Phoronix

While Google Summer of Code is quickly drawing to an end, student developer Jacob Lifshay remains hard at work on the Vulkan-CPU project to have a CPU-based implementation of the Vulkan API...

It's looking like version 2.0.6 of SDL, the Simple DirectMedia Library that's widely used by cross-platform games and other applications, could soon be released...

Making their GNOME Shell session more like the Unity 7 experience, Ubuntu 17.10 as of today is installing its new Ubuntu Dock by default...

With this weekend marking the ending of David Airlie accepting new feature material for DRM-Next to in turn land in the Linux 4.14 cycle in a few weeks, there's a rush by Direct Rendering Manager driver maintainers to submit the last of their new feature work of changes they want in this next kernel release...

The Cirrus DRM/KMS driver commonly used by virtual machines with QEMU emulating the vintage graphics processor now has support for atomic mode-setting...

We have previously looked at Vulkan vs. OpenGL Linux game CPU core scaling and Linux game scaling across multiple CPUs but at the time did not have a Ryzen 3 system. Now having Ryzen 3 Linux box, here is a look at how the Vulkan versus OpenGL performance compares on the low-end processor. As well, it's a fresh look at the NVIDIA vs. RadeonSI/RADV performance.

Oracle is looking to move Java EE off into an open foundation for future development...

The Tyan Thunder CX GT24EB7106 paired with Intel's new Xeon Scalable processors can offer pretty thunderous performance. This server has just arrived at Phoronix for testing and so far is certainly showing off its potential when loading it with dual 20c/40t CPUs (80 threads combined) and 96GB of DDR4-2666 memory...

The Redox operating system, the interesting original OS written around the Rust programming language, is closer to self-hosting as a result of this year's Google Summer of Code...

Matthew Dillon began developing the HAMMER2 file-system in 2012 and back then he talked about it being until at least 2013 when it would be usable, etc. Five years later, it's looking like HAMMER2 is closer to being usable on DragonFlyBSD systems...

While David Airlie has been landing fixes in the RADV Vulkan driver for Radeon RX Vega GPUs, things aren't going quite as smoothly as planned with Airlie now disabling the Vega GPU support in this open-source driver...

Calamares, the open-source project trying to be the universal installer framework used by Linux distributions, is working towards their big v3.2 update...

Noticing I had an AMD Athlon II X3 425 system still racked up and hadn't been powered on in a long time, I decided to decomission it, but not before running some final benchmarks on that system. Having the recent AMD Ryzen 3 1200 / 1300X CPUs I decided it would make for an interesting comparison how the old Athlon II X3 compares to AMD's low-end CPU of today, the Ryzen 3 processors based on Zen. Here are those benchmarks that also include performance-per-Watt and overall AC system power consumption numbers.

Out today is the latest four-month update to the KDE Applications collection of desktop packages...

NVIDIA is working on a new OpenGL memory usage reporting extension, NV_query_resource. Before anyone jumps though to bash NVIDIA over coming up with yet-another-memory-reporting extension for OpenGL, this one is aimed at reporting the usage at an object-level rather than just overall amounts...

It's fairly rare these days seeing improvements to the xf86-video-ati DDX: the driver for those running a pre-AMDGPU (GCN 1.2) graphics card with this driver paired with Radeon DRM and not using the generic xf86-video-modesetting driver instead. But if you are using xf86-video-ati and use the "TearFree" feature to try to avoid screen tearing, a number of patches landed today...

The Krita project has today announced version 3.2 is ready of their open-source, cross-platform digital painting program...

Jerome Glisse of Red Hat has published his 25th revision to the Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) patch series. HMM is about allowing a process address space to be mirrored and for system memory to be transparently used by any device process...

The Qt Company has this morning announced the availability of the release candidate for the upcoming Qt Creator 4.4 integrated development environment...

NVIDIA's driver team has today released new Vulkan beta drivers for both Windows and Linux...

For audio engineers and musicians making use of the cross-platform, open-source Ardour Digital Audio Workstation, its 5.11 release is now available...

Alex Deucher sent in more Radeon/AMDGPU feature material today for DRM-Next of new code that in turn is being queued up for the Linux 4.14 kernel cycle...

The Minoca operating system is a "general purpose operating system written from scratch" but has a POSIX-like interface and is SMP-ready, network-capable, event-driven, and other modern features...

The latest Mesa patches provide support for the GFX9 performance counters of Radeon RX Vega GPUs for those wishing to profile the driver or games/applications on these newest AMD GPUs...

The high profile real-time strategy game Ashes of the Singularity are seeing their Vulkan port released next week...

Yesterday marked GNOME turning 20 while today Debian developers and users have its 24th birthday of the project to celebrate...

This week another new feature has landed in Phoronix Test Suite 7.4 Git for making it even easier for new (and existing) users of the Phoronix Test Suite to easily add additional perspective to their system's performance with OpenBenchmarking.org seamless comparisons...

With my Radeon RX Vega benchmarks so far this week I have been using the amd-staging-4.12 tree that contains the DC display code and Vega support. Though even with fresher code is amd-staging-drm-next, so here are some benchmarks...

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver has picked up support for the VK_KHR_external_semaphore extensions...

David Airlie has begun fixing up the open-source "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver so it can properly work with the newest Radeon RX Vega graphics cards...

Leo Liu of AMD is out today with another series if video/multimedia related patches for the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver stack...

An oversight from yesterday's AMD Radeon RX Vega Linux review was forgetting to mention the VDPAU video playback capabilities for this Vega graphics card on the open-source driver stack...

Google today is shipping the beta version of the upcoming Chrome 61 web-browser release...

Debian developers are still hoping they will be able to remove the Qt4 tool-kit during the Debian 10 "Buster" development cycle...

Our Vega GPU benchmarks didn't stop after yesterday's Radeon RX Vega Linux review or open vs. closed driver comparison. This morning for your viewing pleasure is a fun comparison looking at how the Radeon RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64 compare to several generations of the older Radeon graphics cards going back to the HD 2900XT (R600) graphics processor.

Vulkan 1.0.58 was released yesterday as the latest minor update to this high-performance graphics API and already Mesa's RADV driver has patches pending...

It looks like AMD developers have an initiative underway to make the process easier of updating the Radeon Linux graphics drivers whether it be the fully open-source driver stack or the hybrid AMDGPU-PRO driver...

Today marks the third iteration of the rolling-release Solus Linux distribution project that has become increasingly popular with enthusiasts and is also aligned with their own Budgie Desktop Environment...

It was twenty years ago today that Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena founded the GNOME project...

Eric Anholt at Broadcom continues working on the VC5 driver stack that should yield next-generation graphics for future Broadcom SoCs, some of which will hopefully make it into future Raspberry Pi revisions...

Of the many interesting findings from this morning's AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 / 64 Linux review was how the open-source AMDGPU+RadeonSI driver stack with OpenGL actually outperforms AMDGPU-PRO driver, the hybrid Radeon Linux driver relying upon AMD's closed-source OpenGL driver that's also shared with the Windows OpenGL driver. Here are more benchmarks of the RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64 showing the margins by which AMDGPU+RadeonSI can outperform AMDGPU-PRO.

ZFS On Linux (ZOL) has finally picked up support for native encryption...

On the same day as Microsoft releasing .NET Core 2.0, the Mono folks are out with a software update of their own...

The Kodi HTPC/multimedia software has revamped support for Wayland as an alternative to the X.Org Server on Linux thanks to Google Summer of Code developer Philipp Kerling...

Microsoft announced the .NET Core 2.0 release this morning and it comes with continued Linux support...

For those anxious to see AMDGPU's DC / DAL / display code mainlined either for the Radeon RX Vega support, FreeSync capabilities, HDMI/DP audio, or other display features, there is now a public TODO list...

Those using the Reiser4 file-system in some capacity can now safely upgrade to the Linux 4.12 kernel...

For those wanting to use AMDGPU-PRO to power your RX Vega setup even though the performance is slower than RadeonSI OpenGL, the launch-day driver is now public...

The Radeon RX Vega is shipping today and for Linux gamers this is a serious AMD offering for being able to handle modern Linux games. But it goes beyond that in the RX Vega launch easily being the most successful launch ever for a GPU backed by open-source drivers on launch day. I've been spending the past several days testing the Radeon RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64. The RX Vega 56 is a very competent graphics card for $399 USD while those wanting to reach peak performance for Linux gaming on a open-source system can find the RX Vega 64 for $499 USD. The open-source support for Vega isn't without some initial setup hurdles and some growing pains along the way, but it's looking very good for launch-day and the best DRM+Mesa support we have ever seen at-launch for the premiere of a new discrete GPU architecture.

With the just-posted Radeon RX Vega 56 / 64 Linux review, there aren't any OpenCL benchmarks due to some issues encountered in the process. When the Vega OpenCL support is in better shape, results will be published. But for those anxious to see anyways what the current ROCm OpenCL performance looks like for Ethereum with Ethminer, here's a quick look...