With Linux 4.11.0 being released as soon as this weekend, here's a look back at the changes I found most exciting about this next kernel feature release...
With the Mesa 17.1 branching now having happened plus in prepping for Radeon RX 500 series Linux graphics benchmarks this week, for your viewing pleasure now are tests on nine different AMD GCN GPUs under a range of Linux gaming tests when using the 4.11 kernel and Mesa 17.1 Git trees. NVIDIA comparison results will follow plus planned RX 560/580 Linux benchmarks.
GLVND is the NVIDIA-led effort for the new "Linux OpenGL ABI" or basically the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library to allow multiple OpenGL drivers to happily co-exist on the same system. Mesa's existing GLVND support has been limited to GLX while now there is EGL support...
Independent Mesa contributor Edward O'Callaghan has posted some early patches for supporting the OpenGL ARB_parallel_shader_compile extension in Mesa...
In early April AMD released the AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 driver as their first hybrid proprietary driver update in some time. With this update came support for Ubuntu 16.04.2 (and also 16.10, unofficially) but to little surprise it doesn't work out-of-the-box with this week's Ubuntu 17.04 release. But it can be made to work...
With Mesa 17.1 branching this weekend I figured it would be a fun Easter running benchmarks of Mesa Git compared to previous branches with a Radeon RX 470 Polaris graphics card. Here are these Mesa 17.1 benchmarks while other tests and on more GPUs is forthcoming.
Over the years we have seen many mobile/smartphone focused Linux efforts come and go from OpenMoko, Moblin/MeeGo, webOS, Firefox OS, and most recently Ubuntu Touch while others like Sailfish OS and Plasma Mobile appear to be somewhat stagnate or at least not gaining much marketshare nor advancing rapidly. But what if more of these mobile Linux efforts were to collaborate on a common base? There's a new effort being worked on in this area...
The UBports community are among those planning to fork the work on Unity 8 and they've already made ambitious plans like porting Unity 8 to Wayland. More details were revealed today...
Intel's Jason Ekstrand has posted 21 new Mesa patches for adding the VK_KHX_external extensions to their ANV Vulkan driver. He believes the patches are now ready for merging and plans to land them for what will become Mesa 17.2...
Not to be confused with the KDE Elisa music player written about just two weeks ago as a new alternative to Juk, Amarok, Cantata, and other KDE music/media player projects, the latest effort is called Babe...
Debian developers are preparing for the final phase of the development freeze on Debian 9.0 "Stretch" and it's looking like the official release might not be too far out...
Last week we reported on Intel Cannonlake patches for their DRM kernel driver while published today were patches for bringing up the next-generation Intel graphics within Mesa...
TrueOS developers continue working on their Lumina Desktop Environment and coming up soon is the v1.3 release of their Qt5-powered desktop environment...
Ahead of the planned branching and release candidate of Mesa 17.1 in just hours, Rob Clark has landed some last minute work for the Freedreno Gallium3D driver that provides open-source support for Qualcomm Adreno hardware...
One of the immediate requests that usually comes in with each new Ubuntu release is a comparison of the Linux gaming performance when trying out the different desktop options. From yesterday's Ubuntu 17.04 release, here are Steam Linux gaming tests with Budgie, GNOME Shell, KDE Plasma 5, MATE, Unity 7, and Xfce4 when using an AMD Polaris graphics card on the RadeonSI driver stack.
Next week AMD is expected to roll-out the updated Polaris graphics cards in the form of the Radeon RX 550, RX 560, RX 570, and RX 580 series. The Linux drivers should be ready...
For those excited by yesterday's Wine 2.6 release with D3D CSMT as the long-awaited command-stream multi-threading to boost game performance, don't get your hopes too high with this release...
If you read enough Phoronix, you know that Mesa and the Linux kernel's DRM graphics drivers continue advancing at a remarkable pace, especially in recent times. Thus if you were an Ubuntu 16.10 user but planning to upgrade to Ubuntu 17.04, here are some benchmark results showing the performance improvements you can expect with the Radeon/AMDGPU DRM and RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. Plus there are also some results when using the Oibaf PPA on Ubuntu 17.04 to show what more performance can be tapped by switching to Mesa 17.1-dev.
Facebook developers have put out their latest release of HHVM to empower this PHP interpreter as well as what powers their Hack programming language...
Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 was released today alongside the other Ubuntu 17.04 flavors, but for those wondering what's happening to Ubuntu GNOME now that Ubuntu 18.04 will use GNOME with Unity being dropped, the Ubuntu GNOME flavor is winding down...
While Intel's Beignet is a terrific project especially when it comes to being a leading open-source OpenCL implementation that works with OpenCL 2.0 on GPUs (something that can't be said for Radeon with its open-source OpenCL stack consistently lacking and Nouveau not really being usable either), the sad part of it is that Beignet is consistently slow in supporting new versions of LLVM...
Ubuntu mirrors are now live with the final builds of 17.04 "Zesty Zapus" for those wanting to upgrade to this latest six-month release of Ubuntu Linux...
This week Unigine Corp released the much anticipated Superposition benchmark and it's a darn beautiful OpenGL 4.5 Linux-friendly graphics test. But, sadly, didn't have any Vulkan rendering option...