With the upcoming Linux 4.18 kernel release due out in August there is the AMDGPU kernel driver support for Vega 20, the yet-to-be-released Vega GPU said to be the 7nm part launching later this year in Radeon Instinct products and featuring 32GB of HBM2 and adding some new deep learning instructions. Now the RadeonSI Gallium3D user-space driver for OpenGL within Mesa has Vega 20 support.
It turns out that when using GCC 8 since April (or GCC 9 development code) if running on Intel Skylake (or newer architectures like the yet-to-be-out Cannonlake or Icelake) and compile your code with the "-march=native" flag for what should tune for your CPU microarchitecture's full capabilities, that hasn't entirely been the case. A fix is en route that can correct the performance by as much as 60%.
For those looking to pick up a new Linux game this weekend, Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War was released today with same-day native Linux support.
Intel rolled out today the Xeon E-2100 processors as the successor to the Xeon E3 CPUs. The Xeon E-2100 series is intended for entry-level workstations and based upon the Coffeelake CPU microarchitecture.
NVIDIA developers today released the 396.24.10 driver, their latest beta driver for Linux focused on the latest Vulkan innovations and improvements and is joined by the Windows 398.58 driver.
In part with GPU demand by crypto-currency miners waning a bit, NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics card availability at retailers has been improving in recent weeks as well as seeing less inflated prices than just recently had been the case. Given the better availability and stabilizing prices, here is a fresh look of the current line-up of GeForce and Radeon graphics cards under Ubuntu Linux using the newest AMD/NVIDIA drivers and also providing performance-per-dollar metrics given current retail prices.
Granted OpenBSD isn't the most desktop focused BSD out there and that WiFi isn't therefore the highest priority for this security-focused operating system, but with the latest code it can now finally auto-join WiFi networks.
While the GTK+ 4.0 tool-kit was previously talked about for release by the end of 2018, that's now looking more like spring of 2019 when this next major version will be released.
The AMDVLK open-source Radeon Vulkan Linux driver has seen its latest weekly code drop that brings with it some of the extensions needed for supporting the Steam VR experience.
Linux 4.19 is shaping up to be a pretty exciting kernel release for what is expected to be the last version before Linux 5.0.
For those maintaining their own home-built Linux router, Linux 4.19 is going to be pretty exciting: CAKE Qdisc has been merged into net-next, making it a feature for this next kernel cycle.
Luc Trudeau, a video compression wizard and co-author of the AV1 royalty-free video format, has written a piece about the optimization state for video formats like VP9 and AV1 on POWER and ARM CPU architectures.
Another routine Mesa 18.1. point release is being prepared while waiting for the August debut of the Mesa 18.2 feature update.
It's rare in recent years to have anything to report on xf86-video-ati, the X.Org driver for the display/2D experience for pre-GCN Radeon graphics cards. But this week has been a large batch of fixes and improvements for those using this DDX driver with pre-HD7000 series hardware.
The GLib low-level GNOME library while being quite mature is seeing a significant update with its version 2.58 release due out this September for GNOME 3.30.
One of the surprisingly controversial changes being implemented for Fedora 29 is dropping GCC and GCC-C++ from the default BuildRoot for assembling Fedora packages with Koji and Mock.
Developers behind Samba, the open-source SMB/CIFS implementation for providing integration with the Windows Server Domain and Windows clients, is preparing for their next 4.9 release.
The NVIDIA Jetson Xavier Development Kit is pretty darn exciting with having eight ARMv8.2 cores, a 512-core Volta GPU, 16GB of LPDDR4, and under 30 Watt power use.
Open-source developer Antonio Larrosa who contributes to KDE and openSUSE has been developing a command-line music manager called Bard. He's written an interesting post about how he sped up some of his operations by around eight-thousand times faster.
In addition to the AMD-licensed Chengdu Haiguang x86 server processors and Zhaoxin x86-compatible CPUs from VIA Centaur lineage, another CPU effort within China has been C-SKY.
One month ago Intel was quick following the Linux 4.18 merge material to begin sending in new feature work for Linux 4.19 by means of the DRM-Next repository. They've already done a few rounds of updates while now another serving of Direct Rendering Manager patches were served up.
One day past the release of upstream Wine 3.12, the downstream Wine-Staging 3.12 is now available that continues incorporating hundreds of experimental/testing patches atop these bi-weekly Wine releases.
At the end of last year the Intel Clear Linux project's Clear Containers initiative morphed into OpenStack's Kata Containers. Clear Linux now supports the resulting Kata Containers.
With the current-generation Dell XPS 13 XPS9370-7002SLV currently being tested at Phoronix, one of the areas I was most anxious to benchmark was the power consumption... For years it has been a problem of Linux on laptops generally leading to less battery life than on Windows, but in the past ~2+ years there has been some nice improvements within the Linux kernel and a renewed effort by developers at Red Hat and elsewhere on improving the Linux laptop battery life. Here are some initial power consumption numbers for this Dell XPS 13 under Windows 10 and then various Linux distributions.
The march to QEMU 3.0 is now underway following discussions at the end of last year for jumping to the v3.0 milestone after the long-running v2.x series. The first release candidate is now available and marks a hard feature freeze for the QEMU 3.0 milestone.
Being roughly mid-way through the Linux 4.18 kernel development cycle, I spent some time this weekend running benchmarks of the AMDGPU DRM driver on Linux 4.18 Git compared to Linux 4.17 stable on three different Radeon graphics cards while using the Mesa 18.1.3 based drivers.
It's one month late but the Xen Project Hypervisor 4.11 release is available today with great scads of new features.
A new beta of the Radeon Open Compute "ROCm" stack was quietly made available for v1.8.2.
Version 2018.2 of the Unity Game Engine is now available as the latest quarterly update to this widely-used, cross-platform engine. Unity 2018.2 is quite exciting and does include some Vulkan and Linux changes.
If the Lynx open-source text-based browser isn't satisfying your needs with viewing modern web sites via the terminal, Browsh is a new entrant into the text-based web-browser space that seeks to support modern web standards.
Apple is said to be working on some new domain-specific compilers.
Thanks to Facebook / Open Compute Project, the Octeon CN81xx SoCs are now supported by upstream Coreboot and happen to be the first Cavium ARM SoCs supported by this project.
The USB Type-C DisplayPort Alternate Mode driver will be coming to the Linux 4.19 kernel.
One of the most exciting Google Summer of Code 2018 projects is Vulkan-Virgl for supporting this modern graphics/compute API within virtual machines.
It's an exciting day in RADV land as in addition to work on the new Vulkan 1.1.80 extensions, David Airlie landed a patch he's been baking for speeding up the shader compilation performance for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver within Mesa.
The belated Wine 3.12 development release is now available for testing, the first release following WineConf 2018.
The folks at iX Systems have announced their first public beta of FreeNAS 11.2, their downstream of FreeBSD 11.2 focused on supporting network-attached storage (NAS) systems.
After converting the GNU Emacs repository to Git a few years back, Eric S Raymond has been working on the massive undertaking of transferring the GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) repository in full over to Git. But the transition to GCC Git is being hampered since due to the massive size of the repository, Raymond's system is running under extreme memory pressure with 64GB of RAM.
Canonical today released new Ubuntu Minimal images for cloud computing. The new images are half the size of the traditional Ubuntu Server and are said to boot up to 40% faster, so I decided to run a quick Amazon EC2 Linux distribution boot time comparison today...
A new pull request has been submitted to MoltenVK, the open-source project for mapping the Vulkan graphics/compute API over Apple's Metal to run on iOS/macOS. This pull request is working to address the issue that caused at least one MoltenVK-using iPhone/iPad game to be rejected from the Apple App Store.
Canonical today announced the new Minimal Ubuntu, which is a "tiny" package set focused for speed, performance, and stability of Ubuntu in cloud deployments.
Chances are if you are spending more than $400 USD to have the Intel Core i7 8086K, the limited edition processor that is Intel's first to have a turbo frequency at 5.0GHz (and can easily overclock on all cores to 5.0+ GHz), you probably care a great deal about your system's performance. For squeezing extra performance out of the hardware, there is a wide variety of software optimizations available. Many of those software optimizations can be found within Intel's own Clear Linux distribution as previously shown while for this i7-8086K benchmarking is a look at how nine Linux distributions compare out-of-the-box when tested on this Coffeelake CPU and all CPU cores overclocked to 5.0GHz.
Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's open-source Linux GPU driver team has been particularly busy in recent days with "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver enhancements.
It looks like Arm Limited is going on the offensive against the RISC-V open-source processor instruction set architecture.
Fulfilling a 6+ year desire, GNOME's GLib library now has a generic memory reference counting API.
Taking place last week in The Hague, Netherlands, was the WineConf 2018 conference. This year's WineConf -- on top of the usual annual discussions about this open-source project for running Windows games/applications on Linux/macOS -- took the time to celebrate the project's 25th anniversary.
Queued into the staging code for introduction with the Linux 4.19 kernel is the Gasket driver framework and the first driver based upon it, Apex.
One of three new Vulkan extensions introduced in this weekend's Vulkan 1.1.80 specification update is VK_KHR_8bit_storage for providing 8-bit types is now available in patch form for the Intel open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver.
The fourth weekly test release of the Linux 4.18 kernel is now available.
If you are still running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 or one of the downstreams like CentOS, Scientific Linux, or Oracle Linux, these benchmarks are for you in showing the performance of Scientific Linux 6.9 vs. 6.10 vs. 7.5 for getting an idea about the current performance of EL6/EL7.
The latest hardware at Phoronix for testing is the Dell XPS 13.3-inch (XPS9370) with Intel Core i7-8550U Kabylake-R processor featuring UHD Graphics 620. A number of interesting Linux benchmarks are currently being worked on, including Windows versus various Linux distribution performance tests as well as power consumption, etc. For some initial figures for your viewing pleasure this weekend are some of the gaming/graphics tests between Windows 10 and Ubuntu Linux.
The open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver continues to be largely a community affair aside from occasional code/documentation dumps (and hardware supplies) from NVIDIA and then Red Hat also employing a few of the key contributors to the Nouveau DRM kernel driver and Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D within Mesa. When it comes to Red Hat's Nouveau developers like Ben Skeggs and Karol Herbst, they started out as community contributors over the years to this driver. Fortunately, this year has brought another new contributor to the Mesa driver stack.
Released yesterday was Vulkan 1.1.80 that offers three new extensions while the Intel ANV open-source driver has begun rolling out patches for supporting this latest Vulkan specification update.
Back in January there were Xilinx developers who posted a DRM/KMS driver for their DisplayPort subsystem as part of the ZynqMP SoC. It looks like the driver for this display pipeline may soon be ready for mainline.
The latest work on improving KDE's usability is adding a "share" menu to the Dolphin file manager.
Back in February MoltenVK was open-sourced as part of The Khronos Group and Valve working harder to get Vulkan working on macOS/iOS by mapping it through to using Apple's Metal Graphics/Compute API. The most notable user of MoltenVK on macOS to date is the Vulkan Dota 2 on Mac, but for those looking to use this Vulkan-to-Metal framework on iOS, it looks like Apple might be clamping down.