Phoronix

Purism has been supporting both the GNOME and KDE projects with their mobile ambitions and looking to have both desktop environments feature their wares on the in-development Librem 5 smartphone. But as far as the default user experience/interface goes on the Librem 5, they are leaning towards GNOME...

David Airlie has announced his plans to begin mainlining some early infrastructure work on the "soft" FP64 code into Mesa Git. This doesn't yet allow for soft FP64 on older GPUs lacking the hardware capability to do this otherwise, but will help in another area and can make for easier mainlining of the actual soft FP64 support in the future...

Red Hat developer Hans de Goede has recently been on a mission to improve Linux battery life on Fedora. Now that SATA link power management is better handled and other tweaks, his latest target is on getting Intel's Panel Self Refresh (PSR) support enabled...

As noted when covering the news yesterday of Khronos launching the OpenGL 4.6 Adopters Program, the NVIDIA proprietary driver and Intel's open-source Linux driver are the first OpenGL drivers considered 4.6 compliant. But on the Intel Linux side, the OpenGL 4.6 work has yet to be all upstreamed into Mesa...

Greg Kroah-Hartman's pull request of the char/misc driver work usually isn't too exciting each kernel cycle, but for Linux 4.16 it's definitely on the heavier side with introducing three new subsystems for different hardware busses...

Last July marked the release of MythTV 29 as the latest release of this once super popular Linux DVR/PVR software. Today marks the availability of MythTV 29.1...

Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in pull requests this morning for the various subsystems he oversees for the mainline Linux kernel, including the staging area...

Recently I wrote about Qualcomm's Code Aurora working on Adreno A6xx GPU support and sure enough that has panned out with the initial patch series being posted for this latest-generation Qualcomm GPU architecture...

The KDE Calligra graphics/office suite forked from KOffice is up to version 3.1...

With this morning's debut of the openSUSE Leap 15.0 public beta that is derived from the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 source code, I was curious to check it out and also run some benchmarks. For seeing how the current beta performance is stacking up I ran some benchmarks against openSUSE Leap 42.3, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Clear Linux, and a daily snapshot of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

While the Linux 4.15 kernel introduces AMDGPU DC display code support and is currently enabled just by default for RX Vega GPUs and newer, a lot of work continues going into this new display code stack...

David Miller has presented the set of networking subsystem changes targeting the Linux 4.16 and once again it's on the heavier side...

Back during the Linux 4.15 kernel merge window XFS file-system maintainer Darrick Wong commented there was great scads of new stuff and now with Linux 4.16 he's repeating that line. XFS for Linux 4.16 brings several significant changes to this mature Linux file-system...

Jiri Kosina of SUSE has submitted his feature pull requests today for the Linux 4.16 kernel, including the HID subsystem updates...

The well known FIO benchmark saw a +244% improvement in read bandwidth for one test case as a result of one change to be found in Linux 4.16...

Yesterday I posted some initial benchmarks of Mesa 18.0 on RADV/RadeonSI drivers for AMD GPUs now that feature development is over for this next quarterly installment of Mesa 3D. On the Radeon side there were mostly performance improvements to note with the RADV Vulkan driver, but what about on the Intel side? Today are benchmarks of the Intel i965 OpenGL and ANV Vulkan drivers compared to earlier Mesa releases for seeing how the Intel (U)HD Graphics performance has changed on the Linux desktop.

The Khronos Group today has announced the OpenGL 4.6 Adopters Program with a new open-source conformance test suite (OpenGL CTS) for this latest version of the OpenGL graphics API released last year...

Version 8.1 of the GNU Debugger (GDB) is now available for developers...

Jolla has shared some of their plans for improving Sailfish X, their mobile operating system available for purchase to load on Sony Xperia devices. There are some interesting Sailfish X plans this year with this continuing to be one of Jolla's main focuses...

LibreOffice 6.0 is now officially available!..

The first public beta snapshots have begun for openSUSE Leap 15, the distribution that will be mirroring SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 that is under development for release this summer...

While Clear Linux may be extremely performant as shown in our many benchmarks, its default repository serving "bundles" (their task-based approach to package management) can be a bit light if wanting to use this Intel open-source Linux distribution on the desktop. There has been yum available via a bundle while now next-gen Yum, DNF, is also now available on Clear Linux...

With each Linux kernel cycle the F2FS file-system that has been part of the mainline kernel now for five years, this "Flash-Friendly File-System" gets a bit more mature and featureful...

Andres Rodriguez working for Valve as part of their Linux graphics driver team has begun landing his work around OpenGL semaphores for Mesa/Gallium3D and following through with the necessary bits for RadeonSI with the EXT_semaphore work being needed by SteamVR...

With the RadeonSI NIR back-end continuing to mature with more OpenGL coverage and now supporting GLSL 4.50, I decided to run some tests of Mesa 18.1-dev Git to see the impact when enabling NIR support...

Red Hat's betting big on the container game getting bigger with making public this afternoon their agreement to acquire CoreOS for $250 million USD...

After all the Oracle/Solaris controversies last year, it's good to see Oracle today releasing their first public beta of Solaris 11.4 as an update to the Solaris 11 operating system...

The 64-bit ARM (ARM64 / AArch64) architecture code changes were mailed in a short time ago for the Linux 4.16 kernel and it includes mitigation work for Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities...

A few days ago we found out that at the end of 2017 AMD quietly released their AOCC 1.1 C/C++ compiler. AOCC is AMD's compiler succeeding AMD Open64 that existed years ago as their optimized Fortran/C/C++ compiler for past CPU microarchitectures while the "AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler" is designed for current-generation Zen processors. Here are benchmarks of the new AMD AOCC 1.1 release compared to GCC 7, GCC 8, Clang 5.0, Clang 6.0, and Clang 7.0 SVN.

The Free Software Foundation's largest-ever single contribution came in the form of one million dollars worth of Bitcoin...

The Khronos Group has published their tentative list of sessions behind held at their Developer Day event coinciding with the Game Developers Conference in March...

With Mesa 18.0 now well into its feature freeze and this quarterly update to Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers bringing many new features and improvements as covered in our Mesa 18.0 feature overview here are some benchmarks comparing the Mesa 18.0 RadeonSI/RADV driver performance to the current 17.3 stable series and the older 17.2 series as well.

Herbert Xu has submitted the crypto subsystem updates for the Linux 4.16 kernel. This time around there are a number of ARM/ARM64 related improvements...

Tuhi is a new open-source project started by Red Hat's Peter Hutterer and Benjamin Tissoires to support Wacom SmartPad devices on Linux...

The latest work by Fedora developers on feature work for Fedora 28 is shipping with VA-API 1.0 support for updated capabilities around the Video Acceleration API...

With the in-development Linux 4.16 kernel there is now support for PCID with Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization guests...

The Btrfs file-system updates were mailed in and subsequently pulled today to the mainline tree for the Linux 4.16 kernel merge window...

The open-source game engine developers behind the huge Godot 3.0 update out before the end of January as planned...

The block subsystem updates have now landed in Linus Torvalds' Git tree during the first full day of the Linux 4.16 kernel merge window...

With Linux 4.16 is initial support for the Jailhouse hypervisor to support native Linux guests in non-root cells...

After rolling out the 390.12 beta Linux driver in early January as the first public driver in the 390 series, NVIDIA is ending January by the first 390 stable release: 390.25...

While using Vulkan lowers the CPU utilization compared to OpenGL, in our testing of NVIDIA versus the open-source Radeon drivers we generally have found the red team's drivers to consume more CPU resources. Thus it's good to hear that RADV co-conspirator Bas Nieuwenhuizen is working on reworking how this Radeon Vulkan driver handles pipeline emitting...

After hitting the RC phase a few weeks ago, OPNsense 18.1 has been officially released as the latest version of this pfSense-forked network/router-oriented BSD operating system...

Once again being punctual with their releases, the GNU Linux-libre volunteers managed to release the GNU Linux-libre 4.15-gnu kernel a short time after Linus Torvalds on Sunday released the official Linux 4.15 kernel...

After the page table isolation (K)PTI support was added late in the Linux 4.15 kernel cycle in light of the Meltdown CPU vulnerability, improvements to this code are on the way with Linux 4.16...

It has been more than two years since the release of Ncurses 6.0 as the GNU project for developing terminal-independent text-based user-interfaces while this weekend marked the availability of the big Ncurses 6.1 update...

Emil Velikov announced the release today of Mesa 18.0-RC3 with 50+ changes comprising of many Intel ANV and Radeon RADV Vulkan driver fixes...

Ingo Molnar began sending in his various Git pull requests this morning for targeting the Linux 4.16 kernel merge window, including the scheduler updates...

This weekend I wrote how the AMDKFD discrete GPU support should be in place for the next kernel cycle, Linux 4.17. This is going to allow discrete Radeon GPUs to have ROCm working off the mainline kernel for OpenCL/compute support, but for 4.17 it's unlikely RX Vega GPUs will have compute working...

L2 Code and Data Prioritization (L2 CDP) is a feature of Intel's Resource Director Technology (RDT) that will now be supported with the Linux 4.16 kernel...