Phoronix

While Google Summer of Code ended one month ago, Jacob Lifshay has continued working on his "Vulkan-CPU" project now known as Kazan. He's certainly making progress on this CPU-based Vulkan implementation...

While not particularly relevant to Linux gamers at this point in time, AMD is dropping their CrossFire branding in favor of just calling it their mGPU technology...

With FreeType 2.8.1 having been released last week, a lot of new code landed in the early hours of today to its Git repository...

Besides the embargo expiring this morning on the Intel Core i9 7960X, the Core i9 7980XE Extreme Edition processor is also now fair game. Here is our look at the Linux performance for this 18 core / 36 thread processor within a single 165 Watt package.

While Intel previously announced the expanded Intel Core X-Series line-up including the Core i9 7960X and Core i9 7980XE processors, only today is the performance embargo expiring as these CPUs begin to ship to further battle AMD's Ryzen Threadripper line-up. Here is today's launch-day Linux benchmarks of the Core i9 7960X.

OpenSSH 7.6 will be hitting the streets soon...

The annual X.Org Developers' Conference wrapped up on Friday as the meeting of key contributors to components including the xorg-server, Wayland, Mesa, and other crucial components of the Linux desktop stack...

Intel has rushed up the announcement of their 8th Gen Intel Core desktop processors following a recent leak. We can now confirm that these new Intel CPUs are en route to retailers, they have already arrived for testing, and will be benchmarked under Linux on Phoronix once that secondary embargo expires...

Linus Torvalds has announced the release of the second weekly test candidate of the upcoming Linux 4.14 kernel...

Martin Flöser (nee Gräßlin) has announced the "XFree KWin" project. This isn't to be confused with XFree86 but rather is about ridding KWin optionally of X11/X.Org dependencies...

Earlier this year ASUS announced the Tinker Board as their first step into the ARM single board computer world. Earlier this month I finally received a Tinker Board for testing and it has been quite interesting to say the least. The Tinker Board with its Rockchip SoC has been among the most competitive ARM SBCs we have tested to date in its price range and the form factor is compatible with the Raspberry Pi.

DragonFlyBSD today picked up direct input support within the kernel's polling code. This can boost the networking performance though for now is just supported by the IX4 driver, what is used as the Intel 10Gb Ethernet driver...

A Norwegian developer has developed a new Qt platform abstraction plug-in to let Qt applications make use of GTK+ for windowing system integration. The Qt apps rely upon GTK+ as a host toolkit to provide GTK menus, GTK for input, and other integration bits...

While I usually look at the Linux kernel code size following each merge window, I am a few days late this time around due to busy Xeon/EPYC benchmarking and XDC2017. Anyhow, Linux 4.14 is showing some weight gains but nothing too bad...

Wrapping up our XDC2017 coverage for this annual X.Org developer event that took place this past week in Mountain View, Zhenyu Wang of Intel presented on their ongoing work for mediated GPU virtualization pass-through support on Linux, Intel GVT...

While NVIDIA isn't doing much to help out Nouveau, at least the company is contributing to the open-source Linux graphics ecosystem in other ways. In addition to presenting at XDC2017 this week on the Unix device memory allocator API and DeepColor / HDR support, they also presented on server-side GLVND...

SDL 2.0.6 was released on Friday as the latest feature update for this widely-used library that allows for more cross-platform portability of applications and games centered around input, audio, and video helpers...

Longtime Nouveau contributors Martin Peres and Karol Herbst presented at this week's XDC2017 X.Org conference at the Googleplex in Mountain View. It was a quick talk as they didn't have a whole lot to report on due to their open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver efforts largely being restricted by NVIDIA Corp...

X.Org Server 1.19 is already almsot one year old and while X.Org is currently well off its six month release cadence, version 1.20 is being figured out for an early 2018 release...

Just a quick heads up for those that haven't noticed yet, HTTPS is now used by default across all of Phoronix.com as of this week...

The X.Org Foundation board announced during this week's XDC2017 summit that they have officially completed the paperwork to become a Khronos adopter...

Intel OTC developers are working on support for huge GTT pages for their Direct Rendering Manager driver...

Earlier this year Keith Packard started a contract gig for Valve working to improve Linux's support for virtual reality head-mounted displays (VR HMDs). In particular, working on Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) and X.Org changes needed so VR HMDs will work well under Linux with the non-NVIDIA drivers...

Arcan, the open-source display server powered by a game engine, is out with a new release. Its Durden desktop environment has also been updated...

It's been a few weeks since last delivering any large RADV/RadeonSI open-source AMD Linux graphics benchmark results due to being busy with testing other hardware as well as battling some regressions / stability problems within the AMDGPU DRM code and Mesa Git. But with Linux 4.13 stable and the newest Mesa 17.3-dev code, things are playing well so here are some fresh OpenGL vs. Vulkan benchmarks on three Radeon graphics cards.

The Pitivi open-source non-linear video editor has been in development for thirteen years while its v1.0 release is finally near...

While most of the talks that take place at the annual X.Org Developers' Conference are around the exciting progress being made across the Linux graphics landscape, at XDC2017 taking place this week at Google, the open-source GPGPU / compute talk is rather the let down due to the less than desirable state of the open-source OpenCL ecosystem...

Kevin Brace, the sole active developer left working on the OpenChrome driver stack for VIA x86 graphics, presented yesterday at XDC2017 about his work on this driver and how in the years to come he still hopes to work on other vintage GPU support...

While busy covering the many new features of Linux 4.14, one important change slipped by that I have long been waiting to see merged: Heterogeneous Memory Management...

Java 9 (JDK 9) has finally reached general availability! Following setbacks, Java 9 is officially available as well as Java EE 8...

Recently I wrote about a BFQ regression fix that should take care of a problem spotted in our recent I/O scheduler Linux 4.13 benchmarks while now that work has yielded a set of four patches working to improve this recently-merged scheduler...

J.A. Suarez Romero of Igalia is preparing Mesa 17.1.10 as the final point release for the Mesa 17.1 release stream...

Last week it was decided to delay the Fedora 27 beta due to bugs while this week they've been forced to delay the release a second time...

Kaveh Nasri, the manager of Intel's Mesa driver team within the Open-Source Technology Center since 2011, spoke this morning at XDC2017 about the accomplishments of his team and more broadly the Mesa community. Particularly over the past year there has been amazing milestones accomplished for this open-source driver stack...

Besides the CryENGINE 5.4 release happening today, Epic Games has made public their first preview release of the upcoming Unreal Engine 4.18...

Eric Anholt of Broadcom just finished presenting at XDC2017 Mountain View on the state of the VC4 driver stack most notably used by the Raspberry Pi devices. Additionally, he also shared about his early work on the VC5 driver for next-generation Broadcom graphics...

One day after releasing updated GeForce Linux legacy drivers, NVIDIA is now out with an update to their long-lived 384 branch...

Crytek today has shipped the exciting CryENGINE 5.4 game engine update...

We recently looked at several Noctua cooler options for Intel's Core X-Series while today the tables have turned and we tried out Noctua's TR4-SP3 heatsink that is capable of cooling the high-Wattage Threadripper and EPYC processors with air cooling.

The first release candidate of PostgreSQL 10.0 is now available for testing...

Besides working on the new Unix device memory allocator project, they have also been engaged with upstream open-source Linux developers over preparing the Linux desktop for HDR display support...

For those making use of Beignet for Intel graphics OpenCL acceleration on Linux, it finally has added support for LLVM 5.0...

The first batch of drm-intel-next changes are ready to be queued in DRM-Next as feature work for eventually merging to mainline come the Linux 4.15 merge window...

One of the many interesting talks at yesterday's XDC2017 conference was Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais talking about GPUVis...

Intel's Clear Linux team has rolled out their Clear Containers 3.0 technology...

A few months ago was a vibrant discussion about a Meson proposal for libdrm/Mesa while today the initial patches were posted in bringing a possible Meson build system port for Mesa...

James Jones of NVIDIA presented this morning at XDC2017 with their annual update on a new Unix device memory allocation library. As a reminder, this library originated from NVIDIA's concerns over the Generic Buffer Manager (GBM) currently used by Wayland compositors not being suitable for use with their driver's architecture and then the other driver developers not being interested in switching to EGLStreams, NVIDIA's original push for supporting Wayland...

TVE200 is a new Direct Rendering Manager driver being queued for Linux 4.15...

The X.Org Developers Conference kicked off a short time ago at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA. But even if you are not at the event, there is a livestream...

Wine Staging 2.17 is now available as the latest experimental/testing build of Wine with various patches added in...