Phoronix

For those riding the Mesa 19.1 stable release train, Mesa 19.1.2 is now available as the second point release to this quarterly update to this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers for the Linux desktop...

After being delayed from earlier kernel cycles, Linux 5.3 will allow for tracking the last time a process made use of AVX-512 in order for user-space schedulers to provide better task placement...

LLVM's RISC-V CPU back-end has made immense progress over the past few years and now for the LLVM 9.0 release due out at the end of August or early September could become official...

During H1'2019 on Phoronix.com were 1,766 original news articles and 130 original Linux hardware reviews / featured benchmark multi-page articles. Here is a look back at the most popular articles during the first half of the year on Phoronix...

Back in March 2019 when Intel announced Sound Open Firmware, they also announced ACRN as a small footprint hypervisor intended for real-time and safety-critical use-cases. Now with Linux 5.3 this IoT-focused hypervisor can handle Linux guests on the ACRN hypervisor...

As a change we had been expecting this cycle, Ubuntu 19.10 has upgraded to GCC 9 as the default system compiler over GCC 8...

Intel's patches for supporting the multi-die topology of Cascadelake-AP processors is now going into the Linux 5.3 kernel...

Vulkan 1.1.114 is another weekly update to the Vulkan graphics API specification... With this update does come a new extension of some interest...

Last week Valve formally announced their new Radeon shader compiler for AMD's open-source Linux graphics drivers. At this stage it's an out-of-tree solution providing generally faster performance to the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver over the current AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler but they also have ambitions of wiring it up to the RadeonSI OpenGL driver once mature too, assuming AMD's developers are willing to make use of this new compiler code. For those wondering about the Vulkan performance, here are our independent benchmarks of the current Mesa 19.2 RADV performance with the LLVM shader compiler compared to Valve's new "ACO" compiler back-end and then also using AMD's official AMDVLK reference driver that is also leveraging LLVM.

Following last night's Linux 5.2 kernel release, the GNU folks maintaining their GNU Linux-libre off-shoot that de-blobs the kernel of being able to load binary-only firmware/microcode files or the ability to load binary-only kernel modules is out with their re-based kernel...

As outlined yesterday, AMD's Ryzen 3000 processors are very fast but having issues booting newer Linux distributions. The exact issue causing that boot issue on 2019 Linux distribution releases doesn't appear to be firmly resolved yet but some are believing it is an RdRand instruction issue on these newer processors manifested by systemd...

Thomas Gleixner sent in his various x86 code updates early this morning for the just kicked off Linux 5.3 kernel cycle...

The GPIO updates for the newly-opened Linux 5.3 kernel merge window is dropping the FMC subsystem as they deem it easier to re-start from scratch writing that code than to try to repair it, or "start over using the proper kernel subsystems than try to polish the rust shiny." Funny enough, this code is being used by the CERN's well known Large Hadron Collider...

The past several years Siemens and others have been working on Jailhouse as a Linux-based partitioning hypervisor for bare metal appliances. Their previous release was all the way back during last year's Oktoberfest and now with construction for this year's fest kicking off at the wiesn, the developers happen to be releasing their next version of Jailhouse...

It's 2019 and OpenGL 4.6 remains the latest version of this once predominant graphics API yet Mesa's Gallium3D LLVMpipe software rasterizer is still only exposing OpenGL 3.3...

Due to summer holidays, the 64-bit ARM (AArch64/ARM64) architecture changes were already sent in days ago for the Linux 5.3 kernel merge window...

While back in May we provided a Linux 5.2 feature overview following the closure of its merge window, given Sunday's release of the Linux 5.2 Bobtail Squid kernel, if you've lost track of what there is to get excited about in this new kernel, this article is for you...

Adding to the excitement of 7 July is the release of the Linux 5.2 stable kernel, which also means the opening of the Linux 5.3 merge window...

Leading up to today's Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" series launch it was looking like there wouldn't be any support within Mesa's Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver for this community-maintained open-source implementation. But the open-source developers at Valve managed to not only deliver Navi 10 support but also Navi 12 and Navi 14 are also supported with this new Mesa 19.2 code...

As a follow-up to this morning's Radeon RX 5700 / RX 5700 XT Linux benchmarks, AMD has now published a packaged launch-day Linux driver for those wanting to use these new RDNA/Navi graphics cards on Linux without building your own kernel/Mesa/libdrm/LLVM... Well, assuming you are on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS...