Phoronix

One of the most exciting open-source OpenCL projects we have been following in recent years is POCL as "Portable C" for having an LLVM-based portable OpenCL implementation to run on CPUs as well as GPUs now via AMD HSA back-end and a new experimental NVIDIA CUDA back-end. The POCL 1.0 release is finally near...

SYCL as a reminder is Khronos' higher-level OpenCL programming model based on C++. It's been a while since the last update, but a new point release is now available...

When we heard of RHEL deprecating Btrfs with Red Hat losing hope in this feature-focused Linux file-system, we were relayed word that Red Hat was planning for their own Stratis project for next-gen Linux storage. Stratis is now expected to ship in preview form for Fedora 28...

At the end of 2013 we wrote about a new Qt5 web-browser inspired by Opera and in 2014 it entered alpha form. But since then we hadn't heard much of that browser, Otter, until a Phoronix reader brought it up in our forums today...

At the end of October ReactOS 0.4.7-RC1 was released as the newest test release for this open-source operating system project continuing to work on re-implementing the Windows APIs. That official v0.4.7 release is now available...

It's always great waking up to new features landing in Mesa Git...

Back in early November Intel finally landed its shader cache support for allowing GLSL shaders to be cached on-disk similar to the RadeonSI shader caching that has been present since earlier in the year. But this functionality isn't yet enabled by default as it still needs more testing...

For those wanting to easily browse the source-code to all Debian packages, it can now be trivially done so from your hardware...

Over the past week I have carried out some Radeon and NVIDIA Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux benchmarks. While not quite as interesting as those discrete GPU comparisons, while having the Windows 10 Pro x64 Fall Creator's Update around and testing from the Core i7 8700K, I also ran some Windows vs. Linux tests for the integrated UHD Graphics.

Last week marked the official release of PHP 7.2 that besides offering new features does provide minor performance boosts to PHP7...

Being announced from Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit today is the HP Envy x2 and ASUS NovaGo, interesting ARM-powered laptops...

Open-source graphics driver contributor for Valve, Samuel Pitoiset, has been working on clearing up some remaining issues with the RADV Vulkan driver's support for the RX Vega graphics cards...

CodeWeavers has announced the release of their Wine-based CrossOver 17.0 software for macOS and Linux...

While kernel side there's been Memory Protection Keys support since Linux 4.9 and work has already landed in GCC and Clang, the glibc GNU C Library is finally adding support for MPK...

It's been a while since last having anything to report on with Loop-AES as a long-standing means for offering transparent data encryption in the form of a loopback device. The project is now out with a new release providing out-of-tree compatibility with Linux 4.14/4.15 kernels...

For those wanting to run with AMD EPYC processors in the cloud, it's now possible with Microsoft Azure...

Kata Containers is the latest tech in the container space and is an effort hosted by the OpenStack Foundation in conjunction with many participating organizations. The underlying tech for Kata Containers originated from the Intel / Clear Linux Clear Containers project...

It's been thirteen months since the release of X.Org Server 1.19 and there is no expedited effort to get the next major release out the door, but X.Org Server 1.20 is still expected to happen in the months ahead...

Are you still using the Vivaldi web browser? If so, you can now use it on ARM devices like the Raspberry Pi...

It's been another interesting year of Microsoft open-source/Linux announcements...

OpenMW remains as the open-source game engine project re-implementing the code to power Elderscrolls III: Morrowind, the popular 2002 RPG game from Bethesda. OpenMW 0.43 is now available as the latest release...

Last week I wrote about a Google engineer working on HDCP content protection support for Intel's Direct Rendering Manager driver on Linux that is also obviously open-source. Understandably, that raised concerns by free software purists not wanting to potentially lock-down their system in any manner to playback protected content on their systems...

The final standard of C++17 (formerly known as "C++1z") is now official...

DragonFlyBSD now supports up to 64TB of physical memory...

The latest version of the TeamViewer remote control / desktop sharing / web conferencing software is now available for Linux with a number of improvements...

Jason Ekstrand of Intel has landed nearly 50 changes to the SPIR-V and Vulkan driver code in Mesa 17.4-dev Git...

One of many improvements being planned for next year's Fedora Workstation 28 release is to improve the initial setup process...

For those who already picked up a Raven Ridge laptop or looking to when more of these Zen+Vega devices surface in the weeks ahead, the Raven Ridge firmware is now living within linux-firmware.git...

VC4CL is a newer effort bringing OpenCL to the Broadcom VideoCore IV GPUs as found in the Raspberry Pi boards...

When it comes to having an i3-compatible Wayland compositor, Sway manages to capture much of the limelight, but Way-Cooler continues to advance as an alternative compositor...

Mesa 17.3 isn't the only thing running behind schedule but also out today is Qt 5.10-RC3 after this tool-kit release failed to ship last month...

Mesa 17.3 is having a tough time getting out the door with now being up to a sixth release candidate, but the official release is now expected this week...

Timothy Arceri who has been for the past year working on Linux GPU driver optimizations for Valve has just merged his latest patch series providing optimizations for the Gallium3D NIR linking phase...

The second weekly release candidate to the Linux 4.15 kernel was released early on Sunday...

With 2017 slowly drawing to a close, here's a look back at the most-viewed Mesa news on Phoronix this year...

A few days back we published some Windows 10 vs. Linux gaming benchmarks with two Radeon graphics cards. For putting those numbers into better perspective, here are the results now when adding in two competing NVIDIA graphics cards on both operating systems.

The fourth and final development release of Phoronix Test Suite 7.6 is now available ahead of its stable release expected next week...

This past week the fan on my reference Radeon RX 480 graphics card surprisingly died. It's been a number of years since I last had a fan go out on a graphics card heatsink with much better reliability these days, especially with the reference graphics cards. When deciding what cooling solution to use for this RX 480 Polaris card, I decided to try a budget passively-cooled solution.

It's been another busy week of development on the GTK4 tool-kit...

A Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) meeting on Friday approved another batch of changes around the Fedora 28 development cycle...

Jonas Ã…dahl of Red Hat has released a new version of Wayland-Protocols, the collection of protocols that extends/introduces new functionality not part of the core Wayland protocol...

Besides working on disabling ME in all their laptops, the System76 team has also been busy working on their new Ubuntu-derived Pop!_OS operating system...

Valve is reporting the Linux gaming marketshare for November 2017 at a mere 0.27%...

One of the benefits of open-source software is the ability for code re-use by other projects and that may now happen with the AMDGPU kernel driver's scheduler...

With the recent Windows 10 Fall Creator's Update there were some improvements to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) particularly around boosting the I/O performance (though further WSL performance work is coming), so this week I've been carrying out some fresh benchmarks of Windows 10 WSL with its openSUSE and Fedora options. For additional perspective I also compared the performance to running benchmarks with Linux containers on Docker under Windows 10 and lastly the "bare metal" Linux performance.

If you have encountered some early fallout from using the AMDGPU DC display stack or just want to help in testing patches likely to be queued for Linux 4.16, AMD has sent out another patch of DC patches...

While Linux 4.15-rc1 was just released this past weekend, Intel open-source graphics driver developers have already sent in their first pull request to DRM-Next of new feature material targeting Linux 4.16...

Armory is a promising open-source game engine that prides itself in being built around Blender...

Lennart Poettering has begun his release wrangling process in getting systemd 236 ready for release this month...

While Intel has been supporting VA-API for years, basically since X-Video/XvMC became irrelevant, as its primary video API for video acceleration, they are now rolling out a new media driver...