Phoronix

With all the discussions about AMD's Ryzen 7 processors that boast eight cores plus SMT, there has been much discussion in our forums and elsewhere the past few days about how many cores most modern Linux games actually utilize... That plus with looking at how well Ryzen's CPU cores scale, I have carried out some fresh Linux CPU core scaling benchmarks with an Intel Core i7 6800K Broadwell-E to see if most Linux games can end up using 4+ cores right now.

Reports out over the weekend indicate that C++17 is "done" as the next version of the C++ ISO standard...

Several times in the past we have covered Zapcc as an LLVM Clang based compiler focused on very fast compilation speeds. Zapcc 1.0 has been released today...

Google and the X.Org Foundation have firmed up the dates for the annual X.Org Developers' Conference...

Intel's Daniel Vetter has updated their drm-intel-testing tree with early code to begin testing that should end up being queued for the Linux 4.12 kernel...

Many Phoronix readers appear rather intrigued by the AMD Ryzen 7 1700 on Linux as it offers good multi-threaded performance with eight cores / 16 threads and retails for just $329 USD. Making the Ryzen 7 1700 even more appealing to enthusiasts is that it overclocks well. For those curious, here are benchmarks of the Ryzen 7 1700 on Ubuntu Linux running at 4.0GHz.

With the recent roll-out of Mesa's on-disk shader cache, an initial limitation was that the entire cache would be erased if a user switched between 32-bit and 64-bit applications. That's now been fixed. And now the OpenGL GLSL shader cache is enabled by default...

Linus Torvalds has announced the first test release of the upcoming Linux 4.11 kernel...

If all goes according to plan, Linus Torvalds will have announced the first release candidate of the upcoming Linux 4.11 kernel before the day is through. The Linux 4.11-rc1 release also marks the end of the feature merge window for this kernel cycle. So with that said, here is a look at the new features of the Linux 4.11 kernel that I have been covering through closely watching the Git repository and mailing list over the past two weeks.

Intel's "SWR" software rasterizer living within Mesa now has support for OpenGL geometry shaders...

For fans of the Ada programming language, id Tech 4 / Doom 3 is being rewritten by an open-source enthusiast in this structured, statically-typed language...

Linux 4.11 is worthwhile in that it's bringing ALC1220 audio support, the codec used by many Ryzen (and Intel Kabylake) motherboards, but this next kernel version doesn't appear to change Ryzen's performance...

The WebAssembly efforts so far have been centered around making use of the LLVM compiler infrastructure, but now there are patches for providing partial WASM support atop the GNU toolchain...

With the rest of the RadeonSI shader cache support landing in Mesa, I have carried out some benchmarks to measure the impact of this on-disk GLSL shader cache not only for the performance of games but also the reduced load-times.

Alan Griffiths of Canonical has announced the release of MirAL 1.3, Mir's abstraction layer to ease bringing up new environments under Mir while providing a stable ABI...

Curious how Ryzen scales across its CPU cores and SMT? Here are some Ubuntu Linux benchmarks testing a Ryzen 7 1700 with different core/thread counts.

Emil Velikov has announced the first point release to last month's big Mesa 17.0 release...

Version 3.2 of the Postfix mail transfer agent is now available...

Chris Mason has sent in a secondary pull request of Btrfs material for the Linux 4.11 merge window...

Intel's set to enable atomic mode-setting by default with code slated to land for the Linux 4.12 kernel...

Besides recent Intel graphics hardware making use of firmware binary blobs now for the GuC/HuC functionality, Intel audio hardware continues in making use of firmware binary-only blobs for audio support...

For those looking for some interesting weekend reading, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has provided a lengthy write-up about what happened in Munich with regards to LiMux and the possibility of abandoning their Linux/open-source efforts in favor of going back to Microsoft Windows...

Submitted earlier in the Linux 4.11 merge window were the big ARM SoC and platform changes for this next kernel version while some last-minute ARM changes have just arrived...

Yesterday we posted launch-day Ryzen 7 1800X Linux benchmarks that were particularly appealing for multi-core / heavily-threaded workloads like code compilation. Given all the code compilation done by Linux users in particular, if you were intrigued by the Ryzen 7 1800X performance but find the $499 USD price-tag to be too higher, today I have my initial benchmark figures on the Ryzen 7 1700. The Ryzen 7 1700 is still eight cores and sixteen threads but will only set you back $329 USD as the current low-end Ryzen processor for what's currently available.

Wine 2.3 is out as the latest bi-weekly development snapshot...

Yesterday on top of the main Ryzen 7 1800X Linux benchmarks and the follow-up Linux gaming benchmarks, I also posted some extra Ryzen benchmark results and encouraged Phoronix readers to compare their own system's performance to our data using our open-source, automated benchmarking framework...

Soft/emulated ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 support for GPUs not natively implementing double-precision/FP64 support is getting close in Mesa...

The latest in our AMD Ryzen Linux benchmarking is looking at the impact of compiled binaries when making use of Zen "znver1" compiler optimizations with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) compared to other optimization levels like Bulldozer and K8-SSE3.

Today marks the release of KDE's new Kube 0.1 project, the first tech preview (pre-production) release of this experimental Kontact based on Qt Quick and Akonadi-Next...

Al Viro has called for the new statx system call to be added to the Linux 4.11 kernel...

LLVM 4.0 remains running behind schedule but the third release candidate is now available for testing with hopes of shipping this updated compiler stack in the next week or so...

One week after sending in the main power management and ACPI updates for the Linux 4.11 kernel, Rafael Wysocki has served up a second batch of feature updates for this next kernel version...

Taking things further than the recent landing of the TGSI on-disk shader cache for this Gallium3D IR, Timothy Arceri at Valve has landed his support for a RadeonSI driver on-disk shader cache...

For those craving some Linux gaming benchmarks from the newly-released AMD Ryzen 7 1800X processor, here are some test results. In this initial comparison are benchmarks of the Ryzen 7 1800K to Core i7 7700K when running these processors at stock speeds while using a Radeon R9 Fury graphics card paired with AMDGPU+RadeonSI for the Linux graphics driver stack.

Adam Jackson has announced the release of X.Org Server 1.19.2 and users are encouraged to update to this latest point release...

Back in 2011 was the glorious announcement that AMD would support Coreboot with its future CPUs. Sadly, a lot has changed at AMD over the past half-decade, and there isn't any Coreboot support to find today for Zen/Ryzen...

Assuming you have already checked out this morning's Ryzen 7 1800X Linux benchmarks, here are some more data points while putting the finishing touches on the Ryzen 7 Linux gaming benchmarks being published later today...

Yesterday I wrote about initial Nouveau open-source acceleration for GeForce GTX 1050/1060/1070/1080 GPUs and now the signed firmware images needed for pairing with that code are readily available...

Razer co-founder and CEO Min-Liang Tan has shared plans to improve their Linux support, at least when it comes to their Blade laptops...

The day many of you have been waiting for is finally here: AMD Zen (Ryzen) processors are shipping! Thanks to AMD coming around at the last minute, I received a Ryzen 7 1800X yesterday evening and have been putting it through its paces. Here is my walkthrough of the Linux experience for the AMD Ryzen and new motherboard and a number of the initial Linux benchmarks for this high-end Zen CPU while much more coverage is coming in the hours and days ahead.

GNOME 3.23.91 was released this morning by Matthias Clasen. With this GNOME 3.24 Beta 2 release there is an API/ABI freeze, feature freeze, UI freeze, and string freeze...

DiRT Rally is the latest game from Feral Interactive that has launch-day open-source AMD graphics support, a welcome improvement from the past. Thanks to the ever maturing state of the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and Feral's increased Radeon testing, there is good out-of-the-box Radeon support for this AAA racing game on Linux.

Intel's ANV Vulkan driver in Mesa Git has picked up support for two more extensions of this week's big Vulkan update...

Just weeks after bringing HITMAN to Linux, Feral Interactive this morning has released another high profile game ported from Windows: DiRT Rally. DiRT Rally is now available for Linux gamers interested in a fun racing game. I've been benchmarking their Linux port the past few days and have both Radeon and NVIDIA results to share for launch-day. Here are fourteen NVIDIA GPUs tested with DiRT Rally on Ubuntu Linux.

Adoption of the Linux 4.10 kernel going strong with not only Ubuntu Zesty and Intel's Clear Linux already having pulled it in, among other rolling releases, but openSUSE Tumbleweed is also now too riding off Linux 4.10.1...

If you are interested in embedded Linux development but missed out last week's Linux Foundation event in Portland, the videos are now available online...

Valve has put out their Steam survey results for February 2017 and show another drop in the estimated Linux gaming market-share...

Croteam has pushed yet more Vulkan improvements into The Talos Principle as they prepare to bring Vulkan and Linux support to their other titles this year...

Lennart Poettering has announced the release of systemd 233...

Last week I posted Benchmarks Of Ubuntu 17.04 Beta vs. Antergos, Clear Linux, openSUSE Tumbleweed. Those results were interesting and as usual Clear Linux had led many of the benchmarks due to Intel's investments into highly optimizing this Linux distribution for the maximum out-of-the-box performance. For curiosity sake, I ran some fresh benchmarks of Ubuntu 17.04 daily vs. Clear Linux on another test system and have those results to share...