Phoronix

An Intel engineer over the weekend sent out the latest patches for implementing the company's User-Mode Instruction Prevention (UMIP) support within the Linux kernel...

Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 4.14-rc8 as the last release candidate prior to declaring the Linux 4.14 LTS kernel...

The Linux-friendly folks at CompuLab have just announced their newest industrial-grade, fanless PC: the fitlet2...

Adding to the array of articles about F1 2017 that was released a few days back by Feral Interactive as their first Vulkan-exclusive Linux game port, here are some numbers concentrated on the GeForce GTX 1060 vs. Radeon RX 580...

It's been a while since last posting any open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) benchmarks compared to the official NVIDIA proprietary Linux graphics driver simply as there hasn't been too much progress to report on recently. There still isn't re-clocking for Maxwell 2 and Kepler GPUs, dynamic re-clocking remains unimplemented for earlier generations of GPUs, there is not a Nouveau Vulkan driver yet, and they remain tackling OpenGL 4.4~4.5 compliance. But for those wondering how the performance of Nouveau is with re-clocked Kepler / Maxwell 1 graphics cards, here are some fresh benchmarks of the very latest NVIDIA Linux drivers.

While I have tested out many StarTech server racks at Phoronix, I have never checked out the company's computer peripherals. I ended up trying out their 2.5-inch aluminum external enclosure and have ended up liking it almost as much as their racks.

If Linux 4.14 weren't an LTS release with so many changes, it would likely be released today with -rc7 having come last week, but due to the size of this new kernel, 4.14-rc8 will most likely be christened today followed by Linux 4.14 next weekend. Here's a reminder about some of the most technically interesting work in this new kernel update...

A Phoronix reader this week sent in notice of a new Git repository seeking to provide a reverse-engineered driver for ARM's Mali T-Series graphics...

Details are very scarce on the new Qualcomm "Saphira" processor, but initial support for it was added this week to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)...

A few days back I wrote about the Banshee engine picking up Linux support and its maturing Vulkan renderer. A Phoronix reader pointed out another project worthy of a shout-out...

Tom Stellard of Red Hat will once again be taking up duties as point release manager for LLVM...

Here are some of the most exciting RADV vs. AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan performance benchmarks we have seen to date... The AMDGPU-PRO official AMD Vulkan Linux driver does run with Feral's latest Linux game port, F1 2017, but the community-driven, open-source RADV Vulkan driver often outperforms it!

Phoronix reader Thomas Frech has shared with us another article on Monero/XMR cryptocurrency mining performance with AMD Threadripper. Thsi follows his recent guest posts of mining Ethereum with Threadrippers and AMD Vega GPUs, Ethereum and Monero mining on the same systems, and the AMDGPU-PRO 17.40 crypto mining boost...

Phoronix readers wishing to click our Amazon links when shopping in the EU can now support our site...

With Feral Interactive's port of F1 2017 to Linux, only Radeon via RADV and NVIDIA are supported for this racing game that's making use of the Vulkan graphics API under Linux. For those curious about if Intel graphics can squeeze by for this game with the open-source "ANV" Intel Vulkan driver, I tried it out...

Patches by an Android security team member at Google allow the Linux kernel to be compiled with Clang using Link Time Optimizations (LTO)...

With Enlightenment E22 having been in development for one year and queued over 1,500 patches so far, the next release could be near with a great number of new features and improvements...

Hot off their inaugural Pop!_OS release two weeks back, this Ubuntu-derived Linux distribution developed by System76 is moving onto their next set of goals...

The Audacity open-source digital audio editor is out with a new feature release...

Longtime Linux users will likely recall the Slax distribution from back in the day that was Slackware-based, shipped with KDE, and offered a pretty nice live OS experience while being highly modular and made it easy to re-spin derivatives. Now it's coming back in new form...

For those anxious to see how Radeon graphics cards are performing with Feral's latest Linux game port, F1 2017, here are some preliminary benchmarks of Radeon GPUs with the AMDGPU+RADV driver compared to various NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on Ubuntu Linux.

Microsoft's latest addition to Visual Studio 2017 15.5 is quite surprising: support for cross-compiling to ARM targets using the GCC compiler...

As part of marking AMD's open-source driver strategy starting 10 years ago, among other articles, over the past week I posted an 18-way Radeon graphics card comparison on Ubuntu 17.10 while upgrading to the latest drivers. Taking those numbers further and putting them into more perspective, here is now a brief 34-way comparison with the NVIDIA GeForce counterparts added in.

The NVIDIA-owned PGI has announced their latest monthly update to their proprietary CPU/GPU compiler stack for Windows, Linux, and macOS systems...

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) will be seeing the last of its features added in the next two weeks for next year's GCC 8 stable release...

The Nouveau DRM kernel driver changes have now been submitted and pulled into DRM-Next for Linux 4.15...

In between hacking on the RADV Vulkan driver, managing DRM-Next, and his other activities at Red Hat, David Airlie has now sent landed some improvements to the aging R600 Gallium3D driver and more improvements are on the way...

David Airlie has sent out a new RADV patch adding support for copy descriptors...

Today marked the Linux release of F1 2017, which was ported by Feral Interactive and with this port it went from being a Direct3D 11 game on Windows to exclusively making use of the Vulkan graphics API on Linux. Radeon GPU benchmarks are still ongoing, but for these launch-day benchmarks, here are F1 2017 performance numbers on Ubuntu Linux with a variety of GeForce graphics cards.

Besides the NVIDIA 387.22 Linux driver update released earlier this week, today they are issuing the 384.98 update in their long-lived driver branch...

Not only are the Canonical developers that are left working on the Mir display server trying to make it easier to run Mir on other Linux distributions, but they have now punted the project to GitHub...

Following last weekend's WineConf 2017 and its announcement, Wine project founder Alexandre Julliard has sent out a detailed action item list as a result of the developers' meeting in Poland...

Feral Interactive has just made F1 2017 publicly available via Steam on Linux and via the Feral Store for those wanting to try out this racing game that was released for Windows earlier this year...

Linux 4.15 will be exciting for AMD Zen systems not only for working temperature reporting (finally) being in place for Ryzen/EPYC, but AMD EPYC CPUs should also benefit from a scheduler topology improvement...

The second test release of Phoronix Test Suite 7.6-Alvdal is available for your cross-platform, open-source benchmarking needs. This time around the release bundles in a number of BSD support improvements...

Earlier this year is when Canonical shared they were creating a new Ubuntu Server installer as an eventual replacement to the text-based Debian Installer that their server edition has been using up to this point. It's looking like this "Subiquity" installer could be in good shape by Ubuntu 18.04 LTS...

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti has begun shipping...

Building off an earlier update in DRM-Next of upstreaming more AMDKFD changes for Linux 4.15, a second batch of feature work was proposed today for merging into DRM-Next...

Andres Rodriguez of Valve has posted a set of 17 patches for implementing the OpenGL GL_EXT_semaphore extension within Mesa and wired through for RadeonSI...

Announced last summer by Jason Donenfeld was the "WireGuard" project as a next-generation secure network tunnel for the Linux kernel. It's looking like this network addition could soon be reaching the mainline Linux kernel...

The Etnaviv open-source driver stack providing reverse-engineered Vivante Linux graphics driver support continues on its feature streak...

Days ahead of the five year anniversary of Steam being publicly available on Linux and well off the ~2% highs for Steam's Linux marketshare, the numbers for October 2017 are now being reported...

Among the projects recently adopting the Meson build system has been Mesa 3D. The build time benefits are quite encouraging for developers...

Continuing on in our fresh Radeon Linux graphics benchmarks in commemorating 10 years of AMD's open-source driver strategy with already showing how the driver compares to the old Catalyst/fglrx and Ubuntu 14.04 to 17.10 OpenGL tests, up next is an 18 way graphics card comparison of both old and new Radeon graphics cards while using the very latest Linux driver stack.

For the past five years or so has been work on Intel DRM "Fastboot" support and it's looking like this feature may finally be re-enabled by default...

Mir 0.28.1 is now available as a minor update over Mir 0.28 that squeezed out the door ahead of Ubuntu 17.10...

We previously covered Banshee as one of the interesting Vulkan-based projects with this open-source game engine supporting OpenGL / Direct3D 11 and as of January added Vulkan support. They had been planning to firm up Linux support for Q4 and they have managed to strike that goal...

During October on Phoronix were 257 original news articles and 33 featured articles / reviews. There was a lot of exciting Linux hardware happenings during October!..

With the switch from Unity back to GNOME as the default desktop environment of Ubuntu, Canonical has joined the GNOME Foundation's Advisory Board...

Intel developers have finally landed their patches for supporting the i965 Mesa OpenGL on-disk shader cache...