Phoronix

Yesterday I wrote about initial Nouveau open-source acceleration for GeForce GTX 1050/1060/1070/1080 GPUs and now the signed firmware images needed for pairing with that code are readily available...

Razer co-founder and CEO Min-Liang Tan has shared plans to improve their Linux support, at least when it comes to their Blade laptops...

The day many of you have been waiting for is finally here: AMD Zen (Ryzen) processors are shipping! Thanks to AMD coming around at the last minute, I received a Ryzen 7 1800X yesterday evening and have been putting it through its paces. Here is my walkthrough of the Linux experience for the AMD Ryzen and new motherboard and a number of the initial Linux benchmarks for this high-end Zen CPU while much more coverage is coming in the hours and days ahead.

GNOME 3.23.91 was released this morning by Matthias Clasen. With this GNOME 3.24 Beta 2 release there is an API/ABI freeze, feature freeze, UI freeze, and string freeze...

DiRT Rally is the latest game from Feral Interactive that has launch-day open-source AMD graphics support, a welcome improvement from the past. Thanks to the ever maturing state of the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and Feral's increased Radeon testing, there is good out-of-the-box Radeon support for this AAA racing game on Linux.

Intel's ANV Vulkan driver in Mesa Git has picked up support for two more extensions of this week's big Vulkan update...

Just weeks after bringing HITMAN to Linux, Feral Interactive this morning has released another high profile game ported from Windows: DiRT Rally. DiRT Rally is now available for Linux gamers interested in a fun racing game. I've been benchmarking their Linux port the past few days and have both Radeon and NVIDIA results to share for launch-day. Here are fourteen NVIDIA GPUs tested with DiRT Rally on Ubuntu Linux.

Adoption of the Linux 4.10 kernel going strong with not only Ubuntu Zesty and Intel's Clear Linux already having pulled it in, among other rolling releases, but openSUSE Tumbleweed is also now too riding off Linux 4.10.1...

If you are interested in embedded Linux development but missed out last week's Linux Foundation event in Portland, the videos are now available online...

Valve has put out their Steam survey results for February 2017 and show another drop in the estimated Linux gaming market-share...

Croteam has pushed yet more Vulkan improvements into The Talos Principle as they prepare to bring Vulkan and Linux support to their other titles this year...

Lennart Poettering has announced the release of systemd 233...

Last week I posted Benchmarks Of Ubuntu 17.04 Beta vs. Antergos, Clear Linux, openSUSE Tumbleweed. Those results were interesting and as usual Clear Linux had led many of the benchmarks due to Intel's investments into highly optimizing this Linux distribution for the maximum out-of-the-box performance. For curiosity sake, I ran some fresh benchmarks of Ubuntu 17.04 daily vs. Clear Linux on another test system and have those results to share...

Collabora developer and longtime X.Org/Wayland contributor Daniel Stone has written a blog post detailing some of the recent and ongoing projects being led by the consulting firm when it comes to open-source graphics...

Emil Velikov has announced the availability today of the Mesa 17.0.1 release candidate...

NVIDIA released their new Vulkan beta driver on Monday to support the new Vulkan 1.0.42 extensions but that ended up breaking the SteamVR Linux support, which relies upon Vulkan. NVIDIA has now corrected this support...

The patches are now out there for having initial accelerated support in the Nouveau DRM driver for the GeForce GTX 1050/1060/1070/1080 series "Pascal" graphics cards. The signed firmware is being released and will allow these consumer graphics cards to now have hardware-accelerated support via the open-source driver...

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) will see new features introduced with the Linux 4.11 kernel...

NVIDIA did their much anticipated unveiling last night at GDC of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card as "the fastest gaming GPU ever."..

February 2017 was rather exciting for Linux enthusiasts with the big Vulkan update ahead of GDC, some fresh Windows 10 vs. Linux benchmarks, AMD Ryzen on the horizon, Intel Kabylake providing lots of testing fun, and other open-source advancements...

The latest and last planned development release of Phoronix Test Suite 7.0-Ringsaker is now available for your cross-platform, open-source benchmarking needs...

Valve developer Andres Rodriguez has posted a set of 22 patches for supporting high priority scheduling within the AMDGPU kernel driver...

The WebAssembly project that's the cross-browser effort for low-level programming for in-browser client-side execution has reached a major milestone today. WASM can allow compiling C/C++ among other languages down into code supported by Firefox, Chrome, WebKit, and Edge...

In preparation for Ryzen tests coming up in the near future, I've been running some fresh benchmarks across a range of Intel and AMD x86_64 Linux systems. For those curious about the current performance of Ubuntu 17.04 daily with the Linux 4.10 kernel, here are benchmarks from 14 of the systems.

Unity Technologies had their keynote this morning at GDC 2017 where they talked about the plans for their game engine this year...

By now you probably know that X.Org's security is in bad shape and routinely new security issues are uncovered and that's the case today...

The open-source Haiku OS inspired by BeOS has made much progress this month on several fronts...

Genode OS 17.02 has been released today as the latest version of this open-source operating system framework...

I've been testing out SteamVR on Linux with the HTC Vive the past few days. From my time spent and trying out various graphics cards with Destinations, Dota 2, and Serious Sam VR: The First Encounter, my impressions is that for this Linux VR beta at least a GeForce GTX 1070 or GTX 1080 is really needed for good performance.

The X.Org Foundation has been once again accepted as a mentoring organization for this year's Google Summer of Code. Yes, the X.Org involvement in GSoC isn't limited to just the xorg-server but also covers Mesa, Wayland, and other involvements...

It's going on five years since there was the call for deprecating FBDEV within the mainline Linux kernel and various ongoing efforts to get more drivers to making use of the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) rather than FBDEV. But with Linux 4.11, FBDEV still remains in place...

David Airlie sent in another pull request of DRM material for Linux 4.11, which follows last week's main DRM feature update for Linux 4.11...

In celebrating their five-year milestone, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced their latest product: the Raspberry Pi Zero W...

Thanks to the work done in part by Fedora, Arch Linux has enabled in testing support for the GLVND-enabled Mesa that can happily co-exist alongside the NVIDIA proprietary driver...

Now that Vulkan 1.0.42 is public and it contains the extensions needed for SteamVR on Linux, the RADV changes are now public...

Now that Google has proven SHA1 as unsafe, Ubuntu's Mir display server developers were quick to abandon its usage in favor of SHA256...

Now that Vulkan's external memory patches are now public with today's Vulkan 1.0.42 big update, the Intel ANV open-source Vulkan driver is getting ready to roll out their support for their new extensions...

According to Purism's Youness Alaoui, their Coreboot port to the Librem 13 v1 laptop is now considered complete...

While most are focused on the OpenXR VR announcement from The Khronos Group as well as the new Vulkan extensions, less people seem to be talking about their call for participation around a new "3D Portability Initiative", which if it succeeds could be a win for Linux gamers and others...

For many months now there has been vkQuake as a port of Quake 1 to Vulkan while now there is a port of that pulling in SteamVR support...

We are now through week one of two for the Linux 4.11 kernel merge window. I've already written a number of news posts this past week covering features I find interesting for Linux 4.11. If you are short on time and behind in your Phoronix reading, here's a quick overview of the material so far for this next major kernel bump...

The Khronos Group not only is shipping Vulkan 1.0.42 with many new extensions for this week's GDC but the embargo just expired on even more exciting announcements!..

LLVM's LLD linker still isn't too widely used yet on Linux systems, but the performance of this linker alternative to GNU Gold and GNU ld are quite compelling...

The "GDC Vulkan update" has arrived with a number of new extensions!..

OpenBenchmarking.org has turned six years old while in June is when Phoronix.com will celebrate its 13th birthday and the Phoronix Test Suite has its 9th birthday...

The NV_dedicated_allocation extension that is one of the Vulkan extensions needed by Valve's SteamVR on Linux, has now been enabled within mainline Mesa for the RADV driver...

AMD's Ryzen CPU is finally shipping in a few days! If you are planning to be an early adopter of AMD Ryzen processors, you will really want to be running a newer Linux kernel release for proper support and performance...

The GNU Linux-libre 4.10 kernel was released last weekend just after the official Linux 4.10 kernel release while I hadn't noticed the de-blobbed kernel release until today. The Linux-libre folks continue to criticize the open-source GPU DRM drivers as being offenders for using binary blob firmware/microcode...

Back in November we saw patches for wiring in PRIME support to the RADV Vulkan driver and last week rewritten RADV PRIME code was released while this weekend it has landed in Mesa Git...

The out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system has been updated for the Linux 4.10 kernel...