Phoronix

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...

Prolific Wayland contributor Pekka Paalanen is requesting comments on the possible protocol addition for Wayland's Weston designed for easing the debugging experience...

Red Hat's Lyude has enabled the ARB_post_depth_coverage within the Nouveau NVC0 driver and the associated work for bringing it up within Gallium3D / Mesa state tracker...

OpenBenchmarking.org, our "cloud" component to the Phoronix Test Suite for centralized result aggregation by those opting to publicly upload their test results and also serving as the repository for all test profiles and test suites so they can ship independent of the PTS version, has hit 24 million test/suite downloads...

I haven't encountered this issue myself on any of my Ryzen Linux boxes, but it seems there are a number of Ryzen Linux users who are facing segmentation faults and sometimes crashes when running concurrent compilation loads on these Zen CPUs...

Last week Fedora 26's beta was delayed and today they have needed to still postpone this beta release due to bugs...

It's that time of the year where we see how the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack is working on past and present hardware in a large GPU comparison with various OpenGL games and workloads. This year we go from the new Radeon RX 580 all the way back to the Radeon HD 2900XT, looking at how the mature Radeon DRM kernel driver and R600 Gallium3D driver is working for aging ATI/AMD graphics hardware. In total there were 51 graphics cards tested for this comparison of Radeon cards as well as NVIDIA GeForce hardware for reference.

TrueOS, the FreeBSD-derived operating system formerly known as PC-BSD, is out with a six-month stable release update...

For those that have been longing to run Windows applications/games on Android using Wine, that day is finally getting closer with mainline Wine...

If you have been waiting to pick up an AMD Ryzen CPU until the prices drop, they are beginning to do so...

For those riding the stable Mesa 17.1 release train, the 17.1.2 update is expected this weekend...

While LZ4 can be very fast with its compression and decompression speeds, there's a new kid on the block that appears to be even faster: LZ4m...

With the start of a new month comes updated Steam usage figures for the month prior...

Coreboot has joined the Software Freedom Conservancy as a member project...

Virtual Programming has revealed their latest noteworthy Linux game port: Micro Machines World Series...

After posting a number of NVIDIA GPU Linux benchmarks this week using their latest drivers, here is similar treatment on the Radeon side using their newest open-source driver code.

On 5 June we celebrate the 13th birthday of Phoronix.com as well as 9 years since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0. In celebration, for the next week we are running a great deal on our ad-free, multi-page-articles-on-a-single-page, while supporting our site "Premium" subscription...

It's now been nearly two months since Canonical announced they were abandoning their Unity 8 / Ubuntu Phone dreams and about the same amount of time since the forks started around Unity 8, Mir, and Ubuntu Touch itself...

Valve's developers working on the Mesa / Linux graphics driver stack continue tuning KHR_no_error for helping lower the CPU utilization in OpenGL bug-free games...

It looks like RADV developers are working on getting their driver ready for bringing up Radeon RX Vega support on their unofficial, open-source Vulkan driver...