Phoronix

It's not yet merged to mainline Mesa, but Eric Anholt of Broadcom has spent the past week wiring up more of the OpenGL functionality for the in-development VC5 driver stack for the next-generation Broadcom graphics hardware...

Last winter we covered work being done out of the Imperial College in London on the wild results when fuzzing OpenGL shaders in uncovering issues in multiple OpenGL drivers, including the Mesa drivers. The scholarly results were recently published of this testing within Automated Testing of Graphics Shader Compilers...

Rejoice as S3TC (S3 Texture Compression) support now resides within Mesa Git following its patent expiry on Monday...

The latest work hitting LLVM 6.0 is support for the Myriad ma2x8x class of processors and some other missing Myriad CPUs...

Version 17.09 of the NixOS Linux distribution built around the Nix package manager is out with a new release...

The first beta of KDevelop 5.2 is now available as the KDE-focused integrated development environment...

As expected, Mesa 17.2.2 was released today by Igalia's Juan Suarez Romero...

FreeBSD 12.0 will have initial support for ZFS Channel Programs (ZCP) for running administrative tasks on the file-system via Lua...

New kernel patches have been posted for enabling Thunderbolt networking support...

As mentioned last week, the S3TC patent has now expired. With the S3 Texture Compression no longer encumbered by a patent, support for it is being added to mainline Mesa...

D language support will be added to GCC and today the third revision to these patches have been published...

While some bogus Linux market-share reports put the Linux desktop usage at over 6% for the month prior, the Valve-reported Steam Linux numbers decreased month over month...

Linus Torvalds has continued in his traditional Sunday release cadence of issuing a new kernel update for testing...

During September on Phoronix, yours truly wrote 280 original news articles and 30 featured articles/reviews. There was a lot of exciting happenings last month but October and more broadly Q4 is looking to be even more exciting with a lot on the horizon...

NASA is still said to be porting their "Eyes" visualization software to Linux...

The Unity 3D Game Engine now has available a beta release of its upcoming "2017.3" update. There are interesting changes with this release...

With Ubuntu 17.10 discontinuing the 32-bit desktop ISOs, here is the last time it makes sense comparing the Ubuntu 32-bit (i686) versus x86_64 performance.

After being twice delayed, the beta of Fedora 27 is cleared for release next week...

Of the many improvements I am excited for with the GTK4 toolkit is the introduction of a Vulkan renderer...

By the end of the calendar year Intel has reiterated the first 10nm Cannonlake devices are expected to market. It's looking like among the first Cannonlake designs will be a new Google Chromebook...

We've known a new DragonFlyBSD release was being worked on for release soon. That release has now been branched, the first release candidate tagged, and it's being marked as version 5.0...

For those not comfortable riding Mesa Git, Mesa 17.2.2 is set to be released early next week as the newest stable update for the open-source 3D graphics driver stack...

For fans of the Outlast first-person survival horror game that was released in 2013 and brought to Linux in 2015, you may get better performance now if using the Mesa drivers thanks to the OpenGL threading being flipped on...

Ending out September is the very exciting news that AMDGPU DC display code will likely land in Linux 4.15. Out of this excitement of finally seeing a mainline Linux kernel with modern Radeon GPUs supporting HDMI/DP audio, atomic mode-setting, and more. I decided to see how well this "drm-next-4.15-dc" code is working out for Radeon RX Vega graphics cards, where attached monitors can finally be driven by this DC code rather than having to rely upon AMDGPU-PRO or other kernel branches. So for ending out this exciting month, here are some fresh benchmarks of the RX Vega 56 / RX Vega 64 and other Radeon GPUs using this kernel paired with Mesa 17.3-dev Git built against LLVM 6.0 SVN compared to various NVIDIA Pascal graphics cards.

If you need an extra reason to celebrate this weekend, next week the notorious S3 Texture Compression (S3TC) patent is set to expire!..

When KDE's KWin is acting as a Wayland compositor, there's now a real-time scheduling policy to ensure the graphical system is always responsive...

Wine 2.18 is now available for those wishing to run Windows games/applications on Linux this weekend...

Adding to the list of Microsoft's Linux actions in 2017 comes a new preview version of the "next-generation" Skype for Linux...

As part of our ongoing AMD EPYC Linux benchmarking, I've been working this week on a cross-distribution GNU/Linux comparison followed by some BSD testing... Of course, I couldn't help but to see if Intel's performance-oriented Clear Linux distribution would run on the AMD EPYC server...

Linux right now offers a "Long Term Support" release where support for the kernel branch is maintained for two years, which is nice compared to kernel releases usually dropping maintenance around N+1.1 after the release. But moving forward, Linux LTS releases will now be maintained for six years...

Just ahead of the weekend, Intel has published a new set of patches up for testing that are expected to then be merged to DRM-Next for Linux 4.15...

The next update to RHEL, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5, is expected to include a Wayland technical preview within its GNOME Shell session...

Red Hat's oVirt virtualization management platform is out with a new development release...

Google's Chrome has offered virtual reality support for a while and most recently will even let you browse the web in VR while the Linux support has lagged behind...

While NVIDIA's Vulkan Linux driver performance has already been very good, it's potentially even better now with the newest NVIDIA Vulkan beta driver...

The annual X.Org Developers' Conference devoted to all things X.Org / Mesa / Wayland / DRM will for the first time be hosted in Spain next year...

Overnight the final beta of Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" was released for Ubuntu proper and its derivative friends...

Yesterday was the very exciting news of the AMDGPU DC code finally being called for pulling to DRM-Next for integration in the Linux 4.15 kernel. So far it's looking like that will indeed happen for Linux 4.15 assuming Linus Torvalds has no objections. If you want to test out this kernel for HDMI/DP audio, Radeon RX Vega display support, atomic mode-setting, or other modern features, here is an Ubuntu kernel spin...

Epic Games this week announced the second preview release of Unreal Engine 4.18. Among the fixes this time around affect Linux and Vulkan...

With the hype this week around Firefox Quantum Beta with its user-interface refinements and more noticeably the performance improvements, I decided to run some benchmarks on my end with a variety of tests comparing Firefox 52 ESR, Firefox 56 stable, Firefox 57 Quantum beta, and Chrome 60. Here are those web browser benchmark results from the Linux x86-64 desktop.

System76 is today announcing the beta release of their Ubuntu-derived Pop!_OS Linux operating system...

We are just hitting the end of Q3, but already this calendar year Microsoft has continued their trend of the past few years of engaging with open-source and Linux in different aspects...

Earlier this week we published our launch-day benchmarks of the Core i9 7960X and Core i9 7980XE. Those Linux benchmarks were done with Ubuntu, but for those wondering what the maximum performance looks like for these high-end desktop processors, here are some comparison results with Intel's own Clear Linux distribution.

Landing in Mesa 17.3-dev Git yesterday is initial support for the Meson build system! Initially, this Meson build support just works for the Intel ANV and Radeon RADV Vulkan drivers...

The final Firefox 56.0 binaries have hit the mirrors ahead of its official announcement to come. Firefox 56.0 brings more improvements while Firefox 57 "Quantum" will be a huge update...

Knoppix 8.1 is now available although no release announcement has yet to hit the wire. As it's been some years since last trying out Knoppix, I decided to fire up this new release...

It's been known another USB spec update was being worked on as "USB 3.2" while a few days ago this specification update was made official...

Ubuntu will no longer be producing a desktop i386 ISO beginning with the soon-to-be-released Ubuntu 17.10...

Apple this week released macOS 10.13 "High Sierra" as the latest version of its operating system. Of course, curiosity got the best of me so here are benchmarks of macOS 10.12.6, macOS 10.13, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 17.10 from a MacBook Air to see how the performance compares.

A new feature being considered for Fedora 28 is Annobin as a new GCC plugin that would implant extra information into generated binaries...