It's a busy day in the software and hardware space today as well as a busy week for Oracle with several big releases this week. The latest is the general availability of the long-awaited MySQL 8.0 update.
The embargo on the Ryzen 5 2600X and Ryzen 7 2700X processors has expired now that these Ryzen+ CPUs are beginning to ship today. We can now talk about the Linux support and the initial performance figures for these upgraded Zen desktop CPUs.
Today the Ryzen+ "Pinnacle Ridge" processors begin shipping and we can now share with you the initial performance results for the Ryzen 5 2600X and Ryzen 7 2700X processors. One of the most common questions I've received about these improved Zen processors since showing them off last week was inquiries/hopes about the Linux gaming performance, so those numbers are first up today followed by other Linux benchmark results forthcoming.
The KDE community has announced the release today of KDE Applications 18.04 as the first major update to the open-source KDE application set for 2018.
Yesterday Feral announced that the long-awaited Linux release of Rise of the Tomb Raider would be coming tomorrow and now they have honored that release. Rise of the Tomb Raider is now natively available for Linux and this port is exclusively relying upon the Vulkan graphics API for rendering. Here are our initial benchmarks of Rise of the Tomb Raider on Linux with Radeon GPUs while making use of the Mesa RADV driver.
Croteam today released a trailer for their upcoming game Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass.
AMD's Huang Rui has posted a set of 20 patches providing "GFXOFF" support for the AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager Linux kernel driver.
The usage of LLVM as part of the graphics driver stack continues to be picked up now especially in the Vulkan/SPIR-V world.
Earlier this month with the Vulkan 1.1.72 specification update was the new VK_EXT_descriptor_indexing extension that is quickly being well received by developers.
Intel tonight announced they are open-sourcing their nGraph compiler code, which serves as a framework-neutral deep neural network model compiler.
One of the most common Linux hardware questions I've received dozens of times in the past few weeks alone has been over the support for "RX Vega M" Vega-based graphics processors found on select newer Intel Kabylake CPUs. It appears RadeonSI at least should now support these Radeon graphics on Intel CPUs.
In addition to Mesa 17.3.9 being released today, Mesa 18.0.1 also rolled out the door as the first point release to last quarter's Mesa 18.0 series.
Besides the fresh BSD/Linux disk performance tests, some other tests I ran on various BSDs and Linux distributions this week was looking at the performance impact of Intel Meltdown CPU vulnerability mitigation on each of them, namely the performance impact of using kernel page-table isolation.
The first release candidate of the upcoming Xen 4.11 virtualization hypervisor release is now available.
With the recent release of DragonFlyBSD 5.2 one of the prominent changes is HAMMER2 now being considered stable for most use-cases. I've been running some benchmarks of this file-system compared to alternatives on other operating systems and have some FreeBSD / Linux reference points to share.
We've known openSUSE Leap 15 would arrive this summer now we finally know when exactly it will make its debut.
With the RADV Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver continuing to be advanced by Valve and other independent developers while AMD continues with open-source code drops of their official AMDVLK Vulkan driver, it's been a friendly open-source Radeon Vulkan driver performance and feature/extension battle since that official AMD Vulkan driver was opened up at the end of last year. With new AMDVLK/XGL/PAL code drops happening about weekly and RADV continuing to receive new feature/performance work every few days, both drivers continue maturing gracefully as shown by our latest performance benchmarks.
Feral Interactive has just announced they will be launching Rise of the Tomb Raider for Linux tomorrow, 19 April.
For those still using the Mesa 3D release that debuted in Q4'2017, the Mesa 17.3.9 point release is now available while it's the last planned update for the series.
Google has rolled out Chrome 66 to its stable channel for Linux desktop users as well as other supported desktop/mobile operating systems.
Tuesday was a very busy release day for Oracle folks as in addition to shipping an updated Solaris 11.4 beta and Oracle Linux 7 Update 5, their compiler folks also announced the GraalVM 1.0 virtual machine release.
Four years after the debut of Trisquel 7.0 and a year and a half since the 8.0 Alpha, Trisquel 8.0.0 is now available for this Linux distribution that's endorsed by the Free Software Foundation.
Following last week's release of Wayland 1.15 / Weston 4.0, the development gates are once again open for new feature activity to land for Wayland and the reference Weston compositor. Weston has already landed a big patch series for what will likely become Weston 5.0.
In the three weeks since GIMP 2.10 finally reached the release candidate stage a lot of changes have continued to land and today marks the GIMP 2.10 RC2 availability.
While some at Oracle were busy releasing Oracle Linux 7 Update 5 as their RHEL7 downstream, the remaining Solaris developers were putting out a refreshed public beta spin of Solaris 11.4.
GNOME 3.29.1 was released this afternoon as the first step towards what will eventually become GNOME 3.30 in September.
Last week NVIDIA released their first 396 Linux driver beta that most notably introduces their new "NVVM" Vulkan SPIR-V compiler. Coming out today is a new Vulkan beta update with some continued enhancements.
Just one week after launching Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5, Oracle has released the latest version of their RHEL7-derived Oracle Linux 7. The Oracle Linux 7 Update 5 pulls in the latest *EL7 changes while also offering their "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" option.
Nginx 1.14.0 is now available as the latest open-source stable release of this popular web server alternative to Apache.
With last week's release of Feral GameMode as a system tool to optimize Linux gaming performance, which at this point just toggles the CPU frequency scaling driver's governor to the "performance" mode, reignited the CPU governor debate, here are some fresh Linux gaming benchmarks. Tests were done with both the CPUFreq and P-State scaling drivers on Linux 4.16 while testing the various governor options and using both AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.
Of the many great features/changes for Linux 4.17, one of the most exciting to us is the idle power efficiency and performance-per-Watt improvements on some systems thanks to a rework to the kernel's idle loop handling. Rafael Wysocki and Thomas Ilsche as two of the developers working on this big code change presented on their work today for this CPU idle loop ordering problem and its resolution.
Eric Anholt believes he is getting quite close to the stage of merging the Broadcom VC5 DRM driver into the mainline Linux kernel tree.
The upcoming Qt 5.11 tool-kit release will have generalized ray-casting support within the Qt 3D module.
The upcoming Fedora 28 Linux distribution release is now under its "final freeze" for releasing in the next few weeks.
The 2018 X.Org Board of Directors elections are over with 49 of the 91 X.Org registered members having casted a ballot.
Earlier this month Intel ISA documentation pointed to a new CPU micro-architecture codenamed "Tremont", we've seen a few kernel patches also referencing Intel Tremont, and now there is Tremont microarchitecture support for LLVM's Clang compiler.
While back in 2015 there was Azure Cloud Switch as Microsoft's first foray into having their own Linux distribution that handles networking within their Azure data centers, today they have announced their Azure Sphere product for IoT use-cases and it's powered by Linux.
The Debian release team has put out their latest information concerning the upcoming Debian 10 "Buster" release.
AMD kicked off the start of a new week by doing fresh code drops of the PAL and XGL code-bases used to form the AMDVLK open-source Radeon Vulkan Linux driver.
Texas Instruments is still dealing with Imagination Tech PowerVR SGX GPUs and has now posted an open-source DRI3 WSEGL plug-in for getting this binary blob to work with 3D acceleration under an X.Org Server using Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3.
Vulkan 1.1.73 is out as the latest minor refinement since last month's big Vulkan 1.1 update.
While the Linux 4.17 merge window officially closed yesterday with the release of Linux 4.17-rc1, FUSE maintainer Miklos Szeredi is now trying to get his changes added.
Phoronix Test Suite 8.0 Milestone 3 is now available for evaluation as the latest step towards the official 8.0-Aremark release due out later this quarter.
With Qt 5.11 already due to ship at the end of next month, Qt developers have begun discussing the follow-on Qt 5.12 release to ship in late 2018.
Purism's latest hire to work on the Librem 5 privacy-minded Linux smartphone effort is a UI/UX designer who has long been involved with GNOME.
This year's X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC2018) has already received some big name sponsors.
Just like clockwork the Linux 4.17-rc1 kernel was released tonight following the two week long merge window.
Of the many improvements to be found in the in-development Linux 4.17 kernel -- nicely summarized in our Linux 4.17 feature overview -- one of the features I've been anxious the most to begin benchmarking has been the reported power management improvements. Here are my initial power/performance tests of Linux 4.17 that for some systems is seeing a measurable drop in power usage, even in some cases under load while without sacrificing the performance.
Mesa 18.0.1 is being planned for release on Wednesday as the first stable point release / maintenance update for this quarterly installment to Mesa 3D.
While the Linux 4.17 kernel merge window is closing today and is already carrying a lot of interesting changes as covered by our Linux 4.17 feature overview, Thomas Gleixner today sent in a final round of x86 (K)PTI updates for Meltdown mitigation with this upcoming kernel release.
Besides looking at the HAMMER2 performance in DragonFlyBSD 5.2, another prominent change with this new BSD operating system release is the Spectre and Meltdown mitigations being shipped. In this article are some tests looking at the performance cost of DragonFlyBSD 5.2 for mitigating the Meltdown Intel CPU vulnerability.
Linus Torvalds is expected by the end of the day to release Linux 4.17-rc1, thereby marking the end of the two-week merge window that saw a lot of changes and new features land for Linux 4.17. Here is our original feature overview of the changes to be found in this next major release of the Linux kernel, which should premiere as stable by the middle of June.
A few weeks back we reported on plans for OpenCL C++ support to be mainlined in LLVM's Clang C/C++ compiler front-end and that work is now happening.
At the end of March longtime Mir developer Alan Griffiths of Canonical announced EGMDE, the Mir Desktop Environment as a desktop example implementing Mir/MirAL APIs and supporting Wayland clients. Griffiths has now put out his latest article in guiding interested developers in working with the code.
As part of the AMDVLK/XGL/PAL driver stack is now the WSA library.
Based off Friday's release of Wine 3.6 is now a new Wine-Staging release that is carrying about 930 patches atop the upstream Wine code-base.
KDE Plasma 5.13 will be starting up even faster, focusing more on Wayland improvements, improved monitor hot-plugging, GTK global menu support, and a lot of polishing throughout.