Phoronix

Qt 3D Studio 2.0 is coming this summer, but today marks the Qt 3D Studio 1.1 release as an incremental upgrade for those using this 3D user-interface authoring system that originated out of NVIDIA's open-source code...

Back in January was the announcement of Intel's "Titan Ridge" Thunderbolt 3 controllers that offer DisplayPort 1.4 support and optional USB-C computer port compatibility while retaining backwards compatibility...

It's been several months since last hearing anything about OpenChrome as the open-source driver project still working to create a free software driver for VIA's aging x86 graphics hardware. There remains ambitions for getting this driver to the mainline Linux kernel, but 2D acceleration for now is out, and their DDX driver has been delayed indefinitely...

The Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" is now under its feature freeze. This marks the period now by which Ubuntu developers should be focusing on bug fixes rather than new features...

Intel's i965 Mesa OpenGL driver now allows for 48-bit addressing, which greatly expands the GPU memory limits...

KDiff3 is a long-time Qt-powered program for showing compares and merges between 2_ text files or directories. It's basically a nice graphically-driven diff viewer and has automatic merge abilities, Unicode handling, etc...

With the start of a new month comes a new batch of Steam Survey results from Valve... For February 2018 they are reporting a 0.28% marketshare...

A new release is available of DXVK, the Vulkan-based implementation of Direct3D 11 intended to offer a faster experience for running 3D games/applications under Wine...

Going back to last November has been MSAA fast-clear patches for the Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver while today they were finally merged...

After being delayed due to Spectre and Meltdown with the Canonical developers busy mitigating those CPU security vulnerabilities, the Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS release was rolled out a few minutes ago...

A week back I wrote about new Wine Vulkan patches being under review and this week the initial bits have now been merged to mainline Wine...

For more than the past year we have reported on kernel work to further lock down the Linux kernel with UEFI Secure Boot and it's looking now like that work may finally be close to being mainlined...

It's been just one week since Qt 5.11 Alpha shipped while today The Qt Company released Qt 5.11 Beta 1...

Last year Intel open-source developers squared away priority GPU scheduling support within their kernel DRM driver and from Mesa are exposing support for "high priority" GPU processes via the EGL_IMG_context_priority extension. There hasn't been any major real-world user of this support yet, but a patch would allow Wayland's Weston OpenGL renderer to make use of it...

A prolific contributor to Mozilla's GFX-RS project, the Rust programming language, and also an author to a Rust-based SPIR-V shader compiler is now working on a C++-based Vulkan-over-D3D12 implementation...

Many ioquake3-powered games like OpenArena, Smokin' Guns, World of Padman, and others have faded away or at least not put out a new release in a number of years, but I was surprised this morning waking up to a new Urban Terror release...

Another month is in the books as we approach the 14th birthday of Phoronix. It was another eventful month with 293 original news articles and another 18 featured reviews/articles on the site along with many other benchmarks being a work-in-progress...

As was planned yesterday, X.Org Server 1.20 Release Candidate 1 has become a reality...

The Sculpt operating system that aims for day-to-day / general purpose use-cases and built atop the Genode OS Framework is now available...

KDE's KScreen screen configuration tool is getting some nice improvements as part of the Plasma 5.13 development cycle...

A Phoronix reader granted us remote access to a FOXCONN C2U4N_MB system featuring two Cavium ThunderX 48-core SoCs. For those curious about the potential of a modern 96-core ARM platform, here are some basic benchmark results.

In the past we have reported on work done by students at the Imperial College London on fuzzing OpenGL drivers and in the process uncovering various driver bugs affecting Linux too. They have out a new WebGL demo that has already uncovered at least one Mesa driver bug...

Valve Linux GPU driver developer Timothy Arceri provided a status update today on the RadeonSI NIR back-end that is needed as part of the SPIR-V ingestion upbringing and that this Radeon GCN OpenGL driver may switch to using NIR by default in the future...

2017 marked the first tine in a decade without seeing a major update to the X.Org Server. But finally X.Org Server 1.20 is now being prepared for release and it incorporates all the major work since the X.Org Server 1.19 debut in November 2016. Needless to say, xorg-server 1.20 is going to be a huge release...

Following the big VLC 3.0 release from the beginning of February, the VideoLAN crew is ending out the month with the v3.0.1 point release...

For those of you making use of Oracle VM VirtualBox, the 5.2.8 point release is now available as a rather large point release...

Intel Linux developer Joonas Lahtinen has sent in the latest DRM-Intel-Next pull request of new material for DRM-Next that in turn will land during the next Linux 4.17 kernel cycle...

Indeed it turns out that the landing today of RandR leases and deep color / color depth 30 support for GLAMOR/modesetting is because Red Hat's Adam Jackson is finally wrangling the xorg-server 1.20 release together...

Falkon 3.0 has been released today as the first version since its rebranding from QupZilla as an open-source, Qt-powered web-browser...

One big piece of Keith Packard's work on improving Steam VR for Linux or particularly VR HMD handling is now merged to Git master...

Independent developer Mario Kleiner has spent the past several months working on plumbing the Linux graphics stack for better "deep color" or 30-bit color depth support. His latest work on the X.Org Server has now been merged to mainline...

For those of you with a Radeon GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" GPU, the RADV Vulkan driver support for these first Graphics Core Next graphics processors continues to be improved...

The AMD developers working on their official, cross-platform "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver code have just pushed out another batch of changes to their open-source code repository...

Adriaan de Groot continues working on improving the KDE stack for FreeBSD. The moment is finally near where KDE Plasma 5 along with the modern KDE Applications stack should soon be available via the FreeBSD Ports collection...

The X.Org Foundation is calling on student developers to consider applying for this year's Google Summer of Code where you could be working on exciting projects for Nouveau, Mesa, Wayland, and more while gaining valuable work experience and earning a nice stipend...

Shortly after announcing the Wayland 1.15 Alpha release on Monday, Samsung's Derek Foreman did the adjoining alpha release of the Weston 4.0 reference compositor...

Two years after unveiling Qt Automotive Suite 1.0 for designing digital cockpits for the ever increasing number of screens within cars, The Qt Company has today announced Qt Automotive Suite 2.0...

It's been just one week since the Mesa 17.3.5 debut while today it's been succeeded by v17.3.6 as what's being advertised as an emergency release...

The Godot Game Engine is one of the few projects already announcing a change in their plans following this morning's announcement of better and open-source Vulkan support on macOS/iOS...

DC patch wrangler Harry Wentland of AMD has sent out the 33 latest patches for the AMDGPU display code stack...

Derek Foreman of Samsung's Open-Source Group has announced the alpha release of Wayland 1.15...

The in-development Linux 4.16 kernel has already received a few rounds of updates for the mitigation work on the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities while more is on the way...

Samsung OSG developer Mike Blumenkrantz is proposing a new Wayland protocol for dealing with session management behavior...

Two years and a few days since the Vulkan 1.0 release is now marked by a new significant milestone for this cross-platform graphics/compute API... It's not a new Vulkan release today, but Vulkan is now available on Apple's iOS and macOS platforms! Here are the details with the embargo just expiring on Vulkan now on macOS/iOS but still without the official support from Apple.

There has been some interesting open-source GPU compute happenings in the works this year including SPIR-V support for Gallium3D Clover and Nouveau NIR support along with associated Mesa changes. Rob Clark of Red Hat and lead developer on the Freedreno driver has also jumped on board these recent Mesa compute initiatives...

The third release candidate is available today of LLVM 6.0 and its associated components like Clang, Compiler-RT, libc++, LLDB, etc...

Jolla is talking up Sailfish OS 3.0 this week at the Embedded World conference as the "next-generation of the independent mobile operating system" and plans to ship it this calendar year...

While Meson+Ninja remains all the hype these days when it comes to open-source build systems, the GNU build system isn't going away any time soon and a key component of that was just updated, Automake 1.16...

Linus Torvalds released Linux 4.16-rc3 on Sunday night and overall it was another routine update towards stabilizing the Linux 4.16 kernel...

Oracle's current Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) release is making use of Linux 4.1 that is definitely showing its age... Fortunately, for those using this Oracle spin of the Linux kernel on their RHEL-clone Oracle Linux have UEK Release 5 in the pipe that is transitioning to Linux 4.14 LTS...