Phoronix

Aside from our 2017 year-end recap, if you were busy reliving the favorite moments of last year and missed some of our original content in December, here's a look back at the top highlights of last month...

Released nearly one year ago was the experimental NVIDIA VkHLF project as a high-level framework for Vulkan. It's been a while since last hearing anything about it, but some new code was just merged...

We end 2017 on Phoronix with 3,390 original news posts on Phoronix this year and 369 featured articles/reviews...

Linus Torvalds has released the sixth weekly release candidate of the upcoming Linux 4.15 kernel...

Here are some other end-of-year benchmarks I had been working on in looking at the current performance of Mesa 17.2.2 versus 17.3.1 versus 17.4-devel Git with RadeonSI OpenGL on three different graphics cards...

While AMD developers worked on the Radeon Gallium3D "Clover" OpenCL support for some time, that really hasn't been the case in years with the AMD's open-source OpenCL effort these days being focused upon their ROCm compute platform. Some within the community though still work on this OpenCL Gallium3D state tracker from time to time and this New Year's weekend is an interesting project pairing Clover with AMD's proprietary OpenCL compiler...

While Haiku OS is incredibly close to delivering their long-awaited beta, it didn't end up materializing in 2017 but they still made much headway into this open-source BeOS-inspired operating system...

The open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver project providing independent, reverse-engineered 3D graphics driver support for GeForce GPUs made a lot of progress in 2017 although not as great as many would have hoped for. But 2018 will hopefully prove to be more interesting...

As shown in recent benchmarks of the RADV Vulkan driver, while the Radeon RX Vega GPU support is now considered conformant and fully-functioning, it's not yet as well optimized as earlier generations of GPUs with this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver. Fortunately, it looks like Bas Nieuwenhuizen is working on more performance optimizations...

DRM subsystem contributor Noralf Trønnes is proposing a patch-set to provide generic FBDEV emulation support in DRM drivers via exportable dumb buffers...

With the Mesa-based RADV Vulkan driver having just landed a significant performance optimization you may be wondering whether RADV Vulkan now leads to faster gaming frame-rates than using the mature RadeonSI OpenGL driver... I was curious so I ran some fresh benchmarks using the newest Mesa Git code.

With the LLVM Clang 6.0 code branching and feature freeze coming up on 3 January, here's a recap of some of the most interesting new features and changes to find with the LLVM 6.0 compiler infrastructure and Clang 6.0 C/C++ front-end...

Alex Deucher of AMD has sent in the last feature updates to DRM-Next of new AMDGPU material to be queued for the Linux 4.16 kernel cycle that will begin later in January...

Remember Arcan? The Linux display server built off a game engine. The project is ending 2017 with the release of the Arcan 0.5.4 display server and its associated Durden v0.4 desktop...

I would like to wish all Phoronix readers a happy new year and hopeful that 2018 will be even better for Phoronix and all open-source/Linux communities...

Glade 3.21 was released today as the latest development release of this tool for quickly designing GTK3/GNOME user-interfaces...

Ahead of next week's LLVM 6.0 feature freeze / code branching, the Clang C/C++ compiler front-end has picked up support for the concept of configuration files...

Here's a look back at the most popular Linux gaming news on Phoronix this calendar year...

I've been working on some AMD EPYC virtualization tests on and off the past few weeks. For your viewing before ending out the year are some initial VirtualBox vs. Linux KVM benchmarks for seeing how the guest VM performance compares.

Five years ago today I wrote about The Problems Right Now For Gaming On Linux with regards to challenges for Linux gaming when it comes to the software and hardware. In the five years since and with seeing thousands of more games be made available for Linux, the situation still is not ideal but it's much better than at the end of 2012...

2017 was easily the most pivotal year for the Ubuntu Linux distribution in years with Canonical having decided to end Unity 8 development in favor of moving to a GNOME Shell Wayland session. There was also the decision to develop a new server installer that is still under development, Snaps and its underlying tech continues to be worked on as an alternative to Flatpak, and Ubuntu continues to dominate the cloud landscape...

Just hours ago was a new patch series being merged to Mesa Git by RADV co-founder Bas Nieuwenhuizen to allow for correct DCC usage. I have just finished up my initial benchmarks of those RADV changes and they indeed help the few Radeon GPUs tested.

The fourth weekly release candidate of Wine 3.0 is now available for testing...

AMD/Radeon had a stellar 2017 for Linux most notably with delivering working Radeon RX Vega open-source driver support at launch, AMDGPU DC finally being merged to the mainline Linux kernel, and the official "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver now being open-source. Besides never-ending performance tuning, there's really just one major feature/area where the Radeon Linux graphics driver support is missing...

The KDE-aligned Krita digital painting software has published a retrospective of 2017 and a look ahead to 2018...

Wayland had a very successful year with Ubuntu 17.10 now using it by default, more niche/hobbyist Wayland compositors making progress, KDE Plasma on Wayland becoming more usable for day-to-day use, more applications/libraries natively supporting Wayland, GTK4's Vulkan renderer becoming very usable, and other advancements...

Not only is Vega now Vulkan 1.0 conformant with RADV, but it's also much faster if pulling down the very latest Mesa bits...

Since October RADV has officially become a Vulkan 1.0 conformant driver for Volcanic Islands GPUs while Sea Islands and Polaris hardware has also been on this same support level. RADV support for the newer Vega GPUs had been lagging behind, but these latest-generation AMD GPUs are now also effectively conformant...

Last week NVIDIA sent out an experimental allocator driver for the Nouveau code-base as well as EXT_external_objects support for Nouveau NVC0 in Mesa. So far though many upstream open-source driver developers are not yet convinced about the current design of this Unix Device Memory Allocation library as a potential replacement to GBM...

Git 2.16-rc0 has been released as the first test version of this upcoming distributed revision control system update...

The latest in our streak of year-end benchmarking is seeing how Linux performance has evolved over the course of 2017. For that we tested Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux distribution as well as Ubuntu using releases from the start of the year to their current state for seeing how the performance compares using the same system.

Drew DeVault who is the lead developer of the i3-compatible Sway Wayland compositor has introduced wlroots as a new modular Wayland compositor library...

For those wondering how the LLVM Clang vs. GCC C/C++ compiler performance is comparing as we end out 2017, here are some recent benchmarks using the latest Clang 6.0 SVN and GCC 8.0.0 compilers in a range of benchmarks.

AMD developers working on the newly open-sourced AMDVLK Vulkan driver have pushed out their first post-release code update synced against the latest changes in their internal AMD driver tree...

On the Linux kernel mailing list over the past week has been a discussion about Syzbot, an effort by Google for continuously fuzzing the mainline Linux kernel and its branches with automatic bug reporting...

It's not quite the Ubuntu rolling-release process that some have proposed over the years, but a new proposal is being formulated for shipping updates to key Ubuntu system components on a monthly basis rather than having to wait six months for updates to the Linux kernel, Mesa, etc...

The past few years Siemens has been working on Jailhouse as a Linux-based partitioning hypervisor that has aimed to be a lighter alternative to KVM. It's been seven months since the last update, but now Jailhouse 0.8 is now available...

Support for Memory Protection Keys (a.k.a. PKU / PKEYs) was finished up this year in the Linux kernel, glibc, and related components. This memory protection feature premiered with Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs and is said to be coming to future desktop CPUs, but it doesn't look like that's happening for the Cannonlake or Icelake generations...

The first point release to NetBSD 7.1 is now available as this BSD operating system ends out 2017...

A new Btrfs file-system kernel driver patch is now available to improve its RAID1/RAID10 read performance, particularly for SSDs...

Back on Christmas Eve I posted our initial AMDVLK Radeon Linux driver benchmarks for this newly open-sourced official Radeon Vulkan driver. Complementing those earlier Vulkan Linux gaming numbers are some more performance metrics for AMDVLK compared to the Mesa-based RADV driver and then the closed-source AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan driver.

A week ago Ubuntu 17.10's ISO was pulled due to a show-stopping laptop bug whereby some UEFI-enabled laptops from multiple vendors were running into "BIOS corruption" where BIOS settings could no longer be changed, USB booting becoming non-functional, and similar UEFI-related issues. Fortunately, a fixed kernel is now available and some affected users are reporting a successful workaround for making their laptops full-functioning once again...

LLVM release manager Hans Wennborg is moving ahead with plans to branch the LLVM 6.0 code and its components earlier than anticipated...

With yesterday having looked at the AMD/Radeon popular Linux/open-source achievements of the year, the tables have turned to now look at the Intel Linux/FLOSS activity...

While Unigine Engine 2 has yet to be picked up by any major games besides Dual Universe, this highly advanced game engine continues advancing and its effort for industrial simulators appears to be paying off as well. Unigine Corp is ending out 2017 by having released Unigine 2.6.1...

This year on Phoronix were more than 290 news articles on Phoronix about the Vulkan graphics API, not counting our dozens of Vulkan benchmarking articles, etc. Here's a look at the most popular Vulkan moments of the year...

LLVM's Clang compiler support for the Intel Icelake processors that succeed Cannonlake is getting into better shape ahead of the LLVM/Clang 6.0 feature freeze in January...

The BlueZ Linux Bluetooth stack is out with a new feature update before ending out the year...

RADV Vulkan driver co-founder David Airlie has begun digging through AMD's newly-opened AMDVLK official Vulkan driver in order to gain some hindsight and port some fixes/changes to this unofficial Mesa-based open-source Vulkan driver...

This year on Phoronix there has been more than 3,700 original Linux/FLOSS news posts, benchmarks, hardware reviews and more. Here's how that compares to prior years...