Phoronix

Last week AMD released an updated AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver with performance fixes so I've now carried out a fresh comparison of this updated 17.10-429170 driver compared to the latest open-source stack of Mesa 17.2-dev Git plus the Linux 4.12 development kernel.

Last month at Computex Intel announced the Core-X series with up to 18 core configurations. The first of these new processors are preparing to ship and the embargo has just lifted concerning reviews and performance details...

Mesa 17.1.3 is now available as the latest stable point release to this important 3D user-space graphics stack...

AMD's GPUOpen initiative has posted a number of Vulkan open-source projects over time from the Anvil Vulkan framework to a Vulkan-supproted CodeXL and various code samples. Their latest open-source project is a Vulkan memory allocator...

Another Xfce component saw a new development release in the slow road towards Xfce 4.14...

Red Hat's Peter Hutterer has announced the first release candidate of the upcoming libinput 1.8 input handling library release that's now widely used by X.Org and Wayland systems...

Valgrind 3.13 is now available as the newest feature update to this widely-used tool for memory debugging and profiling...

Not only is Debian 9.0 released as the main GNU/Linux OS, but also Debian GNU/Hurd is now out with a major release as their pairing of the GNU user-land with Hurd in place of the Linux kernel...

For those looking to run Steam in a more isolated/sandboxed environment, Valve's game distribution service can now be easily run in a Flatpak environment...

Debian 9 "Stretch" is now officially available...

The rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed distribution is now building its packages with PIE (Position Independent Executables) as the default...

With the Linux 4.12 kernel when running in emulated environments like VMs/clouds atop NVMe (NVM Express) solid-state storage you should be able to obtain much greater performance...

Last week I wrote about Librem 13 v2 support landing in upstream Coreboot while now more work for this Purism laptop is now set in Git...

The Ubuntu-based KDE Neon distribution for its "dev unstable" image now comes pre-installed with the Wayland session option...

Earlier this month with some fresh Windows vs. Linux benchmarks were numbers showing how the open-source Radeon driver stack is now nearly on-par with the Radeon Windows driver as well as how the Intel Linux graphics performance is getting closer to parity too. In this article are the least interesting numbers: the NVIDIA Linux vs. Windows 10 results.

Right now if you want to make use of SteamVR on Linux with Radeon GPUs, you need to use a patched version of the RADV driver. The RADV Vulkan bits for SteamVR are still working their way to mainline while the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver doesn't yet support SteamVR's required Vulkan extensions, but the support is being worked on...

One of the features we are most looking forward to with Qt 5.10 is the initial Vulkan support...

Richard Biener has announced plans for releasing GCC 6.4 in the near future as another maintenance update to last year's GCC 6 launch...

With Firefox 54 having shipped this week, Firefox 55 is now in beta...

Plenty of changes are taking place for Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" beyond just transitioning from Unity to GNOME...

With Canonical divesting in Mir from the desktop and abandoning their mobile phone/tablet ambitions, we might not see Mir v1.0 ever reached as was anticipated to happen for the Ubuntu 17.10 cycle. However, Mir is still being maintained for IoT use-cases and today is a new point release...

I picked up a Corsair Force MP500 NVMe M.2 solid-state drive for one of the new test systems in the Phoronix lab and so I ran some benchmarks on this high-performance drive compared to a few other SSDs.

AMD has just released a new AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 driver. While another 17.10 series driver release for this hybrid stack may not seem exciting without a large version bump, there are some noteworthy changes to this release...

Since the end of last year Glibc has offered a tunables framework that could be exposed via the --enable-tunables switch at compile-time while now it's being enabled by default...

It's been a half-year since the last release of the Cairo 2D graphics library, but that changed this week with the new Cairo 1.15.6 snapshot...

It was just yesterday that bindless texture support landed in Mesa Git for RadeonSI while now Samuel Pitoiset who works for Valve's Linux graphics driver team has taken to other work...

Jerome Glisse at Red Hat continues working on Heterogeneous Memory Management for the mainline Linux kernel and hopefully will be merged soon. He's now extended HMM with cache-coherent device memory support...

While it feels just like yesterday when the big Krita 3.0 drawing program update was released with its port to Qt5, Krita 4.0 is already under development...

FreeNAS 11.0 is now officially available, the network attached storage (NAS) centered operating system powered by FreeBSD...

The Allwinner sun4i-drm driver has a ton of new code ready to ship with the Linux 4.13 kernel that will greatly help many Allwinner SoC users out there running this open-source Direct Rendering Manager driver...

Kingsoft Software has released an updated version of their (proprietary) office productivity software for Linux...

With last week having posted some fresh macOS Sierra vs. Linux OpenGL benchmarks, here are some more interesting tests to compare the Intel OpenGL driver on Windows 10 Pro x64 to the open-source Intel OpenGL driver used by Linux. Linux beating macOS wasn't too much surprise considering that Apple has been neglecting OpenGL for years, but the Linux vs. Windows OpenGL comparison is a much tougher battle.

The UBports camp is now shipping their first stable over-the-air (OTA-1) update to those wishing to use this fork of Ubuntu Phone / Unity 8...

Hans Wennborg has published his proposed schedule for the LLVM / Clang 5.0 release that would put the stable debut at the end of August...

David Airlie has queued up his own work on introducing the "DRM sync objects" concept into DRM-Next for in turn landing with the upcoming Linux 4.13 kernel...

Quite pleasant waking up today to find that in Mesa Git are the 70+ patches for implementing ARB_bindless_texture support within RadeonSI Gallium3D...

The open-source Godot 2D/3D Game Engine continues working towards its big "Godot 3.0" release although it remains months behind schedule...

If you are running Intel Haswell hardware with integrated graphics and have been seeing hangs under Linux, you're not alone but a fix is in the works...

Additional web browser news this week is Mozilla's launch today of Firefox 54...

Following last week's Chrome 59 debut, Chrome 60 is now in beta...

Building off last week's Wine 2.10 release is now the adjoining Wine-Staging 2.10 release with various experimental/testing features tacked on...

Following the retirement of Valve's Steam Greenlight program, Steam Direct is now available as the streamlined, transparent, and accessible method for game developers to bring their games to Steam...

Georges Stavracas has been hacking away on better half-tiling support in GNOME Shell / Mutter and is working towards quarter-tiling functionality...

After multiple delays, the first beta of Fedora 26 is now officially available...

Following last week's news about PCI Express 4.0 and 5.0, a Phoronix Premium member had requested some graphics card benchmarks when comparing PCI Express 1.0 vs. 2.0 vs. 3.0 performance under Linux.

Marek Olšák at AMD has published his latest patch series: 24 patches providing further clean-ups and micro-optimizations to Gallium3D's Mesa state tracker...

Feral Interactive has announced that they will be bringing XCOM2's War of the Chosen DLC expansion to Linux and macOS...

There haven't been too many interesting game announcements at E3 2017 so far this week where Linux support has been explicitly mentioned, but Tropico 6 is now confirmed for 2018 and will be supported on Linux...

The Solus Linux distribution and its Budgie desktop continue moving on strong and they've added another developer to their team while the project leader Ikey Doherty will be working on the project full-time...

In prepping for the Debian 9.0 release in a few days, developers have uploaded Debian Installer Stretch RC5 that also serves as the installer's final release candidate...