Phoronix

Back in April Vulkan crossed 1,000 project mentions on GitHub while overnight it crossed the threshold of 1,500 references...

WineConf 2017 is taking place today and tomorrow in Wroclaw, Poland. The event began today with a keynote by Wine founder Alexandre Julliard where he talked about Wine 3.0 plans and what's further out on the roadmap...

Many Linux gamers are excited by the prospects of soon having FreeSync support working on the purely open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver stack...

The first public beta of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 is now available for their Enterprise Server, Enterprise Desktop, Enterprise Workstation Extension, and Enterprise High Availability products...

Vulkan 1.0.65 marks the latest weekly update for the specification around this high performance graphics/compute API, but it's not particularly exciting this time around...

To little surprise considering all of Feral's Vulkan driver help recently, their racing game port announced earlier today, F1 2017 for Linux, will use the new graphics API...

The IPC3 is CompuLab's latest-generation Intense-PC. It may look similar to past IPC models, but is now equipped with the latest generation Intel Core CPUs while remaining fan-less and within an all-metal housing that's extremely durable.

While F1 2016 didn't make it to Linux, Feral Interactive just announced F1 2017 will be coming to Linux and it's arriving next week...

Ahead of the weekend, the beta of Chrome 63 is now available for all supported platforms...

Yesterday the GTK tool-kit added support for KDE's server-side decorations on Wayland to be used when client-side decorations are not active. Now it's been proposed adding the KDE Server Decoration Protocol to the upstream Wayland-Protocols repository...

With Mir now having basic Wayland support, next on their agenda is to improve the acceptance/conformance tests around Wayland in general that will help in vetting Mir's Wayland support code...

Last week AMD released a new AMDGPU-PRO driver aimed for cryptocurrency mining that is their first release in the new v17.40 series. This new driver also allows adjusting the fragment size for increased performance and at least for mining yields a big performance boost. Here are some fresh benchmarks on multiple Radeon graphics cards using 17.40 with the amdgpu vm_fragment_size set for 2MB compared to the latest NVIDIA 387 Linux graphics driver on various GeForce GPUs.

AMD's Linux team working on the AMDGPU DC display code sent out a set of 29 more patches this week...

One area where AMD Ryzen users have encountered Linux issues with virtualization is when trying to setup pass-through support for a graphics card to allow the virtual machine direct access to the GPU. When NPT (Nested Page Tables) are enabled, performance can become severely degraded...

Even Google is concerned about attack vectors with UEFI and Intel's Management Engine that their NERF project seeks to alleviate some of these concerns and is used by their servers...

Intel's open-source developers working on their i915 Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver have had a very busy cycle preparing a lot of new code for the upcoming Linux 4.15...

Open blocker bugs are preventing Fedora 27 from being released next week...

Running GTK3 applications on a KDE Plasma Wayland session will soon look better with GNOME's toolkit now supporting the KDE server-side decorations...

The GNU Compiler Collection currently uses -O0 as the default optimization level when no other optimization level is passed. An ARM developer is proposing the default optimization level be changed to -Og...

One step below AMD's current top-end EPYC 7601 server processor is the EPYC 7551. The EPYC 7551 costs around $800 USD less than the 7601 while still being a 32 core / 64 thread part but with slightly lower clock frequencies. In this article is a look at the EPYC 7251 / 7351P / 7401P / 7551 / 7601 Ubuntu Linux performance compared to various Intel Xeon CPUs in our lab.

For fans of the Lightworks commercial-grade non-linear video editing software, their first beta update of the 14.1 series is now available...

Today's GeForce GTX 1070 Ti announcement is hardly a surprise given all the recent leaks about this new card, but NVIDIA announced it today and will be shipping in early November...

Intel developers have been working on a new user-space file-system designed for persistent memory. This user-space file-system is designed to be high-performance and does not make use of FUSE...

Two developers from the Pengutronix embedded Linux company out of Germany presented at this week's Embedded Linux Conference in Europe. There they talked about zero-copy video streaming on embedded systems, and as part of that, the Etnaviv open-source graphics driver...

Following AMD on Twitter teasing new Ryzen announcements the past few days, today is expected to be the launch day for the new Ryzen Mobile hardware up to now known as "Raven Ridge"...

A new release is now available of Beignet, Intel's open-source project providing Linux OpenCL compute support for their Iris/HD/UHD Graphics products...

Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais‏ who is heavily involved in their Linux efforts as well as those around virtual reality has commented the VR market-share is already larger than the entire Steam Linux market-share...

With Mesa 17.3 now having been branched for its stable release next month and that bringing much improved RADV Radeon Vulkan performance and more mature RX Vega support along with a ton of other improvements, here is a fresh comparison of the newest open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver code compared to the latest NVIDIA Linux driver on a range of graphics cards.

Google today has pushed out Android Studio 3.0 as the latest stable release of this integrated development environment for their mobile operating system...

While Plymouth has become widely-used as a bootsplash screen on most Linux systems these days and is much better off than the RHGB days, SUSE has sent out initial patches as part of their proposal for having a new in-kernel bootsplash system...

For those looking at assembling a new system around Intel's 8th Gen Core "Coffee Lake" CPUs, the motherboard I've been conducting most of my Linux tests from has been the ASUS PRIME Z370-A. A few weeks of use with this motherboard, I'm happy with this Intel Z370 motherboard.

The Linux Mint crew has confirmed today they will be discontinuing future releases of their KDE spin following next month's Linux Mint 18.3 release...

As further sign of Feral Interactive continuing to pursue Vulkan for their Linux games, a Feral developer today posted a patch for implementing the brand new AMD_shader_info extension for the RADV Mesa driver...

Qt 5.10 is up to its second beta milestone ahead of its expected stable debut by the end of November...

When glibc 2.26 was released in August it was a noteworthy release with plenty of optimizations and introduced its own per-thread cache. With the next installment of the GNU C Library there will also be many more optimizations...

There's been a theme recently with the open-source graphics drivers of working on priority scheduling support from AMDGPU priority scheduling for VR use-cases and tied into RADV to Intel also allowing context priority support that in turn is exposed through EGL. The Freedreno driver has also been working on a context priority implementation...

Mesa's support for the OpenGL KHR_no_error extension is now treated as "done" for all drivers...

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, the recently named "Bionic Beaver", will most likely be shipping with a Linux 4.15-based kernel...

At the OpenZFS Developer Summit today besides an Oracle engineer talked of hope for upstreaming ZFS in Linux, another interesting session was showcasing Open ZFS running under Windows...

SQLite 3.21 is now out as the newest feature release for this widely-used embedded database library...

For many years Linux storage enthusiasts have dreamed of having the ZFS file-system part of the mainline Linux kernel. But since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems that outlook has looked much more bleak that they would re-license the ZFS kernel code under a license compatible with the upstream GPLv2 Linux kernel. But an Oracle engineer presented today that the ZFS Linux dream might still come true...

Yesterday I posted some fresh benchmarks of the RX Vega between the AMDGPU+RadeonSI/RADV open-source vs. AMDGPU-PRO drivers, which showed the pure open-source driver stack performing admirably well for the latest-generation AMD graphics architecture and the community-driven RADV Vulkan driver was even performing nicely. Due to how well RADV has matured during the Mesa 17.3 cycle, here are some benchmarks using a Radeon RX 580 "Polaris" graphics card showing off its more mature support for Vulkan.

Epic Games has today released Unreal Engine 4.18 as the newest version of their cross-platform game engine...

Aspyr Media has released Observer for Linux and macOS as their newest game port...

Next month's Mesa 17.3 release won't have OpenGL 4.6 that debuted this summer, but they are getting close to supporting this latest version of the OpenGL graphics API...

We've been looking at the interesting AMD EPYC server processors recently from the high-end EPYC 7601 to the cheapest EPYC 7251 at under $500 as well as the EPYC 7351P that offers 16 cores / 32 threads for only about $750. The latest EPYC processor for testing at Phoronix has been the EPYC 7401P, a 24 core / 48 thread part that is slated to retail for around $1075 USD.

Mark Shuttleworth has just revealed the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS codename.....

Intel has published more patches for supporting new instruction set extensions that will debut with "Ice Lake" processors when launched in late 2018 or early 2019...

GNOME developer Adrien Plazas has written a blog post about some of the big work items he's engaged in for retro-gtk, the GNOME user-interface for running various libretro cores / game emulators...

With Mesa 17.3 having been branched yesterday and the first release candidate issued for this quarterly feature update, here's a look at some of the development numbers for this Q4'17 Mesa update...