Phoronix

The "vboxvideo" kernel driver providing DRM/KMS display support for VirtualBox guest virtual machines has been going through a rework with plans to mainline this driver in the Linux kernel...

Etnaviv contributor Christian Gmeiner has posted a set of 21 patches for implementing support for performance counters within this reverse-engineered Vivante DRM graphics driver...

Collabora, under sponsorship from Intel, has been working on "DRI3 v1.1" as the first major update to the Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3...

SDL2 now has initial support for the JACK Audio Connection Kit sound server...

Just weeks after the Opus 1.2 beta, the release candidate for this forthcoming audio codec update / library has been released...

Valve has hired another prominent open-source graphics driver contributor...

In April, Canonical's longtime CEO Jane Silber announced she was stepping down and that Mark Shuttleworth would be returning to the role as CEO...

Version 1.18 of the Rust programming language implementation is now available...

AMD developers have submitted their first round of Radeon/AMDGPU feature updates to DRM-Next for in turn targeting the Linux 4.13 kernel...

Just days after celebrating nine years since the Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 release, Phoronix Test Suite 7.2-Trysil is now officially available...

Keeping in mind that Intel graphics are not officially supported for Dawn of War III on Linux, I couldn't help but to see if/how it ran with Kabylake HD Graphics.....

Today marks the highly anticipated debut of Dawn of War III for Linux (and macOS) ported by Feral Interactive. Here are a number of OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks of NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards running Ubuntu Linux with this game.

Facebook developers have released HHVM 3.20 as the newest release of their alternative PHP interpreter and also what serves for their Hack programming language...

In addition to having some fresh Radeon Linux vs. Windows GPU driver numbers as an added bonus as we celebrate Phoronix's 13th birthday this week are some fresh macOS vs. Linux OpenGL performance figures.

Jonathan Riddell has shared some early planning details for the current KDE Plasma 5.11 cycle as well as early details for Plasma 5.12...

Over the past few months we have seen some incredible progress made to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver as well as AMDGPU (and the RADV Vulkan driver, though not the focus of today's article) as well as the Mesa 3D stack as a whole. The open-source Radeon Linux driver is much faster now than where it was last year and is becoming competitive with NVIDIA's Linux driver performance. For seeing how close the AMDGPU+RadeonSI stack is now to Windows, here are some fresh benchmarks.

Today is the last day to take advantage of our heavily-discounted special for joining our ad-free version of the site that also provides multi-page articles on a single page, priority access to me for benchmark requests / feedback, etc, all while helping to support the site and our daily Linux hardware testing operations...

A day ahead of Feral's much anticipated Linux (and macOS) port of Dawn of War III, the game porting firm has announced the system requirements...

Samuel Pitoiset's improvements around KHR_no_error support have landed in Mesa Git...

It's time for the call-for-papers (CFP) for the X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC2017) happening this September at the Googleplex...

Those downloading the very latest Ubuntu desktop ISO of 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" for testing will find that it now boots to the GNOME Shell desktop and also provides an option for running GNOME on Wayland...

Google's Brotli compression format is nearing its big 1.0 release...

In addition to Intel's Linux open-source kernel developers working on Cannonlake support, they have also been working on the hardware bring-up for Coffee Lake...

In case you missed the articles last year or are curious how they are holding up, here's an update on the custom L-shaped desks I built last year of galvanized pipes and sheets of butcherblock for being able to withstand the weight of plenty of monitors and other computer hardware...

Dawn of War III rolls out to Linux this Thursday with OpenGL and Vulkan support. When it comes to the Intel ANV Vulkan driver, it appears that it will work as long as you are using the very latest Mesa Git...

Among the lesser-known GNU projects is Taler, which is trying to be a free software electronic payment system. Today marks its v0.3 release, but it only works so far with toy currencies...

GL_vs_VK is self-described as a "comparison of OpenGL and Vulkan API in terms of performance" and offers multiple test-cases for directly comparing OpenGL and Vulkan in different environments. Here are some benchmarks on several different drivers and GPUs.

Ahead of the planned openSUSE Leap 42.3 release at the end of July is what's being released soon as a release candidate...

For the Qt 5.10 release at the end of the year there will be initial support for Vulkan following the cross-platform tool-kit's existing support for Direct3D 12. The Vulkan support is a step in the right direction but will likely be a few releases if not until Qt6 before seeing more thorough Vulkan API support...

NetBSD developers are preparing to release the version "8.0" of their operating system in the near future...

Thanks to work done by Collabora, Etnaviv, and other open-source developers, NXP/Freescale iMX6 platforms can now boot Android with no proprietary blobs...

RADV developer David Airlie has published a set of 14 patches today that provide this unofficial open-source Radeon Vulkan driver with Vega GPU support...

What better way to celebrate the 13th Phoronix birthday than coincidentally having a new Mesa release! It's not as exciting as a new feature release, but Mesa 17.1.2 is now available as the latest stable point release...

Google promoted Chrome 59 to the stable channel today for Linux, macOS, and Windows. This is an exciting update for Linux users...

With the Ethereum cryptocurrency generating lots of buzz recently due to its rising valuation and being excellent for mining on GPUs, here are some Ubuntu Linux benchmarks when testing many different GeForce and Radeon graphics cards with the Ethminer OpenCL support, including performance-per-dollar and performance-per-Watt metrics.

Well, it doesn't look like Apple is going to abandon their in-house "Metal" graphics API in favor of the Vulkan industry standard for high-performance graphics... Apple used WWDC today to announce Metal 2...

This month will mark one year since the release of the Radeon 400 "Polaris" graphics cards. With the one year anniversary and also celebrating the 13th birthday of Phoronix, I ran some comparison tests showing the progress of the AMDGPU+RadeonSI driver stack over the better part of the past year using a Radeon RX 470 Polaris graphics card.

The Khronos Group has released the ratified glTF 2.0 specification this morning as their transmission format for portable 3D assets. glTF 2.0 can be integrated now not only within Khronos graphics API using applications/games but also within Direct3D and Metal...

What better way to celebrate the Phoronix birthday than a new Vulkan update!..

Phoronix is now officially a teenager, with it marking 13 years since I founded Phoronix.com. Today also marks nine years since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0-Trondheim for advancing open-source benchmarking...

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 4.12-rc4 as the newest weekly test candidate of the upcoming Linux 4.12...

Bas Nieuwenhuizen has taken to revising David Airlie's work on external memory support for the RADV Vulkan driver, which are among the extensions needed by SteamVR on Linux...

GDB 8.0 has been released as the newest feature release for this widely-used GNU Debugger...

As another interesting benchmark special for Phoronix's 13th birthday is a comparison of Intel Kabylake, NVIDIA, and Radeon Vulkan vs. OpenGL Linux driver performance. Not only are we looking at the raw OpenGL/Vulkan performance but also the relative performance between graphics APIs on each vendor.

Dolphin Emulator, the open-source cross-platform game console emulator for the GameCube and Wii, has been continuing to improve its Vulkan back-end and is also moving forward with its work on a Qt user-interface...

Being half-way through 2017 now, there are three wishes I hope will still be fulfilled this calendar year by the AMD open-source Linux graphics driver stack...

Those holding interest in the Reiser4 file-system can now use it with the Linux 4.11 kernel...

For those interested in the 0 A.D. open-source ancient warfare real-time strategy game, the next alpha release is in sight...

Our latest featured article this week in the lead-up to Phoronix's 13th birthday is a new OpenGL RadeonSI vs. Vulkan RADV driver comparison with six different Radeon graphics cards. This also features some older hardware tested making use of the experimental AMDGPU DRM driver, which is needed for RADV to work on more of the GCN card line-up.

The fourth and last planned development milestone release of Phoronix Test Suite 7.2-Trysil is now available ahead of the official release in the days ahead...