On Tuesday a new X.Org Server 1.20 release candidate was issued by Red Hat's Adam Jackson for this prolonged development cycle now stretching well more than one and a half years...
With the in-development Linux 4.17 kernel there is the long-awaited discrete GPU support in good shape at least for hardware like Polaris and Fiji. While the latest and greatest AMD GPUs are the Vega family, more work has been needed for AMDKFD support. Unfortunately those Vega changes didn't make it in for Linux 4.17, but those patches are now available...
Andy Shevchenko has submitted the platform-drivers-x86 updates for the Linux 4.17 kernel merge window that largely benefit modern x86 laptops running Linux...
While it could have been pretty much assumed up until now that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 would ship without Python 2 considering that next enterprise Linux OS release isn't even out yet, its long-term maintenance support, and Python 2 reaching EOL at the start of 2020, but now it's been made official...
There are old CPU architectures being dropped from the Linux 4.17 kernel while also some new CPU support added. The latest work added with the busy Linux 4.17 development cycle is support for the MIPS-based Microsemi Ocelot SoCs...
While AMD has plumbed in FreeSync variable-rate refresh support with their AMDGPU DC display code stack, it's not yet all happy on the open-source mainline kernel as the missing piece has been over having a unified API for the Direct Rendering Manager drivers that can be used for supporting Free-Sync or the VESA-approved AdaptiveSync or HDMI VRR (Variable Refresh Rate). The discussion over having this common API for DRM drivers is back to being discussed...
With today's release of the Feral GameMode library/daemon of course I am running some benchmarks... Here is some initial numbers while this has spurred some fresh benchmarks looking at the P-State vs. CPUFreq performance and their respective frequency scaling governor options...
ReactOS 0.4.8 is now available as the project's first update of 2018 that continues working on becoming an "open-source Windows" with binary drop-in compatibility support...
In addition to the overhauled/rewritten Windows support, the upcoming Phoronix Test Suite 8.0-Aremark is also featuring much better support for the BSDs. As part of that testing, here are some fresh benchmarks of FreeBSD and TrueOS...
The latest driver optimization work by Timothy Arceri on Valve's Linux GPU driver team has been working on function inlining within NIR rather than within the GLSL IR optimizations. The net result is faster NIR compile times that benefit the Intel OpenGL driver and also help with RadeonSI Gallium3D...
Last month I wrote about Broadcom's Eric Anholt exploring the use of AMDGPU's DRM scheduler within the in-development Video Core V (VC5) DRM driver. That work has panned out and looks like it will eventually work out for this open-source Broadcom graphics driver...
The "real-time clock" (RTC) changes usually aren't too notable to the Linux kernel merge windows, but for the in-development Linux 4.17 kernel to prolong their life for decades to come, at least as far as the clock is concerned...
KDE Connect is the nifty KDE project providing allowing communication between your Linux desktop computer and your Android smartphone/tablet via a secure communication protocol. KDE Connect 1.3 is now the latest feature release...
Today's hardware monitoring subsystem updates sent into the Linux 4.17 kernel merge window were a bit peculiar with "new Centaur CPUs" now being supported for reading the CPU core temperatures...
The Vulkan CTS as the conformance test suite for ensuring drivers are properly and fully implementing the Vulkan graphics and compute API continues getting even more in-depth and attempts to cover as many corner-cases as possible...
Hitting the Mesa mailing list today from AMD developers are a set of twenty-two patches providing VP9 video acceleration support via the Gallium3D VA-API state tracker...
When it comes to Mir acting as a Wayland compositor, feature support continues to be extended for making this a more viable offering for those looking to have full Wayland support...
Thanks to Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux driver team, the RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver supports the new VK_AMD_shader_core_properties extension...
As of the Linux 4.16 kernel that was released one week ago, the kernel-side bits are in place for Intel Virtual GPU support and in user-space the upcoming QEMU 2.12 has the necessary code for the GTK and SPICE code-paths...
Prominent Ubuntu community developer Simon Quigley has sparked a discussion about Ubuntu's release milestones and the possibility of moving away with their alpha and beta one milestones moving forward...
Landing in Linux 4.15 was performance counters support in the Etnaviv DRM driver as the low-level bits for exposing the hardware counters with this reverse-engineered, open-source Vivante graphics driver. The user-space/Mesa side code has now landed too...
Landing in Linux 4.15 was performance counters support in the Etnaviv DRM driver as the low-level bits for exposing the hardware counters with this reverse-engineered, open-source Vivante graphics driver. The user-space/Mesa side code has now landed too...
Last month Intel launched the Optane SSD 800P series as a step below the ultra-fast Optane 900P solid-state drives but still a big step ahead of other SSD options like the Intel 760p series. Here are our first Linux performance benchmarks of the Optane 800p series with testing the 118GB SSDPEK1W120GA 800p SSD on Ubuntu.
We are now through the first week of the two week long Linux 4.17 kernel merge window process for introducing the new features/functionality to this next big kernel release...
The Sway Wayland Compositor that is known for its compatibility and inspiration from the i3 tiling window manager is nearly out with its version 1.0 release...
Our latest Windows vs. Linux benchmarking interest has been seeing how the AMD Ryzen 7 performance compares with the latest operating systems / Linux distributions. We have recently posted some Windows 10 vs. Windows WSL vs. Windows Linux benchmarks, relative Spectre/Meltdown mitigation impact tests on Windows vs. Linux, and other benchmarks but has mostly been done with Intel or server hardware. For those curious, today's tests were done with an AMD Ryzen 7 1700 platform.
We are at the end of the first (and busiest) week of the two-week long Linux 4.17 kernel merge window. There have been many articles on Phoronix about the big highlights of this next kernel version while here are some of the smaller change-sets that came about this week...
The latest nifty open-source Vulkan project we have come across worthy of a shout-out is VKVG. VKVG is short for Vulkan Vector Graphics and is a C library for drawing 2D vector graphics using the Vulkan graphics API...