It's been a while since we last ran some GCC PGO benchmarks, the Profile Guided Optimizations or feedback-directed optimization technique that makes use of profiling data at run-time to improve performance of re-compiled binaries. Here are some fresh benchmarks of GCC PGO impact on a Xeon Scalable server while using the newly-released GCC 8.2 release candidate.
The NVIDIA Unix developers have released the 396.45 binary display driver today with just two listed bug-fixes.
Last week Intel sent in a "final" batch of i915 DRM driver feature updates to DRM-Next for the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel cycle but it turns out there is one more batch of changes now focused on landing.
While waiting for the big ROCm 1.9 update, another point release to the ROCm 1.8 series is available for this Radeon Open Compute stack.
GCC 8.2 as the first point release to the stable GCC 8 compiler is tentatively set to debut next Thursday, 26 July, but available now for testing is the release candidate.
Just in case you have your hands still on the Samsung Galaxy S or Galaxy S 4G that were released back in 2010 as once high-end Android smartphones, they have DeviceTree support with the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel cycle.
The Raven Ridge Linux support continues to maturing. The latest on these Zen+Vega APUs using the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver stack should be slightly better performance when using the RADV Vulkan driver.
A rather late self-contained feature proposal for the in-development Fedora 29 is to better support FPGAs.
Linux 4.19 is going to be another exciting kernel on the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) front with a lot of good stuff included while hours ago we finally got a look at what's in store for the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver.
It's been a while since last having any news to report on Freedrenon, the open-source, community-driven Gallium3D driver for providing accelerated 3D support for Qualcomm Adreno graphics hardware. But ahead of the upcoming Mesa 18.2 feature freeze, Freedreno founder Rob Clark has been landing a number of improvements.
The Sway Wayland compositor continues maturing like a fine wine and as it nears the big 1.0 milestone new features continue to be introduced.
Adding to the big batch of feature additions and improvements queuing in DRM-Next for the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel merge window is another round of drm-misc-next improvements.
GNOME 3.29.4 is coming out this week as the latest development release building up to GNOME 3.30 this September. GNOME Shell and Mutter have put out their latest releases for this development milestone.
Epic Games has today rolled out Unreal Engine 4.20 as the latest version of their Linux-friendly, cross-platform game engine while also promoting Unreal Studio 4.20 to beta.
Red Hat's Christian Schaller has provided an update regarding some of the new feature work and improvements that the Red Hat developers have been working on this summer for Fedora Workstation.
The great folks at Red Hat have open-sourced a new security checker that is able to scan compiled Linux x86_64 binaries to look for potential Spectre Variant One vulnerabilities.
With the April release of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on the server front was a brand new, in-house developed server installer created by Canonical to differentiate it from Debian's long-used text installer for the Ubuntu Server images. While it offered a fresh look and some new features, it shipped without many features common to Linux server installers. Fortunately, that is changing with the upcoming Ubuntu Server 18.04.1 release.
While Page Table Isolation (PTI/KPTI) has been available since the Meltdown CPU vulnerability was disclosed at the start of the year, that's been for x86_64 Linux while the x86 32-bit support has remained a work-in-progress and only relatively recently has come together.
The Qt Company has officially released Qt Creator 4.7 as the newest feature release to this open-source, cross-platform Qt/C++ focused integrated development environment.
Since 2016 we have been looking forward to the REAPER digital audio workstation software for Linux while with this week's v5.93 release, the experimental Linux-native builds are now officially available.
Fedora has begun utilizing a user-space jitter entropy daemon for feeding entropy to the kernel at boot time in case not enough is available for the kernel's random needs. But with that approach not being from a true hardware random number generator, a patch worked out by veteran Linux kernel developer Ted Ts'o will mix in RdRand entropy.
Serving as the Mesa 18.2 release manager is Andres Gomez of Igalia. He's now pushed back the release plan by two weeks, although Mesa 18.2.0 still should end up shipping in August.
The Linux 4.19 kernel will be introducing a new "raspberrypi-hwmon" driver capable of reporting under-voltage conditions for Raspberry Pi boards.
While the kernel configuration is just one part of Intel's Clear Linux optimizations for their performance-oriented distribution, a Fedora user has taken the liberty of spinning a Fedora kernel build based upon Clear Linux's kernel configuration.
Back in April 2017 was the announcement that System76 would begin designing and manufacturing their own systems beginning with desktops and to be followed at a later date by their own laptops, rather than relying upon whitebox designs that they currently retail with their Ubuntu/Pop!_OS-loaded PCs. The Colorado-based company is inching closer to fully realizing their goal.
In addition to sending down a new SRU for Solaris 11.3, the Oracle developers left maintaining Solaris have issued their second beta of the upcoming Solaris 11.4.
While Linux hardware support for desktop PCs has advanced a great deal over the years, one area that continues to struggle is support for fan/thermal/power sensors on many of today's motherboards. This area has struggled with not enough public documentation / data-sheets from ASIC vendors as well as not enough upstream Linux kernel developers being interested in the hwmon subsystem. The IT87 Linux driver for many common Super I/O chips found on countless motherboards is unfortunately facing a downfall.
The public draft of the OpenMP 5.0 SMP programming standard is now available for review ahead of the specification's expected stable release before the end of 2018.
While Solaris 11.4 is still in the oven being baked at Oracle, the thirty-fourth stable release update of Solaris 11.3 is now available.
Recently I have published benchmarks looking at Windows Server and FreeBSD against eight Linux distributions as well as a 9-way Linux desktop OS benchmark comparison while the latest in this string of fresh Linux distribution benchmarks is looking at the Linux laptop performance impact, if any, between these operating systems. Up for this benchmarking dance was Microsoft Windows 10, Windows 10 when running Ubuntu 18.04 via WSL, Ubuntu 18.04 itself, Fedora Workstation 28, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Clear Linux.
A SUSE developer is seeking feedback and interest on the possibility of allowing a scripting language -- most likely Python -- to be used within the GCC compiler code-base. This would primarily be used for replacing existing AWK scripts.
Another one of the new frameworks slated for the Linux 4.19 kernel cycle kicking off in August is for idle injection.
The latest AMDGPU firmware/microcode binary images for Radeon GPUs have landed in the Linux-Firmware Git tree.
There's already a new framework coming to Linux 4.19 in the form of Google's Gasket while queued this week is now another new framework: the FPGA Device Feature List.
While Ubuntu and most of its derivatives have stopped producing 32-bit x86 images with the number of devices out there dwindling that can't run x86_64, Lubuntu is among the few still offering i686 images to help those who may be running on outdated hardware but still interested in running the latest Linux software.
Landing yesterday in Glibc for Intel's Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) were the instructions for Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) and Shadow Stack (SHSTK).
Purism has offered a status update on their software/hardware efforts around the Librem 5 smart-phone they have been working on that is security-minded, open-source, and that they plan to begin shipping in January of 2019.
NVIDIA released today the 390.77 Linux driver, the latest in the 390 "long-lived" driver branch, for those not using the short-lived 396 bleeding-edge driver series.
There had been plans drafted to finish dropping Yum 3 in Fedora now that DNF is quite mature as the next-generation package manager, but that isn't happening now until at least Fedora 30.
Igalia developers have been very involved with the Intel open-source developers on getting the long-awaited OpenGL 4.6 support into the "i965" Mesa driver. As has been the case for a while, out-of-tree patches can allow this to happen but with the Mesa 18.2 branching soon, it doesn't look like this will materialize ahead of this next release.
One of the exciting additions to look forward to with the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel cycle is the virtual "VKMS" kernel mode-setting driver. The driver is still a work-in-progress, but multiple developers are working on it.
ReactOS 0.4.9 release candidates have been available for weeks while now the official v0.4.9 release images are now spun.
The GCC 8 compiler brought the Synopsys ARC CPU target while for the GCC 9 release is going to be support for the company's HS4x processors.
While the RadeonSI and Intel i965 Mesa drivers have been at OpenGL 4.5 compliance for a while now, the Nouveau "NVC0" Gallium3D driver has been bound to OpenGL 4.3 officially.
While GTK4 likely isn't coming out until next spring, the Nautilus file manager port to this updated tool-kit is well underway.
Taking place last month at Berlin's C-Base was the sixteenth Linux Audio Conference. The 2018 Linux Audio Conference focused on everything from different open-source sound projects to different multimedia tools and more.
The fifth weekly release candidate for the Linux 4.18 kernel is now available for testing.
Latte Dock 0.8 is now available as the latest feature update for this open-source, KDE-aligned desktop dock.
The Catfish search utility now officially lives under the Xfce umbrella.
Alfred Chen announced this week the release of PDS-mq 0.98s, his latest patch-set of this CPU scheduler against the Linux 4.17 upstream code-base and includes minor optimization work and bug fixes.
Longtime Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst who joined Red Hat several months ago has been working on Nouveau NIR support as stepping towards SPIR-V/compute support and this summer the work very much remains an active target.
Following the news about VP9 and AV1 having more room to improve particularly for alternative architectures like POWER and ARM, a Phoronix reader pointed out an effort that Mozilla is behind on developing the "rav1e" encoder.
Presented at this past week's 2018 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC18) was TxFS, the Texas Transactional File System for Linux.