Phoronix

LunarG has been working to reduce the size of the SPIR-V intermediate representation used by Vulkan (and OpenCL 2.1+) through improvements to the SPIRV-Tools project...

With Amazon AWS this week having released Amazon Linux 2 LTS I was excited to put this updated cloud-focused operating system through some performance tests to see how it stacks up with the more well known Linux distributions.

While the Linux kernel has supported the official Sony PlayStation 3 controller as an input device, some of the off-brand/knockoff models haven't quite behaved correctly on Linux but that's now being rectified...

A new contributor to the Wayland/Weston camp has been working on several improvements to the Weston reference compositor...

Fedora Linux this year picked up support for more multimedia codecs, continued innovating on both the Linux desktop/workstations and servers, the Fedora/RedHat developers continued a lot of upstream improvements throughout the Linux landscape, their Wayland support continues to be solid, and they continued shipping the latest and greatest packages in their distribution releases...

The latest OpenGL extension added to Mesa by Intel developers is the rather new EXT_disjoint_timer_query...

Back at WineConf 2017 VKD3D was announced for bringing Direct3D 12 to Wine by implementing Microsoft's latest graphics API atop the Vulkan graphics API. The initial code for this new library is beginning to take shape...

Amazon AWS has announced their "next generation" version of their Amazon Linux operating system intended for running on their EC2 compute cloud as well as on-site via VMware/VirtualBox/Hyper-V images that are free to all...

Ahead of the holidays Google has pushed out the Chrome 64 beta to all supported platforms...

Lennart Poettering has announced the release of systemd 236 as the init system's final release of 2017...

KDE Applications 17.12 is now available as the newest six-month update to this collection of KDE programs making use of KDE Frameworks 5...

Given this week's release of the big AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 Linux driver update, here are some fresh OpenCL GPU benchmarks comparing the performance of AMD's latest Radeon graphics cards on this newest Linux driver to that of the latest NVIDIA GeForce GPUs on their respective newest driver.

"Bolt" is a new project by Red Hat / GNOME developers in dealing with Thunderbolt 3 security levels on Linux...

The FreeBSD-based operating system TrueOS that's formerly known as PC-BSD has put out their last stable update of 2017...

Emil Velikov of Collabora has announced the release today of Mesa 17.2.7 as the latest point release for this older stable branch of Mesa...

It was four years ago this week that Valve began shipping SteamOS, their Debian-based Linux distribution intended for Steam Machines and those wanting a gaming-oriented Linux distribution. While Valve still technically maintains the SteamOS Linux distribution, the outlook at this point is rather bleak...

Collabora's Tomeu Vizoso is working on a interesting VirtIO DRM patch that lets clients running within a virtual machine communicate with a display compositor of the host system...

The Xen Project has announced version 4.10 of their open-source hypervisor. Xen 4.10 aims for better security, architectural improvements, better documentation, and more...

The past few days Canonical's Mir developers have been preparing their next milestone with pushing this display server along with Wayland protocol support and now that new "v0.29" release is available...

Back in October I wrote about SUSE working on a new, in-kernel bootsplash project. That work has yet to be mainlined but it looks like it's still on track for going upstream in the future with the latest version now being released that addresses issues uncovered during review...

Geoffrey McRae has published the code to the "Looking Glass" project he's been working on as a "extremely low-latency" KVM frame relay implementation for guests with VGA PCI pass-through...

The latest Steam client release on Wednesday rolls out OpenGL and Vulkan shader pre-caching by default...

Oracle has announced the release of their Linux Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 4 Update 6...

Last month on Phoronix I featured the DXVK project that's working to implement Direct3D 11 over Vulkan (not to be confused with VK9 as the separate effort to get D3D9 over Vulkan). This project is making a surprising amount of progress in its early stages...

FreeNAS 11.1 is now available as the latest feature update to this popular FreeBSD-based Network Attached Storage (NAS) operating system...

While SilverStone is mostly known for their computer cases, power supplies, and other peripherals, with the TS421S they have a compelling four-disk drive enclosure on their hands. The TS421S drive storage device supports up to four SAS/SATA 2.5-inch drives over a single mini-SAS SFF-8088 cable.

Back in March we wrote about GAPID as a new Google-developed Vulkan debugger in its early stages. Fast forward to today, GAPID 1.0 has been released for debugging Vulkan apps/games on Linux/Windows/Android as well as OpenGL ES on Android...

NetworkManager now has support for Intel's lean "IWD" WiFi daemon...

Not only are Ubuntu developers working towards demoting Python 2 on their Linux distribution but they are also working on being able to demote the GTK2 tool-kit from the main archive to universe followed by its eventual removal in the future...

It turns out that if firing up KDE's KWin Wayland compositor without XWayland support, it can start up so fast that it causes problems...

With yesterday's release of the Radeon Software Adrenalin driver for Windows, it actually picks up a feature that is roughly similar to something the open-source Radeon driver stack - and all of the Mesa's Gallium3D drivers for that matter - have offered for years...

Wayland had a very eventful year with it conquering more Linux desktops now since the switch to using GNOME Shell on Wayland with Ubuntu 17.10, Ubuntu's Mir compositor still being around but having switched to adding Wayland protocol support, KDE's Wayland support becoming day-to-day usable, and much more...

A new major release is available of Cryptsetup, the user-space utility for dealing with the DMCrypt kernel module for setting up encrypted disk volumes...

Following yesterday's excitement around the Radeon Software Adrenalin Driver as well as word of AMD open-sourcing their Linux driver and making other Linux driver changes, AMD's GPUOpen team has announced the release of a new version of Radeon GPU Profiler...

VLC 3.0 is something we've been looking forward to for years and it's looking like that big multimedia player update could be released very soon...

During last week's Snapdragon Technology Summit, a few references to "Vulkan2" were dropped... Well, here's the official comment from Khronos on that as well as my thoughts on this hypothetical next version of Vulkan...

GIMP 2.9.8 has been released as the newest development version of this widely-used, open-source Photoshop-like program in its road to GIMP 2.10...

With today's AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 Linux driver release alongside the Radeon Software Adrenalin Driver for Windows users, it's significant in a few ways. First and foremost, AMD has stuck to their word of the past two years and is now able to open-source their official Vulkan Linux driver. When it comes to AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 itself you are now able to mix-and-match driver components to choose what pieces you want of AMD's somewhat complicated driver make-up. Additionally, their OpenGL/Vulkan drivers in 17.50 have some new feature capabilities. So with that said here's a fresh look at how the AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 professional driver performance compares to the latest open-source RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan drivers.

AMD isn't the only one busy with GPU software updates today but NVIDIA has issued CUDA 9.1 as their first feature update to the CUDA 9 compute platform...

The Fedora Project's plans on delivering an initial "Fedora 27 Modular Server" build constructed under their new packaging principles has been thwarted...

For modern AMD graphics cards there are two OpenGL drivers and two Vulkan drivers available to Linux users/gamers that support the same modern AMD GPUs, not counting the older AMD Linux drivers, etc. Here's a rundown now on how those drivers compare...

Ahead of the Vulkan 1.0 debut nearly two years ago, we heard that for AMD's Vulkan Linux driver it was initially going to be closed-source and would then be open-sourced once ready. At the time it sounded like something that would be opened up six months or so, but finally that milestone is being reached! Ahead of Christmas, AMD is publishing the source code to their official Vulkan Linux driver.

There's more Radeon Linux excitement today beyond AMD finally open-sourcing their Vulkan driver. Coming out today is the AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 driver that bundles in the open-source RADV and RadeonSI drivers too, in letting you "mix and match" the driver components you want for your system.

AMD open-source developer Nicolai Hähnle has spent the past few months working on the ARB_gl_spirv extension as mandated by OpenGL 4.6. Some of the prep work for supporting that extension has landed in Mesa 17.4-dev Git...

Not only did GNOME have a very busy 2017, but as 2017 nears its end, here's a look back at the most exciting events in the KDE camp...

This week has started off to being another busy time in Mesa Git just ahead of the holidays...

Epiphany 3.27.3 was released this morning as the newest release of GNOME's web browser in the road to the GNOME 3.28 stable desktop debut next March...

VESA has rolled out DisplayHDR 1.0 as its newest standard. As implied by the name, the standard is in regards to specifying HDR (High Dynamic Range) quality for displays...

A Phoronix reader recently inquired about whether power-saving utilities like Intel PowerTop and TLP are still useful for conserving power on modern Linux distributions and modern hardware. The short answer is, yes, and here are some numbers.

For those interested in the open-source Coreboot project that serves as a replacement to proprietary UEFI/BIOS, the videos from their European Coreboot Conference are now available...