Phoronix

NVIDIA has done an open-source code drop to end out 2017. It's not as exciting as many would have hoped for in providing Nouveau GPU re-clocking abilities, any improvements to the signed firmware situation, or an open-source Vulkan driver, but there is now an experimental Nouveau allocator to implement their proposed generic device allocator library...

Yesterday I provided some benchmarks showing how the Radeon RX Vega performance has evolved since launch but if looking more broadly at how the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D Linux gaming performance has advanced over the course of 2017, the gains become much more profound. Here are tests of the open-source driver state over 2017 when testing an older Radeon HD 7950 (GCN 1.0) graphics card as well as a Radeon R9 Fury and RX 580 graphics cards.

The KDE Calligra graphics/office suite forked from KOffice several years back is preparing for its next major release...

Last year The Khronos Group announced NNEF as a open-source, royalty-free neural network format to combat the proprietary formats used today. In their last standards update of 2017, NNEF 1.0 is now available...

After going through fourteen rounds of patch revisions, Daniel Stone of Collabora might be ready to land his 40+ patches implementing atomic mode-setting support within Weston...

Red Hat developers working on the oVirt virtualization management platform have announced the release of oVirt 4.2...

Published on Tuesday were a set of 60 kernel patches rolling out "hyper_dmabuf" as a means of allowing DMA-BUF buffers to be exchanged between virtual machines...

Canonical has temporarily pulled the download links for Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" from the Ubuntu website due to ongoing reports of some laptops finding their BIOS corrupted after installing this latest Ubuntu release. The issue is appearing most frequently with Lenovo laptops but there are also reports of issues with other laptop vendors as well...

One of several side projects by the Solus Linux distribution project has been linux-steam-integration as a means of a helper package to improve the integration of the Steam client and Steam games running on Linux. LSI applies workarounds and other optimizations to get Steam games running better on Linux...

With the end of the year quickly approaching, here's a look at how the current AMD Radeon vs. NVIDIA GeForce GPU cryptocurrency mining performance is playing out for Ethereum Ethminer with OpenCL. Tests were done on 14 graphics cards using the latest drivers and in addition to looking at the raw GPU mining performance are also performance-per-Watt and performance-per-dollar metrics.

Samuel Pitoiset working on Valve's Linux GPU driver team has addressed the last of the minor F1 2017 rendering bugs encountered when using the open-source RADV Vulkan driver...

The Debian project had a very successful year with the release of Debian 9 "Stretch" and let's not forget about Debian GNU/Hurd 2017, the installer alpha test releases beginning for Buster, Devuan 1.0 as Debian without systemd, and the continued maintenance releases...

Earlier this month the Fedora Modular working group decided to throw in the towel on Fedora Modular Server 27 and instead to do a "classic" server edition. We now have more details on how the eventual re-architected Modular Server should look for F28...

Longtime Fedora/GNOME developer Christian Schaller who leads the desktop engineering team at Red Hat recently commented on some bold Linux/tech predictions for 2018. He's now also shared his personal opinion on why "the year of the Linux desktop" has yet to materialize...

The Unity game engine is ending out the year by releasing their 2017.3 engine update...

As part of our end-of-year benchmarking, a Phoronix Premium supporter had brought up the idea of seeing how the Radeon RX Vega Linux driver performance has evolved since launch. Ask and you shall receive: here's some numbers showing the state of the Radeon RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64 performance with the open-source RadeonSI+AMDGPU performance as of this week compared to back on launch-day.

The GNOME Builder development environment has already been working on many new features for next year's GNOME 3.28 desktop environment while even more features are now on track...

The Vulkan graphics API has been particularly popular with some gaming console emulators from the Dolphin Emulator to RetroArch. The latest emulator now working on Vulkan support is PPSSPP on Linux...

Today marks the release of Portable Computing Language "POCL" 1.0 for this originally CPU-based OpenCL implementation...

It remains to be seen how exactly the situation will play out with the existing open-source RADV Vulkan driver that's in the Mesa tree and AMD's to-be-opened "Radeon Open Vulkan" driver that is the company's official Vulkan driver. At least though Vulkan drivers are lighter and less maintenance than OpenGL drivers...

Since yesterday several (Windows-focused) publications have been running stories about how AMD's next-gen "Navi" GPU was supposedly spotted in the AMD Linux driver code...

Intel has sent in another round of feature updates of their i915 DRM driver to DRM-Next of new material slated for Linux 4.16...

While Linux is our predominant focus at Phoronix, a special place in our heart remains for the BSDs. Here's a look back at the most popular BSD operating system articles on Phoronix this year...

Andres Gomez of Igalia has posted the initial schedule for getting to the Mesa 18.0 release next quarter...

If you are exclusively using Linux for gaming, hopefully you aren't hoping for an HTC Vive this Christmas as the SteamVR support on Linux still leaves a lot to be desired. At the start of the year Valve finally put out their first SteamVR developer build for Linux and now nearly one year later, it still feels like a very rough beta.

As we've been covering since the original patches back in October, SUSE has been working on a very interesting in-kernel bootsplash system. It's growing into an interesting alternative to the user-space-based Plymouth, but one of the leading common criticism of it is the use of FBCON rather than interfacing with the DRM/KMS APIs...

Mesa 17.3.1 is on track to be released this week as the first point release to this quarter's Mesa 17.3 feature release...

Intel has announced the first FPGA product that makes use of High Bandwidth Memory 2 (HBM2) for extreme HPC performance...

Using the high-end SilverStone TS421S 4-disk SATA drive enclosure, I've been carrying out a number of Btrfs and EXT4 file-system multi-disk benchmarks over the past week. Here are the latest numbers for how Btrfs' native RAID capabilities are running up against EXT4 when using MDADM "soft" RAID.

More (X)Wayland improvements are en route for GNOME 3.28...

Even with AMD open-sourcing their official Vulkan driver any day now, David Airlie, Bas Nieuwenhuizen, and others independently continue to advance the dissenting RADV Vulkan driver...

Pekka Paalanen of Collabora has begun the overdue task of providing documentation on XWayland...

In between hacking on the RADV Vulkan driver, David Airlie has found the time to land his patches enabling OpenGL 4.3 and GLSL 430 support within Mesa 17.4-dev Git for the R600g driver...

Richard Biener of SUSE is preparing to release GCC 7.3 next month...

The libdrm Mesa DRM library that principally sits as the interface between Mesa and the kernel Direct Rendering Manager drivers is out with a big update...

Linus Torvalds has issued the fourth weekly release candidate for the upcoming Linux 4.15 kernel release...

The official release is near for the Arch-based Manjaro 17.1 Linux distribution...

ScummVM 2.0 has been released as a major update to this open-source game engine recreation project...

The Smallest Server Suite -- also known as TheSSS -- remains a live CD/DVD capable Linux operating system making it trivial to deploy a range of services...

It was a heck of a year for Ubuntu's Mir display server from it starting off as the display server to the now-abandoned Unity 8 desktop and it surviving Canonical's cancelling of the Unity/convergence projects to now not only being fitted for IoT use-cases but gaining Wayland support with hopes some will use it as a Wayland compositor. This also went from Mir 1.0 nearly being released and back to the drawing board to Canonical now hiring more Mir developers and adding Mir to other Linux distributions: what a wild ride 2017 has been for this controversial project...

Earlier this month I wrote how Intel engineers have been busy with continuing to tune glibc's performance with FMA and AVX optimizations. That work has continued but also other architectures continue tuning their GNU C Library performance ahead of the expected v2.27 update...

Hot off the release of the new GIMP 2.9.8 and ahead of the expected GIMP 2.10 release candidates that are expected to begin, a new addition to GIMP is a plug-in supporting the new FreeDesktop.org/Flatpak screenshot API...

KDE Partition Manager 3.3 was released this week as the newest version of this program for managing disk devices/partitions from the KDE desktop...

The Fortran committee decided last month to rename the upcoming Fortran 2015 programming language update to Fortran 2018. GCC support is being prepped...

Matthias Clasen of Red Hat announced the release of GNOME 3.27.3 this weekend...

If you are thinking of gifting yourself (or someone else) a FreeSync-compatible monitor this holiday season, here's a look at how the AMD FreeSync support is working right now, the driver bits you need to be aware of, and how it's all playing out for those wanting to use this tear-free capability for Linux gaming.

As part of our various year-end lists, recaps, and end of year testing, here's a look back at the most prominent NVIDIA open-source/Linux news of the year...

Unity is one of the big public users of the open-source Crunch DXT texture compression library. While it's no longer maintained by Rich Geldreich / Binomial, Unity has continued advancing this open-source code to further improve the compression ratio and speed...

Samsung's Open-Source Group has been working on making their Wayland support in the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) even better...

Christian Schaller who has long been involved in GNOME/Fedora development while serving as a senior software engineering manager at Red Hat and formerly with Collabora has some bold predictions about 2018 for open-source software...