Phoronix

After sitting in Bionic-Proposed the past week, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS has officially moved from the Artful Aardvark's Linux 4.13 kernel to now running on Linux 4.15...

I was surprised to learn that up until this week, Mir's initial Wayland support didn't allow for windows of Wayland clients to be moved around the screen...

Igalia's Jose Maria Casanova Crespo sent out a set of patches today for fixes that allow for the enabling of the VK_KHR_16bit_storage extension within Intel's ANV Vulkan driver...

Now that the dust is beginning to settle around the Meltdown and Spectre mitigation techniques on the major operating systems, in the weeks and months ahead we are likely to see more performance optimizations come to help offset the performance penalties incurred by mitigations like kernel page table isolation (KPTI) and Retpolines. This week a new patch series was published that may help with KPTI performance...

A year and a half ago I wrote about a start-up working on dynamically-tuned, self-optimizing Linux servers. That company is now known as Concertio and they just launched their "AI powered" toolkit for IT administrators and performance engineers to optimize their server performance...

Nix 2.0 is now available as the latest major update to this functional package manager most commonly associated with the NixOS Linux distribution...

Purism has released updated Coreboot images for their Librem 13 v2 and Librem 15 v3 laptops...

Back in December was our most recent round of Windows Subsystem for Linux benchmarking with Windows 10 while since then both Linux and Windows have received new stable updates, most notably for mitigating the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities. For your viewing pleasure today are some fresh benchmarks looking at the Windows 10 WSL performance against Linux using the latest updates as of this week while also running some comparison tests too against Docker on Windows and Oracle VM VirtualBox.

It's been a busy past week for open-source GPU compute with Intel opening up their new NEO OpenCL stack, Karol Herbst at Red Hat posting the latest on Nouveau NIR support for SPIR-V compute, and now longtime Nouveau contributor Pierre Moreau has presented his latest for SPIR-V Clover support...

Besides bringing Ubuntu Touch to new mobile devices, the UBports team has also managed to continue their community-driven work on advancing the Unity 8 convergence desktop after Canonical abandoned work on it last year. They now have Unity 8 working on top of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS...

NVIDIA developer Thierry Reding on Wednesday posted a series of patches for providing NVIDIA Tegra support in Mesa in conjunction with the Nouveau DRM driver...

Tuukka Turunen of The Qt Company has shared some of the company's plans for the Qt toolkit in 2018. There is a lot ahead for this open-source, cross-platform toolkit in 2018 with another long-term support release later this year, new Qt Python bindings, a safety-critical renderer and more...

Intel's next-generation Cannonlake processors with "Gen 10" graphics will be considered good to go with the next kernel cycle, Linux 4.17. The alpha/preliminary hardware support flag is being removed for these CPUs expected later this year...

If you happen to have laying around a Moto G Gen 2 (Moto G 2014) device, it can have a second-life now running UBPorts' Ubuntu Touch software stack...

If you are making use of the Mesa 17.3 releases, have you found them to be buggier than normal for this open-source 3D graphics driver stack? There remains a higher than average amount of bugs still outstanding that have plagued Mesa 17.3, even with being up to 17.3.5...

Wine-Staging has been a flavor of Wine popular with Linux gamers for often carrying bleeding-edge patches and other experimental work prior to being mainlined. But over two months ago, Wine-Staging went silent without any further updates. A few days ago the original maintainers announced they parted ways with the work due to lack of time and would not be issuing any new releases. Now there are new developers taking over...

A few days back FreeBSD 11 stable was mitigated for Meltdown (and Spectre vulnerabilities), which came more than one month after these nasty CPU vulnerabilities were disclosed while DragonFlyBSD was quickly mitigated and the first of the BSDs to do so. While OpenBSD is known for its security features and focus, only today did it land its initial Meltdown mitigation...

For those curious about the state of Intel's open-source Mesa OpenGL driver relative to the company's closed-source Windows OpenGL driver, here are some fresh benchmark results when making use of an Intel Core i7 8700K "Coffee Lake" processor with UHD Graphics 630 and testing from Windows 10 Pro x64 against Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS, Ubuntu with the Linux 4.16 Git kernel and Mesa 18.1-dev, and then Intel's own Clear Linux distribution.

While we all know that APUs crave as fast as system memory as possible, with DDR4 memory kits these days easily costing more than the Ryzen 3 2200G and even the Ryzen 5 2400G, here are some reference results when testing the Ryzen 5 2400G under Linux with memory speeds from DDR4-2133MHz to DDR4-3600MHz...

The Mesa-based open-source "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver has new patches pending for AMD_gcn_shader support...

Last year we covered the work on the project "Chai" as an open-source, reverse-engineered driver for Mali T700 series. After a hiatus, the lead developer is back working on the project...

Longtime Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst joined Red Hat at the end of last year where his current task is on NIR intermediate representation support for Nouveau as part of bringing SPIR-V compute support to this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver...

Google's "Auto Ads" now make use of machine learning for the placement and selection of ads on the site...

While Python 3 has been around now for a decade, most Linux distributions are still working towards moving away from Python 2 and that includes Intel's Clear Linux distribution...

AMD is taking their Zen microarchitecture to the embedded space now with the announcement of the AMD Launches EPYC Embedded 3000 and Ryzen Embedded V1000 series...

For Mesa 18.0 is the initial Intel shader cache support for archiving compiled GLSL shaders on-disk to speed up the load times of subsequent game loads and other benefits. For the Mesa 18.0 release the functionality isn't enabled by default but it will be for Mesa 18.1...

Besides x86_64, we have seen Spectre mitigation work happen recently for ARM, POWER, and IBM s390, but no prominent MIPS activity to report until now...

With the recent release of Godot 3.0 there is an OpenVR module, but that's just the beginning of this open-source 3D game engine in supporting virtual reality...

Xorgproto debuted earlier this month as a centralized package of all X.Org protocol headers that used to be versioned and developed independently. Given the slower development now of the xorg-server and lots of the protocols being intertwined, they are now all bundled together. Tuesday marked the 2018.3 release with the new additions for Keith Packard's SteamVR Linux infrastructure work...

Right now to make most use of the Steam Controller on Linux you need to be using the Steam client while there have been independent user-space programs like SC-Controller to enable Steam Controller functionality without the Steam client running. A new and independent effort is a Linux kernel driver for the Steam Controller...

Last year Canonical announced work on a new text-based server installer for Ubuntu. It's come a long way over the past year and will be the default server installer with 18.04 LTS...

While the newly-released Raven Ridge APUs could make for nice HTPC systems given the number of compatible mini-ITX/micro-ATX motherboards and these 65 Watt APUs offering Zen CPU cores with Vega graphics, besides the current problematic Raven Ridge graphics support, there are still some broader AMDGPU DC audio problems for newer graphics cards...

There is an experimental branch of KDE's KWin window manager / compositor with support for Vulkan compositing...

Roderick Colenbrander's Wine-Vulkan work for Vulkan infrastructure support under Wine has been updated and is ready for review, making these initial bits a candidate for soon being incorporated into mainline Wine...

The Performance Co-Pilot open-source cross-platform monitoring/visualizing stack has reached version 4.0 as its first major version hike in almost ten years...

Given the recent performance changes following the Spectre/Meltdown CPU vulnerability mitigation and having just wrapped up some fresh CPU bare metal benchmarks as part of that testing as well as the recent AMD Raven Ridge launch, I've carried out a fresh round this week of benchmarks on various Amazon EC2 on-demand instance types compared to a number of bare metal Intel and AMD processors in looking at how the compute performance compares.

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve has worked through the last of the Dawn of War 3 issues for Radeon Vega GPUs with the RADV Vulkan driver...

While waiting to see what Khronos could have in store for GDC 2018 next month around Vulkan, today marks the Vulkan 1.0.69 point release availability...

Hitting right on time even when the branching was running one week late is the first alpha release for the upcoming Qt 5.11 tool-kit update...

Earlier this month Valve Linux GPU driver developer Timothy Arceri landed NIR shader caching support within the Gallium3D Mesa state tracker as an alternative to the existing TGSI IR caching support. Arceri has now worked through implementing this NIR cache support for the RadeonSI driver...

For those still interested in Jolla's Linux-based but locked down Sailfish mobile operating system, the Sailfish OS 2.1.4 release is now available to early access users...

While Mesa 17.3.4 was just released a few days ago with 90+ changes, Mesa 17.3.5 is now available as a quick follow-up release due to a serious bug...

Here are some preliminary benchmarks of the Linux 4.16 development kernel compared to Linux 4.15 stable on five different systems.

SuiteCRM 7.10 is now available as the latest major feature release to this customer relationship management (CRM) software forked from SugarCRM's last open-source release...

One of the discussion items in the forums this week was about the video memory allowance for the Vega graphics on Raven Ridge APUs as well as efficiences or inefficiencies around the TTM memory manager as used by the AMDGPU kernel driver. Here are some vRAM size tests with the Ryzen 3 2200G...

After announcing last week that they are bringing Rise of the Tomb Raider to Linux, Feral Interactive announced this morning they are also bringing A Total War Saga: THRONES OF BRITANNIA to Linux...

With my launch testing of the Raven Ridge desktop APUs with the Ryzen 5 2400G and Ryzen 3 2200G there were some stability issues to report and some hangs within games and mode-setting issues. It appears those issues are exacerbated with some motherboards: the past few days with two different AMD B350 motherboards have been a real pain getting the current AMDGPU driver stack working -- and even Linux 4.17 AMDGPU WIP code -- on either of these Raven Ridge APUs...

Linus Torvalds has announced the second weekly release candidate of the in-development Linux 4.16 kernel...

It's now possible to use the graphics/drm-next-kmod port on FreeBSD 11 stable...

While Canonical is no longer involved in Unity 8 development, the community-driven UBports team continues working on their "Unity 8" and "Ubuntu Touch" efforts with a hope to deliver a developer ISO soon...