Phoronix

Curious about the Beignet OpenCL performance impact on a Broadwell-U laptop/ultrabook and just going through bare metal benchmarking withdrawals while away this week in Russia, I was running some Beignet tests on the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon...

It seems like it would have been done long ago, but upstream SDL2 now finally has out-of-the-box Steam Controller mappings for Linux and iOS...

While Timothy Arceri at Valve had just made the change to a 5% cache size limit of your disk space from an original 10% maximum threshold, he's now changed it to just a 1GB cache limit...

The VK_KHX_multiview extension that is important for VR games/applications is expected to soon land within Mesa Git for Intel's ANV driver. Meanwhile, the VK_KHX_external_memory extensions have landed for this open-source Intel driver...

With Debian 9.0 not being far away from releasing, the Debian CD Images Team has issued an update over their fundamental changes happening for this "Stretch" cycle...

Initial Meson build system integration has landed in the xorg-server code-base for testing...

A few days back I posted benchmarks of the initial GTX 1050/1060/1070/1080 Nouveau 3D support. As expected, the performance was rather abysmal with re-clocking not being available for Pascal (or Maxwell) GPUs on this open-source NVIDIA Linux kernel driver. For those trying to use Nouveau for Linux games or care about your GPU clock speeds, currently the GTX 600/700 "Kepler" series is still your best bet or the GTX 750 "Maxwell 1" is the last NVIDIA graphics processors not requiring signed firmware images and can properly -- but manually -- re-clock with the current Nouveau driver.

Debian 9.0 "Stretch" has seen UEFI Secure Boot support no longer being considered a release blocker but is now just a stretch goal for this upcoming release...

The first development snapshots of GNOME Shell and Mutter in the 3.25 series were released today in preparation for this week's GNOME 3.25.1 milestone...

Judging by the massive Rust fan base in our forums, those of you reading this will be delighted today about the newest version of Rustlang, v1.17...

The second release candidate is now available for GStreamer 1.12, the next version of this widely-used, open-source, cross-platform multimedia framework...

Qt developers have begun a fresh round of discussions over the supported platforms / operating systems of Qt 5.10 that will be released in the later part of this calendar years...

KDE Plasma is getting web-browser integration initially for Google Chrome and is expected to be followed by Mozilla Firefox support...

Mesa previously had a hard-coded limit to not take up more than 10% of your HDD/SSD storage, but now that limit has been halved...

For putting the AMD Ryzen 7 Linux performance in additional perspective and showing how various Amazon EC2 cloud instances compare to bare metal hardware, here are fresh benchmarks of many different Amazon EC2 instance types compared to various Linux systems in our lab. This comes down to a 29-way comparison of different cloud instances and bare metal systems.

For those sticking to stable Mesa releases, Mesa 17.0.5 is being prepped for release in the days ahead...

Git 2.13 has stepped closer to being released with today's 2.13-rc1 debut...

Epiphany 3.25.1 has been released as the latest update for GNOME's Web Browser in what will be part of GNOME 3.26 this September...

Given Microsoft's Windows 10 Creators Update earlier this month and the never-ending advancements to the open-source Linux graphics driver stack along with the recent release of Ubuntu 17.04, here are some fresh benchmarks of Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux when running a wide variety of cross-platform games with an AMD Radeon RX 580 and R9 Fury graphics cards.

The GrSecurity initiative that hosts various out-of-tree patches to the mainline Linux kernel in order to enhance the security will no longer be available to non-paying users...

Following news of Red Hat hiring another developer to work on open-source graphics compute, AMD is now hiring at least two more developers too...

The 96Boards organization has announced the official launch and shipping of the HiKey 960...

Last week I posted initial Radeon RX 580 Linux benchmarks and even AMDGPU overclocking results. That initial testing of this "Polaris Evolved" hardware was done with the fully-open Radeon driver stack that most Linux enthusiasts/gamers use these days. The AMDGPU-PRO driver wasn't tested for those initial articles as it seems to have a diminishing user-base and largely focused for workstation users. But for those wondering how AMDGPU-PRO runs with the Radeon RX 580, here are some comparison results to DRM-Next code for Linux 4.12 and Mesa 17.2-dev.

Late last year F2FS picked up multiple device support for this Flash-Friendly File-System. This F2FS multi-drive capability isn't native RAID support like Btrfs but just allows a single F2FS file-system to span multiple devices. But it's more than that in that block allocation and the garbage collection policy is modified to boost I/O performance by taking advantage of the multiple SSD/flash devices.

POCL, the Portable Computing Language project, aiming to provide a portable OpenCL implementation for usage against different CPUs and back-ends, has been working on CUDA support...

Red Hat is looking to hire another developer to specialize in advancing the open-source graphics stack...

It appears that GRUB 2.02 is now ready for release as the first stable update to GRUB2 since the v2.00 release five years ago...

One of the many features to look forward to with Linux 4.12 is the Nouveau DRM driver providing initial 3D/accelerated support for GeForce GTX 1050/1060/1070/1080 "Pascal" graphics cards. Here are some benchmarks of this open-source NVIDIA driver support for these latest-generation GPUs compared to the proprietary driver.

Systemd can now be built with the Meson build system as an alternative to its traditional Make support...

It shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, but the PHP 7.2 release schedule was firmed up earlier this month and is aiming to ship by the end of November...

Linux kernel developers are still looking to raise the requirements of GCC for building the Linux kernel...

For those still having OS/2 software to run or just missing the days of OS/2, the software firm Arca Noae that is run by OS/2 veterans is preparing a new installment of the operating system with blessings from IBM...

While earlier this year the future of Android-x86 was questioned, so far the project is moving along and released this week was Android-x86 6.0-r3 as the latest Marshmallow update...

An Enlightenment developer has been working on support for accelerating EFL Evas filters with OpenGL shaders...

Last week I began posting a number of AMD Radeon RX 580 Linux benchmarks but not covered so far has been the OpenCL compute performance considering the Clover-based compute stack isn't good enough for benchmarking and is basically unmaintained these days by AMD. Meanwhile, their ROCm stack is still being brought up and is not yet fully-opened nor optimized yet for performance. Thus for those with desktop cards looking for basic OpenCL support are left with the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver with its closed-source OpenCL driver. In this article are some fresh OpenCL benchmarks of AMDGPU-PRO on the RX 580 and other Radeon GPUs compared to NVIDIA with its Linux OpenCL driver.

If you are in the market for a dual-band USB WiFi adapter, the Panda PAU09 N600 WiFi adapter works well on modern Linux distributions and will cost you just about $20 USD.

A Phoronix Premium reader recently requested some fresh boot time comparisons and power consumption numbers for Intel laptop hardware, so here are some numbers.

After talking about it for a long time, Intel Optane Memory is now officially available. A 16GB module will cost just $44 USD or $77 for a 32GB capacity...

In aiming to enhance online video streaming, the SRT video protocol has been open-sourced and an alliance forming around that for low-latency video...

For those wishing to try out the FreeBSD-based desktop-focused TrueOS operating system, formerly known as PC-BSD, there is a new stable release...

Emil Velikov has released the second weekly RC release ahead of next month's Mesa 17.1...

Initial support for Radeon RX Vega support in Mesa landed for Mesa 17.1 at the end of March. However, this initial support was limited to OpenGL 3.1 while now patches have come to take Vega up to OpenGL 4.5...

LLVM developers have been wanting to move from their 3-clause BSD-like "LLVM license" to the Apache 2.0 license with exceptions. It's been a while since last hearing about the effort while now a third round of request for comments was issued...

For fans of MPV as the media player forked from MPlayer/MPlayer2, a new release was tagged this weekend...

While GCC 7 is being released in the days ahead, the OpenIndiana crew continuing to advance the open-source Solaris stack has begun offering GCC 6 as an auxiliary/supplementary compiler...

OpenLara is an open-source effort to have a engine re-implementation of the classic Tomb Raider game...

While last week Linus Torvalds was looking at releasing Linux 4.11 this weekend, Linux 4.11-rc8 instead was issued today...

arkOS, the Arch-based Linux distribution focused on "securely self-hosting your online life" with aims to make it easy to deploy servers for web-based services, is being discontinued...

Patches posted today for Nouveau NVC0, the open-source NVIDIA driver for modern GeForce GPUs, implement OpenGL compute shader support for Pascal hardware...

With the Linux 4.11 kernel potentially being released as soon as today, here are some fresh benchmarks of Btrfs / EXT4 / F2FS / XFS on a solid-state drive and comparing the performance of 4.11 Git back to Linux 4.9 and 4.10.