Spectre Variants 3A and 4 are now public as the newest speculative execution vulnerabilities affecting many CPUs and with the mitigations also expected to affect performance. Initial Linux kernel patches are available.
Lennart Poettering has announced the call for presentations of this year's All Systems Go! conference, what was born out of the earlier systemd.conf conference.
Given that DragonFlyBSD recently landed some SMP performance improvements and other performance optimizations in its kernel for 5.3-DEVELOPMENT but as well finished tidying up its Spectre mitigation, this weekend I spent some time running some benchmarks on DragonFlyBSD 5.2 and 5.3-DEVELOPMENT to see how the performance has shifted for an Intel Xeon system.
There still are several weeks to go until the Linux 4.17 kernel will be officially released and for that to initiate the Linux 4.18 merge window, but we already know some of the features coming to this next kernel cycle as well as an idea for some other work that may potentially land.
With the recently minted Linux 4.17 kernel there was initial USB Audio Class 3.0 support for this audio-over-USB specification while with Linux 4.18 that UA3 support will be further enhanced.
With the Linux benchmarks of the Ryzen 7 2700 last week I included a few Linux gaming benchmarks, but for those evaluating CPU options for your next Intel/AMD Linux gaming system upgrade, here is a much more thorough set of benchmarks from a wide variety of OpenGL and Vulkan powered Linux games. The Ryzen 7 2700, Ryzen 7 2700X, and Core i7 8700K processors were tested for this Ubuntu gaming comparison while testing with both a Radeon RX Vega 64 and GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.
With development on Phoronix Test Suite 8.0 wrapping up for release in the coming weeks, here is a recap of some of the prominent changes for this huge update to our open-source, cross-platform benchmarking software.
Taking place last week in Oxford, UK was IWOCL 2018: the International Workshop on OpenCL. For those that couldn't make this compute conference, session videos have begun appearing online.
Linux 4.17 is up to its sixth weekly release candidate ahead of the official release expected by mid-June.
Just shy of one month since the long-awaited debut of GIMP 2.10, the first stable point release is now available.
Anyone happening to have an ATI Mach 64 graphics card from the mid-90's or a 3Dfx-competitor Rendition graphics card also from the 90's can now enjoy the benefits of the recently released X.Org Server 1.20.
Last month AMD released the AOCC 1.2 compiler for Zen systems. This updated version of their branched LLVM/Clang compiler with extra patches/optimizations for Zen CPUs was re-based to the LLVM/Clang 6.0 code-base while also adding in experimental FLANG support for Fortran compilation and various other unlisted changes to their "znver1" patch-set. Here's a look at how the performance compares with AOCC 1.2 to LLVM Clang 6.0 and GCC 7/8 C/C++ compilers.
The Linux 4.18 kernel will feature the initial Steam Controller kernel driver that works without having to use the Steam client or using third-party user-space applications like the SC-Controller application.
The second beta release of FreeBSD 11.2 is now available for weekend testing.
Ensuring your CPU microcode is kept up-to-date for Zen processors is now a little bit easier with the microcode files being added to the linux-firmware.git collection.
For those aspiring Vulkan programmers, the Vulkan experts at LunarG have published a tutorial to learn how to make use of the newest debug extension, VK_EXT_debug_utils.
When it comes to open-source ARM Mali graphics driver efforts there has been the Panfrost driver targeting the Mali T700 series that has occupied much of the limelight recently, but there has been a separate effort still working on open-source driver support for the older 400/450 series.
Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has been working on support for 32-bit GPU pointers for user SGPRs as his latest performance enhancement for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver.
Depending upon the motherboard and other factors, the Raven Ridge Linux support has been a bit of a mess since its February launch. Fortunately, with time various Linux driver fixes have landed for improving the stability and performance of these APUs with Zen CPU cores and Vega graphics. During my recent testing of the AMD Ryzen 5 2400G, it was completely stable and running fine with the newest open-source driver code but the Ryzen 3 2200G was still a stability nightmare.
AMD has landed a number of updated firmware images into the linux-firmware tree for their recent generations of hardware.
One of Sony's compiler experts has taken to working on some tuning for the AMD Ryzen "znver1" microarchitecture support within the LLVM compiler stack. This begs the question why Sony is working on Ryzen improvements if not for a future product.
Next year's GCC 9 compiler release will be eliminating support for older ARM versions.
First time Mesa release manager Dylan Baker has managed to release Mesa 18.1 on time as the Q2'2018 quarterly update to this OpenGL/Vulkan driver stack.
After working on Lubuntu-Next for a while in transitioning from the GTK-based LXDE desktop environment to the modern and maintained LXQt desktop environment that is powered by Qt5, the Lubuntu 18.10 will be the release that officially moves over to the LXQt desktop and pushes out LXDE.
Canonical and Microsoft have rolled out Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to the Microsoft Store for running with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Here are some initial benchmarks of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on Windows 10 WSL with the April 2018 Update compared to the Bionic Beaver installed bare-metal and then also the older Ubuntu 16.04 WSL setup.
The Git Protocol Version 2 was announced today by Google as a major update to the distributed revision control system's wire protocol. Git protocol version 2 is much more efficient and yields significant performance benefits.
KDE Plasma 5.13 is out in beta form today ahead of its planned release in June. Plasma 5.13 has ended up being a very compelling and huge upgrade for the KDE Plasma 5 desktop.
Will Cooke, the Director of the Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical, has outlined the major desktop plans for the Ubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish" cycle.
Purism has formally introduced "Calls", its GTK3-based PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) phone dialing application that it hopes will be accepted into the upstream GNOME project. Purism plans to develop this phone dialer using GNOME's Telepathy framework but for now is using a simple oFono back-end.
Vim 8.1 is out today as the latest stable feature update to this advanced cross-platform text editor.
The Qt Company is hoping to be able to release the Qt 5.11 tool-kit in just a few days.
Initial open-source driver support for the NVIDIA GV100 "Volta" GPUs will be introduced with the upcoming Linux 4.18 kernel cycle.
The in-development Panfrost reverse-engineered, open-source driver for supporting ARM Mali T700 series graphics is now much more capable thanks to work carried out on their "half-way" Gallium3D driver in recent weeks.
Purism's Dorota Czaplejewicz has been active within the Wayland community recently as they work on their Librem 5 phone Wayland compositor and Phosh shell for this software stack and iMX8 hardware they hope to begin shipping next year.
One of the best and most long-standing open-source Linux games is 0 A.D. and in time for the weekend they have a new release.