Phoronix

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...

While AMD announced their EPYC 7000 series CPUs last week, prominent new security features of these high-end processors aren't yet ready with support in the mainline Linux kernel...

After testing out AMDGPU's DRM-Next code for Linux 4.13, I moved on to seeing if there are any Kabylake graphics performance differences slated for the upcoming Linux 4.13 kernel cycle...

Since the Intel Core-X Series were announced last month at Computex, I've been excited to see how well this high-end processor will perform under Linux... Linux enthusiasts have plenty of highly-threaded workloads such as compiling the Linux kernel, among other packages, and thus have been very excited by the potential of the Core i9 7900X with its ten cores plus Hyper Threading and sporting a 13.75MB cache. With finally having an X299 motherboard ready, here are my initial Ubuntu Linux benchmarks for the i9-7900X.

Building off last week's Wine 2.11 update is now the adjoining Wine-Staging release that adds in various experimental patches for more widespread testing...

Collabora is strengthening their graphics development team with a former Canonical developer working on Mir who was laid off during the Ubuntu maker's recent restructuring...

Now with the motherboards having arrived, we can move on to our Intel Core-X Linux benchmarking. Here is an initial look at the Intel Core i7 7740X Kabylake-X processor.

NVIDIA has made their TensorRT 2 library publicly available today as the newest major update to their deep-learning inference optimizer and run-time...

Thanks to today's Radeon Vega Frontier Edition launch, AMD has released an updated AMDGPU-PRO Linux hybrid driver...

With the Linux 4.13 merge window likely to open next week and the DRM-Next cutoff already having passed for new material that in turn wants to target 4.13, here are some initial benchmarks with a Polaris and Fiji graphics cards for this new AMDGPU DRM code.

GStreamer now has a plug-in for supporting accelerated video decoding using NVIDIA's VDPAU-successor, NVDEC...

The Radeon Vega Frontier Edition has begun shipping today as the Vega-based compute card geared to go up against the Titan Xp and P100 accelerators for compute/workstation workloads. This is the first Vega GPU card to market, but will come at a hefty cost...

MATE developer Martin Wimpress has shared that they are talking to Mir developers about how Mir could be used as a Wayland compositor...

Valve developer Samuel Pitoiset appears quite motivated to see Dawn of War 3 running well under Linux with the RadeonSI driver stack...

While Vulkan is most often talked about for being a high-performance graphics API, it also has integrated compute capabilities -- and in fact, may be the future of OpenCL -- and is quite capable for GPGPU computing. There are countless Vulkan graphics tutorials and code samples out there, but for those interested in just Vulkan for compute, a Phoronix reader pointed me to a new simple/easy project...

Broadcom developer Eric Anholt has shared another weekly update concerning his summer 2017 hacking on the VC4 open-source driver stack that is most notably used by the Raspberry Pi...

After carrying out the P-State/CPUFreq governor comparison with a focus on OpenGL and Vulkan Linux games, next I ran some fresh numbers seeing how well modern OpenGL/Vulkan Linux games are scaling across multiple CPU cores.

This weekend I posted a comparison of OpenGL/Vulkan performance for Radeon and NVIDIA GPUs with Serious Sam 3: BFE now that it's updated to the Vulkan-enabled "Fusion" 2017 update. For those curious about the Intel HD Graphics gaming potential for this game, here are some results...

Igor Stoppa of Huawei continues working on a new kernel feature to provide read-only protection for dynamic data...

TrueOS-aligned Lumina Desktop Environment 1.3 is now available as the latest stable release for this Qt-powered desktop environment...

For those wondering about the impact on gaming of the different CPUFreq vs. P-State CPU frequency scaling drivers and their different governors, here are some fresh tests using an Intel Skylake CPU with Radeon RX Polaris graphics when using the latest Linux 4.12 kernel and Mesa 17.2-dev.

Nicolai Hähnle of AMD has posted his set of 92 patches for implementing an experimental NIR back-end within the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...