For just over the past year Intel open-source driver developers have been developing a new Gallium3D-based OpenGL driver for Linux systems as the eventual replacement to their long-standing "i965 classic" Mesa driver. The Intel developers are now confident enough in the state of this new driver dubbed Iris that they are looking to merge the driver into mainline Mesa proper.
The Kernel Address Sanitizer (KASAN) that detects dynamic memory errors within the Linux kernel code has just picked up another win with uncovering a use-after-free vulnerability that's been around since the early Linux 2.6 kernels.
If you are passionate about Linux/open-source and experienced with the 3D graphics programming and/or compute shaders, AMD is looking to expand their open-source/Linux driver team by about ten people.
With the GCC 9 compiler due to be officially released as stable in the next month or two, we've been running benchmarks of this near-final state to the GNU Compiler Collection on a diverse range of processors. In recent weeks that has included extensive compiler benchmarks on a dozen x86_64 systems, POWER9 compiler testing on the Talos II, and also the AArch64 compiler performance on recent releases of GCC and LLVM Clang. In this latest installment of our GCC 9 compiler benchmarking is an extensive look at the AMD EPYC Znver1 performance on various releases of the GCC compiler as well as looking at various optimization levels under this new compiler on the Znver1 processor.
Adding to the list of third-party GPU overclocking utilities for Linux is TuxClocker, a Qt5-based user-interface currently with support for NVIDIA graphics cards and experimental support for AMD GPUs.
This week openSUSE Leap 15.1 reached the beta stage for this Linux distribution derived from the same sources as SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP1.
Arm announced today their Neoverse N1 7nm platform catering towards cloud workload performance as well as the Neoverse E1 platform for high-efficiency infrastructure.
Towards the beginning of the month we reported on the Gallium Nine state tracker working on NIR support as an alternative to its original focus on the common TGSI intermediate representation to Gallium3D. That NIR-ified version of Gallium Nine is now working and beginning to run most Direct3D 9 games fine.
The GNOME project has been working on integration with the Matrix federated real-time communication protocol for a while, which can bridge to other platforms like IRC, WhatsApp, XMPP, and Telegram. KDE is also now backing Matrix and will be supporting it by its instant messaging framework.
Intel's open-source ANV Vulkan driver now supports the VK_EXT_depth_clip_enable that was designed in part to help the DXVK project for mapping Direct3D atop of the Vulkan API.
It soon might be easier should you find yourself trying to build Debian packages from a Fedora system.
Mesa 19.0-RC5 was issued a short time ago as the latest release candidate for Mesa 19.0. Due to blocker bugs remaining, at least one more release candidate is likely next week before seeing the official release.
The RadeonSI NIR back-end as an alternative to its longstanding TGSI usage continues to be improved upon as a prerequisite for supporting OpenGL 4.6 with SPIR-V ingestion. A fresh batch of RadeonSI NIR work was merged today, including to enable it by default for one Linux game.
While "OpenCL-Next" will hopefully be on track for releasing later this year as the next big update to OpenCL, OpenCL 2.2-10 was released today by The Khronos Group as the latest maintenance update to the nearly two year old OpenCL 2.2 specification.
Out today are the first alpha releases for Wayland 1.17 and the Weston 6.0 reference compositor. This alpha release is about two weeks behind schedule but the developers have updated their plans to now ship the beta releases on 5 March, release candidates begin on 12 March, and potentially releasing the stable versions of Wayland 1.17.0 and Weston 6.0.0 on 19 March.
Intel developers have begun posting their Linux kernel patches for enabling multi-die/package topology support to the Linux kernel as part of their Cascade Lake AP upbringing.
Following today's Vulkan 1.1.101 release, NVIDIA has debuted a new Vulkan beta driver for Linux (and Windows) users.
Flatpak's Flathub finally supports the notion of application beta releases for application maintainers wanting to offer up early-access/testing versions of applications.
DigiKam 6.0 is now available as the Qt/KDE aligned open-source image organizer and with this new release has full support for video file management too.
While I am a big fan of Intel's Clear Linux distribution for its raw performance on x86_64 hardware that for most workloads goes unsurpassed by any other Linux platform out-of-the-box, there has been a lot of Phoronix readers wondering how well it could function as a standard desktop Linux distribution. With upgrading my main production system earlier this month, I decided to try out Clear Linux and now with 200+ hours into using it as the OS on my main production system, I figured it'd be good to share my initial thoughts.
One of the recent XFS innovations under work and maturing with time has been Copy on Write (CoW) support for this mature Linux file-systems. The XFS CoW support continues to be improved upon and an "always CoW" option is being prepared to always force this behavior.
Version 6.3 of the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) was just recently published by the UEFI Forum and support for this latest ACPI revision is on the way with the Linux 5.1 kernel.
Coming just one week after the Vulkan 1.1.100 release and just days after the Vulkan API celebrated its third birthday, Vulkan 1.1.101 is now available.
The Linux kernel is in the process of receiving support for the HyperBus, a high performance DDR bus interface used for connecting the processor/controller/ASIC to "HyperFlash" flash memory or "HyperRAM" DRAM.
Since November we haven't heard much about Google's effort around FS-VERITY as transparent integrity / authenticity support for read-only files on a writable file-system. Fortunately, the effort didn't stop and new patches are pending for this implementation that complements DM-VERITY.
Ubuntu 17.10 dropped its i386 / 32-bit x86 installer image while the i386 port has remained part of the package archive. Other Ubuntu derivatives over the past year have also moved to drop their 32-bit installer images and with Lubuntu/Xubuntu now ending their ISOs for that port, it's hitting the end of the road. Now for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, there might not even be the i386 port.
Outreachy, the program formerly known as the Outreach Program for Women and intended to get more females and other under-represented groups in technology engaged with Linux/open-source projects, has opened up their application process for those seeking a summer internship while receiving a $5,500 USD stipend.
For those sticking to the Mesa 18.3 series until the Mesa 19.0 release is officially out and sufficiently matured, Mesa 18.3.4 is now available as the latest point release for these open-source 3D drivers.
The plan to use the Wayland-native version of Firefox by default for Fedora Workstation 30 atop GNOME has been tentatively approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo).
Our past tests have shown that while most Linux distributions default to "none" for their I/O scheduler on NVMe solid-state storage, that isn't necessarily the best scheduler decision in all cases. Here are tests using the Linux 5.0 Git kernel using laptop and desktop hardware while evaluating no I/O scheduler, mq-deadline, Kyber, and BFQ scheduler options.
While we have talked about the possibilities of writing a Vulkan Wayland compositor and there was even a short-lived Vulkan renderer for KDE's KWin, it's also possible to write a X11 window manager around the Vulkan interfaces.
While Linux 5.0 isn't even out yet, there are a lot of changes building up for the Linux 5.1 cycle that have us excited.
Besides having a dedicated Intel GPU to look forward to in 2020, the effort around creating an open-source RISC-V architecture based graphics processor continues being spearheaded by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton and other libre hardware developers.
Ben Skeggs, the Nouveau DRM maintainer employed by Red Hat, has sent in the big batch of open-source NVIDIA driver changes slates for the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel.
Linus Torvalds announced the release of the Linux 5.0-rc7 kernel on Sunday night.
Wine developers André Hentschel and Stefan Dösinger have been working on "Hangover" as a means of running Windows x86/x86_64 applications on 64-bit ARM (AArch64) Linux and Android or even Windows for ARM. They are out today with the project's first alpha release.
At the start of the month Intel open-sourced SVT-AV1 aiming for high-performance AV1 video encoding on CPUs. That complemented their existing SVT-HEVC encoder for H.265 content and already SVT-AV1 has been seeing nice performance improvements. Intel now has released SVT-VP9 as a speedy open-source VP9 video encoder.
For those that have been wanting to try out the near-final Sway 1.0, this Wayland compositor has made its way into the Debian archive albeit only in the "experimental" section for now.
If you are in the market for an AMD Ryzen Threadripper or AMD EPYC heatsink that fits within 4U height requirements, the Noctua NH-U9 TR4-SP3 is still easily the best option available. I'm now running the NH-U9 TR4-SP3 in five different EPYC/Threadripper systems in the racks and they work out splendid.
Geary 0.13 is out today as a big step-up for this GNOME e-mail client for the Linux desktop.
Wine 4.2 debuted on Friday and now the latest Wine-Staging release is available that continues carrying hundreds of extra patches re-based atop upstream Wine to provide various experimental/testing fixes and other feature additions not yet ready for mainline Wine.
Sunday mornings mean another weekly recap of the KDE improvements made, thanks to the great analysis by KDE developer Nathan Graham. While Plasma 5.15 was released this week, the KDE developers are already hard at work on KDE Plasma 5.16.
The initial version of the WireGuard open-source secure VPN tunnel is now available for macOS, following the WireGuard for iOS port a few months prior. But sadly on the Linux front, the kernel bits still have yet to be mainlined.
The newest addition to the Freedreno Gallium3D driver for open-source 3D on Qualcomm graphics hardware is enabling OpenGL compute support for A6xx series hardware.
While the Linux kernel has shipped Cgroups V2 as stable since early 2016, on Fedora and most other Linux distributions it hasn't been enabled by default over the original control groups "Cgroups" implementation. But come Fedora 31 later this year, they are now planning to make it the default.
Of the many free software projects under the GNU umbrella, there aren't many games. One of the only titles is GNU FreeDink, which is out this weekend with its newest update after several active weeks of development.
The previously mentioned work on improving ETC2 support for older generations of Intel graphics has now been mainlined for Mesa 19.1.
While Ubuntu may no longer be using Compiz by default as the compositing window manager, the Compiz project is still alive as marked by today's Compiz 0.9.14.0 release.
Debian 9.8 is available this weekend as the latest bug-fix / security fix update to Debian GNU/Linux "Stretch".
Queued for mainlining with the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel cycle is initial support for Bitmain SoCs. Bitmain is the Chinese company that started out designing ASICs for Bitcoin mining with the Antminer and other products. The company has also been venturing into designs for artificial intelligence and deep learning.
The latest addition to AMD's open-source Linux kernel driver is supporting BACO on Vega 12.
A set of 38 patches have been sent out that wire in support for the VK_KHR_shader_float16_int8, VK_AMD_gpu_shader_half_float, VK_AMD_gpu_shader_int16, and VK_KHR_8bit_storage extensions to the RADV driver within Mesa.
With Windows 10 Version 1903 inching closer as the "April 2019" Update, Microsoft published a blog post on Friday night outlining the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) changes they are making in this next installment of the operating system.
While the current Wayland/Weston release cycle is a bit behind schedule, it has allowed time for another addition to be made to the Weston 6.0 compositor.