Phoronix

Intel's Iris Gallium3D driver may now see slightly better performance in some scenarios thanks to fast color clears support having landed...

The "WineVulkan" code within Wine for exposing the Vulkan API to Windows games/applications now supports the requirements to last year's Vulkan 1.1 base specification...

Out for GDC week is the NVIDIA 418.56 Linux driver as the latest stable update to their current long-lived driver release branch...

The performance out of Intel's SVT video encoders for offering great CPU-based video encoding performance for the likes of HEVC / AV1 / VP9 continues maturing quite nicely. Since discovering Intel's open-source work at the start of February and benchmarking it several times since, its performance has continued to improve particularly for the SVT-AV1 encoder...

Last week NVIDIA announced the GeForce GTX 1660 as the newest RTX-less Turing GPU but costing only $219+ USD. The GTX 1660 is a further trimmed down version of the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti that launched several weeks prior. After picking up an ASUS GeForce GTX 1660 Phoenix Edition, here are Linux OpenGL/Vulkan gaming benchmarks compared to a wide assortment of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards under Ubuntu.

AMD has launched a new version of its open-source Radeon GPU Analyzer (RGA) software under the GPUOpen umbrella...

After being delayed the better part of one month, LLVM 8.0 officially set sail this morning...

For about one week already Intel's rolling-release Clear Linux distribution has been shipping with GNOME 3.32. Here are some quick graphics and gaming benchmarks comparing GNOME 3.30.2 to 3.32.0...

For those using Samba as the open-source re-implementation of SMB/CIFS and allowing for file/print sharing with Microsoft Windows systems, Samba 4.10 is now available as the project's latest feature release...

With the core functionality for Intel Icelake CPUs appearing to be in place, Intel's open-source developers have been working on the other areas of hardware enablement for these next-generation processors...

While Vulkan 1.1.104 was just released on Sunday with new extensions ahead of this week's Game Developers Conference, today marks the availability of Vulkan 1.1.105 with new extensions for the "Google Games Platform", a.k.a. their just announced Stadia cloud game streaming platform...

Greenfield is the nearly two year old effort providing an in-browser, HTML5 Wayland compositor. This open-source project has allowed for remote Wayland applications to run in browsers while running from remote hosts. Greenfield though can now run applications directly inside a user's web browser via Web Worker threads...

Radeon DDX wrangler Michel Dänzer of AMD has announced the releases today of xf86-video-amdgpu 19.0.1 and the xf86-video-ati 19.0.1 release for older Radeon hardware...

Last week during Facebook's Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit, some interesting details were revealed by Intel and their work on this open-source hardware initialization effort alternative to proprietary BIOS/firmware...

Google used the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC 2019) to officially unveil "Stadia" as their cloud-based game streaming service formerly known as Project Stream...

The Mesa Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver has a series of patches pending for introducing VK_KHR_8bit_storage support...

One of the demos NVIDIA is showing off this week at their GPU Technology Conference is Quake II being path-traced using a Vulkan port of the game and adapted to handle VK_NV_ray_tracing functionality paired with the latest GeForce RTX GPUs...

Mozilla this morning released Firefox 66.0 as the latest version of their open-source, cross-platform web browser...

The first beta of the Qt 5.13 tool-kit update is now available for testing. The Qt Company still hopes to ship Qt 5.13.0 in May and for that to happen they will be issuing multiple betas until they are ready for the release candidate phase...

Orbital is an open-source project providing a virtualization-based PlayStation 4 emulator that is still in its early stages but what interests us is its technical details including the use of Vulkan/SPIR-V...

SiFive has announced an upgraded Freedom Everywhere SoC as well as the HiFive1 Revision B developer board using this FE310-G002 SoC...

While NetBSD has more than a half-dozen tier-one supported architectures and dozens more of tier two ports, DragonFlyBSD has been largely centered on x86_64 since their dropping of 32-bit x86 a while ago. Arm has largely remained off their radar but there seems to be some growing interest around seeing DragonFlyBSD on AArch64...

For demonstrating the many use-cases around the $99 Jetson Nano that was announced on Monday, NVIDIA engineers devised an open-source robot that you can build yourself with mostly 3D printed parts and by default is geared to run on Ubuntu Linux.

Announced on Monday was that the US Department of Energy in cooperation with Argonne National Laboratory will see the "Aurora" supercomputer as the first US Exascale SC coming online in 2021 and featuring Intel's highly anticipated Xe Graphics...

MATE 1.22 is now available as the latest feature update for this fork of the GNOME 2 desktop components...

One of the most interesting announcements out of NVIDIA's 2019 GTC conference is the introduction of the Jetson Nano, NVIDIA's latest Arm developer board featuring a Tegra SoC. This developer board is very different from the past Jetson boards in that it's aiming for a very affordable price point: just $99 USD.

The plans to ship the Wayland-ized Firefox by default in Fedora 30 have been thwarted and will now have to wait until Fedora 31 to try again...

The Mesa 18.3 series will soon be winding down with the Mesa 19.0 release now stable since last week, but out today is 18.3.5 as the latest update...

Last year we were expecting The Khronos Group to introduce OpenXR 1.0 for this standard to address fragmentation and provide interoperability in the VR space followed by AR. That debut last year didn't happen although they did show off the first demonstration at SIGGRAPH. This week though at GDC they are announcing the OpenXR 0.90 provisional specification release...

Since the long-awaited introduction of FreeSync support with the Linux 5.0 kernel, one of the missing elements has been this variable rate refresh support within the RADV Vulkan driver...

Not to be confused with Apple's Quartz graphics layer, a new open-source project called Quartz by developer Michał Siejak is producing stunningly beautiful results while being powered by the Vulkan graphics API, making use of Qt 3D, and NVIDIA RTX support within this path tracer...

The-Forge, a cross-platform rendering framework that is open-source and has supported Linux and Vulkan since 2016 and worked on a variety of interesting rendering features like more advanced "Tress-FX" support, rolled out two new releases this month...

Solus 4 has officially set sail as the latest version of this popular desktop Linux distribution that is known for its "Budgie" desktop environment, borrowing some performance optimizations from the likes of Clear Linux, and various usability enhancements and more to enhance its desktop experience...

Linus Torvalds has just closed off the Linux 5.1 kernel merge window and issued 5.1-rc1 as the first test release...

NVIDIA has issued new Vulkan beta drivers leading up to the Game Developers Conference 2019 as well as this next week there being NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference (GTC) nearby in California...

It shouldn't come as any surprise, but landing today in Mesa 19.1 Git is the initial support for the Nouveau Gallium3D code to make use of the NIR intermediate representation as an alternative to Gallium's TGSI...

With the annual Game Developers' Conference (GDC) kicking off tomorrow in San Francisco, Khronos' Vulkan working group today released Vulkan 1.1.104 that comes with several noteworthy extensions...

The two-week long merge window for Linux 5.1 is expected to close later today so here is a look back at all of the changes and new features coming with this next version of the Linux kernel.

Re-based off Friday's release of Wine 4.4, Wine-Staging 4.4 is now available though the delta compared to upstream is now many patches lighter thanks to some of the work being upstreamed...

Linux game porter Ethan Lee has taken a break from his FNA-XNA/FAudio/Wine hacking to add support to the SDL2 library for the GameCube controller adapter intended for Nintendo's Wii U / Switch devices...

The first development milestone release of Phoronix Test Suite 8.8-Hvaler is now available for your open-source, automated benchmarking needs on Linux, BSD, Windows, and macOS operating systems...

Paolo Bonzini submitted the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes for the Linux 5.1 kernel on Friday, much later in the cycle than normal. This isn't due to some big ticket features landing but rather "some ugly factors" in the form of tracking down some bugs and ended up dropping some premature optimizations...

Similar to Microsoft Windows, KDE Plasma 5.16 is picking up an option on the shutdown screen for letting users reboot into their UEFI setup screen where supported...

With broader availability expected soon for Intel Optane NVDIMMs backed by 3DXPoint memory, which offers a new means of speedy persistent memory, patches have landed in Linux 5.1 to optionally treat this persistent memory just like system RAM...

While there is the Panfrost Gallium3D driver that has been advancing rapidly within mainline Mesa for Arm's Mali newer Midgard/Bifrost architectures, the Lima driver might finally see the light of day in mainline Mesa for Mali's older 400/450 series graphics engine...

Knoppix, one of the first "live" Linux distributions that dates back to the year 2000 and still continues to see occasional updates, is out today with Knoppix version 8.5 in celebration of the latest Chemnitzer Linux Days event...

The Andrew File-System (AFS) continues to evolve as a distributed file-system. Over the past year and a half there's been a lot of activity to AFS in the mainline Linux kernel, including material slated for the in-development Linux 5.1 kernel but then Linus Torvalds ended up having to un-pull the changes...

Adding to the big list of changes to find with the yet-to-be-released GTK4 toolkit is some refactoring around the entry widgets to improve the text entry experience as well as making it easier to create custom entry widgets outside of GTK...

NetworkManager 1.16 is now available as the newest feature release for this widely used Linux networking configuration component...

Scaleway, the European cloud company we previously have talked about on Phoronix for their usage of Coreboot on servers, this week announced new "general purpose" VMs powered by AMD EPYC processors. Curious about the performance, I fired up some benchmarks.