Alyssa Rosenzweig who has been leading the charge recently on the open-source Mali T700 GPU driver that was called "Chai" but has been renamed to "Panfrost" is now pursuing a "half-way driver" approach to testing their knowledge of the hardware's command stream...
A few days back we covered the heated exchange on the kernel mailing list over the path being pursued by the Linux kernel "lockdown" patches. Those back and forth messages between Google's Matthew Garrett and Linus Torvalds have now spilled over into a blog post by Garrett...
If you have been a Phoronix reader for any decent amount of time, you have likely seen how well Intel's Clear Linux distribution continues to run in our performance comparisons against other distributions. The developers behind this Linux distribution have begun a new blog series on "behind the magic" for some of the areas they are making use of for maximizing the out-of-the-box Linux performance...
While the Linux 4.17 kernel is getting much larger in some areas like the sizable additions to DRM this cycle, when it comes to the kernel's staging area where new/experimental code gets vetted before being officially mainline, it's lost tens of thousands of lines of code this cycle...
The initial RISC-V architecture support landed in Linux 4.15 and now this open-source, royalty-free processor ISA is seeing further improvements with the Linux 4.17 cycle...
Given the booming popularity of Linux containers, it's little surprise but unfortunate that Linux file-systems are having to protect against specially-crafted file-system images by malicious actors looking to exploit vulnerabilities in the code...
For several days we've had remote access to one of the brand new Raptor Talos II Workstations that is powered by POWER9 processors and open-source down through the firmware. For those curious how these latest POWER processors compare to AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon processors, here are some benchmarks comparing against of the few other systems in house while all testing was done from Debian GNU/Linux.
The latest batch of AMDGPU DC display code patches were posted last night on the mailing list. These 32 patches touching around three thousand lines of code have more fixes and also work on the FreeSync module...
Last week David Airlie sent in the big DRM feature update for Linux 4.17 prior to going on holiday. For those wondering whether there was going to be any drama with the DRM updates increasing the size of the Linux kernel by another one hundred thousand lines of code, in large part due to Vega 12 header additions, Linus pulled it in without any fuss...
With Linux suspend/resume support still sometimes being problematic, it's great to hear Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has a team working on continuing to improve the Linux support for this power-saving functionality...
While there was a lot of hoopla recently about Valve removing the "Steam Machines" link from their main navigation on their website, Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais has written a public post to reaffirm the company's commitment to Linux and SteamOS...
The kernel lockdown feature further restricts access to the kernel by user-space with what can be accessed or modified, including different /dev points, ACPI restrictions, not allowing unsigned modules, and various other restrictions in the name of greater security. Pairing that with UEFI SecureBoot unconditionally is meeting some resistance by Linus Torvalds...
Last month I wrote how Ubuntu 18.04 began enabling "automatic suspend" by default on new installations where after 20 minutes systems were suspending without notice and in some cases still causing issues trying to resume with modern x86 hardware in 2018... Fortunately, Ubuntu developers are reverting that behavior when on AC power...
For those waiting until v18.0.1 before upgrading to the Mesa 18.0 series, Mesa 17.3.8 is now available as the latest release off this stable series from the end of 2017...
Mozilla has today announced Firefox Reality as "a new kind of web browser that has been designed from the ground up to work on stand-alone virtual and augmented reality (or mixed reality) headsets."..
As part of the remote testing of the Raptor Talos II Workstation that is comprised of fully free software down to the firmware and powered by high-end POWER9 processors, over Easter weekend I carried out some GCC vs. Clang benchmarks...
It's been just about twenty-four hours that Linus Torvalds has been accepting new material for the Linux 4.17 mainline kernel and it's looking indeed like it will be another very busy kernel update...
It's roughly once a week that AMD updates their external and public facing AMDVLK/PAL source tree for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver while following last week's significant update with Wayland support and more, they have quickly issued another update to this RADV driver alternative...
Darrick Wong has submitted the XFS file-system updates targeting the Linux 4.17 kernel. It's a bit lighter than 4.15 and 4.16 that brought "great scads of new stuff", but there still is a fair amount of feature work taking place...
Not only is there a new X.Org Server 1.20 release candidate today but the folks managing Wayland/Weston development have today announced the first release candidates of Wayland 1.15 and the Weston 4.0 reference compositor...
As we have covered previously, the annual X.Org Developers Conference (XDC) for 2018 is being organized by the folks at consulting firm Igalia and will be hosted in A Coruña, Spain at the local university. This event is taking place from 26 to 28 September and they have now issued their call for papers...
The PowerBook 100 sub-notebook launched in 1991 with a 16MHz Motorola 68000 processor and up to 8MB of memory. In 2018, the Linux kernel is still receiving fixes/improvements for the PowerBook 100 series...
The folks maintaining the GNU Linux-Libre downstream of the Linux kernel have released their kernel 4.16 release that pulls in yesterday's Linux 4.16 kernel but strips out parts that aren't entirely free software and eliminates support for loading binary-only modules, etc...
The Everspace single-player 3D space shooter game has unofficially been available for Linux the past few months but the official Linux release is finally right around the corner...
Back during GDC when everyone was talking about ray-tracing and Microsoft's DirectX Ray-Tracing API for DX12, but NVIDIA has now confirmed they will be soon releasing ray-tracing extensions for Vulkan. Additionally, the company has now thoroughly gone over their new OptiX API for CUDA-based ray-tracing...
For fans of Latte Dock, the KDE Plasma aligned desktop "dock", is out with a big development release ahead of the Latte Dock 0.8 release that will be coming up soon...
While Linux 4.17 is set to drop support for some older/unmaintained CPU architectures, it looks like it will land at least one new port for Linux 4.17 for the Andes NDS32 CPU architecture...
Either as an elaborate April Fool's Day prank or the start of something more, longtime kernel developer David Howells of Red Hat has posted 45 patches that begin the work on porting the Linux kernel to build under a C++ compiler rather than C...
There are no April Fool's Day surprises on Phoronix, but considering the occasion and the otherwise slow Easter weekend, I figured it would be fun to discuss some of the grandest open-source/Linux letdowns or failures from over the years... Here's a trip back down memory lane for some once promising projects and goals...
With the first quarter of 2018 now in the books, I ran GitStats on the current Mesa code-base as of this morning to see how things are looking for the year to date...