Red Hat developers have been working to improve the performance of multi-threaded workloads on NUMA systems.
Independent commentator Artem S. Tashkinov is back at it again with his latest thoughts on GNU/Linux and its problems in a post entitled "Why Linux/GNU might never succeed on a large scale".
AMD Ryzen continued to be a very popular area of interest by Phoronix readers as did our Linux vs. Windows benchmarks, among other hardware tests in July. Last month on Phoronix your's truly authored 23 featured articles/reviews and 290 news articles.
31 July
With the Radeon RX Vega 56 and Vega 64 shipping in two weeks, here are some benchmarks of the latest Radeon and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers with an assortment of modern GPUs. With these latest Linux GPU results are also the current performance-per-Watt and thermal metrics as recorded automatically via the Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. This Radeon vs. NVIDIA Linux comparison should be particularly interesting given the very good Mesa Git performance results posted yesterday that show RadeonSI performing well beyond the AMDGPU-PRO OpenGL levels.
While covered in our OpenGL 4.6 overview from when the embargo expired this morning on this updated graphics API, the Mesa feature list has been updated to reflect the state of OpenGL 4.6 support.
One month after the Phoronix Test Suite 7.2.1 release, the first development milestone release of Phoronix Test Suite 7.4-Tynset is now available for cross-platform, open-source benchmarking evaluation.
OpenBSD is now the latest BSD switching from GCC to LLVM's Clang C/C++ compiler by default.
Jonas Ã…dahl has announced the newest release of the Wayland protocols collection, Wayland-Protocols 1.10.
A big update is available today of OPNsense, the fork of pfSense that serves as a FreeBSD-based network operating system / firewall.
Adding to the exciting morning about OpenGL 4.6 and the Radeon RX Vega launch is the massive patch series adding NIR support to RadeonSI having been merged to Mesa Git.
While this morning the embargo lifted on the exciting OpenGL 4.6 update, those hoping SIGGRAPH 2017 would bring "Vulkan 1.1" or some big update on that front, that is not the case.
As we have been anticipating for weeks/months, a new formal update to OpenGL has been in the works and it's officially out today. Meet OpenGL 4.6! This is a pretty significant update and internally they had the debate whether to call it OpenGL 5.0, but here we are with OpenGL 4.6 that features Vulkan/SPIR-V extensions and more. The good news is the open-source Mesa drivers aren't too far out from OpenGL 4.6 support, at least RadeonSI and Intel.
The embargo just expired on the Radeon Pro Software Crimson ReLive Edition for Vega Radeon Professional Graphics. There isn't much to share from the Linux driver side, except worth noting that Vega Pro graphics hardware has a "secure processor" onboard.
For NVIDIA Linux users read our OpenGL 4.6 overview if you haven't already and then go forth and download the new experimental driver.
It's been a while since last having anything to report on with the once very popular MythTV HTPC/DVR software, but today it's out with a new stable release: MythTV 29.
Mesa 17.2 will be officially released in one or two weeks, so here's a recap of all the improvements made to this open-source 3D Linux driver stack over the past quarter.
The second release candidate of Mesa 17.2 is now available for testing.
ReactOS, the "open-source Windows" operating system developed by the community, is nearing its next release (v0.4.6) and has out a release candidate.
AMD made for an exciting start to SIGGRAPH 2017 by launching the Vega consumer parts last night.
30 July
Following the Linux and BSD multi-threaded tests on the Intel Core i9 7900X, I next decided to try this system with the Solaris-based OpenIndiana. Sadly, it didn't end well.
AMD's GPUOpen initiative has announced the open-source availability of their ProRender renderer.
Linus Torvalds has just released the Linux 4.13-rc3 kernel as the latest weekly test build.
With this week's release of AMDGPU-PRO 17.30, here are some fresh benchmarks of this latest AMD hybrid Linux graphics driver release compared to using the newest pure open-source driver stack in the form of the Linux 4.13 development kernel and Mesa Git.
Bitrig, the operating system that forked OpenBSD back in 2012, is no longer being developed.
It's finally Vega week where AMD will be launching the long-awaited Radeon RX Vega graphics cards... But what about the Linux driver status?
The Etnaviv open-source driver stack that provides reverse-engineered graphics driver support for Vivante graphics cores is working now not only on conventional Linux distributions but also Android environments.
29 July
Jacob Lifshay, the student developer via GSoC 2017 working on a Vulkan CPU-based implementation to essentially serve as a software renderer that is making use of LLVM, now has working SPIR-V to LLVM IR translation.
Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) has exited beta ahead of its formal debut in Windows 10 Fall Creators Update.
Mesa 17.2 is coming in as one of the largest updates ever to Mesa 3D, at least in terms of code delta.
One of this year's Google Summer of Code projects affecting Mesa is porting its OpenMAX IL Gallium3D state tracker from using Bellagio to Tizonia.
Finalizing Fedora's switch from Python 2 to Python 3 by default is still going to take several more Fedora release cycles and should be done by the 2020 date when Python 2 will be killed off by upstream.
The TrueOS BSD distribution has finished porting over more than one thousand FreeBSD RC scripts into OpenRC format for this dependency-based init system.
28 July
It's not quite ready for primetime yet by Linux gamers, but Piper as the GTK-powered user-interface for controlling gaming mice on Linux is getting into shape.
With Intel's recently-launched Core i9 7900X I have carried out some interesting BSD vs. Linux benchmarks when testing out various distributions and comparing each of them at 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 20 threads on this $999+ USD processor.
Get the popcorn ready as this should be an interesting discussion item: is using Qt QML better than HTML5 when designing user-interfaces?
The official update to LibreOffice 5.4 is now available following a slight delay.
The second alpha release of the "Artful Aardvark" 17.10 is now available for Lubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Budgie, and Ubuntu Kylin.
