Phoronix

The GNOME Builder development environment has already been working on many new features for next year's GNOME 3.28 desktop environment while even more features are now on track...

The Vulkan graphics API has been particularly popular with some gaming console emulators from the Dolphin Emulator to RetroArch. The latest emulator now working on Vulkan support is PPSSPP on Linux...

Today marks the release of Portable Computing Language "POCL" 1.0 for this originally CPU-based OpenCL implementation...

It remains to be seen how exactly the situation will play out with the existing open-source RADV Vulkan driver that's in the Mesa tree and AMD's to-be-opened "Radeon Open Vulkan" driver that is the company's official Vulkan driver. At least though Vulkan drivers are lighter and less maintenance than OpenGL drivers...

Since yesterday several (Windows-focused) publications have been running stories about how AMD's next-gen "Navi" GPU was supposedly spotted in the AMD Linux driver code...

Intel has sent in another round of feature updates of their i915 DRM driver to DRM-Next of new material slated for Linux 4.16...

While Linux is our predominant focus at Phoronix, a special place in our heart remains for the BSDs. Here's a look back at the most popular BSD operating system articles on Phoronix this year...

Andres Gomez of Igalia has posted the initial schedule for getting to the Mesa 18.0 release next quarter...

If you are exclusively using Linux for gaming, hopefully you aren't hoping for an HTC Vive this Christmas as the SteamVR support on Linux still leaves a lot to be desired. At the start of the year Valve finally put out their first SteamVR developer build for Linux and now nearly one year later, it still feels like a very rough beta.

As we've been covering since the original patches back in October, SUSE has been working on a very interesting in-kernel bootsplash system. It's growing into an interesting alternative to the user-space-based Plymouth, but one of the leading common criticism of it is the use of FBCON rather than interfacing with the DRM/KMS APIs...

Mesa 17.3.1 is on track to be released this week as the first point release to this quarter's Mesa 17.3 feature release...

Intel has announced the first FPGA product that makes use of High Bandwidth Memory 2 (HBM2) for extreme HPC performance...

Using the high-end SilverStone TS421S 4-disk SATA drive enclosure, I've been carrying out a number of Btrfs and EXT4 file-system multi-disk benchmarks over the past week. Here are the latest numbers for how Btrfs' native RAID capabilities are running up against EXT4 when using MDADM "soft" RAID.

More (X)Wayland improvements are en route for GNOME 3.28...

Even with AMD open-sourcing their official Vulkan driver any day now, David Airlie, Bas Nieuwenhuizen, and others independently continue to advance the dissenting RADV Vulkan driver...

Pekka Paalanen of Collabora has begun the overdue task of providing documentation on XWayland...

In between hacking on the RADV Vulkan driver, David Airlie has found the time to land his patches enabling OpenGL 4.3 and GLSL 430 support within Mesa 17.4-dev Git for the R600g driver...

Richard Biener of SUSE is preparing to release GCC 7.3 next month...

The libdrm Mesa DRM library that principally sits as the interface between Mesa and the kernel Direct Rendering Manager drivers is out with a big update...

Linus Torvalds has issued the fourth weekly release candidate for the upcoming Linux 4.15 kernel release...

The official release is near for the Arch-based Manjaro 17.1 Linux distribution...

ScummVM 2.0 has been released as a major update to this open-source game engine recreation project...

The Smallest Server Suite -- also known as TheSSS -- remains a live CD/DVD capable Linux operating system making it trivial to deploy a range of services...

It was a heck of a year for Ubuntu's Mir display server from it starting off as the display server to the now-abandoned Unity 8 desktop and it surviving Canonical's cancelling of the Unity/convergence projects to now not only being fitted for IoT use-cases but gaining Wayland support with hopes some will use it as a Wayland compositor. This also went from Mir 1.0 nearly being released and back to the drawing board to Canonical now hiring more Mir developers and adding Mir to other Linux distributions: what a wild ride 2017 has been for this controversial project...

Earlier this month I wrote how Intel engineers have been busy with continuing to tune glibc's performance with FMA and AVX optimizations. That work has continued but also other architectures continue tuning their GNU C Library performance ahead of the expected v2.27 update...

Hot off the release of the new GIMP 2.9.8 and ahead of the expected GIMP 2.10 release candidates that are expected to begin, a new addition to GIMP is a plug-in supporting the new FreeDesktop.org/Flatpak screenshot API...

KDE Partition Manager 3.3 was released this week as the newest version of this program for managing disk devices/partitions from the KDE desktop...

The Fortran committee decided last month to rename the upcoming Fortran 2015 programming language update to Fortran 2018. GCC support is being prepped...

Matthias Clasen of Red Hat announced the release of GNOME 3.27.3 this weekend...

If you are thinking of gifting yourself (or someone else) a FreeSync-compatible monitor this holiday season, here's a look at how the AMD FreeSync support is working right now, the driver bits you need to be aware of, and how it's all playing out for those wanting to use this tear-free capability for Linux gaming.

As part of our various year-end lists, recaps, and end of year testing, here's a look back at the most prominent NVIDIA open-source/Linux news of the year...

Unity is one of the big public users of the open-source Crunch DXT texture compression library. While it's no longer maintained by Rich Geldreich / Binomial, Unity has continued advancing this open-source code to further improve the compression ratio and speed...

Samsung's Open-Source Group has been working on making their Wayland support in the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) even better...

Christian Schaller who has long been involved in GNOME/Fedora development while serving as a senior software engineering manager at Red Hat and formerly with Collabora has some bold predictions about 2018 for open-source software...

ZFS On Linux 0.7.4 was released this week as the newest stable release for this ZFS file-system implementation for the Linux kernel...

Since last week's code/feature freeze for the upcoming Wine 3.0, the second release candidate is now available...

LunarG has been working to reduce the size of the SPIR-V intermediate representation used by Vulkan (and OpenCL 2.1+) through improvements to the SPIRV-Tools project...

With Amazon AWS this week having released Amazon Linux 2 LTS I was excited to put this updated cloud-focused operating system through some performance tests to see how it stacks up with the more well known Linux distributions.

While the Linux kernel has supported the official Sony PlayStation 3 controller as an input device, some of the off-brand/knockoff models haven't quite behaved correctly on Linux but that's now being rectified...

A new contributor to the Wayland/Weston camp has been working on several improvements to the Weston reference compositor...

Fedora Linux this year picked up support for more multimedia codecs, continued innovating on both the Linux desktop/workstations and servers, the Fedora/RedHat developers continued a lot of upstream improvements throughout the Linux landscape, their Wayland support continues to be solid, and they continued shipping the latest and greatest packages in their distribution releases...

The latest OpenGL extension added to Mesa by Intel developers is the rather new EXT_disjoint_timer_query...

Back at WineConf 2017 VKD3D was announced for bringing Direct3D 12 to Wine by implementing Microsoft's latest graphics API atop the Vulkan graphics API. The initial code for this new library is beginning to take shape...

Amazon AWS has announced their "next generation" version of their Amazon Linux operating system intended for running on their EC2 compute cloud as well as on-site via VMware/VirtualBox/Hyper-V images that are free to all...

Ahead of the holidays Google has pushed out the Chrome 64 beta to all supported platforms...

Lennart Poettering has announced the release of systemd 236 as the init system's final release of 2017...

KDE Applications 17.12 is now available as the newest six-month update to this collection of KDE programs making use of KDE Frameworks 5...

Given this week's release of the big AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 Linux driver update, here are some fresh OpenCL GPU benchmarks comparing the performance of AMD's latest Radeon graphics cards on this newest Linux driver to that of the latest NVIDIA GeForce GPUs on their respective newest driver.

"Bolt" is a new project by Red Hat / GNOME developers in dealing with Thunderbolt 3 security levels on Linux...

The FreeBSD-based operating system TrueOS that's formerly known as PC-BSD has put out their last stable update of 2017...