For Ubuntu users running the Chromium web browser and wanting to enjoy better video acceleration with Gallium3D or Intel hardware, there is now a Chromium Snap for testing that features VA-API video acceleration support for GPU-based decoding.
Should you be assembling a recording studio or have another purpose for some high-end audio kit, the RME Fireface UCX is the latest sound device seeing support in the upstream Linux kernel.
With each new Fedora release you can pretty much be guaranteed it will be using the latest and greatest releases of the GNOME desktop, the most recent stable kernel, and it's also been very punctual in switching over to new major releases of the GCC compiler -- generally being the first of the major Linux distributions adopting the annual major GNU compiler releases. With Fedora 30 due out in May, it should ship with GCC 9.1 as would be standard practice. It's not guaranteed though as FESCo hasn't signed off on it with this change request coming in past the deadline.
CVE-2016-10739 has been around since April 2016 as implied by the number and finally today this security issue has been fixed in the Git development code for the upcoming Glibc 2.29 GNU C Library.
For those trying to understand their system's performance on a macro level will enjoy a new feature being introduced with Phoronix Test Suite 8.6-Spydeberg for seeing how your CPU/system/GPU/storage/network performance compares at scale to the massive data sets amassed by OpenBenchmarking.org and the Phoronix Test Suite over the past decade.
Adding to the growing Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) ecosystem alongside Ubuntu, openSUSE, Debian, and others is now Fedora Remix. But this spin of Fedora catered for WSL isn't free and not officially sanctioned or supported by Red Hat nor the Fedora project.
With Mesa 19.0 entering its feature freeze before the month is through, here are fresh benchmarks of the very latest RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan performance on Polaris and Vega graphics cards compared to the current stable Mesa 18.3 series and the former 18.2 release. This testing is complementary to last week's Mesa 19.0 RADV vs. AMDVLK vs. AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan tests.
The first release candidate is now available for testing of the OPNsense 19.1 FreeBSD-based firewall operating system forked from m0n0wall when it closed up shop four years ago.
With the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel cycle, discrete Radeon graphics cards based on Vega 10 and newer will have fine-grained controls over what PowerPlay power management features are enabled and the ability to toggle them at run-time.
While Wayland was designed on and for Linux systems, the BSD support for Wayland and the various compositors has continued improving particularly over the past year or so but it's still a lengthy journey.
The big Wine 4.0 release will be out in just a few days while Wine-Staging 4.0 is following close behind for those wanting a bit more exciting and bleeding-edge experience.
Earlier this month was word that Fedora developers were looking at packaging Radeon Open Compute (ROCm) to make it easier for their distribution users to enjoy this open-source Radeon GPU computing software from OpenCL to a TensorFlow port. Some of the early packages of ROCm are now under review for Fedora.
Within the networking subsystem of the Linux kernel one of the changes we are most looking forward to hopefully seeing for Linux 5.1 would be the long-awaited WireGuard, but another interesting feature was queued this past week into net-next.
Linus Torvalds has released the third weekly release candidate for the upcoming Linux 5.0 kernel release.
Z-Wave is the incredibly common wireless communication protocol at the backbone of many home automation systems. To date there hasn't been any in-kernel Z-Wave Linux kernel drivers for this low-energy mesh network standard, but a SUSE developer has prototyped an initial driver and currently exploring the in-kernel possibilities, including what could end up being a Z-Wave subsystem.
The new "Timer Events Oriented" (TEO) governor in development over recent months by Intel developer Rafael Wysocki is poised to land with the Linux 5.1 kernel cycle.
Klibc has seen some new activity recently and that has resulted in the first new release to this minimal standard C library subset in a half-decade.
When it comes to being able to run OpenCL kernels on CPUs, the main option at this point for Linux systems is POCL as the Portable Computing Language. While POCL 1.2 was released just this past September, we're still very much looking forward to the upcoming POCL 1.3 release with more improvements for this portable OpenCL 1.2~2.0 implementation.
Two weeks since the initial Phoronix Test Suite 8.6 development release, the second milestone release is now available for your open-source, cross-platform benchmarking evaluation.
Thanks to a new dedicated protocol for KWayland/KWin around virtual desktops, that support is finally in place. This stems from a two and a half year old bug report for said support.
Longtime Wayland developer Derek Foreman is working on coordinating the next release of the Weston reference compositor. Here are those early details and his hope to ship this next feature release in March.
With the Linux 5.1 kernel cycle that should get underway in just over one month's time, there will now be the long in development work (it's been through 15+ rounds of public code review!) for supporting atomic replace and cumulative patches.
Libhandy is the library backed by Purism for use on their Librem 5 among other potential use-cases for allowing adaptive GTK+ widgets depending upon screen real estate. It's still a ways out from version 1.0, but libhandy 0.0.7 was released this weekend as the latest achievement.
With yesterday's release of Wine 4.0-RC7, the regression/bug count is low enough and the situation looking good that the stable Wine 4.0.0 release should be tagged in the next few days.
When recently publishing the PlaidML deep learning benchmarks and lczero chess neural network OpenCL tests, some Phoronix readers mentioned they were seeing vastly different results with using the PAL OpenCL driver in AMDGPU-PRO (Radeon Software) compared to using the ROCm compute stack. So for seeing how those two separate AMD OpenCL drivers compare, here are some benchmark results with a Vega GPU while testing ROCm 2.0 and AMDGPU-PRO 18.50.
A new release of the GNU Binutils programming tools will soon be available. The upcoming Binutils 2.32 release is primarily made up of new CPU ports.
Timothy Arceri of Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team has landed patches in Mesa 19.0 that drastically reduce the amount of system memory used when firing up the Team Fortress 2 game.
XGI Tech, the nearly two decade old spin off from SiS that was short-lived and once aimed to be a competitor to ATI and NVIDIA, still has a Linux driver within the mainline kernel. But this frame-buffer driver is slated to soon be removed.
GStreamer 1.15.1 was announced on Friday as the first development release in the trek towards GStreamer 1.16 for this powerful open-source multimedia framework.
The developers behind Godot, one of the leading open-source game engines, have announced their second beta release for the upcoming Godot 3.1 feature release.
The NetBSD project has been making good progress in utilizing the LLVM compiler stack not only for the Clang C/C++ compiler but also for the different sanitizers, the libc++ standard library for C++, and other improvements most of which are working their way into the upstream code-bases. One area of NetBSD's LLVM support being explored most recently is using the LLD linker.
Wine 4.0 should be officially out soon, but this weekend the latest test release of it is Release Candidate 7 that brings more than one dozen fixes.
The Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver for Linux systems has picked up two more extensions ahead of the Mesa 19.0 feature freeze that is coming up before month's end.
Making the news rounds a few months back was "WLinux", which was the first Linux distribution designed for Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) on Windows 10. But is this pay-to-play Linux distribution any faster than the likes of Ubuntu, openSUSE, and Debian already available from the Microsoft Store? Here are some benchmarks of these different Linux distribution options with WSL.
The AMDGPU Linux kernel driver for a while has now offered command-line-driven OverDrive overclocking for recent generations of Radeon GPUs. This has allowed manipulating the core and memory clock speeds as well as tweaking the voltage but has not supported increasing the TDP limit of the graphics card: that's in place with Linux 4.20
Among the many Linux 5.0 kernel features is initial open-source NVIDIA driver support for the latest-generation Turing graphics processors. Missed out on during the Linux 5.0 merge window was "TU102" support but now that is coming down as a fix for the 5.0 kernel.
One of the GCC compiler features unfortunately not taken advantage of by most Linux distributions is FMV - Function Multi-Versioning. FMV is what allows for the compilation of different tuned code paths depending upon the processor and for the particular code-path to be chosen at run-time, i.e. optimizing to your heart's content with AVX, SSE4, and other instruction set extensions and compiling all of that into a single binary and for the preferred code path to be taken depending upon the CPU running the binary so it will still run on older CPUs as well as today's most powerful processors.
For those Linux gamers with a NVIDIA RTX "Turing" graphics card, there's finally an interesting open-source workload to enjoy that makes use of the RTX hardware and NVIDIA's VK_NV_ray_tracing extension... A real-time path tracing port of the legendary Quake 2 game.
Next month MoltenVK will celebrate one year since being open-sourced for allowing the Vulkan API to function on Apple's macOS/iOS by mapping the Vulkan calls to the Apple Metal graphics/compute API. Just in time for that first birthday, a big MoltenVK update is now available.
Inkscape on Thursday announced their 0.92.4 release that brought many stability and bug fixes but also some performance improvements and other enhancements. Most exciting though is the debut of Inkscape 1.0 alpha.