Recently I wrote about a BFQ regression fix that should take care of a problem spotted in our recent I/O scheduler Linux 4.13 benchmarks while now that work has yielded a set of four patches working to improve this recently-merged scheduler...
Kaveh Nasri, the manager of Intel's Mesa driver team within the Open-Source Technology Center since 2011, spoke this morning at XDC2017 about the accomplishments of his team and more broadly the Mesa community. Particularly over the past year there has been amazing milestones accomplished for this open-source driver stack...
Eric Anholt of Broadcom just finished presenting at XDC2017 Mountain View on the state of the VC4 driver stack most notably used by the Raspberry Pi devices. Additionally, he also shared about his early work on the VC5 driver for next-generation Broadcom graphics...
We recently looked at several Noctua cooler options for Intel's Core X-Series while today the tables have turned and we tried out Noctua's TR4-SP3 heatsink that is capable of cooling the high-Wattage Threadripper and EPYC processors with air cooling.
Besides working on the new Unix device memory allocator project, they have also been engaged with upstream open-source Linux developers over preparing the Linux desktop for HDR display support...
The first batch of drm-intel-next changes are ready to be queued in DRM-Next as feature work for eventually merging to mainline come the Linux 4.15 merge window...
A few months ago was a vibrant discussion about a Meson proposal for libdrm/Mesa while today the initial patches were posted in bringing a possible Meson build system port for Mesa...
James Jones of NVIDIA presented this morning at XDC2017 with their annual update on a new Unix device memory allocation library. As a reminder, this library originated from NVIDIA's concerns over the Generic Buffer Manager (GBM) currently used by Wayland compositors not being suitable for use with their driver's architecture and then the other driver developers not being interested in switching to EGLStreams, NVIDIA's original push for supporting Wayland...
The X.Org Developers Conference kicked off a short time ago at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA. But even if you are not at the event, there is a livestream...
One week after announcing KDE cooperation on the proposed Librem 5 smartphone with plans to get Plasma Mobile on the device if successful, the GNOME Foundation has sent out their official endorsement of Purism's smartphone dream...
Last week we began with our EPYC 7601 Linux benchmarking of this high-end AMD server CPU featuring 32 cores / 64 threads per socket. Earlier this week were also some 10-year old Opteron vs. EPYC benchmarks and power efficiency tests while the latest in our EPYC Linux testing is seeing how the new AMD processor compares to various Amazon EC2 cloud instances.
For the past few weeks that I have been testing the AMD Threadripper 1950X on Linux, I have been using the Gigabyte X399 AORUS Gaming 7 motherboard. Overall, it's been a pleasant experience and is running fine under Linux. Here's a quick summary.
Following our reporting of Mir picking up initial support for Wayland clients, Mir developer Alan Griffiths at Canonical has further clarified the Wayland client support. It also appears they are still planning to get Mir 1.0 released in time for Ubuntu 17.10...
Red Hat has quietly been working on PipeWire for years that is like the "video equivalent of PulseAudio" while now it's ready to make its initial debut in Fedora 27 and the project now has an official website...
Phoronix Test Suite 7.4.0-Tynset has been officially released as the newest quarterly feature update to our cross-platform, open-source automated benchmarking software...
Intel's "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver has landed support today for some new extensions as well as prepping Android support for this open-source Vulkan driver...
With IBM's newly open-sourced J9 Java Virtual Machine as the Eclipse OpenJ9, I've run some quick benchmarks to get an idea how its performance is comparing to the de facto Java Virtual Machine, Hotspot.
By now you have likely seen our initial AMD EPYC 7601 Linux benchmarks. If you haven't, check them out, EPYC does really deliver on being competitive with current Intel hardware in the highly threaded space. If you have been curious to see some power numbers on EPYC, here they are from the Tyan Transport SX TN70A-B8026 2U server. Making things more interesting are some comparison benchmarks showing how the AMD EPYC performance compares to AMD Opteron processors from about ten years ago.
The latest Linux Mint monthly news is out that highlights some of the recent development efforts around this Ubuntu-derived Linux distribution. A common theme still are HiDPI improvements and Cinnamon 3.6 finally enabling HiDPI by default...
For those that missed the news over the weekend, IBM has open-sourced its in-house JVM and contributed it to the Eclipse Foundation. Eclipse OpenJ9 is this new, full-featured, enterprise-ready open-source Java Virtual Machine...
Banshee has been a promising C++14-written, multi-threaded open-source game engine featuring Vulkan support. When the Vulkan support was added at the start of the year the plan was to see the Linux support added to the game engine in Q2. Well, it looks like in Q4 we could see the Linux client finally materialize...
With Linux 4.14-rc1 having been released one day early, here is our look at the new features of Linux 4.14 with the merge window having been closed. There's a lot to get excited about with Linux 4.14 from graphics driver improvements, new hardware improvements, a new Realtek WiFi driver, a PWM vibrator driver, and Btrfs Zstd compression support..
As anticipated, Mesa 17.2.1 is now available for those wanting to use the latest stable point release of Mesa3D for the best, stable open-source 3D graphics user experience on Linux and other operating systems...
While 8.0 Oreo is the latest version of Google's Android operating system for mobile devices, the free software minded Replicant OS that derives itself from the Android Open-Source Project code-base has re-released their version 6.0...
With the ten-core / 20-thread Core i9 7900X CPU having a 140 Watt TDP, it's a lot to keep cool with air cooling. Even more, with the soon-to-launch new Core i9 models, you really need a beefy heatsink fan if wishing to avoid water cooling. In this article are some tests with different Noctua heatsinks. Besides being able to cool these 2017X processors, the other requirement too is that they fit within 4U space requirements. The heatsinks benchmarked today included the Noctua NH-C14S, NH-U9S, Noctua NH-D9L, NF-A9 PWM fan, and NF-A14 PWM fan.
Phoronix