Phoronix

Intel developers have done their "2016-Q4" quarterly update to XenGT for mediated graphics passthrough on Linux hosts for Intel graphics hardware. This is their last release on the old architecture now that the code began landing upstream in Linux 4.10...

With GNOME 3.24 due to be released next week, I've spent some time trying out the latest, near-final packages using Fedora Rawhide. The experience has been good and from my initial impressions it appears to be another reliable update to the GNOME Shell experience. Here are some screenshots and a recap of the new features and changes for this six-month update to this open-source desktop environment.

If longtime open-source Linux graphics developer Jerome Glisse has his way, the long-awaited Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) support will be merged for the Linux 4.12 kernel...

For those making use of containers, the Fedora Project has announced its first Layered Image Release...

Red Hat's Nick Clifton has written a lengthy update concerning the state of the GNU Toolchain as we near the end of the first quarter, 2017...

Intel developers have published their latest version of patches that implement a Single Loop Power Controller (SLPC) as a replacement to host-based power management features...

At the beginning of today, OpenGL threaded dispatch landed in Mesa as work that's existed in patch form for years but was recently revived for Mesa Git due to the potential for significant performance gains in select scenarios...

Fedora 26 Alpha isn't going to make it out on time and has been delayed, pushing back the final F26 already by a second time...

It looks like a public beta may be available soon of Serious Fusion 2017 for Serious Sam HD...

While the AMDGPU "GCN" compiler support in LLVM is quite mature now, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) hasn't yet received a full-fledged GCN compiler back-end for AMD GPUs. SUSE developers have been working on that for AMD and today they have published their code branch. This GCN back-end for GCC is primarily focused on compute capabilities rather than compiling graphics shaders...

Google has announced Guetzli, not a German cookie, but rather a new open-source algorithm for creating high-quality JPEGs that are 35% smaller than currently available methods...

Today I got around to running a very heavy/demanding, very real-world workload on the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X that I've been meaning to test with this Zen CPU...

With this week's LLVM 4.0 release making the LLD linker ready for production use on some platforms, namely ELF on x86_64 / AArch64, I decided to finally try it out on one of my test systems. I set LLD as the default linker on an Ubuntu 17.04 system and set off to run some benchmarks.

The statx system call was added to Linux 4.11 for providing enhanced file stats. While the statx() system call is in place for Linux 4.11, not all of the file-systems yet support it...

Kent Overstreet has announced a major update to Bcachefs, the new Linux file-system formed out of the advanced Bcache block layer caching code...

The final GNOME 3.23 development release is out ahead of next week's planned GNOME 3.24 debut...

Michel Dänzer of AMD has announced new releases of their X.Org DDX drivers: xf86-video-ati 7.9 and xf86-video-amdgpu 1.3. The changes in the updates are similar while the xf86-video-amdgpu DDX is paired to work with the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver while the xf86-video-ati driver continues on for the mature Radeon DRM...

DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has been testing out various NVMe M.2 SSDs under his BSD operating system to see how these latest-generation storage devices perform...

AMD has confirmed that Ryzen 5 CPUs will begin shipping on 11 April...

The long-standing patches for implementing threaded OpenGL dispatch have landed in Mesa 17.1-devel Git...

Pipeline statistics queries is the latest Vulkan capability being added to the Intel "ANV" Mesa Vulkan driver...

Matthew Dillon has discovered an important bug in the DragonFlyBSD kernel's VFS cluster code affecting the HAMMER file-system write performance...

While watching Khronos' GDC17 presentation recordings, Piers Daniell of NVIDIA touched on some possible future work items for Vulkan during the When Vulkan was One session...

Mesa release manager Emil Velikov is arranging to release Mesa 13.0.6 in the days ahead...

Adam Jackson has announced xorg-server 1.19.3 as the latest point release for the long-living X.Org Server...

The Khronos session videos from this year's Game Developers' Conference (GDC 17) are now available online...

Given AMD's Ryzen is a very new platform, some Phoronix readers have inquired whether a given distribution is a faster and better-supported than others. Here are tests of Ubuntu, Clear Linux, Debian, Antergos, Fedora, and openSUSE tested with an AMD Ryzen 7 1800X system.

QEMU 2.9-rc0 was tagged yesterday as this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack prepares for its next major release...

LLVM developer Rui Ueyama is encouraging the "dogfeeding" of their linker, LLD, that should now be ready for production use on some platforms/architectures with this week's LLVM 4.0 release...

Linaro developers are hoping to merge the generic TEE subsystem into the Linux 4.12 kernel this spring...

Richard Biener has issued a new status report concerning the state of GCC 7 and that it should be released the middle of next month...

With Timothy Arceri at Valve haven gotten the RadeonSI shader cache into shape for Mesa 17.1, his latest focus is on introducing a shader cache for the RADV Vulkan driver...

NetBSD 7.1 was released today as the newest version of this popular BSD operating system known for its portability across many CPU architectures...

There were several interesting Git commits hitting Mesa 17.1-devel tonight...

Google's Chrome/Chromium web-browser is introducing support for animated PNGs (APNG)...

MATE 1.18 is now available as the latest version of this GNOME2-forked open-source desktop environment...

As reported earlier, Keith Packard is Valve's latest driver developer hire for bettering the Linux display stack for gaming, and in particular, VR. Keith has now shared a few comments on his new endeavor...

Canonical developer Alan Griffiths has shared a few details about getting Mir 1.0 ready for release...

While LLVM 4.0 was just released earlier this week, for the LLVM 5.0 release six months down the road there should be better AMD Ryzen (Zen) performance...

The open-source Godot game engine continues working towards their 3.0 major release...

Last week we got to tell you all about the new NVIDIA Jetson TX2 with its custom-designed 64-bit Denver 2 CPUs, four Cortex-A57 cores, and Pascal graphics with 256 CUDA cores. Today the Jetson TX2 is shipping and the embargo has expired for sharing performance metrics on the JTX2.

Valve's latest high-profile hire is adding Keith Packard to their roster of Linux graphics driver developers...

With the recent Wayland 1.13 release, the Weston reference compositor broke tradition of being the same version as Wayland due to having ABI breakage that forced them to bump the version to 2.0. With the next release, it won't be Weston 2.1 but now Weston 3.0 due to additional ABI breaks for libweston...

Eric Anholt has written a status update concerning his latest work at Broadcom on the VC4 Gallium3D graphics driver that's mostly focused on providing a free software graphics driver stack for the Raspberry Pi...

GNOME's Mutter is getting ready for next week's planned GNOME 3.24.0 debut by overnight releasing Mutter 3.23.92...

Open-source photographers can now enjoy digiKam 5.5 as the latest version of this high-quality free software photo manager application...

All of those running ioquake3-powered games are encouraged to update their engine installation as soon as possible...

A Phoronix reader pointed out an interesting reference on a Mesa patch today... Tom Stellard, the former GSoC student who was instrumental in developing the AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end, is now working for Red Hat...

The Clear Containers initiative within Intel's Clear Linux project from their Open-Source Technology Center is out today with a big update...

When the Vulkan 1.0 API specification was unveiled last February, we were originally told by Canonical that Mir in Ubuntu 16.04 would have Vulkan support but now one year later, Mir in Ubuntu 17.04 doesn't even look like it will have Vulkan support. But at least progress is being made...