The GIMP team has released a new point release today to GIMP 2.10 stable. While the version may not be indicative of significant changes, there are some prominent user-facing improvements with this release.
The Linux 4.19 kernel merge window opened one week ago and there's been a lot of new features and improvements to be merged during this front-half of the merge period. If you are behind on your Phoronix reading, here's a look at the highlights for week one.
This past week we looked at the Windows 10 vs. Linux performance for AMD's just-launched Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX and given the interest from that then ran some Windows Server benchmarks to see if the performance of this 64-thread CPU would be more competitive to Linux. From those Windows vs. Linux tests there has been much speculation that the performance disparity is due to Windows scheduler being less optimized for high core/thread count processors and its NUMA awareness being less vetted than the Linux kernel. For getting a better idea, here are benchmarks of Windows Server 2019 preview versus Ubuntu Linux when testing varying thread/core counts for the AMD Threadripper 2990WX.
Even with KDE's annual Akademy conference happening this past week in Vienna, KDE development has been going strong especially on the usability front. The Kate text editor and the KTextEditor component within KDE Frameworks 5 have been the largest benefactors of recent improvements.
Following our POWER9 Linux benchmarks earlier this year, IBM POWER engineers have continued exploring various areas for optimization within the interesting open-source workloads tested. Another batch of optimizations are pending for various projects.
The RISC-V open-source processor ISA support within the mainline kernel is getting into good shape, just a few releases after this new architecture port was originally added to the Linux Git tree.
There is a lot of new feature work for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) within the Linux 4.19 kernel.
The Linux 4.19 kernel will finally be introducing a GPS subsystem to hopefully better standardize a lot of the Linux GPS drivers that have been out there for years out-of-tree.
With the MSI MEG X399 CREATION that we received as part of the launch package for the Threadripper 2950X and Threadripper 2990WX it includes the XPANDER-AERO that provides 4-way M.2 NVMe SSD slots on a PCI Express x16 card. The XPANDER-AERO is actively cooled and could be passed off as a small form factor graphics card upon a very cursory examination. With this card I've been running tests on four Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSDs in RAID to offer stellar Linux I/O performance. Here are some initial benchmarks using Btrfs.
Following the USB subsystem updates, Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in the kernel's staging area work for the Linux 4.19 merge window.
DevConf.US is happening this weekend in Boston, a Red Hat sponsored event for free and open-source software. Among the interesting talks is Red Hat's Matthias Clasen providing an update on the Fedora Silverblue initiative.
Having wrapped up his latest stable kernel wrangling and the fallout from L1TF/Foreshadow, Greg Kroah-Hartman got around today to sending out the feature pull requests for the kernel subsystems he oversees.
For those that have fond memories of the K Desktop Environment 3, you can still enjoy a KDE3-derived experience in 2018 with the just-released Trinity Desktop R14.0.5.
In addition to AMD releasing AMDGPU-PRO 18.30 on Friday, they also did their usual weekly source push of their newest "AMDVLK" open-source Radeon Vulkan driver code.
With the Adreno 600 series support going into Linux 4.19 for the kernel bits, the user-space OpenGL driver support for the latest-generation Qualcomm graphics has now been merged into Mesa.
Two release candidates of Wayland 1.16 / Weston 5.0 were not originally scheduled, but it's been necessitated due to some pressing issues both with Wayland and its reference compositor.
Greg Kroah-Hartman had a fun Friday night issuing new point releases to the Linux 3.18 / 4.4 / 4.9 / 4.14 / 4.17 / 4.18 kernels only to have to issue new point releases minutes later.
If you are looking to enjoy id Software's RAGE or Doom VFR games this weekend on Linux via Wine, they should be playing nicer with the latest open-source Mesa graphics driver code.
AMDGPU-PRO 18.30 is now available as the long desired update to this official AMD Linux graphics driver package that consists of the driver installation option for both the "all-open" and closed/proprietary driver modules.
After resisting Gallium3D for the past decade with a preference on continuing to maintain their "i965" Mesa classic driver and all they've invested into its compiler stack and more, it seems times are changing as the open-source Intel team has been starting up development of a modern Gallium3D driver.
Due to the summer holidays it's been four weeks since Wine 3.13 but it has now been succeeded by Wine 3.14 as the newest feature release.
While yesterday were the benchmarks showing how Linux games struggle to scale past a few CPU cores/threads, in this article is a look at the scaling performance of various applications/workloads under Linux up to 64 threads using the AMD Threadripper 2990WX. Here's a look at how the Linux performance changes in a variety of applications from one to sixty-four threads with this new HEDT processor.
Canonical's team responsible for continuing to advance the Mir display server has been making good progress this summer on fleshing out some missing functionality.
With the DRM feature work for Linux 4.19 now in the kernel, AMD's stellar open-source driver team has begun staging their work-in-progress changes for the AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager driver for the next kernel cycle.
Just in time for any weekend Linux gamers, a new release of DXVK is available that maps the Direct3D API to Vulkan for allowing faster Windows gaming performance under Wine.
Ubuntu derivative Lubuntu that is now using the LXQt desktop environment has laid out more of their plans to switch over to Wayland rather than the existing X.Org based session.
Following the main DRM features update for Linux 4.19, a secondary pull request has now been submitted that offers up the nine thousand lines of code for bringing up the Adreno 600 series support for supporting the very latest Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs.
The good news is that the open-source AMD graphics team continues working on support for upcoming hardware, but the bad news is that it looks like their VCN video hardware might be a bit more locked down than it is now.
The POWER architecture changes have been submitted for the in-development Linux 4.19 kernel.
It has been a while since ASUS last offered any Linux options for laptops, but they appear to have a new effort underway with Endless OS.
One of the frequent requests/comments stemming from the launch-day Windows 10 vs. Linux benchmarks on the new AMD Threadripper 2990WX were questions about whether this 32-core / 64-thread processor would do better with Windows Server given Microsoft's obvious tuning of that Windows flavor to high core/thread counts... Well, here are some initial figures with Windows Server 2016 and a Windows Server 2019 preview.
Today the quarterly update to the collection of KDE software applications has shipped with its newest features.
ARM has made public an aggressive CPU forward-looking road-map and some performance expectations. ARM is hoping to deliver year-over-year performance improvements of more than 15% through 2020.
On Monday when the launch embargo expired on the Threadripper 2950X and Threadripper 2990WX I hadn't run any gaming benchmarks since, well, most games even on Windows can't scale out to 32 threads let alone 64 threads... Especially on Linux. It's far more practical getting these Threadripper 2 processors if you want to compile with 32 or 64 make jobs -- among many other common multi-threaded Linux workloads -- versus using this $899 or $1799 processor for a Linux gaming system. But if you are curious how Linux games scale with the Threadripper 2950X, here are some benchmark results when testing both AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics.
Last month I wrote about lazy TLB mode improvements on the way to the mainline kernel and this week the changes were indeed merged for the in-development Linux 4.19 kernel.
Linux stable maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman has released new updates across the Linux 4.18, 4.17, 4.14, 4.9, and 4.4 kernel channels to address the recently exposed L1 Terminal Fault "L1TF" / Foreshadow Meltdown-like CPU vulnerability affecting Intel processors.
In a controversial move, the Linux kernel will be pushing the question off to distribution vendors on whether to put trust in CPU hardware random number generators.
Here is a look at some of the smaller features landing in the Linux 4.19 kernel this week in a variety of different subsystems.