Phoronix

Earlier in the Linux 4.12 cycle I delivered a number of I/O scheduler benchmarks from a solid-state drive while for this article are some fresh I/O scheduler tests using a slower SSD as well as a conventional HDD. Schedulers tested were CFQ, Noop, deadline, MQ None, MQ Kyber, MQ BFQ, and MQ Deadline.

Among the sound changes coming for Linux 4.13 is supporting some new Realtek audio codecs...

Phoronix reader "Yoshi" has graciously allowed me remote access to his newly-minuted Radeon Vega Frontier Edition workhorse paired with an AMD Ryzen 7 processor...

For fans of the QNX operating system, SDL2 mainline can now run on QNX 7.0...

Just in case you had any doubt of AMD launching the Radeon RX Vega graphics card later this month at SIGGRAPH, they've now made it publicly clear...

Valve's monthly Steam Survey metrics show a relatively large decline in the Linux market-share for the past month...

With Linux 4.12 likely coming out this weekend, here's a look at some of the features you will likely be able to find within Linux 4.13...

The first release candidate for FreeBSD 11.1 is now available for testing...

There are some additional milestones to celebrate at the end of June...

Keith Packard has published another update on his work around DRM leases and his objective of improving the open-source driver stack for SteamVR / Linux VR...

A few days back NVIDIA released the Vulkan 381.10.10 Linux beta that featured performance improvements as well as new Vulkan/OpenGL interoperability extensions. That beta driver has already been succeeded by a new driver...

KDE developer Martin Gräßlin has written more about KWin's auto test suite with KDE system administrators having set up a new continuous integration system...

Last month was another eventful period on Phoronix and also as we celebrated the 13th birthday of Phoronix and the 9th of the Phoronix Test Suite. During June on Phoronix were 31 featured articles/reviews and 249 news items written by your's truly...

Andres Rodriguez of Valve has published initial support for the OpenGL EXT_external_objects within Mesa, the new GL extensions likely to be part of OpenGL 4.6...

Mesa 17.1.4 is now available as the newest stable point release for the Mesa 17.1 series...

Just as scheduled, last night marked the release of Radeon Open Compute (ROCm) v1.6 being released...

If all goes according to plan, the Linux 4.12 kernel will be officially released before the weekend is through. Here's a recap of some of the most exciting changes for this imminent kernel update...

AMD has silently pushed out an updated AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 driver but the changes are unknown...

We have some OpenGL numbers for Radeon Vega Frontier Edition on AMDGPU-PRO under Linux...

We will likely be seeing more driver-specific per-application performance/workaround tuning within Mesa Gallium3D drivers moving forward...

Continuing on with our Core i9 7900X Linux benchmarking this week are some numbers when testing this ten-core Skylake-X processor on various Linux distributions under an array of different workloads. Tested for this roundup was Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS, Ubuntu 17.04, Fedora 26, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Manjaro 17.0.2, and Clear Linux 16160.

The Qt Company has made good on their word to improve release management and get Qt 5.9.1 shipped punctually...

An open-source contributor has begun working on a new open-source driver for the ARM Mali-400 GPU...

Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" Alpha 1 is now available as the first official development release (sans the daily ISOs) for this upcoming milestone...

Ending out H1'2017 is Phoronix Test Suite 7.2.1-Trysil as the first and only planned point release for this release series...

When buying the MSI X299 SLI PLUS for our initial X299 + Intel Core X Series Linux benchmarking from NewEgg it came with the MSI DS502 Gaming Headset as a free gift. Curiosity got the best of me today, and it actually works just fine under Linux...

Today NVIDIA released their first 384 series Linux driver beta and for the occasion I fired up some fresh OpenCL / Vulkan / OpenGL benchmarks in seeing if there are any performance changes for users to see with this new series that will eventually succeed the 381.22 stable release...

Micro Machines World Series rolled out today and it's greeted by same-day Linux support...

Thanks to this week's Radeon Vega Frontier Edition launch, AMD pushed out a new build of their hybrid driver stack for Linux, AMDGPU-PRO. This new release is marketed as AMDGPU-PRO 17.20 and is only found when looking for the Frontier driver, but it's been working out fine so far in my Polaris/Fiji GPU testing. Here are some benchmarks compared to their current stable series, AMDGPU-PRO 17.10, as well as the newest open-source AMDGPU+RadeonSI/RADV driver stack.

NVIDIA has today announced the 384.47 beta driver for Linux, which succeeds their current 381 short-lived stable release series...

Intel developers have begun prepping support for upcoming Cannonlake SoCs in Coreboot...

Following my initial Intel Core i9 7900X Linux benchmarks this week were questions raised about its power use and thermal efficiency. Here are some tests looking at those factors, including the performance-per-Watt.

Originally Mir 1.0 was expected early in the Ubuntu 17.10 development cycle, but with their dramatic shift away from Unity 8 and Mir, that's no longer happening but there are new plans for Mir 1.0...

Longtime Linux laptop/desktop vendor System76 known for their Ubuntu-loaded systems has gone public today with their new operating system called "Pop!_OS", which in just a matter of months will begin appearing on their new products...

The GRUB bootloader now supports file-systems making use of EXT4 file-system encryption but where the boot files are left unencrypted...

First there was Radeon Pro and now there is Ryzen PRO for CPUs catering towards business customers. Ryzen PRO desktop CPUs will be out around the end of summer while mobile PRO parts will come in H1'2018...

There's another ARM SBC (single board computer) trying to get crowdfunded that could compete with the Raspberry Pi 3 while being a quad-core 64-bit ARM board with 4K UHD display support, up to 2GB RAM, and should be working soon on the mainline Linux kernel...

While not as prominent as GNU Emacs or GNU Nano, GNU Moe was released today as the latest release of this text editor...

What if you could have a monitor that weighed less than two pounds, only required a single cable for both power and display, offered 1080p on a 15-inch IPS screen, and was designed for portability? It would be possible to easily have a secondary display with you anywhere whether it be outdoors, on the beach, in the conference room, or practically anywhere. ASUS has managed such a device with the MB16AC ZenScreen.

As expected given NVIDIA's Vulkan beta driver update earlier today, Vulkan 1.0.53 is now available...

Eight days ago Lennart Poettering of systemd fame unveiled his work on the new casync project while this week he is talking about a new tool...

While Vulkan has taken much of the spotlight in the past year when it comes to multi-platform graphics APIs, OpenGL continues to be used by many games, a lot of commercial/workstation software continues relying on OpenGL and that will not change over night, and there it continues to be a widely-used graphics API even if it may not be as fast or customizable as Vulkan. While we previously heard there would likely not be a new version of OpenGL in the foreseeable future, it appears OpenGL 4.6 is on the way...

As it's probably been one year or so since last trying out Epic Games' new Unreal Tournament game in public alpha and with today's update offering easier Linux access, I decided to try it out...

A few days back I posted some fresh P-State and CPUFreq governor tests on Intel hardware while now is a similar comparison on the AMD side with a Ryzen 7 1800X processor and Radeon R9 Fury graphics card.

Epic Games has released an updated version of its new, free-to-play Unreal Tournament game powered by Unreal Engine 4. With this latest update does come a new, easy-to-obtain Linux client!..

With NVIDIA just releasing a new beta Vulkan driver that in addition to having new Vulkan extensions and better Vulkan/OpenGL interoperability also has "various performance improvements", I couldn't resist running some benchmarks...

CVE-2017-9445 is regarding a vulnerability opened by systemd that could allow malicious actors to crash the program or run programs via a specially crafted DNS response...

KDE Plasma 5.10.3 has been released as the newest bug-fix update to Plasma 5. For NVIDIA Linux users in particular this upgrade should be worthwhile...

If you haven't already done so, make sure to participate in our first annual 2017 Linux Laptop Survey...

NVIDIA quietly released a new Vulkan beta driver that offers up a number of new OpenGL and Vulkan extensions that haven't yet received widespread exposure. NVIDIA Vulkan users, meet the 381.10.10 release...