Phoronix

If you read enough Phoronix, you know that Mesa and the Linux kernel's DRM graphics drivers continue advancing at a remarkable pace, especially in recent times. Thus if you were an Ubuntu 16.10 user but planning to upgrade to Ubuntu 17.04, here are some benchmark results showing the performance improvements you can expect with the Radeon/AMDGPU DRM and RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. Plus there are also some results when using the Oibaf PPA on Ubuntu 17.04 to show what more performance can be tapped by switching to Mesa 17.1-dev.

Wine 2.6 is now available and it's a very exciting development update!..

Facebook developers have put out their latest release of HHVM to empower this PHP interpreter as well as what powers their Hack programming language...

Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 was released today alongside the other Ubuntu 17.04 flavors, but for those wondering what's happening to Ubuntu GNOME now that Ubuntu 18.04 will use GNOME with Unity being dropped, the Ubuntu GNOME flavor is winding down...

With the DRM driver features settled for Linux 4.12, I was curious about the size of these Direct Rendering Manager drivers...

The 2017 X.Org Elections have ended. Here are the results...

Qt 5.9 is moving closer to release so the release schedule planning around Qt 5.10 is now happening...

While Intel's Beignet is a terrific project especially when it comes to being a leading open-source OpenCL implementation that works with OpenCL 2.0 on GPUs (something that can't be said for Radeon with its open-source OpenCL stack consistently lacking and Nouveau not really being usable either), the sad part of it is that Beignet is consistently slow in supporting new versions of LLVM...

Ubuntu mirrors are now live with the final builds of 17.04 "Zesty Zapus" for those wanting to upgrade to this latest six-month release of Ubuntu Linux...

This week Unigine Corp released the much anticipated Superposition benchmark and it's a darn beautiful OpenGL 4.5 Linux-friendly graphics test. But, sadly, didn't have any Vulkan rendering option...

With Ubuntu 17.04 having switched to X.Org Server 1.19 at the last minute, I ran some classic 2D tests from the Zesty Zapus to see how the 2D X11 performance has been impacted thanks to the GLAMOR optimizations that took place for the xorg-server 1.19 cycle...

Timothy Arceri, working for Valve on the open-source Mesa graphics stack primarily around Radeon hardware support, has posted early patches on his latest OpenGL extension upbringing...

Elie Tournier, the GSoC student developer who last year worked via GSoC on "soft" FP64 double-precision support for older GPUs lacking the hardware capabilities, has posted patches wiring up his soft implementation for Intel "Gen 6" (Sandy Bridge) graphics thereby allowing ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 support...

Chrome 59 stable isn't expected until early June, but when this release comes it will bring with it an interesting feature: a headless mode...

Intel's Clear Linux distribution has switched from using the ACPI CPUFreq scaling driver for recent generations of Intel hardware to now using the P-State CPU frequency scaling driver...

Kent Overstreet continues developing Bcachefs as what he hopes will be a next-generation Linux file-system code that's originally derived -- but now distantly removed -- from the Bcache code-base...

With the end of feature material for DRM-Next having passed for Linux 4.12, here is a look at some of the changes you will be able to find with the Direct Rendering Manager code when the cycle begins for the Linux 4.12 kernel...

A new release is available of the nginx web server that's continuing to take on Apache with reportedly now having around a 33% web server market-share while Apache has dipped below 50%...

Last week we were the first to exclusively report that Jane Silber would be out as Canonical's CEO with Mark Shuttleworth returning to the role as CEO. Today, Jane Silber has publicly announced she's indeed stepping down...

Released at the end of last week was a long-awaited update to the Radeon hybrid Linux driver, AMDGPU-PRO. The AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 update brings support for newer kernel releases so this driver finally deploys nicely on Ubuntu 16.04.2 / 16.10 and also has a number of fixes. Here are some benchmark results of this latest AMDGPU-PRO release compared to the latest open-source Radeon Linux driver stack in the form of the Linux 4.11 kernel and Mesa 17.1-dev with OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks.

Matthias Clasen has announced the first point release to last month's big GNOME 3.24 desktop release...

While there was the KDE-aligned Shashlik effort for trying to get Android apps running on the Linux desktop, Anbox is a new initiative made public this week by a Canonical developer for running Android programs on the Linux desktop...

Comparing the hybrid AMDGPU-PRO proprietary Linux driver to the RadeonSI Gallium3D open-source driver stack with the newly-released OpenGL 4.5-using Unigine Superposition has shown how far the open-source driver stack has come...

The folks behind StreamComputing BV are looking to strengthen the OpenCL compute ecosystem by improving the documentation and code samples as well as better overviews for those wishing to learn this Khronos compute standard...

Intel's compiler team is working on getting an Altera Nios II back-end mainlined within LLVM...

Canonical developer Alan Griffiths has been blogging a lot in recent days about the Mir display server. He's been trying to get the community to support Mir and even potentially add native Wayland client support. His latest post is entitled "Why Mir" with many still wondering why they should care about Mir when Wayland has proven to be the tested and widely-adopted path forward...

Blender 2.79 is under development and it sounds like this release should be quite exciting for those into performance improvements or better OpenCL support...

It's already been seven years since Unigine Corp rolled out the Unigine Heaven tech demo and four years since Unigine Valley while in that time while we have seen thousands of Linux game ports emerge, but few can match the visual intensity of these tech demos. In looking to set a new standard for jaw-dropping graphics and preparing to torture current Pascal and Polaris graphics cards as well as future Volta and Vega hardware, Unigine Corp today is releasing Unigine Superposition 1.0. Unigine Superposition is one godly GPU benchmark and is a beauty to watch.

Samuel Pitoiset, one of the developers on Valve's open-source Linux driver team focused on better Radeon support, has posted a set of 26 patches for changes needed to support ARB_bindless_texture and is in the process of getting this feature working for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

Open-source AMD developers have been discussing in recent days how to better deal with the experimental support of GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" (and GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands") support in AMDGPU and making it easier to enable while ensuring the Radeon DRM driver with its mature GCN 1.0/1.1 support doesn't interfere...

While Unity 8 and Mir may be on their way out, Canonical continues backing Snappy and the involved developers have got Snap support integrated into Fedora 24 and newer...

While Canonical is expected to maintain Mir for IoT use-cases, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is expected to use the GNOME desktop on Wayland. The community forks so far of Unity 8 also appear to want to switch to Wayland eventually rather than Mir. In trying to maintain relevance for Mir, longtime Mir developer Alan Griffiths is asking whether the community would be interested in native Wayland client support in Mir...

Theo de Raadt has announced the release of OpenBSD 6.1...

While writing DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) drivers were once a rather daunting task and not really considered much by ARM/embedded developers, over the past few years DRM has evolved a lot as it's picked up new drivers -- especially for today's many ARM SoCs -- and its core infrastructure has improved with picking up many new helpers and other improvements that lower the barrier of entry for DRM development...

Today marks AMD formally launching the Ryzen 5 line-up with immediate availability...

While NVIDIA's GeForce 400/500 "Fermi" graphics cards have since been succeeded by Kepler, Maxwell, and now Pascal, the Fermi hardware is still receiving some love from open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) developers in taking baby steps towards working re-clocking support...

The stock kernel of Ubuntu 17.04 is doing away with Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) support for a number of ancient graphics processors...

Eric Anholt's work on the VC4 Raspberry Pi driver stack continues with his most recent activities being the start of DMA-BUF fencing support and continuing efforts around using the Meson build system in the X.Org world...

Work on Godot 3.0 as the next major update to this open-source, cross-platform 2D/3D game engine is advancing with an alpha now in sight...

With last week's surprise decision by Mark Shuttleworth to abandon Unity 8 efforts and switch back to the GNOME desktop by Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, while some applauded the decision, others begged the question why not switch to KDE or "Ubuntu should default to [your favorite DE]."..

Mediatek developers have been working to mainline their MT2701 SoC support in the Linux kernel the past number of months and with Linux 4.12 will come support to their DRM/KMS driver...

A new, unofficial project at Google is XRTL, creating a cross-platform real-time rendering library, with support for Vulkan and other graphics APIs...

Last September we wrote about RoundCube-Next being woefully behind schedule even after they raised more than one hundred thousand dollars for this massive overhaul to the RoundCube webmail software. Sadly, not much has changed since and the project has yet to see any Git commits in 2017...

Last week when posting an eight-way BSD/Linux OS comparison there were a few premium members who requested seeing Solus results side-by-side. For those interested, here are some fresh benchmarks of this promising Linux distribution.

The Portable Computing Language (POCL) has issued a new release of their open-source CPU-based OpenCL implementation...

The Kotlin programming language continues to be developed by JetBrains and while it originated as a new language built atop the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), there is now experimental support for native compilation...

For fans of BeOS-inspired Haiku OS, the operating system now has Mesa 17.0 and LLVM 4.0 for the latest graphics driver and compiler support...

OpenELEC 8.0 was released this weekend as the newest version of this mediacenter / multimedia focused Linux distribution...

The third release candidate to Debian Installer for 9.0 "Stretch" is now available for testing...

KDE Frameworks 5.33 was released this weekend as the latest monthly installment to this large set of KDE libraries to complement Qt...