Phoronix

With now being able to benchmark ArrayFire via the Phoronix Test Suite, I've been having fun running a number of OpenCL graphics card tests with the 300+ available AF tests. The tests over the past week have been using the NVIDIA Linux driver while here are our first Radeon benchmark results using the AMDGPU-PRO driver stack.

GNOME developer Jonas Ã…dahl has begun landing his work on a new monitor configuration system in Mutter for the GNOME 3.24 desktop release...

The developers working on NetworkManager have rolled out their big v1.6 feature update...

Ubuntu 17.04, the Zesty Zapus, is still planning to ship Linux 4.10 for its kernel when the OS ships in April...

AMD developer Christian König is working on 10-bit HEVC video decoding support for the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver stack...

The second release candidate is now available for the upcoming Mesa 17.0...

For a while now there have been some requests to post GPU benchmarks from some modern low-end and higher-end CPUs while testing different graphics cards, particularly to see the impact of the Vulkan API. With all the recent Kabylake testing, I've run some open-source AMD graphics tests using a Core i3 7100 and Core i5 7600K for those that may be weighing CPU options for a Linux gaming system upgrade.

For those that were too excited about Wine 2.0 and its new features that you went off to download it before reading the rest of the email announcement, moving forward they are changing their versioning scheme...

Unigine will soon be releasing their much-anticipated Superposition benchmark. This is their first tech demo / benchmark powered by Unigine Engine 2 and will be stunning for Linux users and don't mind stressing their high-end graphics card and OpenGL driver...

Bryce Harrington of Samsung's Open-Source Group has announced the alpha release of Wayland 1.13 along with the Weston 2.0 alpha release. Rather than it being Weston 1.13, it's bumping to Weston 2.0 for this reference Wayland compositor...

There are some new boards now supported by mainline Coreboot...

For those interested in Google's WebP lossy/lossless image format that tends to deliver much superior compression vs. quality results to JPEG, a new release is on approach...

The Solus desktop environment has delivered innovations on a number of fronts, including its work on the Budgie desktop that has a growing following. While Budgie Desktop started off as being based upon GNOME, now the developers are working to decouple from GNOME and begin making use of the Qt tool-kit...

Timothy Arceri of Collabora is close to finally merging the massive OpenGL on-disk shader cache. A majority of that work is for common Mesa but for the initial work it's just been wired into Intel's i965 Mesa driver. But, fortunately, this Collabora developer is planning to wire up the GLSL shader cache for benefiting the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

One day after The Khronos Group revealed Vulkan 1.0.39 with various new extensions, the Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver within mainline Mesa adds support for VK_KHR_maintenance1...

Wine 2.0 is now officially available...

For those looking to purchase a newer Intel Z270 motherboard for use with the new Kabylake processors, the ASUS PRIME Z270-P is what I've been using the past two weeks for my initial Kabylake benchmarking. So far it's been working out great and haven't run into any issues.

The OpenGL and OpenGL ES Conformance Test Suites (GL CTS) from The Khronos Group have finally went the way of their Vulkan CTS... open-source!..

Arch Linux is moving ahead with preparing to deprecate i686 (x86 32-bit) support in their distribution...

GCC 7 moved on to only bug/documentation fixes but an exception was granted to allow the BRIG front-end to land for AMD's HSA support in this year's GNU Compiler Collection update. As of this morning, the BRIG front-end has merged...

Note to self: don't drop CPUs on the ground. But even with a bent Core i5 "Kabylake" processor, it still managed to work...

NVIDIA has continued in their much-appreciated tradition of issuing new beta drivers on the same day as Khronos updates OpenGL/Vulkan. Out already for Windows and Linux gamers/developers are a beta driver implementing the new Vulkan 1.0.39 extensions...

Netdata, for the uninitiated, is a distributed real-time performance and health monitoring suite. Netdata can be used for monitoring server performance/health as well as VMs, IoT devices, and more in a "fast and efficient" manner. Netdata 1.5 has been released as a big update to this open-source tool...

While Qt 5.8 was just released yesterday, the feature freeze is already upon us for Qt 5.9 due to the v5.8 release having been dragged out from November to this week...

Just in case any of you are running a slightly older Linux system that is still running systemd 228, it turns out there was a local root exploit in that version...

Last week at Linux.Conf.Au 2017 was a presentation by David Airlie, the Linux kernel DRM subsystem maintainer, Red Hat developer, and RADV Vulkan driver developer, among other hats. At this year's Linux conference in Australia he gave a nice presentation on Vulkan and the RADV driver work...

Timothy Arceri of Collabora has updated the hardware agnostic portion of the on-disk shader cache patches...

Some more exciting graphics news today aside from a big Vulkan update is Microsoft announcing they have open-sourced a DirectX shader compiler...

The delay in seeing a new Vulkan 1.0 update was worthwhile as the v1.0.39 release today is rather fun...

With there now being an ArrayFire test profile for the Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org, it was a breeze to test 13 different NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on the 300+ ArrayFire OpenCL GPU compute tests...

Last week marked the debut of the NVIDIA 378.09 Linux driver beta. While the release notes didn't mention any widespread performance improvements, an individual or two at least in the forums seemed to think it did and have already been inquiring why I wasn't yet using this new (beta) driver in my Linux benchmarks. Anyhow, here are some 375 vs. 378 Linux driver tests...

It's been a while since the last update to Unreal Engine 4, but available today is the first public preview release for UE4.15...

Last week I began delivering Linux Kabylake benchmarks with the Core i5 7600K while this week I finally am set to receive the Core i7 7700K. But for those curious how Kabylake is looking on the low-end, I picked up a Core i3 7100 as currently the cheapest Kabylake desktop processor. Here are some initial Linux benchmarks of this Core i3 processor on Ubuntu Linux.

Making its rounds this morning as a "Raspberry Pi competitor" is the Tinker Board from ASUS...

Firefox 51.0 just hit Mozilla's FTP servers for those wanting the latest version of this open-source web-browser...

Not only has FreeBSD been making progress with supporting LLDB as LLVM's debugger alternative to GDB, but the NetBSD project has also been making inroads with this open-source debugger...

The second development release is now available of the upcoming Phoronix Test Suite 7.0-Ringsaker...

Qt 5.8 was supposed to ship back in November, but that major toolkit update has finally shipped today...

Wine 2.0-RC6 was released on Friday as likely what's the final release candidate ahead of the stable Wine 2.0.0 debut. Shipping today is the Wine-Staging update re-based off this latest development release while also pulling in some new patches...

Linus Torvalds has released the Linux 4.10 RC5 kernel...

With now having a test profile for the ArrayFire GPU library, here is the start of some benchmarks of a Linux OpenCL comparison using this advanced library. For your viewing pleasure this Sunday morning are the results for the complete GeForce GTX 1000 "Pascal" line-up to date...

Recently on Phoronix we've tested the re-clocking and boost support in Nouveau with the Linux 4.10 kernel and separately landing in Mesa 17.0 Git was the big Maxwell performance boost for Nouveau Gallium3D. That Gallium3D driver work improves the Maxwell open-source performance by "1.5x to 3.5x" via instruction pipelining improvements. With those latest improvements in the kernel and Mesa, how does Nouveau now compare to NVIDIA's binary Linux driver?

One of the smaller improvements I've been working to make on Phoronix Test Suite 7.0-Ringsaker has been improving the system information reporting view...

Vulkan 1.0.38 was released on 16 December and there has yet to be any other Vulkan-Docs update since then, which is strange when considering there were 38 point releases to Vulkan 1.0 in less than one year that the API specification has been public. There generally has been point releases every week or two for advancing this high-performance graphics API...

For those looking to relive some old gaming moments this weekend, the iortcw project continues to be developed as the open-source code-base around Return to Castle Wolfenstein...

If you have some spare GPU cycles this weekend, ArrayFire can now be benchmarked via the Phoronix Test Suite...

With GCC7 feature development ending, this week I conducted some benchmarks of the latest GCC 7 snapshot against that of the past three major release series of the GNU Compiler Collection: 6.3.0, 5.4.0, and 4.9.4. All tests were done on Ubuntu Linux x86_64 with an Intel Core i7 6800K processor.

One of the latest Fedora 26 changes being worked on is enabling TRIM/Discard by default for newly-created encrypted disks via dm-crypt...

For C++ developers, the Vulkan space is quite vibrant as aside from the official Vulkan-Hpp C++ library there are a growing number of abstraction layers for Vulkan C++ development...

The libvirt virtualization API saw a major 3.0 release this week to succeed its earlier v2.5 milestone...