It's been four years since the debut of the Cairo 1.14 stable series and today that has been succeeded by Cairo 1.16. Cairo, as a reminder, is the vector graphics library for 2D drawing and supports back-ends ranging from OpenGL to PDF, PostScript, DirectFB, and SVG outputs. Cairo is used by the likes of the GTK+ tool-kit, Mozilla's Gecko engine, Gnuplot, Poppler, and many other open-source projects.
In addition to System76 being busy finishing up work on their new PC build factory in Denver and making their first foray into open-source hardware, they also continue working on Pop!_OS as their downstream of Ubuntu Linux with various features added in.
Among other software releases, yesterday brought the debut of the PostgreSQL 11.0 database server. Given it has possible performance enhancements and the new (non-default) LLVM-based just-in-time compilation ability, I decided to run some benchmarks on the powerful Dell PowerEdge EPYC 2P server.
While LG isn't often thought of as a laptop manufacturer, their Gram laptop line-up has recently been making some waves. The LG Gram laptops are powered by Intel Core CPUs and are designed to be slim and sleek yet durable. With the next Linux kernel (4.20~5.0), they should be better supported should you want to wipe the default Microsoft Windows installation.
Mesa 18.2.3 is out today as the latest point release to the Mesa 18.2 stable series. Notable to this point release are several bug fixes and workarounds to benefit Steam Play / Wine (and the Valve downstream Proton) and various new games being brought up there thanks in part to DXVK.
A few days back Linux game porter/developer Ethan Lee joined CodeWeavers to work on Wine/Proton for Valve. In particular, he's going to be focusing on his FAudio project as a Windows XAudio(2) re-implementation. CodeWeavers appears to be eager on getting FAudio merged into upstream Wine.
Intel sent over the Core i9 9900K as their first 9th Gen Coffeelake-S CPU hitting store shelves today. With the embargo on that now expired, let's have a look at how well this eight-core / sixteen-thread processor performs under Linux.
Complementing the just-published Intel Core i9 9900K Linux benchmarks with the launch-day embargo lift are the Linux gaming benchmarks... This article is looking at the Linux performance between the Core i9 9900K and AMD's Ryzen 7 2700X in a variety of native Linux games as well as comparing the performance-per-Watt. So if you are a Linux gamer and deciding between these sub-$500 processors, this article is for you.
It had been more than two weeks since the last time AMD developers updated their public source trees making up the official AMDVLK Vulkan driver but fortunately that has now changed. Given the time since the last commit, there is a lot of goodies with this new AMDVLK driver refresh.
Intel developers today announced the release of KVMGT 2018-Q3 (also known as Intel GVT-g for KVM) as well as the accompany Xen hypervisor tailored XenGT 2018-Q3 update.
In addition to LLVM's multi-year effort on re-licensing their code, some developers also remain hard at work on officially migrating the project from an SVN development workflow to Git.
The HarfBuzz open-source text shaping library that is used by GNOME, KDE, Firefox, LibreOffice, Chrome OS, Java, and countless other desktop applications has reached version 2.0.
Canonical managed to announce on the same-day as the Ubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish" debut their goal for this cycle of opening up their software/hardware survey results that began with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS desktop installations. Those initial results are now available but the available data and analytic capabilities are rather underwhelming.
Here are the first of our benchmarks for the GeForce RTX 2070 graphics card that launched this week. In our inaugural Ubuntu Linux benchmarking with the GeForce RTX 2070 is a look at the OpenCL / CUDA GPU computing performance including with TensorFlow and various models being tested on the GPU. The benchmarks are compared to an assortment of available graphics cards and also include metrics for power consumption, performance-per-Watt, and performance-per-dollar.
Igalia's Juan Suarez Romero as the Mesa 18.2 series release manager is putting the finishing touches on the 18.2.3 point release to benefit Steam Play / Proton / Wine games.
Fedora 29 will not be managing to deliver its final release right on time due to lingering blocker bugs.
The busy release date continues with Mozilla/Xiph.Org announcing the release of the Opus 1.3 audio codec.
It should come as no surprise, but the official release of Ubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish" is now available with the announcement just hitting the wire.
Adding to the exciting release day is Theo de Raadt releasing OpenBSD 6.4 as the newest version of this BSD operating system known for its security mindfulness.
Besides Ubuntu 18.10 releasing today, another cause for celebration today is the official debut of the PostgreSQL 11 database server.
Among the changes to find in Ubuntu 18.10 are the latest stable Linux kernel as well as a significant Mesa upgrade and also the latest X.Org Server. These component upgrades make for a better Linux gaming experience particularly if using a modern AMD Radeon graphics card. Here are some results as well as whether it's worthwhile switching to Linux 4.19 and Mesa 18.3-dev currently on Ubuntu 18.10.
Nadav Amit of VMware has announced their (currently experimental) work on "dynamic indirect call promotion" or what they have dubbed "RELPOLINES" -- not to be confused with the traditional Retpolines for "return trampolines" as one of the Spectre Variant Two software-based mitigation approaches. Relpolines is designed to have lower overhead than Retpolines.
When it comes to open-source ARM graphics drivers, the Raspberry Pi / VC4 effort and Freedreno continue to be the two best examples of fully open-source graphics driver coverage including 3D support. Freedreno has been attracting contributions from Qualcomm / CodeAurora in what started out as solely a community reverse-engineered effort and with the latest-generation Adreno 600 series hardware the open-source support is in great shape.
With GCC 9 feature development ending in a few weeks, it's now a mad dash by developers to land their last minute additions into this annual open-source compiler update -- including a look ahead for what is coming down the pipe in the compiler space.
It's Cosmic Cuttlefish day! Assuming no last minute delays, Ubuntu 18.10 and its downstream flavors will be out today with their newest six-month non-LTS releases to be supported through July of 2019.
With the upcoming Linux 4.20 kernel cycle (that given past comments by Linus Torvalds might be renamed to Linux 5.0), a new PCI feature queued ahead of the upcoming merge window is peer-to-peer memory support.
As part of some brief openSUSE news today, some early details concerning Leap 15 Service Pack 1 (Leap 15.1) were shared.
With the imminent Linux 4.19 kernel release there is VCN JPEG decode support within the AMDGPU DRM driver for use with Raven Ridge APUs. The accompanying user-space patches for the Radeon Gallium3D code have now been posted for making this functionality work on the Linux desktop with these Zen+Vega APUs.
GCC's test suite will soon begin testing the C++17 standard as part of its C++98/11/14 standard tests by default... This doesn't affect the default C++ standard used by the GCC G++ compiler at this point, but at least will help eliminate any lingering C++17 bugs as well as helping to stop regressions in the future.
We are approaching one year since the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities shocked the industry, and while no new CPU speculative execution vulnerabilities have been made public recently, the Linux kernel developers continue improving upon the Spectre/Meltdown software-based mitigation techniques for helping to offset incurred performance costs with current generation hardware.
Lightworks, the long-standing non-linear video editing system that has offered a native Linux build the past few years after being challenged by delays for a few years, is out today with version 14.5 and comes with Linux, macOS, and Windows support.
Longtime Ubuntu/Linux PC vendor System76 has been teasing their efforts around an "open-source computer" and other open-source hardware efforts now that they are in the home stretch of setting up their own US-based manufacturing facility. Some new details on their initial aspirations are now out there.
DragonFlyBSD 5.4 should be a really great release if you are a BSD user and have an AMD Threadripper 2 box, particularly the flagship Threadripper 2990WX 32-core / 64-thread processor.
Former RadeonHD driver developer Luc Verhaegen is back at the AMD Radeon GPU reverse-engineering game. He's now pursuing Radeon firmware flashing with the Coreboot Flashrom utility.
GNOME developers want to make sure they have a competitive text rendering stack with other platforms and as such are looking to make some modernization improvements to Pango.
There is just three weeks left for GNU toolchain developers to finish landing new feature material in GCC 9.0 ahead of next year's GCC 9.1 stable release.
With Raptor Computing Systems' Talos II Lite and especially the forthcoming Blackbird positioning the POWER architecture in a prime spot for use by libre Linux users who want a system that's open-source down to the firmware, they've been trying to make sure the Linux desktop stack is in order. The latest area they've been working on is browser coverage.
It's been three years since the original draft proposal for relicensing the LLVM compiler code was sent out and while there hasn't been a lot to report on recently about the effort, they are making progress and proceeding.
Valve in cooperation with CodeWeavers and other developers continues making rapid progress on Steam Play and their "Proton" downstream flavor of Wine.
Google engineer Brendan Higgins sent out an experimental set of 31 patches today introducing KUnit as a new Linux kernel unit testing framework to help preserve and improve the quality of the kernel's code.
Google's Chrome/Chromium 70 web-browser made it out today for Linux users as well as all other key supported platforms.
The Ubuntu Server developers are looking to make it easier to deploy free SSL/TLS certificates from Let's Encrypt.
Arriving earlier this month was a Dell PowerEdge R7425 server at Phoronix that was equipped with two AMD EPYC 7601 processors, 512GB of RAM, and 20 Samsung 860 EVO SSDs to make for a very interesting test platform and our first that is based on a dual EPYC design with our many other EPYC Linux benchmarks to date being 1P. Here is a look at the full performance capabilities of this 64-core / 128-thread server compared to a variety of other AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon processors while also doubling as an initial look at the performance of these server CPUs on Ubuntu 18.10.
Just ahead of Ubuntu 18.10, Solus 4, and Fedora 29 among other forthcoming Linux distribution releases, Elementary OS 5 "Juno" has been released for a polished desktop experience that aims to compete with macOS and Windows for desktop usability.
More Linux storage drivers have been converted to the "blk-mq" interfaces for the multi-queue block I/O queuing mechanism for the 4.20~5.0 kernel cycle.
NVIDIA has released the 410.66 Linux graphics driver today as their first stable release in the 410 series and comes with support for the new GeForce RTX 2070 graphics card.
While CodeWeavers' developers have been busy with improvements to Wine and Valve's downstream "Proton" for allowing a great Windows-on-Linux gaming experience, they haven't parted ways with their core business and today they announced the availability of CrossOver 18.
NVIDIA's embargo for reviews on the GeForce RTX 2070 graphics cards has now expired ahead of the expected retail availability on Wednesday.
Adding to the long list of new features for what will be Linux 4.20 or likely renamed to Linux 5.0 per Linus Torvalds' numbering preferences is a new wireless networking subsystem within the kernel's networking code... Meet LoRa.
With the Linux 4.19 kernel set to be released next weekend, here's a recap of the most prominent features to be found in this next kernel release.
Just two weeks after the Qt 5.12 beta release, a second beta is now available for testing of this forthcoming tool-kit update.
While Ubuntu 18.10 is set to roll out this week with its new theme and an assortment of package updates and other enhancements, there is one feature Canonical previously talked about for the Ubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish" cycle that we have yet to see made public.
Going in hand with their work on display stream compression for dealing with next-generation displays, the Intel Direct Rendering Manager driver developers are working on "FEC" support to deal with any errors that come up in the stream.
Solaris 10, what may will argue as the last "good" Solaris operating system release before Sun Microsystems fell under control of Oracle, may soon see its support deprecated by the GCC compiler stack.
With this weekend's release of Vulkan 1.1.88 stealing the show was the Vulkan transform feedback capability to allow projects like DXVK to support Direct3D's Stream Output functionality. But besides VK_EXT_transform_feedback, there are other extensions also being worked on for Mesa ANV / RADV Vulkan driver coverage.
Purism has shared the latest details on their efforts to deliver the open-source Linux Librem 5 smartphone to market in 2019.
The Qualcomm/Atheros "Ath10k" Linux driver coming up in the Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel merge window is picking up two prominent features.
AMD's GPUOpen group today released CodeXL 2.6 as the newest version of their GPU developer suite.
FUSE file-systems in user-space are set to be running faster with the upcoming Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel thanks to several performance optimizations.
It's almost been a half-year already since the release of the long delayed X.Org Server 1.20, but with no signs of X.Org Server 1.21 releasing soon, xorg-server 1.20.2 was announced today as the latest stable point release.
FreeDesktop.org is already effectively part of X.Org given the loose structure of FreeDesktop.org, the key members/administrators being part of both projects, and FreeDesktop.org long being the de facto hosting platform from the X.Org Server to Mesa and much more. But now they may be officially joining forces.
As the latest of our benchmarks using the newly re-released Microsoft Windows 10 October 2018 Update, here are benchmarks of this latest Windows 10 build against seven different Linux distributions on the same hardware for checking out the current performance of these operating systems.
Existing Intel graphics hardware already supports SIMD32 fragment shaders and the Intel open-source Linux graphics driver has supported this mode for months, but it hasn't been enabled. That though is in the process of changing.
As a new alternative over XScreenSaver or using other desktop environments' screensaver functionality, xfce4-screensaver has out its first release albeit of alpha quality.
With the Linux 4.19-rc8 kernel release overnight, one change not to be found in this latest Linux 4.19 release candidate are any alterations to the new Code of Conduct. The latest proposal forbids discussing off-topic matters while protecting any sentient being in the universe.
DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has been quite impressed with AMD's Threadripper 2 processors particularly the Threadripper 2990WX with 32-cores / 64-threads. Dillon has made various optimizations to DragonFly for helping out this processor in past months and overnight he made another significant improvement.
KDE Frameworks 5.51 is out today as the latest monthly update to this collection of KDE libraries complementing Qt5.
Greg Kroah-Hartman went ahead and released Linux 4.19-RC8 as the last test release of the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel.