Phoronix

Remember Arcan? The Linux display server built off a game engine. The project is ending 2017 with the release of the Arcan 0.5.4 display server and its associated Durden v0.4 desktop...

I would like to wish all Phoronix readers a happy new year and hopeful that 2018 will be even better for Phoronix and all open-source/Linux communities...

Glade 3.21 was released today as the latest development release of this tool for quickly designing GTK3/GNOME user-interfaces...

Ahead of next week's LLVM 6.0 feature freeze / code branching, the Clang C/C++ compiler front-end has picked up support for the concept of configuration files...

Here's a look back at the most popular Linux gaming news on Phoronix this calendar year...

I've been working on some AMD EPYC virtualization tests on and off the past few weeks. For your viewing before ending out the year are some initial VirtualBox vs. Linux KVM benchmarks for seeing how the guest VM performance compares.

Five years ago today I wrote about The Problems Right Now For Gaming On Linux with regards to challenges for Linux gaming when it comes to the software and hardware. In the five years since and with seeing thousands of more games be made available for Linux, the situation still is not ideal but it's much better than at the end of 2012...

2017 was easily the most pivotal year for the Ubuntu Linux distribution in years with Canonical having decided to end Unity 8 development in favor of moving to a GNOME Shell Wayland session. There was also the decision to develop a new server installer that is still under development, Snaps and its underlying tech continues to be worked on as an alternative to Flatpak, and Ubuntu continues to dominate the cloud landscape...

Just hours ago was a new patch series being merged to Mesa Git by RADV co-founder Bas Nieuwenhuizen to allow for correct DCC usage. I have just finished up my initial benchmarks of those RADV changes and they indeed help the few Radeon GPUs tested.

The fourth weekly release candidate of Wine 3.0 is now available for testing...

AMD/Radeon had a stellar 2017 for Linux most notably with delivering working Radeon RX Vega open-source driver support at launch, AMDGPU DC finally being merged to the mainline Linux kernel, and the official "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver now being open-source. Besides never-ending performance tuning, there's really just one major feature/area where the Radeon Linux graphics driver support is missing...

The KDE-aligned Krita digital painting software has published a retrospective of 2017 and a look ahead to 2018...

Wayland had a very successful year with Ubuntu 17.10 now using it by default, more niche/hobbyist Wayland compositors making progress, KDE Plasma on Wayland becoming more usable for day-to-day use, more applications/libraries natively supporting Wayland, GTK4's Vulkan renderer becoming very usable, and other advancements...

Not only is Vega now Vulkan 1.0 conformant with RADV, but it's also much faster if pulling down the very latest Mesa bits...

Since October RADV has officially become a Vulkan 1.0 conformant driver for Volcanic Islands GPUs while Sea Islands and Polaris hardware has also been on this same support level. RADV support for the newer Vega GPUs had been lagging behind, but these latest-generation AMD GPUs are now also effectively conformant...

Last week NVIDIA sent out an experimental allocator driver for the Nouveau code-base as well as EXT_external_objects support for Nouveau NVC0 in Mesa. So far though many upstream open-source driver developers are not yet convinced about the current design of this Unix Device Memory Allocation library as a potential replacement to GBM...

Git 2.16-rc0 has been released as the first test version of this upcoming distributed revision control system update...

The latest in our streak of year-end benchmarking is seeing how Linux performance has evolved over the course of 2017. For that we tested Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux distribution as well as Ubuntu using releases from the start of the year to their current state for seeing how the performance compares using the same system.

Drew DeVault who is the lead developer of the i3-compatible Sway Wayland compositor has introduced wlroots as a new modular Wayland compositor library...

For those wondering how the LLVM Clang vs. GCC C/C++ compiler performance is comparing as we end out 2017, here are some recent benchmarks using the latest Clang 6.0 SVN and GCC 8.0.0 compilers in a range of benchmarks.

AMD developers working on the newly open-sourced AMDVLK Vulkan driver have pushed out their first post-release code update synced against the latest changes in their internal AMD driver tree...

On the Linux kernel mailing list over the past week has been a discussion about Syzbot, an effort by Google for continuously fuzzing the mainline Linux kernel and its branches with automatic bug reporting...

It's not quite the Ubuntu rolling-release process that some have proposed over the years, but a new proposal is being formulated for shipping updates to key Ubuntu system components on a monthly basis rather than having to wait six months for updates to the Linux kernel, Mesa, etc...

The past few years Siemens has been working on Jailhouse as a Linux-based partitioning hypervisor that has aimed to be a lighter alternative to KVM. It's been seven months since the last update, but now Jailhouse 0.8 is now available...

Support for Memory Protection Keys (a.k.a. PKU / PKEYs) was finished up this year in the Linux kernel, glibc, and related components. This memory protection feature premiered with Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs and is said to be coming to future desktop CPUs, but it doesn't look like that's happening for the Cannonlake or Icelake generations...

The first point release to NetBSD 7.1 is now available as this BSD operating system ends out 2017...

A new Btrfs file-system kernel driver patch is now available to improve its RAID1/RAID10 read performance, particularly for SSDs...

Back on Christmas Eve I posted our initial AMDVLK Radeon Linux driver benchmarks for this newly open-sourced official Radeon Vulkan driver. Complementing those earlier Vulkan Linux gaming numbers are some more performance metrics for AMDVLK compared to the Mesa-based RADV driver and then the closed-source AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan driver.

A week ago Ubuntu 17.10's ISO was pulled due to a show-stopping laptop bug whereby some UEFI-enabled laptops from multiple vendors were running into "BIOS corruption" where BIOS settings could no longer be changed, USB booting becoming non-functional, and similar UEFI-related issues. Fortunately, a fixed kernel is now available and some affected users are reporting a successful workaround for making their laptops full-functioning once again...

LLVM release manager Hans Wennborg is moving ahead with plans to branch the LLVM 6.0 code and its components earlier than anticipated...

With yesterday having looked at the AMD/Radeon popular Linux/open-source achievements of the year, the tables have turned to now look at the Intel Linux/FLOSS activity...

While Unigine Engine 2 has yet to be picked up by any major games besides Dual Universe, this highly advanced game engine continues advancing and its effort for industrial simulators appears to be paying off as well. Unigine Corp is ending out 2017 by having released Unigine 2.6.1...

This year on Phoronix were more than 290 news articles on Phoronix about the Vulkan graphics API, not counting our dozens of Vulkan benchmarking articles, etc. Here's a look at the most popular Vulkan moments of the year...

LLVM's Clang compiler support for the Intel Icelake processors that succeed Cannonlake is getting into better shape ahead of the LLVM/Clang 6.0 feature freeze in January...

The BlueZ Linux Bluetooth stack is out with a new feature update before ending out the year...

RADV Vulkan driver co-founder David Airlie has begun digging through AMD's newly-opened AMDVLK official Vulkan driver in order to gain some hindsight and port some fixes/changes to this unofficial Mesa-based open-source Vulkan driver...

This year on Phoronix there has been more than 3,700 original Linux/FLOSS news posts, benchmarks, hardware reviews and more. Here's how that compares to prior years...

If you happen to have an older Sandy Bridge era Intel NUC, it may now supported by mainline Coreboot...

Last week we reported on Ubuntu maker Canonical's financial performance for FY2017 with a $122M turnover and nearly 600 employees after spotting the latest data. For those wondering how that compares to previous years, here is more of the past year's performance...

LLVM had another successful year with in 2017 delivering the big LLVM 5.0 update and finishing up development of LLVM 6.0 right now while this open-source compiler stack continues to be adopted by new and interesting use-cases from tieing in LLVM IR to a wide variety of projects to the infrastructure being used heavily now by graphics drivers and other interesting purposes...

One of the common test requests to come in for our end-of-year benchmarking has been a fresh look at the Radeon GPU performance incorporating some both old and new GPUs to see the current state of the open-source driver stack. Tests were done from a Radeon HD 5830 on the Radeon+R600g driver stack to the RX Vega 64 on AMDGPU+RadeonSI, while using the Linux 4.15-rc5 kernel paired with Mesa 17.4-dev.

With the Christmas weekend release of the MPlayer-forked MPV Player 0.28, it's the first video player we are aware of supporting the Vulkan graphics API for video presentation. This release has just basic Vulkan support but it will be much better in the next release...

The OpenChrome DRM driver continues to largely be developed by one community contributor left standing for supporting VIA x86 graphics on the Linux desktop. These VIA graphics chipsets haven't been too common in about a decade, but OpenChrome continues persevering with working to deliver a full-functioning, open-source driver that VIA itself was never able to produce...

Here's a look at our most-viewed original AMD/Radeon Linux and open-source news stories of 2017...

Ben Skeggs of Red Hat has been working on a few Nouveau DRM changes for the next kernel cycle...

The FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report covering work done in the third quarter has now been published...

The MPlayer-forked MPV Player is out with a new feature release that presents several interesting features...

If you are running Fedora Rawhide (their daily/development packages) and using an Intel mobile chipset, be forewarned that they are enabling the SATA link power change that runs the slight risk of potentially causing disk corruption...

For those with extra time this holiday week, AMD recently published their latest patch queue of DC "display code" updates...

VLC lead developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf has released the big VLC 3.0-RC3 update for Christmas...