This week Intel officially launched their Xeon Scalable Processors as what they claim is "the biggest platform advancement in this decade" and will end up going head-to-head with AMD's EPYC processors...
While the DNF 2.0 package manager is found with this week's Fedora 26 release, DNF developers aren't done with changes to the package manager for Fedora...
Intel developers continue working on Cannonlake support for Coreboot while sadly we've seen no activity yet for getting Ryzen/Epyc CPUs working with Coreboot...
With a lot of work going in recently to Mesa's KHR_no_error implementation for being able to optionally disable some error checking/handling within the OpenGL stack for potentially some CPU savings, I did some fresh tests of this feature (also known as MESA_NO_ERROR) when having the Kabylake Pentium CPU installed for the earlier Mesa GL threading tests...
There is just over one week left until the Mesa 17.2 feature freeze and the Etnaviv developers are hoping some of their outstanding work will land in time...
With Mesa's GL threading support ready for wider testing and the developers pursuing per-application enabling of this driver-agnostic Mesa OpenGL multi-threading work, here are some benchmarks of mesa_glthread when using a Pentium and Core i7 CPUs as well as a Radeon RX 580 and R9 Fury.
With Zen CPUs turning out very well in the marketplace, AMD appears to have divested some of their interest in ARM-based processors at least for the time being. But after waiting for years, I finally have my hands on an AMD Opteron A1100 ARM-based SBC for testing...
A controversial change being considered for Fedora 27 is doing away with the i686 kernel build thereby effectively dropping support for older x86 32-bit systems...
While sure to face opposition by some free software fans, Intel developers have begun working on High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) support for the Linux Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) code...
It was in April that GitHub crossed the threshold of having 1,000 projects referencing Vulkan while today they have crossed the milestone of 1,200 projects...
While the Raspberry Pi has offered HDMI CEC (Consumer Electronics Control) support via libCEC, now when using the VC4 DRM kernel driver it will be possible to make use of HDMI CEC...
For those behind on their Phoronix reading or that of the Linux kernel mailing list, here's a look at all of the prominent changes and new features merged so far during the Linux 4.13 cycle...
The latest quarterly update to the pkgsrc cross-platform package manager is now available with a variety of new packages as well as some infrastructure improvements...
Last week the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver added an option to enable SISCHED, the LLVM SI Machine Instruction Scheduler that for a while has been a non-default option for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...
While it's yet another Fedora release shipping several weeks late (in fact, more than one month later than anticipated), the release is once again worth the wait. I've been evaluating the near-final state of Fedora 26 on several of my test systems the past few days and it's working like a champ.
Ubuntu's Mir display server is out today with version 0.27 that is an interim step before Mir 1.0 with Wayland client support. Mir 0.27 contains functionality that was a work-in-progress during Canonical's recent restructuring and shift in focus...
Eric Anholt has written his usual weekly update concerning his happenings on the open-source graphics driver stack for the Raspberry Pi devices and other Broadcom-powered hardware...
SPI, Software in the Public Interest, has released their annual report covering 2016. SPI, for the uninitiated, serves as the steward to many open-source projects from Arch Linux to the X.Org Foundation to OpenMPI and LibreOffice...
Complementing last week's 2017 Linux Laptop Survey results, here are some complementary numbers you may be interested in that are collected by OpenBenchmarking.org based on Phoronix Test Suite activity...
Unity has announced that with their Unity 2017.3 game engine later this year they will be dropping DirectX 9 support. It has a few possible implications for Linux gamers...
Given the recent release of ROCm 1.6 and this being the OpenCL stack providing the exclusive compute support for Vega GPUs and newer, I ran some benchmarks of ROCm 1.6 on the various supported Radeon GPUs and compared them to different GeForce graphics cards atop NVIDIA's latest Linux driver release.
David Airlie has written a post on his new blog concerning a deferred rendering demo in Vulkan and how he managed to take the RADV driver from about half the speed of the AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan driver up to performance parity...
Marek Olšák's work on OpenGL multi-threading is now ready for more wide-scaling testing and will be enabled on a whitelist-basis for games capable of benefiting from this approach...
KDE developer Adriaan de Groot continues making progress on improving the support when running this desktop environment on FreeBSD. Adriaan has even been experimenting with Wayland/Weston on FreeBSD...
The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) student developers working on projects under the X.Org umbrella continue making progress, although one of the efforts has been officially dropped...
In yesterday's Windows 10 Radeon Software vs. Ubuntu 17.04 + Linux 4.12 + Mesa 17.2-dev comparison I tested both Ubuntu 17.04 out-of-the-box and then upgraded it to the Linux 4.12 kernel and Mesa 17.2-dev. Here are some complementary tests I did with a larger set of Linux games...