Phoronix

The latest Steam client release on Wednesday rolls out OpenGL and Vulkan shader pre-caching by default...

Oracle has announced the release of their Linux Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 4 Update 6...

Last month on Phoronix I featured the DXVK project that's working to implement Direct3D 11 over Vulkan (not to be confused with VK9 as the separate effort to get D3D9 over Vulkan). This project is making a surprising amount of progress in its early stages...

FreeNAS 11.1 is now available as the latest feature update to this popular FreeBSD-based Network Attached Storage (NAS) operating system...

While SilverStone is mostly known for their computer cases, power supplies, and other peripherals, with the TS421S they have a compelling four-disk drive enclosure on their hands. The TS421S drive storage device supports up to four SAS/SATA 2.5-inch drives over a single mini-SAS SFF-8088 cable.

Back in March we wrote about GAPID as a new Google-developed Vulkan debugger in its early stages. Fast forward to today, GAPID 1.0 has been released for debugging Vulkan apps/games on Linux/Windows/Android as well as OpenGL ES on Android...

NetworkManager now has support for Intel's lean "IWD" WiFi daemon...

Not only are Ubuntu developers working towards demoting Python 2 on their Linux distribution but they are also working on being able to demote the GTK2 tool-kit from the main archive to universe followed by its eventual removal in the future...

It turns out that if firing up KDE's KWin Wayland compositor without XWayland support, it can start up so fast that it causes problems...

With yesterday's release of the Radeon Software Adrenalin driver for Windows, it actually picks up a feature that is roughly similar to something the open-source Radeon driver stack - and all of the Mesa's Gallium3D drivers for that matter - have offered for years...

Wayland had a very eventful year with it conquering more Linux desktops now since the switch to using GNOME Shell on Wayland with Ubuntu 17.10, Ubuntu's Mir compositor still being around but having switched to adding Wayland protocol support, KDE's Wayland support becoming day-to-day usable, and much more...

A new major release is available of Cryptsetup, the user-space utility for dealing with the DMCrypt kernel module for setting up encrypted disk volumes...

Following yesterday's excitement around the Radeon Software Adrenalin Driver as well as word of AMD open-sourcing their Linux driver and making other Linux driver changes, AMD's GPUOpen team has announced the release of a new version of Radeon GPU Profiler...

VLC 3.0 is something we've been looking forward to for years and it's looking like that big multimedia player update could be released very soon...

During last week's Snapdragon Technology Summit, a few references to "Vulkan2" were dropped... Well, here's the official comment from Khronos on that as well as my thoughts on this hypothetical next version of Vulkan...

GIMP 2.9.8 has been released as the newest development version of this widely-used, open-source Photoshop-like program in its road to GIMP 2.10...

With today's AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 Linux driver release alongside the Radeon Software Adrenalin Driver for Windows users, it's significant in a few ways. First and foremost, AMD has stuck to their word of the past two years and is now able to open-source their official Vulkan Linux driver. When it comes to AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 itself you are now able to mix-and-match driver components to choose what pieces you want of AMD's somewhat complicated driver make-up. Additionally, their OpenGL/Vulkan drivers in 17.50 have some new feature capabilities. So with that said here's a fresh look at how the AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 professional driver performance compares to the latest open-source RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan drivers.

AMD isn't the only one busy with GPU software updates today but NVIDIA has issued CUDA 9.1 as their first feature update to the CUDA 9 compute platform...

The Fedora Project's plans on delivering an initial "Fedora 27 Modular Server" build constructed under their new packaging principles has been thwarted...

For modern AMD graphics cards there are two OpenGL drivers and two Vulkan drivers available to Linux users/gamers that support the same modern AMD GPUs, not counting the older AMD Linux drivers, etc. Here's a rundown now on how those drivers compare...

Ahead of the Vulkan 1.0 debut nearly two years ago, we heard that for AMD's Vulkan Linux driver it was initially going to be closed-source and would then be open-sourced once ready. At the time it sounded like something that would be opened up six months or so, but finally that milestone is being reached! Ahead of Christmas, AMD is publishing the source code to their official Vulkan Linux driver.

There's more Radeon Linux excitement today beyond AMD finally open-sourcing their Vulkan driver. Coming out today is the AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 driver that bundles in the open-source RADV and RadeonSI drivers too, in letting you "mix and match" the driver components you want for your system.

AMD open-source developer Nicolai Hähnle has spent the past few months working on the ARB_gl_spirv extension as mandated by OpenGL 4.6. Some of the prep work for supporting that extension has landed in Mesa 17.4-dev Git...

Not only did GNOME have a very busy 2017, but as 2017 nears its end, here's a look back at the most exciting events in the KDE camp...

This week has started off to being another busy time in Mesa Git just ahead of the holidays...

Epiphany 3.27.3 was released this morning as the newest release of GNOME's web browser in the road to the GNOME 3.28 stable desktop debut next March...

VESA has rolled out DisplayHDR 1.0 as its newest standard. As implied by the name, the standard is in regards to specifying HDR (High Dynamic Range) quality for displays...

A Phoronix reader recently inquired about whether power-saving utilities like Intel PowerTop and TLP are still useful for conserving power on modern Linux distributions and modern hardware. The short answer is, yes, and here are some numbers.

For those interested in the open-source Coreboot project that serves as a replacement to proprietary UEFI/BIOS, the videos from their European Coreboot Conference are now available...

Broadcom developer Eric Anholt has offered an update on the state of the VC5 Gallium3D driver for OpenGL support as well as the work being done on the "BCMV" Vulkan driver. Additionally, the VC4 Gallium3D driver for existing Raspberry Pi devices continues to get better...

The open-source Darktable RAW photography software that's long been available for Linux and macOS has finally been ported to Microsoft Windows. But fortunately that's not all to be found in Darktable 2.4...

GNUstep is the long-standing free software project working to implement Apple's Cocoa Objective-C frameworks used by macOS. The GNU project has made new releases of their GUI and Back libraries...

Intel today has announced their new Pentium Silver and Celeron processor line-up powered by their Gemini Lake microarchitecture...

While 2017 was the first year in a decade without seeing a major X.Org Server release, it wasn't due to lack of X.Org Server development activity. Here's a look back at the X.Org 2017 highlights...

The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver's NIR back-end is moving one step closer to feature parity with the existing OpenGL capabilities of this AMD GCN graphics driver...

Linus Torvalds has announced the third weekly test release of the upcoming Linux 4.15 kernel...

The BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system should be issuing its long-awaited beta release by early 2018...

The x86 scheduler model for Skylake AVX-512-enabled servers has been updated ahead of the LLVM 6.0 feature freeze next month...

With some BFQ performance fixes included as part of Linux 4.15 along with other I/O scheduler work and block improvements for this latest Linux kernel series, here are some fresh benchmarks of the different I/O scheduler options using the Linux 4.15 Git kernel.

OpenBSD has graduated its 64-bit ARM (ARM64) architecture to being officially supported...

GNOME had a very successful 2017 with the excellent 3.24 and 3.26 releases that continued improving their Wayland support, adding various features to their applications, etc. GTK4 development continued heavily as well with a plethora of improvements and new features...

It's been four months since the release of GIMP 2.9.6 and while GIMP 2.9 developments are sadly not too frequent, the next GIMP 2.9.8 release is preparing a host of changes...

Linux system vendor System76 has released their new HiDPI daemon for their laptops and desktops to improving the display experience on multi-monitor configurations...

KDE Frameworks 5.41 is now available as the latest monthly update to this collection of add-on libraries complementing Qt5...

The developers working on the KDE Elisa music player, which was announced earlier this year among several ongoing KDE multimedia player projects is out with its first alpha release ahead of Elisa v0.1...

It was another busy year in the GNU camp...

For your viewing pleasure this weekend are some fresh benchmarks of the very latest NVIDIA and Radeon Linux graphics drivers.

A long-standing KDE initiative that hasn't received as much attention as it deserves is KDE Connect for allowing KDE to interface with other devices -- namely smartphones -- for being able to display phone notifications on your desktop and more. A new KDE Plasmoid makes it easy now to send/receive SMS text messages...

For the past number of months AMD has been working on upstreaming more KFD changes, AMDKFD is their kernel driver to the HSA compute stack. AMD began with upstreaming their APU changes while now they have finally moved onto their "dGPU" changes...

Up to now LLVM's Clang C/C++ compiler has defaulted to using C++98/GNU++98 as its default C++ standard, but fortunately that's no more...