With Chris Wilson's focus at the Intel Open-Source Technology Center seeming to have shifted in full from the never-releasing xf86-video-intel 3.0 driver -- where he was known for his massive contributions, especially to the SNA acceleration architecture -- to the DRM code, his latest work to talk about is pushing out a hefty patch series for the i915 DRM kernel code...
The latest milestone for the open-source, reverse-engineered Freedreno driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics hardware is basic compute support for the newer A5xx hardware...
For those wondering how the bleeding-edge open-source Radeon driver stack is comparing to the latest NVIDIA closed-source binary blob, here are some fresh benchmarks on many different cards. Tested is the new NVIDIA 381.09 binary driver with different Maxwell/Pascal GPUs alongside various AMD GCN card tests using the Linux 4.11 Git kernel and Mesa 17.1-dev Git.
A few days back Intel's Clear Linux updated their LLVM Clang compiler from 3.9.1 to the recent 4.0.0 release, following Beignet getting LLVM 4.0 support. Here are some before/after benchmarks as well as fresh GCC benchmarks.
With Linux 4.11.0 being released as soon as this weekend, here's a look back at the changes I found most exciting about this next kernel feature release...
With the Mesa 17.1 branching now having happened plus in prepping for Radeon RX 500 series Linux graphics benchmarks this week, for your viewing pleasure now are tests on nine different AMD GCN GPUs under a range of Linux gaming tests when using the 4.11 kernel and Mesa 17.1 Git trees. NVIDIA comparison results will follow plus planned RX 560/580 Linux benchmarks.
GLVND is the NVIDIA-led effort for the new "Linux OpenGL ABI" or basically the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library to allow multiple OpenGL drivers to happily co-exist on the same system. Mesa's existing GLVND support has been limited to GLX while now there is EGL support...
Independent Mesa contributor Edward O'Callaghan has posted some early patches for supporting the OpenGL ARB_parallel_shader_compile extension in Mesa...
In early April AMD released the AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 driver as their first hybrid proprietary driver update in some time. With this update came support for Ubuntu 16.04.2 (and also 16.10, unofficially) but to little surprise it doesn't work out-of-the-box with this week's Ubuntu 17.04 release. But it can be made to work...
With Mesa 17.1 branching this weekend I figured it would be a fun Easter running benchmarks of Mesa Git compared to previous branches with a Radeon RX 470 Polaris graphics card. Here are these Mesa 17.1 benchmarks while other tests and on more GPUs is forthcoming.
Over the years we have seen many mobile/smartphone focused Linux efforts come and go from OpenMoko, Moblin/MeeGo, webOS, Firefox OS, and most recently Ubuntu Touch while others like Sailfish OS and Plasma Mobile appear to be somewhat stagnate or at least not gaining much marketshare nor advancing rapidly. But what if more of these mobile Linux efforts were to collaborate on a common base? There's a new effort being worked on in this area...
The UBports community are among those planning to fork the work on Unity 8 and they've already made ambitious plans like porting Unity 8 to Wayland. More details were revealed today...
Intel's Jason Ekstrand has posted 21 new Mesa patches for adding the VK_KHX_external extensions to their ANV Vulkan driver. He believes the patches are now ready for merging and plans to land them for what will become Mesa 17.2...
Not to be confused with the KDE Elisa music player written about just two weeks ago as a new alternative to Juk, Amarok, Cantata, and other KDE music/media player projects, the latest effort is called Babe...
Debian developers are preparing for the final phase of the development freeze on Debian 9.0 "Stretch" and it's looking like the official release might not be too far out...
Last week we reported on Intel Cannonlake patches for their DRM kernel driver while published today were patches for bringing up the next-generation Intel graphics within Mesa...
TrueOS developers continue working on their Lumina Desktop Environment and coming up soon is the v1.3 release of their Qt5-powered desktop environment...
Ahead of the planned branching and release candidate of Mesa 17.1 in just hours, Rob Clark has landed some last minute work for the Freedreno Gallium3D driver that provides open-source support for Qualcomm Adreno hardware...
One of the immediate requests that usually comes in with each new Ubuntu release is a comparison of the Linux gaming performance when trying out the different desktop options. From yesterday's Ubuntu 17.04 release, here are Steam Linux gaming tests with Budgie, GNOME Shell, KDE Plasma 5, MATE, Unity 7, and Xfce4 when using an AMD Polaris graphics card on the RadeonSI driver stack.
Next week AMD is expected to roll-out the updated Polaris graphics cards in the form of the Radeon RX 550, RX 560, RX 570, and RX 580 series. The Linux drivers should be ready...
For those excited by yesterday's Wine 2.6 release with D3D CSMT as the long-awaited command-stream multi-threading to boost game performance, don't get your hopes too high with this release...