Francisco Jerez of Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver team has posted not some new DRM driver patches today but rather CPUFreq/P-State driver patches that could really help Intel integrated graphics performance under some conditions and especially on the lower-power Intel platforms...
While LLVM 6.0 is available as the latest and greatest stable Mesa release, LLVM 5.0.2 is in the works for releasing in the days ahead. Besides normal bug fixes, LLVM 5.0.2 also carries the compiler-side Retpoline patches for Spectre...
The VC5 open-source Linux graphics driver stack has been under heavy development now the past nearly year while not yet seeing any major ARM SBCs or other products making use of this Broadcom VideoCore V (VC5) 3D hardware, which now supports OpenCL and Vulkan. While many are holding out hopes for eventually seeing a next-gen Raspberry Pi with this beefed up VideoCore, it appears there is already a VC6 in the works too...
Continuing on to with some of what we can look forward to seeing with Linux 4.17 for end-users, the sound driver updates are fairly notable for this upcoming kernel cycle...
This past weekend I posted some Linux 3.17 to Linux 4.16 kernel benchmarks using two older Intel hardware platforms and one of the most frequent requests to come in following that article were some AMD benchmarks looking at the Intel Linux performance going a ways back. Here are some test results from Linux 4.4 to 4.16 using an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X system.
Mesa 18.0 managed to meet its Q1'2018 release target by just a couple of days... After being delayed a month and a half, Mesa 18.0.0 is now the latest stable version of this user-space driver stack most commonly associated with its OpenGL and Vulkan implementations...
Another new driver coming for Linux 4.17 is a device driver implementing ACPI's specification for the Time and Alarm Device (TAD). On systems with a supported ACPI version, this can be a handy means of waking up a system with some trivial scripting...
Earlier this month was the big batch of AMDKFD driver updates for DRM-Next / Linux 4.17 for getting the Radeon discrete GPU support squared away. Now coming in as a late pull request is the rest of that dGPU work for AMDKFD...
With the Linux 4.16 kernel release likely to happen this coming Sunday and that marking the opening of the Linux 4.17 merge window, many subsystem maintainers are preparing their "-next" trees of feature updates...
While mainline Wine development code has enough Vulkan support that it can run the few Windows Vulkan games like Wolfenstein and DOOM along with the Vulkan code samples and the Vulkan information utility, it's currently dependent upon the Windows Vulkan SDK being manually installed on the system. That's now changing with Wine developers working on their own Vulkan loader library...
GIMP 2.9 development releases have been happening the past several years and that is finally about to culminate with the long-awaited GIMP 2.10 stable release. Out now is the first release candidate for this big stable update to this GTK2-based image manipulation program...
It looks like the much-delayed X.Org Server 1.20 release with its initial Meson build system support will almost be to feature parity with the server's Autotools build system integration...
While upstream Clang has support for OpenCL C 2.0, it doesn't currently have mainline support for OpenCL C++ but fortunately that soon should change...
While FreeBSD has a Linux compatibility/emulation layer that allows it to run some Linux games, an independent community developer has been working on porting Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4 to FreeBSD...
Stemming from the Fedora Server special interest group planning to update their product requirements with a plan to retire the concept of "server roles", Red Hat / Fedora Server SIG is looking for feedback about what you would like to see from Fedora Server...
The process is now more clear how Linux distributions can be adapted to run on Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with the company now having open-sourced a "WSL Sample" to build WSL distribution packages for the Microsoft Store and for allowing custom Linux distribution packages to be sideloaded onto systems...
AMD's GPUOpen group in cooperation with Khronos today is announcing V-EZ, a new project of theirs designed to make the barrier to entry for the Vulkan graphics API lower. V-EZ provides a middleware layer and simplified API for making it easier to get started with Vulkan development...
With the Linux 4.16 kernel release expected in just a matter of days, here are some fresh file-system benchmarks on this near-final kernel using a solid-state drive and hard drive while testing out the popular mainline file-system choices of Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS.
Besides DriConf or the newer ADRICONF, another tool for open-source Radeon Linux driver users for monitoring their GPU(s) is RadeonTop. RadeonTop 1.1 is now available as the independent project's latest feature release...
Following Crytek putting out their CRYENGINE Sandbox editor source code, Unity Tech has published the C# reference code used by their Unity Engine and Unity Editor...
With the latest Etnaviv DRM code there is now performance counters support for being able to read the hardware counters via perfmon domains. The patches have now been published for making use of these Vivante performance counters from user-space...
Our latest benchmarking of the near-final Linux 4.16 kernel is checking on the performance of two Intel systems going back to the days of Linux 3.17, the oldest kernel that would successfully boot with the Ubuntu 18.04 user-space. Every major kernel release was tested as we see how the Linux kernel performance has evolved on these Haswell and Gulftown systems since October 2014.
Zstd compression continues becoming more widely adopted from Ubuntu looking at Zstd-compressed packages to compressing the Linux kernel image to now the OpenZFS file-system soon having support for Facebook's Zstandard compression algorithm...
With Q1'2018 wrapping up in the week ahead, here's a look back at our more than 856 original news articles and 76 featured benchmark articles / Linux hardware reviews this quarter...
The second development release of Phoronix Test Suite 8.0-Aremark is now available for your open-source benchmarking needs on Linux, macOS, BSD, Solaris, and Windows. As you've likely heard already, one of the big focuses this development cycle is on Windows support improvements with completely rewritten handling for that OS...
As a more modern and feature alternative to the DriConf configuration program for tweaking Mesa driver settings, a few months back we featured ADRICONF as the Advanced DRI Configuration. Recently this GUI program has picked up a few more features...
When having the Microsoft Windows 10 Professional x64 installation on the Core i7 8700K "Coffee Lake" system this week I also took the opportunity to run some fresh OpenGL benchmarks on Windows compared to Linux...
Following this month's successful launch of GNOME 3.28, the release team has now assembled the schedule for the GNOME 3.30.0 release and the 3.29 development milestones...
Back in February was the exciting AMD Raven Ridge desktop APU launch with the Zen CPU cores and Vega graphics. Sadly, however, the Raven Ridge Linux support still appears to be a bit problematic but there have been improvements in recent weeks...
One of the subtle changes that seemed to have been made during the Ubuntu 18.04 development cycle is automatic suspend now being enabled by default on desktop systems...
CodeWeavers' Józef Kucia has sent out a set of patches today against Winevulkan in shifting around some code in preparing to allow for the eventual Direct3D 12 support that's implemented on top of Vulkan by the external VKD3D library...
When it comes to RAW image editing on Linux, Darktable is what most often is talked about for its photography workflow and RAW image processing features. But another open-source alternative for RAW image processing is out with its latest release, RawTherapee...