Phoronix

Making the rounds on the Internet this holiday weekend is an updated NVIDIA GeForce software license agreement prohibiting the use of their drivers in data-center deployments for consumer GPUs...

Well known open-source AMD driver developer Marek Olšák has taken to some Christmas day hacking on Mesa with a significant performance improvement for AMD APU owners and those who care about glxgears...

Rolling out as beta this Christmas is Debian Salsa...

Rob Clark of the Freedreno project has landed his context priority patches in Mesa that originate from this past October...

More AMDKFD changes are being queued for the upcoming Linux 4.16 kernel merge window with this being the kernel HSA driver for ROCm support, etc...

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and we wish you all the best for any and all holidays you may be celebrating as 2017 draws to a close...

If you find yourself with some extra time this holiday season and want to dive into a classic codebase on your modern Linux desktop, KDE developer Helio Castro has been working on his porting skills by porting KDE 2.2.2 and Qt2 to work on modern Linux systems...

With AMD's release on Friday of the long-awaited open-source "AMDVLK" Radeon Vulkan driver here are our initial benchmarks of this official Radeon open-source Vulkan driver compared to the unofficial RADV Mesa-based Vulkan driver and the similar AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 closed-source Vulkan driver.

Slax 9.3 is now available as the latest feature release for this long-time Linux distribution that focuses on delivering a lightweight yet featureful Linux desktop experience...

The long-awaited GIMP 2.10 stable update should indeed materialize in 2018 with the release now being under a tentative string freeze...

Darktable 2.4 is now available as the latest major release for this widely-acclaimed open-source RAW photography software...

The VK9 project that's been working on getting the Direct3D 9 API implemented on top of Vulkan has reached its self-assigned 23rd milestone...

As an early Christmas gift for those wanting to do some kernel testing this weekend, Linus Torvalds has done the release of Linux 4.15-rc5 a little bit early...

The Godot 3.0 game engine is preparing to ship early next year...

Andres Rodriguez, one of Valve's Linux GPU driver developers, has sent out his latest 22 patches for enabling semaphores support (GL_EXT_semaphore) within the RadeonSI driver...

Developers behind the Blender 3D modeling software have shared a "Christmas update" about their ongoing work towards Blender 2.8 as the next major release for this open-source, cross-platform modeling software...

For those still riding the older Mesa 17.2 series rather than the current Mesa 17.3 series that saw its v17.3.1 update this week, v17.2.8 is now available...

Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers have sent in their last planned set of feature changes for DRM-Next that in turn is targeting the Linux 4.16 kernel merge window...

Collabora's latest Wayland enablement effort is on getting the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) running nicely under Wayland with the Mus/Ozone infrastructure...

There's an active discussion this week about making Wayland support available by default on FreeBSD...

Keith Packard working under contract for Valve on improving the VR HMD / SteamVR support for the Linux display stack has sent out his latest - near final - patches for the RandR 1.6 additions...

The third weekly release candidate to next month's Wine 3.0 is now available for testing...

When Canonical announced they would be dropping their Unity 8 plans but that Mir would still be maintained, their reason at the time for maintaining it were "Internet of Things" (IoT) use-cases. While not yet clear, Canonical is privately working on Mir IoT plans for 2018...

For those wondering how the Vulkan vs. OpenGL performance is for various Linux games as we near the end of 2017, here are some test results from the benchmark-friendly Linux games that offer both OpenGL and Vulkan renderers. Tests were done with two Radeon graphics cards and two NVIDIA graphics cards using the latest available Linux GPU drivers.

The latest project aiming for an open-source mobile Linux operating system that is privacy-minded is Eelo. This project does have some merit as it's being started by the original creator of Mandrake Linux...

Last week I reported on AMD finally preparing their open-source Vulkan driver that many Linux enthusiasts have been looking forward to since the Vulkan 1.0 debut nearly two years ago. As of this morning, the source-code to this official AMD Vulkan driver is now publicly available. AMD Linux fans and developers can rejoice this weekend building out this "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver and its new Platform Abstraction Layer (PAL).

GTK4 continues looking good and even better now thanks to nearly 100 commits improving its OpenGL renderer...

Samsung OSG developers have been investigating and dealing with a nasty Wayland bug whereby a Wayland event could be delivered to an incorrect file descriptor. This ends up being due to a shortcoming in the Wayland protocol, but as to not break all existing software out there built against the current Wayland protocol, a workaround has been devised...

2017 could go down as the year that marked the descent of x86 32-bit support. Ubuntu 17.10 dropped their 32-bit desktop ISO, Ubuntu Server is now dropping their 32-bit installer, and more. Now NVIDIA Corp is announcing they are ending 32-bit support for their graphics driver...

Endless Mobile, the company behind the Linux-based Flatpak-using Endless OS and that has sold several different low-cost computers around the world, is looking forward to AMDGPU DC...

The Opus open-source, royalty-free audio codec designed for interactive speech and music over the Internet is working on its version 1.3 update...

There's some exciting news for open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver users this holiday season!..

LLVM 5.0.1 is now available as the first and likely only point release to LLVM 5.0...

Valve has just started their annual Steam Winter Sale that runs through 4 January...

Mesa 17.3.1 has been released today as the first point release to Mesa 17.3, the Q4'2017 feature update to Mesa...

While Red Hat is on track for a run rate of nearly three billion dollars for their current fiscal year, Canonical - the company behind Ubuntu - isn't quite there yet while still dominating the cloud landscape and other areas...

For GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" and GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" graphics processors from AMD, they are supported both by the Radeon DRM driver (the default) as well as the AMDGPU DRM driver (designed for GCN 1.2+ GPUs). As it's been a while since comparing the performance impact of changing the kernel driver for these older GCN graphics cards, here are some fresh benchmarks using the Linux 4.15 Git kernel with Mesa 17.4-dev using a few GCN 1.0/1.1 cards.

The Free Software Foundation and Purism are announcing that the Debian-derived PureOS operating system is being added to the FSF list of approved GNU/Linux distributions...

While Ubuntu Touch may be dead to Canonical, UBports continues to work where the convergence / Unity 8 developers left off with trying to make this mobile platform a reality...

While NVIDIA has been working on HDR display support for the X.Org Server environment via a new "DeepColor" extension, Intel developers have begun working on High Dynamic Range support for Wayland/Weston and the associated changes needed to Mesa...

DisplayLink developers in cooperation with interest from VMware's virtual graphics driver team have sent out a draft proposal for adding a damage interface to the Direct Rendering Manager drivers...

It looks like NVIDIA is trying to end out 2017 on a high note for Linux customers. After yesterday posting their open-source experimental allocator for Nouveau, today they landed the long sought after GP108 signed firmware files...

Complementing our recent Amazon EC2 Linux cloud distribution benchmarks, here are some fresh test results when comparing various Linux distributions when benchmarking them as guest VMs with the KVM hypervisor.

Coreboot is now able to replace the proprietary BIOS on some older Lenovo ThinkPads...

Continuing with our various end-of-year recaps for FLOSS/Linux on Phoronix, our latest look is at the most popular news for (open)SUSE in 2017...

AMD has sent in another round of AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager driver updates to DRM-Next for staging until the Linux 4.16 kernel merge window next month...

It's been more than one year since the release of X.Org Server 1.19 and with X.Org Server 1.20 still being at least some weeks away from release, X.Org Server 1.19.6 was released today...

With Ubuntu 17.10 the 32-bit desktop image/installer was dropped while for the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release they plan to do away with the ubuntu-server i386 release...

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.