0 C/C++ compiler...

In two weeks now Purism has managed to raise over $200,000 USD towards their dream of building a privacy/free-software-minded smartphone running their own custom Linux-based software stack. But they remain a long ways to go from their $1.5 MM goal...

While not for public consumption at least for now, the Electronic Arts' Frostbite game engine has seen internal Linux testing/development...

GNOME Mutter 3.25.92 has been released and it incorporates some interesting changes for the end of the GNOME 3.26 development cycle...

Linux hwmon developer Guenter Roeck has posted a patch adding support for Family 17h (Ryzen/Threadripper/Epyc) temperature monitoring support to the existing k10temp Linux kernel driver...

Building off last week's Wine 2.16 bi-weekly development snapshot, the crew working on the more bleeding-edge/experimental Wine-Staging branch have released their v2.16 update with various features tacked on...