Phoronix

Collabora developer and longtime X.Org/Wayland contributor Daniel Stone has written a blog post detailing some of the recent and ongoing projects being led by the consulting firm when it comes to open-source graphics...

Emil Velikov has announced the availability today of the Mesa 17.0.1 release candidate...

NVIDIA released their new Vulkan beta driver on Monday to support the new Vulkan 1.0.42 extensions but that ended up breaking the SteamVR Linux support, which relies upon Vulkan. NVIDIA has now corrected this support...

The patches are now out there for having initial accelerated support in the Nouveau DRM driver for the GeForce GTX 1050/1060/1070/1080 series "Pascal" graphics cards. The signed firmware is being released and will allow these consumer graphics cards to now have hardware-accelerated support via the open-source driver...

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) will see new features introduced with the Linux 4.11 kernel...

NVIDIA did their much anticipated unveiling last night at GDC of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card as "the fastest gaming GPU ever."..

February 2017 was rather exciting for Linux enthusiasts with the big Vulkan update ahead of GDC, some fresh Windows 10 vs. Linux benchmarks, AMD Ryzen on the horizon, Intel Kabylake providing lots of testing fun, and other open-source advancements...

The latest and last planned development release of Phoronix Test Suite 7.0-Ringsaker is now available for your cross-platform, open-source benchmarking needs...

Valve developer Andres Rodriguez has posted a set of 22 patches for supporting high priority scheduling within the AMDGPU kernel driver...

The WebAssembly project that's the cross-browser effort for low-level programming for in-browser client-side execution has reached a major milestone today. WASM can allow compiling C/C++ among other languages down into code supported by Firefox, Chrome, WebKit, and Edge...

In preparation for Ryzen tests coming up in the near future, I've been running some fresh benchmarks across a range of Intel and AMD x86_64 Linux systems. For those curious about the current performance of Ubuntu 17.04 daily with the Linux 4.10 kernel, here are benchmarks from 14 of the systems.

Unity Technologies had their keynote this morning at GDC 2017 where they talked about the plans for their game engine this year...

By now you probably know that X.Org's security is in bad shape and routinely new security issues are uncovered and that's the case today...

The open-source Haiku OS inspired by BeOS has made much progress this month on several fronts...

Genode OS 17.02 has been released today as the latest version of this open-source operating system framework...

I've been testing out SteamVR on Linux with the HTC Vive the past few days. From my time spent and trying out various graphics cards with Destinations, Dota 2, and Serious Sam VR: The First Encounter, my impressions is that for this Linux VR beta at least a GeForce GTX 1070 or GTX 1080 is really needed for good performance.

The X.Org Foundation has been once again accepted as a mentoring organization for this year's Google Summer of Code. Yes, the X.Org involvement in GSoC isn't limited to just the xorg-server but also covers Mesa, Wayland, and other involvements...

It's going on five years since there was the call for deprecating FBDEV within the mainline Linux kernel and various ongoing efforts to get more drivers to making use of the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) rather than FBDEV. But with Linux 4.11, FBDEV still remains in place...

David Airlie sent in another pull request of DRM material for Linux 4.11, which follows last week's main DRM feature update for Linux 4.11...

In celebrating their five-year milestone, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced their latest product: the Raspberry Pi Zero W...

Thanks to the work done in part by Fedora, Arch Linux has enabled in testing support for the GLVND-enabled Mesa that can happily co-exist alongside the NVIDIA proprietary driver...

Now that Vulkan 1.0.42 is public and it contains the extensions needed for SteamVR on Linux, the RADV changes are now public...

Now that Google has proven SHA1 as unsafe, Ubuntu's Mir display server developers were quick to abandon its usage in favor of SHA256...

Now that Vulkan's external memory patches are now public with today's Vulkan 1.0.42 big update, the Intel ANV open-source Vulkan driver is getting ready to roll out their support for their new extensions...

According to Purism's Youness Alaoui, their Coreboot port to the Librem 13 v1 laptop is now considered complete...

While most are focused on the OpenXR VR announcement from The Khronos Group as well as the new Vulkan extensions, less people seem to be talking about their call for participation around a new "3D Portability Initiative", which if it succeeds could be a win for Linux gamers and others...

For many months now there has been vkQuake as a port of Quake 1 to Vulkan while now there is a port of that pulling in SteamVR support...

We are now through week one of two for the Linux 4.11 kernel merge window. I've already written a number of news posts this past week covering features I find interesting for Linux 4.11. If you are short on time and behind in your Phoronix reading, here's a quick overview of the material so far for this next major kernel bump...

The Khronos Group not only is shipping Vulkan 1.0.42 with many new extensions for this week's GDC but the embargo just expired on even more exciting announcements!..

LLVM's LLD linker still isn't too widely used yet on Linux systems, but the performance of this linker alternative to GNU Gold and GNU ld are quite compelling...

The "GDC Vulkan update" has arrived with a number of new extensions!..

OpenBenchmarking.org has turned six years old while in June is when Phoronix.com will celebrate its 13th birthday and the Phoronix Test Suite has its 9th birthday...

The NV_dedicated_allocation extension that is one of the Vulkan extensions needed by Valve's SteamVR on Linux, has now been enabled within mainline Mesa for the RADV driver...

AMD's Ryzen CPU is finally shipping in a few days! If you are planning to be an early adopter of AMD Ryzen processors, you will really want to be running a newer Linux kernel release for proper support and performance...

The GNU Linux-libre 4.10 kernel was released last weekend just after the official Linux 4.10 kernel release while I hadn't noticed the de-blobbed kernel release until today. The Linux-libre folks continue to criticize the open-source GPU DRM drivers as being offenders for using binary blob firmware/microcode...

Back in November we saw patches for wiring in PRIME support to the RADV Vulkan driver and last week rewritten RADV PRIME code was released while this weekend it has landed in Mesa Git...

The out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system has been updated for the Linux 4.10 kernel...

This past week Valve brought SteamVR on Linux into public beta. With watching the constant hype around VR on Windows, I was quite excited to finally give VR a try with having lined up an HTC Vive for testing and currently Oculus or others not offering current Linux support. I was thinking that I would have some large GPU/driver comparisons and such completed this weekend, but once actually setting up the hardware and software, I realized that wasn't going to be feasible in such short time. So for those interested in the Linux VR space, here are some of my first impressions and why I would consider the current SteamVR more like an alpha release than beta, just yet another struggle Linux gamers face, and another obstacle to overcome if Linux is to be a more serious competitor to Windows in the gaming space.

It's been a while since hearing anything out of the Linux From Scratch (LFS) camp, but this weekend they announced the release of LFS 8.0 as well as Beyond Linux From Scratch (BLFS) 8.0...

LLVM/Clang 4.0 are running a few days behind schedule but should be released in the very near future. With that said, here's our usual look at the new features of this next compiler infrastructure and C/C++ compiler front-end updates...

The Allwinner DRM driver added in Linux 4.7 continues to be worked on and one of the latest efforts by the open-source community is on enabling Allwinner Display Engine 2.0 "DE2" support...

Thomas Rini of the Konsulko Group presented at this week's Linux Foundation Embedded Linux Conference (ELC2017) about the state of U-Boot...

Wayland 1.13 was released this week along with Weston 2.0. In announcing v1.13, Bryce Harrington also laid out plans for Wayland 1.14...

The second release candidate to the upcoming NetBSD 7.1 is now available for testing...

The Linux Foundation's annual Embedded Linux Conference happened this past week in Portland, Oregon. Of interest to Phoronix readers are a few of the graphics-related talks that happened...

For those curious how Ubuntu 17.04 is shaping up, considering this week was the "beta" release for participating flavors, I decided to take a fresh Ubuntu 17.04 x86_64 daily ISO and see how its performance compares to Ubuntu 17.10, Clear Linux 13600, Antergos 17.2, and openSUSE Tumbleweed.

Last year there was a Google Summer of Code student working on a library to implement double-precision operations (FP64) in pure GLSL 1.30 as a benefit to older GPUs not having native FP64 capabilities. While that work didn't materialize as a solution in 2017 for those wanting "soft" ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 for being able to potentially expose OpenGL 4.0 on more R600g era GPUs, the work is ongoing...

Several years back we wrote about Ultra Kernel Samepage Merging (UKSM) for data de-duplication within the Linux kernel for transparently scanning all application memory and de-duping it where possible. While the original developer is no longer active, a new developer has been maintaining the work and continues to support it on the latest Linux kernel releases...

Systemd 233 is expected to be released in the days ahead and as usual it's packing new features and various additions...

Better support for Intel Turbo Boost Max 3.0 are among the changes to find with the platform-drivers-x86 updates for the Linux 4.11 kernel...