Phoronix

Mozilla has rolled out Firefox 52.0 as the latest version of their open-source, cross-platform web browser...

Ubuntu dropped their official alpha/betas long ago, Fedora 27 is dropping their alphas, and openSUSE is also shifting their development approach and will get rid of alpha and beta releases. OpenSUSE Leap 42.3 will be developed in a "rolling" manner although the release will not be a rolling-release post-release, unlike openSUSE Tumbleweed...

With the Linux 4.11 merge window now closed and the RadeonSI shader cache having landed and even turned on by default, it's a great time to run some fresh benchmarks of the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack. Here are some benchmark results with the latest Mesa Git code for RadeonSI Gallium3D and RADV as well as the Linux 4.11-rc1 kernel compared to Linux 4.10.

Intel is off to the races in preparing their new feature material work they plan to have introduced for the Linux 4.12 kernel, even though Linux 4.11-rc1 was just introduced on Monday and thus still nearly two months until the 4.12 merge window...

KDE developer Kai Uwe has provided a look at some of the new features coming for Plasma 5.10, including some screenshots...

One month ago AMD developer Marek Olsak sent out threaded OpenGL dispatch code for Mesa, which can be a big win for some games but unfortunately Marek is now too busy to handle the code. Fortunately, Collabora-turned-Valve developer Timothy Arceri has taken to getting this code vetted...

Two popular Linux distributions based upon Arch have released updated versions of their operating systems...

The Phoronix Test Suite 7.0-Ringsaker update is now available as the latest version of our cross-platform, open-source benchmarking software particularly for Linux, macOS, and BSD systems. Phoronix Test Suite 7.0 has many user-facing updates over Phoronix Test Suite 6.8 and all users are encouraged to upgrade to this latest release of our GPL benchmarking software.

Earlier today I posted some Linux game CPU scaling benchmarks using a Core i7 6800K Broadwell-E For showing how current Linux games make use of (or not) multiple CPU cores, which originated from discussions by Linux gamers following the AMD Ryzen CPU launch with how many cores are really needed. While going through the process of running those Linux game CPU scaling benchmarks, I also ran some other workloads for those curious...

Mageia 6 is running months behind schedule while today the project was able to announce their second stabilization snapshot...

Our latest Ryzen Linux benchmarks are looking at the impact of the CPUFreq scaling driver's governors have on the performance of the Ryzen 7 1800X, including a look at the power consumption and performance-per-Watt when changing the governors.

The Free Software Foundation has announced three more devices that are certified for "respects your freedom" (RYF), including a laptop, motherboard, and USB sound adapter. But don't get too excited quite yet...

Binutils 2.28 is out today as the latest version of this important GNU package...

With all the discussions about AMD's Ryzen 7 processors that boast eight cores plus SMT, there has been much discussion in our forums and elsewhere the past few days about how many cores most modern Linux games actually utilize... That plus with looking at how well Ryzen's CPU cores scale, I have carried out some fresh Linux CPU core scaling benchmarks with an Intel Core i7 6800K Broadwell-E to see if most Linux games can end up using 4+ cores right now.

Reports out over the weekend indicate that C++17 is "done" as the next version of the C++ ISO standard...

Several times in the past we have covered Zapcc as an LLVM Clang based compiler focused on very fast compilation speeds. Zapcc 1.0 has been released today...

Google and the X.Org Foundation have firmed up the dates for the annual X.Org Developers' Conference...

Intel's Daniel Vetter has updated their drm-intel-testing tree with early code to begin testing that should end up being queued for the Linux 4.12 kernel...

Many Phoronix readers appear rather intrigued by the AMD Ryzen 7 1700 on Linux as it offers good multi-threaded performance with eight cores / 16 threads and retails for just $329 USD. Making the Ryzen 7 1700 even more appealing to enthusiasts is that it overclocks well. For those curious, here are benchmarks of the Ryzen 7 1700 on Ubuntu Linux running at 4.0GHz.

With the recent roll-out of Mesa's on-disk shader cache, an initial limitation was that the entire cache would be erased if a user switched between 32-bit and 64-bit applications. That's now been fixed. And now the OpenGL GLSL shader cache is enabled by default...

Linus Torvalds has announced the first test release of the upcoming Linux 4.11 kernel...

If all goes according to plan, Linus Torvalds will have announced the first release candidate of the upcoming Linux 4.11 kernel before the day is through. The Linux 4.11-rc1 release also marks the end of the feature merge window for this kernel cycle. So with that said, here is a look at the new features of the Linux 4.11 kernel that I have been covering through closely watching the Git repository and mailing list over the past two weeks.

Intel's "SWR" software rasterizer living within Mesa now has support for OpenGL geometry shaders...

For fans of the Ada programming language, id Tech 4 / Doom 3 is being rewritten by an open-source enthusiast in this structured, statically-typed language...

Linux 4.11 is worthwhile in that it's bringing ALC1220 audio support, the codec used by many Ryzen (and Intel Kabylake) motherboards, but this next kernel version doesn't appear to change Ryzen's performance...

The WebAssembly efforts so far have been centered around making use of the LLVM compiler infrastructure, but now there are patches for providing partial WASM support atop the GNU toolchain...

With the rest of the RadeonSI shader cache support landing in Mesa, I have carried out some benchmarks to measure the impact of this on-disk GLSL shader cache not only for the performance of games but also the reduced load-times.

Alan Griffiths of Canonical has announced the release of MirAL 1.3, Mir's abstraction layer to ease bringing up new environments under Mir while providing a stable ABI...

Curious how Ryzen scales across its CPU cores and SMT? Here are some Ubuntu Linux benchmarks testing a Ryzen 7 1700 with different core/thread counts.

Emil Velikov has announced the first point release to last month's big Mesa 17.0 release...

Version 3.2 of the Postfix mail transfer agent is now available...

Chris Mason has sent in a secondary pull request of Btrfs material for the Linux 4.11 merge window...

Intel's set to enable atomic mode-setting by default with code slated to land for the Linux 4.12 kernel...

Besides recent Intel graphics hardware making use of firmware binary blobs now for the GuC/HuC functionality, Intel audio hardware continues in making use of firmware binary-only blobs for audio support...

For those looking for some interesting weekend reading, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has provided a lengthy write-up about what happened in Munich with regards to LiMux and the possibility of abandoning their Linux/open-source efforts in favor of going back to Microsoft Windows...

Submitted earlier in the Linux 4.11 merge window were the big ARM SoC and platform changes for this next kernel version while some last-minute ARM changes have just arrived...

Yesterday we posted launch-day Ryzen 7 1800X Linux benchmarks that were particularly appealing for multi-core / heavily-threaded workloads like code compilation. Given all the code compilation done by Linux users in particular, if you were intrigued by the Ryzen 7 1800X performance but find the $499 USD price-tag to be too higher, today I have my initial benchmark figures on the Ryzen 7 1700. The Ryzen 7 1700 is still eight cores and sixteen threads but will only set you back $329 USD as the current low-end Ryzen processor for what's currently available.

Wine 2.3 is out as the latest bi-weekly development snapshot...

Yesterday on top of the main Ryzen 7 1800X Linux benchmarks and the follow-up Linux gaming benchmarks, I also posted some extra Ryzen benchmark results and encouraged Phoronix readers to compare their own system's performance to our data using our open-source, automated benchmarking framework...

Soft/emulated ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 support for GPUs not natively implementing double-precision/FP64 support is getting close in Mesa...

The latest in our AMD Ryzen Linux benchmarking is looking at the impact of compiled binaries when making use of Zen "znver1" compiler optimizations with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) compared to other optimization levels like Bulldozer and K8-SSE3.

Today marks the release of KDE's new Kube 0.1 project, the first tech preview (pre-production) release of this experimental Kontact based on Qt Quick and Akonadi-Next...

Al Viro has called for the new statx system call to be added to the Linux 4.11 kernel...

LLVM 4.0 remains running behind schedule but the third release candidate is now available for testing with hopes of shipping this updated compiler stack in the next week or so...

One week after sending in the main power management and ACPI updates for the Linux 4.11 kernel, Rafael Wysocki has served up a second batch of feature updates for this next kernel version...

Taking things further than the recent landing of the TGSI on-disk shader cache for this Gallium3D IR, Timothy Arceri at Valve has landed his support for a RadeonSI driver on-disk shader cache...

For those craving some Linux gaming benchmarks from the newly-released AMD Ryzen 7 1800X processor, here are some test results. In this initial comparison are benchmarks of the Ryzen 7 1800K to Core i7 7700K when running these processors at stock speeds while using a Radeon R9 Fury graphics card paired with AMDGPU+RadeonSI for the Linux graphics driver stack.

Adam Jackson has announced the release of X.Org Server 1.19.2 and users are encouraged to update to this latest point release...

Back in 2011 was the glorious announcement that AMD would support Coreboot with its future CPUs. Sadly, a lot has changed at AMD over the past half-decade, and there isn't any Coreboot support to find today for Zen/Ryzen...

Assuming you have already checked out this morning's Ryzen 7 1800X Linux benchmarks, here are some more data points while putting the finishing touches on the Ryzen 7 Linux gaming benchmarks being published later today...