Phoronix

The third weekly release candidate to next month's Wine 3.0 is now available for testing...

When Canonical announced they would be dropping their Unity 8 plans but that Mir would still be maintained, their reason at the time for maintaining it were "Internet of Things" (IoT) use-cases. While not yet clear, Canonical is privately working on Mir IoT plans for 2018...

For those wondering how the Vulkan vs. OpenGL performance is for various Linux games as we near the end of 2017, here are some test results from the benchmark-friendly Linux games that offer both OpenGL and Vulkan renderers. Tests were done with two Radeon graphics cards and two NVIDIA graphics cards using the latest available Linux GPU drivers.

The latest project aiming for an open-source mobile Linux operating system that is privacy-minded is Eelo. This project does have some merit as it's being started by the original creator of Mandrake Linux...

Last week I reported on AMD finally preparing their open-source Vulkan driver that many Linux enthusiasts have been looking forward to since the Vulkan 1.0 debut nearly two years ago. As of this morning, the source-code to this official AMD Vulkan driver is now publicly available. AMD Linux fans and developers can rejoice this weekend building out this "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver and its new Platform Abstraction Layer (PAL).

GTK4 continues looking good and even better now thanks to nearly 100 commits improving its OpenGL renderer...

Samsung OSG developers have been investigating and dealing with a nasty Wayland bug whereby a Wayland event could be delivered to an incorrect file descriptor. This ends up being due to a shortcoming in the Wayland protocol, but as to not break all existing software out there built against the current Wayland protocol, a workaround has been devised...

2017 could go down as the year that marked the descent of x86 32-bit support. Ubuntu 17.10 dropped their 32-bit desktop ISO, Ubuntu Server is now dropping their 32-bit installer, and more. Now NVIDIA Corp is announcing they are ending 32-bit support for their graphics driver...

Endless Mobile, the company behind the Linux-based Flatpak-using Endless OS and that has sold several different low-cost computers around the world, is looking forward to AMDGPU DC...

The Opus open-source, royalty-free audio codec designed for interactive speech and music over the Internet is working on its version 1.3 update...

There's some exciting news for open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver users this holiday season!..

LLVM 5.0.1 is now available as the first and likely only point release to LLVM 5.0...

Valve has just started their annual Steam Winter Sale that runs through 4 January...

Mesa 17.3.1 has been released today as the first point release to Mesa 17.3, the Q4'2017 feature update to Mesa...

While Red Hat is on track for a run rate of nearly three billion dollars for their current fiscal year, Canonical - the company behind Ubuntu - isn't quite there yet while still dominating the cloud landscape and other areas...

For GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" and GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" graphics processors from AMD, they are supported both by the Radeon DRM driver (the default) as well as the AMDGPU DRM driver (designed for GCN 1.2+ GPUs). As it's been a while since comparing the performance impact of changing the kernel driver for these older GCN graphics cards, here are some fresh benchmarks using the Linux 4.15 Git kernel with Mesa 17.4-dev using a few GCN 1.0/1.1 cards.

The Free Software Foundation and Purism are announcing that the Debian-derived PureOS operating system is being added to the FSF list of approved GNU/Linux distributions...

While Ubuntu Touch may be dead to Canonical, UBports continues to work where the convergence / Unity 8 developers left off with trying to make this mobile platform a reality...

While NVIDIA has been working on HDR display support for the X.Org Server environment via a new "DeepColor" extension, Intel developers have begun working on High Dynamic Range support for Wayland/Weston and the associated changes needed to Mesa...

DisplayLink developers in cooperation with interest from VMware's virtual graphics driver team have sent out a draft proposal for adding a damage interface to the Direct Rendering Manager drivers...

It looks like NVIDIA is trying to end out 2017 on a high note for Linux customers. After yesterday posting their open-source experimental allocator for Nouveau, today they landed the long sought after GP108 signed firmware files...

Complementing our recent Amazon EC2 Linux cloud distribution benchmarks, here are some fresh test results when comparing various Linux distributions when benchmarking them as guest VMs with the KVM hypervisor.

Coreboot is now able to replace the proprietary BIOS on some older Lenovo ThinkPads...

Continuing with our various end-of-year recaps for FLOSS/Linux on Phoronix, our latest look is at the most popular news for (open)SUSE in 2017...

AMD has sent in another round of AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager driver updates to DRM-Next for staging until the Linux 4.16 kernel merge window next month...

It's been more than one year since the release of X.Org Server 1.19 and with X.Org Server 1.20 still being at least some weeks away from release, X.Org Server 1.19.6 was released today...

With Ubuntu 17.10 the 32-bit desktop image/installer was dropped while for the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release they plan to do away with the ubuntu-server i386 release...

NVIDIA has done an open-source code drop to end out 2017. It's not as exciting as many would have hoped for in providing Nouveau GPU re-clocking abilities, any improvements to the signed firmware situation, or an open-source Vulkan driver, but there is now an experimental Nouveau allocator to implement their proposed generic device allocator library...

Yesterday I provided some benchmarks showing how the Radeon RX Vega performance has evolved since launch but if looking more broadly at how the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D Linux gaming performance has advanced over the course of 2017, the gains become much more profound. Here are tests of the open-source driver state over 2017 when testing an older Radeon HD 7950 (GCN 1.0) graphics card as well as a Radeon R9 Fury and RX 580 graphics cards.

The KDE Calligra graphics/office suite forked from KOffice several years back is preparing for its next major release...

Last year The Khronos Group announced NNEF as a open-source, royalty-free neural network format to combat the proprietary formats used today. In their last standards update of 2017, NNEF 1.0 is now available...

After going through fourteen rounds of patch revisions, Daniel Stone of Collabora might be ready to land his 40+ patches implementing atomic mode-setting support within Weston...

Red Hat developers working on the oVirt virtualization management platform have announced the release of oVirt 4.2...

Published on Tuesday were a set of 60 kernel patches rolling out "hyper_dmabuf" as a means of allowing DMA-BUF buffers to be exchanged between virtual machines...

Canonical has temporarily pulled the download links for Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" from the Ubuntu website due to ongoing reports of some laptops finding their BIOS corrupted after installing this latest Ubuntu release. The issue is appearing most frequently with Lenovo laptops but there are also reports of issues with other laptop vendors as well...

One of several side projects by the Solus Linux distribution project has been linux-steam-integration as a means of a helper package to improve the integration of the Steam client and Steam games running on Linux. LSI applies workarounds and other optimizations to get Steam games running better on Linux...

With the end of the year quickly approaching, here's a look at how the current AMD Radeon vs. NVIDIA GeForce GPU cryptocurrency mining performance is playing out for Ethereum Ethminer with OpenCL. Tests were done on 14 graphics cards using the latest drivers and in addition to looking at the raw GPU mining performance are also performance-per-Watt and performance-per-dollar metrics.

Samuel Pitoiset working on Valve's Linux GPU driver team has addressed the last of the minor F1 2017 rendering bugs encountered when using the open-source RADV Vulkan driver...

The Debian project had a very successful year with the release of Debian 9 "Stretch" and let's not forget about Debian GNU/Hurd 2017, the installer alpha test releases beginning for Buster, Devuan 1.0 as Debian without systemd, and the continued maintenance releases...

Earlier this month the Fedora Modular working group decided to throw in the towel on Fedora Modular Server 27 and instead to do a "classic" server edition. We now have more details on how the eventual re-architected Modular Server should look for F28...

Longtime Fedora/GNOME developer Christian Schaller who leads the desktop engineering team at Red Hat recently commented on some bold Linux/tech predictions for 2018. He's now also shared his personal opinion on why "the year of the Linux desktop" has yet to materialize...

The Unity game engine is ending out the year by releasing their 2017.3 engine update...

As part of our end-of-year benchmarking, a Phoronix Premium supporter had brought up the idea of seeing how the Radeon RX Vega Linux driver performance has evolved since launch. Ask and you shall receive: here's some numbers showing the state of the Radeon RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64 performance with the open-source RadeonSI+AMDGPU performance as of this week compared to back on launch-day.

The GNOME Builder development environment has already been working on many new features for next year's GNOME 3.28 desktop environment while even more features are now on track...

The Vulkan graphics API has been particularly popular with some gaming console emulators from the Dolphin Emulator to RetroArch. The latest emulator now working on Vulkan support is PPSSPP on Linux...

Today marks the release of Portable Computing Language "POCL" 1.0 for this originally CPU-based OpenCL implementation...

It remains to be seen how exactly the situation will play out with the existing open-source RADV Vulkan driver that's in the Mesa tree and AMD's to-be-opened "Radeon Open Vulkan" driver that is the company's official Vulkan driver. At least though Vulkan drivers are lighter and less maintenance than OpenGL drivers...

Since yesterday several (Windows-focused) publications have been running stories about how AMD's next-gen "Navi" GPU was supposedly spotted in the AMD Linux driver code...

Intel has sent in another round of feature updates of their i915 DRM driver to DRM-Next of new material slated for Linux 4.16...

While Linux is our predominant focus at Phoronix, a special place in our heart remains for the BSDs. Here's a look back at the most popular BSD operating system articles on Phoronix this year...