Phoronix

This past week Valve brought SteamVR on Linux into public beta. With watching the constant hype around VR on Windows, I was quite excited to finally give VR a try with having lined up an HTC Vive for testing and currently Oculus or others not offering current Linux support. I was thinking that I would have some large GPU/driver comparisons and such completed this weekend, but once actually setting up the hardware and software, I realized that wasn't going to be feasible in such short time. So for those interested in the Linux VR space, here are some of my first impressions and why I would consider the current SteamVR more like an alpha release than beta, just yet another struggle Linux gamers face, and another obstacle to overcome if Linux is to be a more serious competitor to Windows in the gaming space.

It's been a while since hearing anything out of the Linux From Scratch (LFS) camp, but this weekend they announced the release of LFS 8.0 as well as Beyond Linux From Scratch (BLFS) 8.0...

LLVM/Clang 4.0 are running a few days behind schedule but should be released in the very near future. With that said, here's our usual look at the new features of this next compiler infrastructure and C/C++ compiler front-end updates...

The Allwinner DRM driver added in Linux 4.7 continues to be worked on and one of the latest efforts by the open-source community is on enabling Allwinner Display Engine 2.0 "DE2" support...

Thomas Rini of the Konsulko Group presented at this week's Linux Foundation Embedded Linux Conference (ELC2017) about the state of U-Boot...

Wayland 1.13 was released this week along with Weston 2.0. In announcing v1.13, Bryce Harrington also laid out plans for Wayland 1.14...

The second release candidate to the upcoming NetBSD 7.1 is now available for testing...

The Linux Foundation's annual Embedded Linux Conference happened this past week in Portland, Oregon. Of interest to Phoronix readers are a few of the graphics-related talks that happened...

For those curious how Ubuntu 17.04 is shaping up, considering this week was the "beta" release for participating flavors, I decided to take a fresh Ubuntu 17.04 x86_64 daily ISO and see how its performance compares to Ubuntu 17.10, Clear Linux 13600, Antergos 17.2, and openSUSE Tumbleweed.

Last year there was a Google Summer of Code student working on a library to implement double-precision operations (FP64) in pure GLSL 1.30 as a benefit to older GPUs not having native FP64 capabilities. While that work didn't materialize as a solution in 2017 for those wanting "soft" ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 for being able to potentially expose OpenGL 4.0 on more R600g era GPUs, the work is ongoing...

Several years back we wrote about Ultra Kernel Samepage Merging (UKSM) for data de-duplication within the Linux kernel for transparently scanning all application memory and de-duping it where possible. While the original developer is no longer active, a new developer has been maintaining the work and continues to support it on the latest Linux kernel releases...

Systemd 233 is expected to be released in the days ahead and as usual it's packing new features and various additions...

Better support for Intel Turbo Boost Max 3.0 are among the changes to find with the platform-drivers-x86 updates for the Linux 4.11 kernel...

Last month an independent contributor to the AMD Linux graphics stack posted AMDGPU patches for HDMI Stereo 3D support within this open-source Radeon DRM driver. Those patches were rather dismissed in part because they didn't implement the support along the new DAL/DC display code-paths, but that has now changed...

Junio Hamano announced on Friday the release of Git 2.12.0...

OpenRISC continues advancing with its sights on being a free and open processor for embedded systems using the RISC instruction set architecture...

The MD pull request was submitted on Friday for the Linux 4.11 kernel as were the Btrfs file-system changes...

Wayland 1.13 was released earlier this week but the adjoining Weston compositor update didn't happen at the same time due to some last minute changes needing more time to test, but this Friday, Weston 2.0 is now shipping...

A few days ago I posted some results of surprise performance improvements for a Radeon RX 470 when testing the DRM-Next code queued for Linux 4.11. I've now tested that kernel on more systems and can confirm at least benefits more widespread for RADV's Vulkan performance.

When posting last week our Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Radeon benchmarks and Windows vs. Linux NVIDIA Pascal benchmarks and then the Windows vs. Linux relative performance analysis, as usual, it didn't take long for some to argue that the Linux gaming performance is actually faster but "Unity 7 is slower" and the similar FUD that is usually waged whenever looking at cross-platform performance.

Last December we wrote about work being done on fuzzing OpenGL shaders leading to wild differences with the work being done at the Imperial College London. While they were testing other drivers on different operating systems, they have now fired up tests of Mesa...

Chances are if you are using a NVIDIA GeForce graphics card and planning to game on Linux you are using NVIDIA's official Linux driver, but in case you are trying to use the free software Nouveau driver stack, I tried running Feral's recent HITMAN game release with this open-source NVIDIA driver...

A mix of Qt5, Vulkan, Android on AArch64, and a NVIDIA Shield TV with Tegra X1 SoC sounds like a fun weekend for those wanting to experiment with the latest Qt tool-kit possibilities in development...

While Linus Torvalds yesterday was criticizing the DRM code quality using colorful language and threatening not to accept the DRM changes for Linux 4.11, he ended up merging the code to mainline...

Arnd Bergmann has submitted the big batch of ARM hardware changes for the Linux 4.11 kernel merge window...

With the addition of over two thousand lines of code, GStreamer's video-convert code within gst-plugins-base is now properly multi-threaded...

This week marks the 17.01.0 final release of the Linux Embedded Development Environment (LEDE). They also presented at this week's Linux Foundation Embedded Linux Conference about their project that's a fork of OpenWRT and aims for router/embedded use-cases...

The TTY/serial patches were mailed in earlier this week by Greg KH for the Linux 4.11 kernel merge window. Normally this isn't a pull request with much interest from us as it's generally not too interesting, but this time around it introduces a new bus...

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes have arrived for the Linux 4.11 kernel and there is a lot of them with over 200 commits and the introduction of new features for many of the supported architectures...

David Airlie submitted the main DRM driver updates for the Linux 4.11 kernel, but Linus Torvalds isn't happy about the code quality of a new addition and is considering not accepting the DRM changes for this next kernel release...

Ubuntu derivatives opting to do so have issued their 17.04 "Zesty Zapus" Beta 1 releases tonight...

Serious Sam VR: The First Encounter has been put into public beta today by Croteam for those interested in Linux VR gaming...

While hearing "ASPM" may still scare some of you from the Linux kernel power management woes of a few years ago, ASPM PCI-E L1 PM substate support is coming to Linux 4.11 to hopefully help with power savings for idle PCI Express devices...

Fedora is slowly getting ready for sending the Linux 4.10 kernel down the pipe to supported stable releases of its distribution...

Intel's "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver has landed the support for enabling MSAA compression...

Takashi Iwai has submitted the sound subsystem updates for the Linux 4.11 kernel with most of that work happening in the audio driver space...

On Wednesday the RadeonSI/R600g shader cache landed for on-disk caching of TGSI IR while one day later the caching is already being expanded and may soon be enabled by default...

With the competitive RadeonSI vs. NVIDIA performance for HITMAN on Linux there have been some Premium reader requests for also taking a look at the CPU/RAM usage and other vitals while running this latest Feral game port on the different GPUs/drivers...

The JavaScript engine performance wars are not over with Google preparing to make some significant changes to their V8 JavaScript engine used by Chrome and friends...

Jerome Glisse and others have been working on the rather cool Heterogeneous Memory Management support for the Linux kernel going back several years. While Jerome hoped to see HMM merged for Linux 4.11, it will be sitting out at least one more cycle...

With Radeon R9 Fury X graphics cards, their integrated red LEDs will now light-up according to the load of the GPU...

Dmitry Torokhov has submitted the input feature updates for the Linux 4.11 kernel merge window...

While SHA1 is still much better off than MD5, developers really should think about moving to SHA256 or other crypto hashes with Google now demonstrating the first SHA1 collision...

LLVM 4.0 was supposed to have been released by now, but it's running late due to open blocker bugs...

TinyDRM has been queued in DRM-Next for landing with the in-development Linux 4.11 kernel...

Peter Hutterer announced the first release candidate on Wednesday for the upcoming libinput 1.7.0, the input handling library that's widely-used by Wayland / X.Org / Mir systems...

For those interested in the Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system project, a brief status update was posted today...

The Qt Company today announced the much-anticipated release of the Qt 5.9 Alpha...

While DRM-Next hasn't even been submitted yet for the Linux 4.11 merge window, I ran some benchmarks today of an AMD Radeon RX 470 graphics card comparing Linux 4.10.0 to the current DRM-Next state...

Timothy Arceri who has been working on the Mesa on-disk shader cache for months and most recently began working for Valve on the AMD Linux driver stack has landed support in Mesa 17.1-devel for the GLSL/TGSI on-disk shader cache for the R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers...