Graphics: AMDVLK, XWayland and Vulkan

• AMDVLK Vulkan Driver Stack Gets Updated With More Extensions, Optimizations & Fixes

  AMD developers maintaining their official Vulkan cross-platform driver code have pushed their end-of-week updates to their external source repositories for those wanting to build the AMDVLK driver on Linux from source. This latest AMDVLK push updates not only their PAL (Platform Abstraction Layer) and XGL (Vulkan API Layer) components but it also updates their fork of the LLVM code-base used for their shader compilation.

• EGLStreams XWayland Code Revised Ahead Of X.Org Server 1.20

  It's still not clear if the EGLStreams XWayland support will be merged for xorg-server 1.20 but at least the patches were revised this week, making it possible to merge them into this next X.Org Server release for allowing the NVIDIA proprietary driver to work with XWayland.

• Vulkan 1.1.74 Released With Minor Fixes & Clarifications

  Vulkan continues sticking to the "release early, release often" mantra with the availability today of Vulkan 1.1.74.

Xfce Releases/Updates

• Xfce Settings 4.12.3 / 4.13.2 Released

  Fixes galore! Xfce Settings 4.12.3 and 4.13.2 were released on March 18th with several improvements, feature parity, and translations.

• Xfce PulseAudio Plugin 0.4.0 (and 0.4.1) Released

  Stable as a rock. Xfce PulseAudio Plugin hit a new stable milestone with the 0.4.0 release. This release wraps up the awesome development cycle we’ve had on this over the last few months and is recommended for all users.

• Xfce Settings Update Brings Better Multi-Monitor Support

  While still waiting on the long-awaited Xfce 4.14, out this weekend is an Xfce Settings 4.14.2 preview release as well as an Xfce Settings 4.12.3 stable series update. Both of these Xfce Settings updates bring better multi-monitor support, including visualization of all display configuration states, visually noting if two displays are mirrored, always drawing the active display last so it's on top, and a number of fixes pertaining to the multi-monitor display handling from this Xfce desktop settings agent.

Android Leftovers

• An Android User's Take on the iPhone

• How to make Android use the DNS server of your choice

• If these OnePlus 6 rumours are true its Android rivals should be absolutely terrified

• ZTE is DOA, but has the US government gone too far?

• The Moto G6 phones will reportedly get their Android P update, eventually

• We asked, you told us: Android P will be called…

DragonFlyBSD 5.2, TrueOS 18.03, FreeBSD 11.1, Ubuntu 16.04/18.04 & Clear Linux Tests

This week I posted some benchmarks looking at the Meltdown mitigation impact on BSD vs. Linux as well as some tests of DragonFly's stabilized HAMMER2 while for your viewing pleasure this weekend are a variety of general BSD vs. Linux benchmarks while using the newly-released DragonFlyBSD 5.2, TrueOS 18.03, FreeBSD 11.1, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Ubuntu 18.04, and Intel's Clear Linux. All of these BSD/Linux operating system benchmarks were done using a system with an Intel Xeon E3-1280 v5 Skylake CPU, MSI MS-7998 motherboard, 2 x 8GB DDR4-2133 memory, and a 256GB Toshiba RD-400 NVMe SSD. All of the hardware components were maintained the same throughout the entire testing process. For making the systems comparable and testing the operating systems in the manner set by the vendor, each platform was tested "out of the box" using the default settings.