It's been a while since last having anything significant to report on Redox OS, the Unix-like operating system written in the Rust programming language and pursuing a micro-kernel design, but fortunately this open-source OS is still moving along and they have some interesting plans moving forward.
Gentoo's Linux kernel build has long offered various CPU options in allowing those building their distribution to optimize their kernel build to the CPU being used. Every so often the patch is suggested for upstreaming to the mainline Linux kernel before being quickly rejected by the upstream maintainers.
With openSUSE Leap 15.1 reaching beta this week I decided to take it for a quick spin of this Linux distribution derived from the same sources as SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP1. Here are some quick benchmarks compared to Leap 15.0 as well as the latest rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed.
Published back in January were initial open-source kernel driver patches for Habana Labs' Goya processor intended for accelerating deep learning workloads. This new Habana Labs kernel driver will debut with the mainline Linux 5.1 kernel.
A change made courtesy of Google engineers to the Linux kernel will make it so exploits on Linux have a tougher time trying to disable SMAP and SMEP protections as part of their exploit path.
The release of NetworkManager 1.16 is right around the corner with this morning's first release candidate.
No further point releases to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS had been planned, but in light of the recent APT vulnerability, Canonical has decided to issue an Ubuntu 16.04.6 update that will be hitting the mirrors soon.
With the Linux 5.0 kernel performance approaching the finish line, the past few days I've been ramping up my tests of this new kernel in our benchmarking farm. Unfortunately, when looking at the results at a macro level it's pointing towards Linux 5.0 yielding lower performance than previous kernel releases.
In addition to NVIDIA christening the 418 driver series as stable today with the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti release, they also issued updates for their 390 legacy driver series as well as the 410 long-lived driver release series.
As expected given today's GeForce GTX 1660 Ti launch, NVIDIA has released a new Linux graphics driver supporting the 1660 Ti as well as the RTX 2070 with Max-Q Design and RTX 2080 with Max-Q Design, among other changes.
While the GCC 9 stable compiler release is a few weeks away in the form of GCC 9.1, the GNU Compiler Collection is up to version 8.3.0 today as their newest point release to last year's GCC 8 series.
The Qt Company has published a 2019 roadmap of sorts for areas they plan on focusing their resources this 2019 calendar year.
With the Linux 5.1 kernel cycle soon to kick-off, an early batch of fixes for the AMDGPU DRM driver and other fixes were sent in on Thursday to queue along with all of the new functionality being staged in DRM-Next.
After weeks of leaks, the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is expected to be formally announced in just a few hours. This is a ~$300 Turing graphics card but without any ray-tracing support as so far has been common to all Turing graphics cards. The GTX 1600 series family is expected to expand as well in the weeks ahead.
Earlier this week Arm announced their next-generation Neoverse N1 and E1 platforms with big performance potential and power efficiency improvements over current generation Cortex-A72 processor cores. The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) ahead of the upcoming GCC9 release has picked up support for the Neoverse N1/E1.
With the Linux 5.0 kernel due out within the next week or two, here's a look back at the biggest end-user facing changes for this kernel release that started out as Linux 4.21.
The Raspberry Pi folks have been working the past few months on upgrading their kernel in moving from Linux 4.14 to 4.19. That roll-out has now begun.
Phoronix Test Suite 8.6.1 is now available as a minor update over Phoronix Test Suite 8.6-Spydeberg that shipped at the start of February.
With yesterday's somewhat of a surprise announcement that Intel is ready to mainline their experimental Iris Gallium3D driver as their "modern" Linux OpenGL driver with numerous design advantages over their long-standing "classic" i965 Mesa driver, here are some fresh benchmarks of that latest driver compared to the current state of their OpenGL driver in Mesa 19.1.
Well that sure didn't take long... Less than 24 hours after the merge request to mainline the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver was sent out, it's now been merged into the mainline code-base! The Intel Gallium3D driver is now in Mesa Git for easy testing of their next-generation OpenGL Linux driver.
As some more exciting open-source Intel Linux graphics news this week besides their new merge request to mainline the Iris Gallium3D driver, over in the Vulkan space they have merged today their overlay layer that provides a heads-up display of sorts for their Linux "ANV" driver.
The Librem 5 Linux-powered smartphone originally planned to ship in January 2019 but last year was delayed to April to allow for more time to finish up work on the hardware and software. Today Purism is announcing that the Librem 5 is being delayed to "Q3" but they have been making progress particularly on the hardware side.
For those concerned that running Clear Linux means less available packages/bundles than the likes of Debian, Arch Linux, and Fedora with their immense collection of packaged software, Clear has a goal this year of increasing their upstream components available on the distribution by three times.
Released earlier this month was the GNOME 3.32 beta which also marked the feature/UI/API freeze. Out today is the second beta for the upcoming GNOME 3.32 and now the string freeze is also in effect.
The work led by Red Hat's Hans de Goede the past few Fedora release cycles has culminated with a great out-of-the-box boot experience for the upcoming Fedora 30.
The Qt Company has today issued their first public beta/test release of the upcoming Qt Creator 4.9 integrated development environment.
For those interested in distributed 3D rendering, the developers at BMW recently received clearance to open-source RAMSES, a 3D rendering system optimized for bandwidth and resource efficiency.
Since being added to Mesa 19.1 at the start of this month, the Panfrost driver has continued speeding along with bringing up this ARM Mali T600/T700/T860 open-source graphics driver support. The latest batch of code was merged overnight, including support for some reverse-engineering helpers.
As one of the most interesting patch series sent over by an Oracle developer in quite a while at least on the virtualization front, a "request for comments" series was sent out on Wednesday that would enable the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to be able to boot Xen HVM guests.
There are some last minute changes to the AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver for the upcoming Linux 5.0 kernel release.
Version 18 of D-Bus Broker has been released, the D-Bus message bus implementation designed for high performance and better reliability compared to the D-Bus reference implementation while sticking to compatibility with the original specification.
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.