Phoronix

Linux 4.15 is shaping up to be a massive kernel release and we are just half-way through its merge window period. But for AMD Linux users especially, the 4.15 kernel release is going to be rocking...

Intel is planning to end "legacy BIOS" support in their new platforms by 2020 in requiring UEFI Class 3 or higher...

The platform-drivers-x86 updates have been sent in for Linux 4.15 and include a range of improvements for Intel hardware support. One of the bigger items is support for Skylake CPUs with Turbo Boost Max 3.0...

GNU Nano 2.9 is now available as the latest feature release of this popular CLI text editor and it's bringing several new capabilities...

Our latest Linux file-system benchmarking is looking at the performance of the mainline Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS file-systems on the Linux 4.14 kernel compared to 4.13 and 4.12.

It's been one year and a few days when last researching a status update on "Project Darling" for running macOS/OSX applications on Linux. While the project hasn't been generating too much buzz this year, it still is being developed...

With our review this week of the Intel Optane SSD 900P 280GB U.2 SSD there was a discussion in the forums about using U.2 SSDs in desktop systems, etc. If your system doesn't have a U.2 slot, an adapter like the Funtin SFF-8639 makes it easy to pop the SSD into a PCI-E x4 slot...

There are a ton of exciting improvements building up in Linux 4.15, but not too much on the virtualization front...

HHVM 3.23 has been released as their high performance virtual machine for powering their Hack programming language and current PHP support...

The Freedreno Gallium3D driver that provides reverse-engineered OpenGL support for Qualcomm Adreno graphics processors is able to handle quite a bit of OpenGL 4...

We are just through week one of two for the Linux 4.15 merge window followed by eight or so weeks after that before this next kernel is officially released. But Intel's open-source driver developers have already begun building up a growing stack of changes for Linux 4.16 when it comes to their DRM graphics driver...

Linus Torvalds has accepted the AMDGPU DC display code pull request for the Linux 4.15 kernel. AMD Linux users can now rejoice!..

It's an exciting day for open-source Radeon Linux users today as besides the AMDGPU DC pull request (albeit still unmerged as of writing), Radeon VCN encoding support has landed in Mesa Git...

Intel's Maarten Lankhorst has sent out what could be the final patches for enabling "fastboot" support by default within their DRM graphics driver...

A change recently in the Linux kernel led the CPU MHz reported value via /proc/cpuinfo to either be the nominal CPU frequency or the most recently requested frequency. This behavior changed compared to pre-4.13 kernels while now it's been fixed up to report the current CPU frequency...

Earlier this week I presented out initial Linux benchmarks of the Intel Optane 900P SSD with this 3D XPoint memory U.2 solid-state drive delivering incredible performance figures. Those tests were done with EXT4 while in this article are more tests with other mainline Linux file-systems and also testing some of the different mount options.

The developers behind the Pale Moon web-browser that's been a long standing fork of Firefox have rolled out their first public beta release of their new "Basilisk" browser technology...

The beta of KDE Applications 17.12 is now available ahead of next month's official debut for this quarterly update to the collection of official KDE programs...

In our benchmarks of Windows Subsystem for Linux that allows a Linux environment to run atop Windows 10 via this new WSL kernel subsystem, the performance overall has overall been very good and often performing better than virtualized options. But the main area of poor performance is I/O, except now it's being worked on by Microsoft for greater improvements...

One day after submitting the main DRM feature pull request for Linux 4.15, David Airlie of Red Hat has submitted the secondary pull request that would feature the long-awaited introduction of AMDGPU DC into the mainline kernel...

While Intel Coffee Lake hardware is shipping already, a few bits of tardy kernel code for these "8th Gen Core" CPUs is only hitting the Linux 4.15 kernel. The Intel DRM driver is most notably enabling Coffee Lake graphics by default in 4.15, but there's also some thermal code now landing among other changes now happening...

Frequent Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver contributor Karol Herbst has posted his latest patch series in working towards GeForce GTX 900 "Maxwell 2" graphics processor re-clocking...

As a follow-up to OpenGL 4.2 Support Could Soon Land For AMD Cayman GPUs On R600g, the patches have landed in Mesa 17.4-dev Git! Plus other R600g patches are on the mailing list for review...

More ARM platform upstreaming has taken place for the Linux 4.15 kernel development cycle among other ARM hardware improvements...

Red Hat's Hans de Goede is spearheading an effort to improve the Fedora battery life of laptops -- and should conserve power too for desktops running Fedora Workstation -- for the current Fedora 28 cycle...

Adding to the growing list of changes for GNOME 3.28 are improvements to the Calendar and To Do applications by Georges Stavracas...

While waiting on David Airlie to send in the AMDGPU DC pull request for Linux 4.15, additional AMDGPU DC material continues building up for what should in turn target Linux 4.16...

Intel deprecated Cilk Plus multi-threading support with GCC 7 and now for GCC 8 they are looking to abandon this support entirely...

GhostBSD 11.1 is now available as the BSD operating system derived from FreeBSD 11.1 while catering to Xfce and MATE desktop experiences...

At the start of the month the Intel i965 Mesa driver finally landed its on-disk shader cache, months after the GLSL on-disk shader cache originally landed in core Mesa and wired up for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. While you can't play too many shader-heavy games with current Intel integrated graphics, this GLSL shader cache within Mesa 17.4-dev Git is working well for speeding up load times and does provide some frame-rate benefits in games dynamically loading shaders.

In what appears to be research for potential use within in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems, Bosch in conjunction with other organizations has been developing a 3D window manager that's built atop Wayland/Weston...

The media subsystem updates have been submitted for Linux 4.15 and continues the recent theme of HDMI CEC "Consumer Electronics Control" upbringing within the mainline kernel...

The libata subsystem changes these days tend to not be too interesting, but for Linux 4.15 there is a noteworthy power management change...

There's been a seven year old bug report about enabling OpenGL accelerated layers by default on Firefox for Linux on at least some supported hardware, but Mozilla still doesn't have any plans to do so...

There are a lot of PCI changes that have built up for the Linux 4.15 kernel cycle...

Intel developers have seen their MESA_program_binary_formats extension added to the official OpenGL registry...

The F2FS file-system changes have been submitted for the Linux 4.15 kernel merge window...

Overnight the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) display/graphics driver updates were sent out and ultimately pulled into the mainline kernel for Linux 4.15. This doesn't yet include though the separate AMDGPU DC pull request...

As covered back during XDC2017, Valve and LunarG have been working on more extensive testing of Mesa to catch regressions and meticulously spot any performance changes as they occur. That framework is now publicly available to see the results and for developers allows tracking their own Mesa development branches...

The networking feature updates have landed for the Linux 4.15 merge window...

Alex Deucher of AMD has submitted a set of last minute fixes for the AMDGPU DC code that's expected to be sent this week as a pull request for the Linux 4.15 kernel...

At the end of October Intel released the Optane 900P solid-state drive as their new ultra high-end performance SSD. Windows reviews have been positive, but what about using the Optane 900P on Linux? It's working well and delivers stunning NVMe SSD performance.

Spanish development outfit Igalia has posted their initial work on wiring up the OpenGL 4.6 ARB_gl_spirv and ARB_spirv_extensions into core Mesa and the i965 OpenGL driver...

The Crunch texture compression library developed by former Valve Linux/OpenGL engineer Rich Geldreich who cofounded the Binomial consulting firm is making much progress with showing off impressive compression capabilities for game engines...

GNOME 3.27.2 is now available as the second development release in the road to next March's GNOME 3.28 desktop stable update...

While it was only months ago that Canonical let go of several Mir developers at the same time as other staff reductions for the Unity team and different areas as the company changed their focus, they are now looking for new Mir hires...

The HID and input pull requests have been submitted for the Linux 4.15 kernel merge window...

Epiphany 3.27.2 is now available as the latest web browser release in the road to next year's GNOME 3.28 desktop...

QEMU 2.11-RC1 is available for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

Eric Anholt at Broadcom has continued his spree of bringing up the next-gen VC5 Linux graphics driver stack while also continuing to maintain and improve upon the VC4 driver most commonly associated as being the open-source GPU driver option for the Raspberry Pi...