Phoronix

With Mesa 17.2 expected to be branched before the week is through, expect a lot of last-minute feature activity for new work getting into this next quarterly update for Mesa 3D...

Earlier this week I wrote about Adam Jackson's work at Red Hat on a prototype of an X.Org server-side GLVND implementation. NVIDIA has also now announced their coincidentally similar work...

A frustrated Phoronix reader pointed out a bug report that's been open nearly two years regarding AMD Grenada (basically, Hawaii cards in the R9 300 series) support on the open-source Linux driver being in a tough position for a subset of users...

For those looking to use Intel Kabylake hardware with Intel's Graphics Virtualization Technology, it looks like that support will finally be here come Linux 4.14...

Just in time for this weekend's expected Mesa 17.2 branching, the Intel "i965" Mesa driver has landed support for the ARB_shader_ballot OpenGL extension...

Besides testing the Radeon/AMDGPU work in Linux 4.13, here are some fresh benchmarks of Intel Kabylake GT 2 / HD Graphics 630 from this new in-development kernel...

The Wine project has today announced Wine 2.0.2 as the newest stable update for running Windows programs on Linux, macOS, and other operating systems...

With the Linux 4.13 kernel currently under development there are new module parameters that can make it easier switching from the Radeon DRM default on GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 GPUs to instead using the newer AMDGPU DRM driver, but Radeon remains the default. Here's my test experiences and benchmark results of AMDGPU vs. Radeon for GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs.

With C++20 feature talk heating up, GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) developers are beginning to prepare working on more of the new compiler functionality for this next standard due out in a few years...

For users of Fedora 25 and Fedora 26, the Linux 4.12 kernel will soon be sent down as a stable release update...

Just prior to LLVM 5.0 being branched yesterday, the AMD Zen scheduler model finally landed in LLVM and has the potential of boosting the performance of generated binaries targeting AMD's Zen "znver1" architecture. Here are some benchmarks of LLVM Clang 4.0 compared to the latest LLVM Clang compiler code when testing with both generic x86-64 optimizations and then optimized builds for the first-generation Zen CPUs, tested on a Ryzen 7 processor.

The Qt Company has announced the first public beta of the Qt Creator 4.4 integrated development environment...

RADV developer Bas Nieuwenhuizen has landed support for some new Vulkan extensions introduced by Vulkan 1.0.54...

With the GNOME 3.25.4 development milestone this week, new versions of GNOME Shell and Mutter are among the packages checked-in for release...

We are one step closer to the release of GTK4 with today's GTK+ 3.91.1 tool-kit release...

GNOME Games, the application for the GNOME desktop to serve as a game library for browsing installed games as well as integrating with some game emulators and other features, is seeing new feature activity for the GNOME 3.26 cycle...

Intel announced their 545s series SSD last month and it's been making plenty of rounds on Windows. Curious about the Linux performance, I picked up the Intel 545s 512GB SATA 3.0 SSD for benchmarking on Linux.

Purism, the company that started out with the Librem laptops that are Linux-friendly and now pre-loaded with Coreboot, has long had ambitions for expanding into tablets, smartphones, and other devices. It looks like the first Purism Phone might soon be announced...

A new version of libdrm is available today, the library that sits between the kernel Direct Rendering Manager and the user-space clients like Mesa and others. This libdrm 2.4.82 release is a bit more notable than some of the other point releases as it does have some interesting additions...

It was coming down to the wire for the new AMD Zen scheduler model in LLVM 5.0 but now it's managed to land just hours before the LLVM 5.0 branching...

The GnuPG project has announced libgcrypt version 1.8 as the newest version of this Gcrypt library...

Raptor Engineering who does Coreboot development work and is known for their previous Talos Secure Workstation system to provide a fast and fully libre workstation is going to be launching a new POWER-based workstation...

Georges Stavracas' latest work on GNOME is the new WiFi panel for the GNOME Settings area...

GNOME's Mutter has flipped on its new "Monitor Configuration Manager" by default as it seeks to improve the multi-monitor and multi-GPU experience...

For fans of the MPlayer/mplayer2-based MPV media player, version 0.26 was released with a few months worth of improvements...

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers have continued landing support for the new extensions introduced by Vulkan 1.0.54...

Adam Jackson of Red Hat has been developing a "server-side GLVND" implementation to allow multiple OpenGL driver stacks to co-exist within the X.Org Server space...

Tomorrow is the feature freeze / branching deadline for LLVM 5.0 and as of writing the new AMD Zen scheduler model hasn't been merged, but it looks like it could still happen in time...

I've just finished out a round of tests using the Linux 4.13-rc1 kernel with its new AMDGPU driver code. No regressions with my Polaris and Fiji tests, but at the same time no performance gains trickled through when running various tests with RADV Vulkan and RadeonSI OpenGL from Mesa 17.2-dev...

Since last year NVIDIA has been working on HDR support for the Linux desktop. They've worked on support for their driver, but with the Linux infrastructure for High Dynamic Range monitors lacking, they've been working on lower-level Linux improvements to allow for a HDR Linux desktop ecosystem with this next-generation of displays...

Last month Lennart Poettering of systemd and PulseAudio fame introduced his newest project, casync. The goal of casync is for distributing file-system images and is inspired by rsync and Git...

Intel's Daniel Vetter has sent in a second batch of code updates of new feature work to be staged in DRM-Next for the eventual Linux 4.14 kernel cycle...

Earlier this month the VC5 open-source driver was announced as a new driver for Broadcom's next-generation graphics processor. This has already led to speculation this much more powerful GPU will be found in future Raspberry Pi hardware. Work on this driver has continued while not forgetting about the VC4 driver for current-gen Raspberry Pi devices...

Version 3.2 of the popular Krita digital painting program has a variety of bug-fixes and some new features...

Frequent Phoronix readers may recall that for more than one year a new Linux Random Number Generator has been in-development and today marked the 12th version of these patches being released...

While Intel's Mesa-based open-source OpenGL Linux driver has been officially conformant since early 2017 and has enabled OpenGL 4.5 since last October, the Intel Windows OpenGL driver is finally catching up...

Adding to the list of changes/features you will not find in Linux 4.13 is AMD's Secure Memory Encryption as supported by the new EPYC processors...

Remix OS, the Android-x86 derived operating system for x86/ARM to run Android applications on PCs, is now being discontinued in its current form...

Just ahead of this week's LLVM 5.0 branching, this open-source compiler stack has received completely reworked scheduler information for Intel "Sandy Bridge" CPUs while patches are expected soon for newer generations of CPUs...

KDE's KWin window manager previously made optional use of C++14 when a supported compiler was now available but is now explicitly requiring a C++14 compiler. With this being a core component for the KDE Plasma desktop, hopefully we'll soon be seeing more of KDE make use of more modern C++ features?..

This morning IBM announced the z14 mainframe that is much faster than its predecessors and offers full encryption capabilities...

Linux gamers have frequently complained about the lack of MMORPG games on Linux, but at least today there is now one more with Albion Online beginning to roll out to backers of this medieval fantasy themed game...

With Mesa 17.2 due to be branched by the end of the week and thus place this quarterly update to Mesa under a feature freeze, here are some fresh benchmarks of the AMD RadeonSI OpenGL driver on 17.2-dev compared to v17.1.4 stable as well as a few RADV Vulkan benchmarks too.

There are many bug reports out there about issues with Dell's TB15 and TB16 Thunderbolt docks under Linux, but at least some of those remaining issues should be cleared up by a pending fix...

Slackware, the oldest Linux distribution still being maintained, has turned 24 years old...

For those curious about the GCC versus LLVM Clang compilers with Intel's new Core i9 7900X, earlier this month I had ran some compiler benchmarks on this high-end processor...

Given our recent articles of Glibc enabling a per-thread cache for malloc and Fedora 27 will use glibc 2.26, you may be curious about some of the other features coming to this next version of the GNU C Library...

Last week marked the significant Vulkan 1.0.54 update with new extensions and other improvements while coming out today is the much smaller Vulkan 1.0.55 update...

This week I've been working on transitioning my main production workstation to Fedora 26, but I had a really tough time this cycle deciding which graphics card to use, even with having dozens at my disposal...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) on Friday approved a number of the early change proposals for Fedora 27...