Making the rounds on the Internet this holiday weekend is an updated NVIDIA GeForce software license agreement prohibiting the use of their drivers in data-center deployments for consumer GPUs...
Well known open-source AMD driver developer Marek Olšák has taken to some Christmas day hacking on Mesa with a significant performance improvement for AMD APU owners and those who care about glxgears...
If you find yourself with some extra time this holiday season and want to dive into a classic codebase on your modern Linux desktop, KDE developer Helio Castro has been working on his porting skills by porting KDE 2.2.2 and Qt2 to work on modern Linux systems...
With AMD's release on Friday of the long-awaited open-source "AMDVLK" Radeon Vulkan driver here are our initial benchmarks of this official Radeon open-source Vulkan driver compared to the unofficial RADV Mesa-based Vulkan driver and the similar AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 closed-source Vulkan driver.
Slax 9.3 is now available as the latest feature release for this long-time Linux distribution that focuses on delivering a lightweight yet featureful Linux desktop experience...
As an early Christmas gift for those wanting to do some kernel testing this weekend, Linus Torvalds has done the release of Linux 4.15-rc5 a little bit early...
Andres Rodriguez, one of Valve's Linux GPU driver developers, has sent out his latest 22 patches for enabling semaphores support (GL_EXT_semaphore) within the RadeonSI driver...
Developers behind the Blender 3D modeling software have shared a "Christmas update" about their ongoing work towards Blender 2.8 as the next major release for this open-source, cross-platform modeling software...
For those still riding the older Mesa 17.2 series rather than the current Mesa 17.3 series that saw its v17.3.1 update this week, v17.2.8 is now available...
Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers have sent in their last planned set of feature changes for DRM-Next that in turn is targeting the Linux 4.16 kernel merge window...
Collabora's latest Wayland enablement effort is on getting the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) running nicely under Wayland with the Mus/Ozone infrastructure...
Keith Packard working under contract for Valve on improving the VR HMD / SteamVR support for the Linux display stack has sent out his latest - near final - patches for the RandR 1.6 additions...
When Canonical announced they would be dropping their Unity 8 plans but that Mir would still be maintained, their reason at the time for maintaining it were "Internet of Things" (IoT) use-cases. While not yet clear, Canonical is privately working on Mir IoT plans for 2018...
For those wondering how the Vulkan vs. OpenGL performance is for various Linux games as we near the end of 2017, here are some test results from the benchmark-friendly Linux games that offer both OpenGL and Vulkan renderers. Tests were done with two Radeon graphics cards and two NVIDIA graphics cards using the latest available Linux GPU drivers.
The latest project aiming for an open-source mobile Linux operating system that is privacy-minded is Eelo. This project does have some merit as it's being started by the original creator of Mandrake Linux...
Last week I reported on AMD finally preparing their open-source Vulkan driver that many Linux enthusiasts have been looking forward to since the Vulkan 1.0 debut nearly two years ago. As of this morning, the source-code to this official AMD Vulkan driver is now publicly available. AMD Linux fans and developers can rejoice this weekend building out this "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver and its new Platform Abstraction Layer (PAL).
Samsung OSG developers have been investigating and dealing with a nasty Wayland bug whereby a Wayland event could be delivered to an incorrect file descriptor. This ends up being due to a shortcoming in the Wayland protocol, but as to not break all existing software out there built against the current Wayland protocol, a workaround has been devised...
2017 could go down as the year that marked the descent of x86 32-bit support. Ubuntu 17.10 dropped their 32-bit desktop ISO, Ubuntu Server is now dropping their 32-bit installer, and more. Now NVIDIA Corp is announcing they are ending 32-bit support for their graphics driver...
Endless Mobile, the company behind the Linux-based Flatpak-using Endless OS and that has sold several different low-cost computers around the world, is looking forward to AMDGPU DC...
While Red Hat is on track for a run rate of nearly three billion dollars for their current fiscal year, Canonical - the company behind Ubuntu - isn't quite there yet while still dominating the cloud landscape and other areas...
For GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" and GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" graphics processors from AMD, they are supported both by the Radeon DRM driver (the default) as well as the AMDGPU DRM driver (designed for GCN 1.2+ GPUs). As it's been a while since comparing the performance impact of changing the kernel driver for these older GCN graphics cards, here are some fresh benchmarks using the Linux 4.15 Git kernel with Mesa 17.4-dev using a few GCN 1.0/1.1 cards.
The Free Software Foundation and Purism are announcing that the Debian-derived PureOS operating system is being added to the FSF list of approved GNU/Linux distributions...
While Ubuntu Touch may be dead to Canonical, UBports continues to work where the convergence / Unity 8 developers left off with trying to make this mobile platform a reality...
While NVIDIA has been working on HDR display support for the X.Org Server environment via a new "DeepColor" extension, Intel developers have begun working on High Dynamic Range support for Wayland/Weston and the associated changes needed to Mesa...
DisplayLink developers in cooperation with interest from VMware's virtual graphics driver team have sent out a draft proposal for adding a damage interface to the Direct Rendering Manager drivers...
It looks like NVIDIA is trying to end out 2017 on a high note for Linux customers. After yesterday posting their open-source experimental allocator for Nouveau, today they landed the long sought after GP108 signed firmware files...
Complementing our recent Amazon EC2 Linux cloud distribution benchmarks, here are some fresh test results when comparing various Linux distributions when benchmarking them as guest VMs with the KVM hypervisor.
AMD has sent in another round of AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager driver updates to DRM-Next for staging until the Linux 4.16 kernel merge window next month...
It's been more than one year since the release of X.Org Server 1.19 and with X.Org Server 1.20 still being at least some weeks away from release, X.Org Server 1.19.6 was released today...
With Ubuntu 17.10 the 32-bit desktop image/installer was dropped while for the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release they plan to do away with the ubuntu-server i386 release...