Phoronix

The RADV Radeon Vulkan driver in Mesa now supports an on-disk shader cache...

NVIDIA has today released an updated version of their Linux Graphics Debugger to help game/application developers in analyzing issues and performance problems around OpenGL 4.x on GeForce/Quadro GPUs...

A video decoder driver for the NVIDIA Tegra is closer to the mainline kernel, but is focused on the (older) Tegra 2 chips...

Another set of Intel Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver updates were mailed in to DRM-Next today for the eventual Linux 4.15 kernel cycle...

While we've long been told that Mir 1.0 would happen for Ubuntu 17.10 -- even as recently as last month -- and then earlier this week was a Mir 1.0 tag and the v1.0.0 milestone in Launchpad, that version is being pulled back in favor of calling it Mir 0.28...

Published earlier this week was the Intel Core i3, i5, i7 With NVIDIA vs. AMD Radeon For Linux Gaming results that are quite interesting while in this article is looking at the OpenGL vs. Vulkan Linux gaming performance using NVIDIA's first-rate binary driver while also doing this graphics API/renderer comparison across the Intel Coffeelake processors from low-end to high-end.

Just a friendly reminder that if you are interested in participating in the Phoronix Oktoberfest 2017 deal to help support all our Linux hardware review / benchmarking / game testing work, only a few days are left to enjoy the deeply discounted deals...

The Facebook-developed Zstd compression algorithm was added to the Linux 4.14 kernel and hooked up for Btrfs/Squashfs file-system compression. Support is now being worked on so Zstandard can be used for compressing/decompressing the Linux kernel image...

Towards the beginning of this year NVIDIA donated their "DRIVE Design Studio" software to Qt to serve as the basis of Qt 3D Studio, a new editor for Qt 3D content. The code to this new Qt 3D Studio is now available in pre-release form...

The OVR_multiview OpenGL Extension developed via the OpenVR initiative has been around for several months in an incomplete form for allowing more efficient virtual reality (VR) rendering while now the extension is complete...

A few days back I initially wrote about a SUSE developer working on Zen tuning patches for GCC. That work has continued with more compiler patches coming for optimizing the GNU's compiler for Ryzen / Threadripper / EPYC processors...

While today's release of KDE Plasma 5.11 brings with it many Wayland improvements, KWin maintainer Martin Flöser (né Gräßlin) is proposing to get the Plasma 5.12 support into better shape on Wayland...

AMDGPU DC is expected for Linux 4.15 assuming Linus Torvalds has no objections to merging the code. We hope it won't, but the code-base for this new AMD display code is outright massive at more than 120,000 lines of code over hundreds of patches. Today another 103 new patches were published...

The initial "VC5" Gallium3D driver for next-generation Broadcom graphics hardware has been merged into mainline Mesa...

There's no announcement to break today, but besides there being an uptick in RADV performance work, there are some whispers and other indications of new Vulkan Linux titles likely dropping soon...

Earlier this year was word of BUS1 working on a D-Bus Broker while announced in late August was this D-Bus Broker project as a high performance message bus...

We have begun in delivering many Linux benchmarks of AMD EPYC, but for those of you interested in the BSD operating systems or even the "open-source Solaris" Illumos/OpenIndiana, I have run some basic tests the past few days using the high-end EPYC 7601 64-thread processor on the TYAN Transport SX TN70A-B8026.

For those wondering which Intel Coffeelake processors would make the most sense for a Linux gaming rig, I took the new Core i3 8100, Core i5 8400, and Core i7 8700K processors and tested them each with two Radeon and two NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards for looking at the overall Linux OpenGL/Vulkan gaming performance.

Jakub Jelinek of Red Hat today announced the release of GCC 5.5 compiler that also marks the end of the GCC5 series...

Yesterday a new batch of AMD EPYC processors arrived for testing at Phoronix...

The KDE developers have today announced the stable release of Plasma 5.11 as their autumn feature update...

Now being into Q4, I've been meaning to run some fresh Mesa Git development statistics to see how this year is pacing for this important piece of the open-source graphics ecosystem and Linux desktop...

The first development release of the next quarterly feature update to the Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software is now available...

There is just one week to go until the Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" release but it looks like the Mir 1.0 release will still happen in time...

The new OpenGL extension MESA_tile_raster_order proposed by Eric Anholt at Broadcom has now been merged to the Khronos registry...

Last year the GNU Debugger's code-base was converted from the C programming language (C90) to now using C++11. At last month's GNU Tools Cauldron was an update on this process...

With two weeks left in the crowdfunding campaign, Purism's Librem 5 smartphone initiative crossed its $1,500,000 USD funding goal...

OpenBSD 6.2 has managed to release a few days ahead of schedule...

For fans of the 2012 video game Spec Ops: The Line that was brought to Linux in 2015, this Unreal Engine 3 powered title should run faster with the newest Mesa...

Richard Hughes has announced the release of fwupd 1.0.0 today, the utility increasingly being used by many vendors for supporting updating of device firmware/microcode on Linux...

Phoronix reader Thomas Frech has shared with us an article he wrote about his new Ethereum mining work on two systems using AMD Threadripper processors and a total four Radeon RX Vega 64 GPUs under Linux...

QupZilla 2.2 has been released as the last feature release for this open-source web-browser project prior to its re-branding initiative under the KDE umbrella as the Falkon project...

Qt 5.10 Alpha had arrived last month as two weeks late while The Qt Company has managed to tighten things up and deliver Qt 5.10 Beta now less than one week later than originally scheduled...

The Linux 4.15 kernel is looking to be a very exciting update for AMDGPU DRM driver users...

Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 4.14-rc4 as the latest weekly test candidate for this kernel version that will be the 2017 long-term support release and be supported for a period of six years...

SDDM 0.16 is now available as the latest feature release of the Simple Desktop Display Manager, commonly used by some KDE-based Linux desktops for log-in management needs...

Borg Backup for those that haven't heard is a deduplicating backup program that also builds in compression and encryption abilities...

One month back Marek Olšák landed support in the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for primitive binning with Vega 10 GPUs but now that feature is likely to be disabled by default...

For C++20 the long-awaited modules system is likely to finally land. Facebook engineers have been working on a C++ modules implementation already for the GNU Compiler Collection...

Not only is the Ubuntu 17.10 release imminent, but so is that of OpenBSD 6.2...

For those 3D artists looking forward to next year's big Blender 2.8 update, a new design document has been published...

This week the latest AMDGPU DC patches were queued up ahead of Linux 4.15. As covered in that article, those several dozen patches mostly further clean-up this major AMDGPU display code rework and trim it up by a few thousand lines of code. For those wishing to test out this new display stack, here is a fresh Ubuntu/Debian x86_64 kernel build...

The past few years I have run a Phoronix Premium deal around the time of Oktoberfest for those wishing to support all of the Linux hardware testing, reviews, news, and benchmarking work on the site done seven days per week, 365 days per year. While the actual fest is over at the wiesn, some Phoronix readers have inquired about running a deal again this year to get premium access at a discount. So here's the deal...

Josef Bacik of Facebook's file-system/storage team has announced fsperf as a new testing framework around the Linux file-system/block storage code...

The Debian project this week has announced the release of Debian GNU/Linux 9.2...

Linaro developers have restored work on the SLIMbus patches for the Linux kernel, which have long been dormant...

Vulkan 1.0.62 is now available as the latest updated specification for this high performance graphics and compute API...

The new Intel Core i3 8100 processor is a quad-core CPU running at 3.6GHz, offers integrated UHD Graphics 630, 6MB L3 cache, and has a 65 Watt TDP. This Intel quad-core CPU will cost you less than $120 USD. As about to be shown in these Ubuntu Linux benchmark results, this lowest-end Coffeelake CPU right now has a lot to offer. Here is a 30-way Intel/AMD Ubuntu benchmark comparison featuring the i3 8100, i5 8400, i7 8700K, and many other CPUs going back to the Sandy Bridge and Bulldozer days.

It's indeed looking like the AMDGPU DC display code stack will finally be pulled for the Linux 4.15 merge window, assuming Linus Torvalds has no issues with it in a few weeks...

After running some basic OpenCL/Vulkan UHD Graphics tests yesterday using the brand new Core i7 8700K "Coffee Lake" processor, I next ventured into OpenCL computing with the UHD Graphics using Intel's open-source Beignet CL implementation...