Phoronix

Collabora has announced an update to their Online Development Edition 2.0 platform...

Linaro Connect 17 was this past week in Budapest. One of the interesting sessions was with regard to ARM's Mali graphics drivers where Vulkan was talked about as well as the lack of current open-source drivers due to lack of customer demand...

A patch is now available for enabling the GLSL/TGSI on-disk shader cache for the Nouveau Gallium3D driver...

When receiving the HTC Vive last month for testing the roll-out of Valve's SteamVR beta for Linux, going into it I hadn't realized how immersive the experience was at that point nor all the cables involved. I had setup the HTC Vive VR system in the "basement server room" to deal with the mess of cables, but after using this VR headset for a few days I quickly realized I needed a better area for engaging with virtual reality. After making a custom-built desk and moving where I have the HTC Vive "play room" configured, the experience is much better.

The Khronos Group has done a Friday evening update to the Vulkan 1.0 API specification...

Valve has released an updated SteamVR beta for Linux VR gamers ahead of the weekend...

It's been over two years since last testing out any ATX desktop/tower cases due to using rackmount cases for nearly all of the test systems these days, but for a new Linux VR testing area (will be covered in a separate article this weekend), I went with a conventional ATX PC chassis. The case I went with was the SilverStone Redline RL06 and was pleasantly surprised by the quality of their new budget cases.

GAPID is short for the Graphics API Debugger and is a new open-source project out of Google...

Last month we reported on Fedora 27 looking to drop alpha releases and now that change has been approved...

Complementing yesterday's GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Linux review with OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks and this morning's GeForce GTX 1080 Ti OpenCL benchmarks, here is a range of more standalone benchmarks for this GP102 graphics card...

Some big Ubuntu 17.04 "Zesty Zapus" updates will be coming down the pipe next week...

Days after the Firefox 52 release, Google has officially released Chrome 57.0...

Yesterday, on the launch-day for the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (GP102) graphics card, I posted GTX 1080 Ti OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks while for those more interested in GPU compute performance, here are some preliminary OpenCL compute results.

For those looking to enjoy a new WWII shooter game, Day of Infamy by New World Interactive is leaving Steam's Early Access later this month...

Stephan Müller has announced the newest version of his patches for implementing a new /dev/random implementation he calls the Linux Random Number Generator, or LRNG for short...

The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is NVIDIA's newest, most powerful graphics card for gamers not only on Windows but also under Linux. I only received the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti this morning so here are my initial Linux performance figures for this new high-end Pascal graphics card compared to other NVIDIA and AMD Radeon graphics cards. Linux VR tests, CUDA/OpenCL compute benchmarks, and additional GeForce GTX 1080 Ti results will be published in the days ahead when having more time to spend with this graphics card.

It looks like Facebook could be exploring more from ARM servers in their data centers as they have now brought their HHVM PHP implementation to AArch64...

Collabora's Emil Velikov is continuing as the Mesa release manager and has laid out plans for getting the Mesa 3D 17.1 release to happen in early May...

Intel's Mesa driver is exposing additional performance counters now for helping game/application debuggers better profile the performance of their software on Intel HD/Iris Graphics hardware...

The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is NVIDIA's new high-end gamer graphics card as a step-up from the previous GTX 1080 flagship. The GTX 1080 Ti is getting ready for release by retailers and, thankfully, NVIDIA did mail out a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti for Linux testing at Phoronix...

In the early hours of today AMD posted a set of 23 AMDGPU patches as "prep patches for new ASICs", which given the timing, is presumably prepping for the Radeon RX VEGA...

Samba 4.6.0 is now available as the project's latest stable release for SMB/CIFS support on Linux systems...

Peter Hutterer has released minor updates to libinput as well as the X.Org xf86-input-libinput components...

With Firefox 52 having sailed earlier this week, Mozilla has pushed Firefox 53.0 into beta...

The LLVM compiler infrastructure stack and Clang C/C++ compiler front-end will see their version 4.0 release within the next few days...

With Mesa recently landing their RadeonSI GLSL on-disk shader cache and enabling it by default plus other recent optimizations, plus in kernel-space there now being Linux 4.11-rc1 and that showing potential improvements, here are some fresh benchmarks of AMD Radeon vs. NVIDIA on Ubuntu Linux.

Imagination Technologies has announced their new PowerVR "Furian" GPU architecture for next-gen graphics and compute performance...

The developers behind the Wine-Staging tree that carries various experimental patches atop the latest upstream Wine repository for running Windows programs on Linux/macOS have announced their newest bi-weekly build...

Yesterday I had a call with The Khronos Group president Neil Trevett to discuss some of their latest initiatives and the ongoing advancements to the Vulkan API, WebGL, SPIR-V, and more. Here were some of the highlights...

Our latest AMD Ryzen Linux benchmarking is looking at the performance of the GCC and LLVM Clang compiler performance with a Ryzen 7 1700 on Ubuntu Linux.

AMD developer Christian König has worked the 10-bit HEVC GPU-accelerated decoding into shape for the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

Ben Skeggs has sent in his initial Nouveau feature update abnormally early to DRM-Next for in turn landing in the Linux 4.12 kernel...

NVIDIA has made the surprise announcement of the Jetson TX2 and it's powered by dual custom-designed 64-bit Denver 2 CPUs plus quad Cortex-A57 cores while boasting Pascal graphics with 256 CUDA cores.

For those using the xf86-video-nouveau X.Org driver rather than xf86-video-modesetting, the Nouveau DDX v1.0.14 release took place today...

Kevin Brace, the sole remaining main contributor to the OpenChrome project, has announced version 0.6 of the xf86-video-openchrome driver...

A Phoronix reader has written in about his independent work to make it easier trying out the latest AMDGPU DC/DAL code on Ubuntu...

Recently I ran out of spare SSDs and needed one for one of my test systems where the I/O storage capacity or performance wasn't important, so I decided to try out the Patriot Torch 60GB SSD that can be had for about $33 USD...

Mozilla has rolled out Firefox 52.0 as the latest version of their open-source, cross-platform web browser...

Ubuntu dropped their official alpha/betas long ago, Fedora 27 is dropping their alphas, and openSUSE is also shifting their development approach and will get rid of alpha and beta releases. OpenSUSE Leap 42.3 will be developed in a "rolling" manner although the release will not be a rolling-release post-release, unlike openSUSE Tumbleweed...

With the Linux 4.11 merge window now closed and the RadeonSI shader cache having landed and even turned on by default, it's a great time to run some fresh benchmarks of the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack. Here are some benchmark results with the latest Mesa Git code for RadeonSI Gallium3D and RADV as well as the Linux 4.11-rc1 kernel compared to Linux 4.10.

Intel is off to the races in preparing their new feature material work they plan to have introduced for the Linux 4.12 kernel, even though Linux 4.11-rc1 was just introduced on Monday and thus still nearly two months until the 4.12 merge window...

KDE developer Kai Uwe has provided a look at some of the new features coming for Plasma 5.10, including some screenshots...

One month ago AMD developer Marek Olsak sent out threaded OpenGL dispatch code for Mesa, which can be a big win for some games but unfortunately Marek is now too busy to handle the code. Fortunately, Collabora-turned-Valve developer Timothy Arceri has taken to getting this code vetted...

Two popular Linux distributions based upon Arch have released updated versions of their operating systems...

The Phoronix Test Suite 7.0-Ringsaker update is now available as the latest version of our cross-platform, open-source benchmarking software particularly for Linux, macOS, and BSD systems. Phoronix Test Suite 7.0 has many user-facing updates over Phoronix Test Suite 6.8 and all users are encouraged to upgrade to this latest release of our GPL benchmarking software.

Earlier today I posted some Linux game CPU scaling benchmarks using a Core i7 6800K Broadwell-E For showing how current Linux games make use of (or not) multiple CPU cores, which originated from discussions by Linux gamers following the AMD Ryzen CPU launch with how many cores are really needed. While going through the process of running those Linux game CPU scaling benchmarks, I also ran some other workloads for those curious...

Mageia 6 is running months behind schedule while today the project was able to announce their second stabilization snapshot...

Our latest Ryzen Linux benchmarks are looking at the impact of the CPUFreq scaling driver's governors have on the performance of the Ryzen 7 1800X, including a look at the power consumption and performance-per-Watt when changing the governors.

The Free Software Foundation has announced three more devices that are certified for "respects your freedom" (RYF), including a laptop, motherboard, and USB sound adapter. But don't get too excited quite yet...

Binutils 2.28 is out today as the latest version of this important GNU package...