Phoronix

As some more end-of-the-year Linux benchmarks, here are OpenCL Darktable and Blender benchmarks when testing on thirteen different NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

Building off last week's Wine 2.0-RC2 milestone is now an updated Wine-Staging with various experimental/testing patches...

For users of the Network File System, there are more NFS client updates coming in the Linux 4.10 kernel...

Back in February marked the launch of XCOM 2 for Linux and while it was possible to get the game working with RadeonSI Gallium3D, just ahead of Christmas there is a new update from Feral Interactive providing official support for Mesa/AMD graphics...

The Document Foundation today announced MUFFIN, a new user-interface concept for LibreOffice...

So far this year on Phoronix I have written more than 3,400 articles on open-source and Linux. Of all the events this year, which were my favorite? Here's my favorite announcements and milestones for Linux and free software in 2016...

A few months back the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the PIXEL desktop environment that is used in future versions of the Raspbian Linux distribution for the Raspberry Pi ARM SBCs. Now though they've decided to spin Debian and PIXEL for x86 systems...

While the DRM feature updates for Linux 4.10 were already sent in and integrate the AMDGPU improvements for the next kernel release, a fixes pull request sent in now gives more hope for GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" users wanting to run AMDGPU...

In case you plan to do any video editing for your 2016 holiday videos and are deciding between the different open-source non-linear video editors, OpenShot 2.2 was released this morning as a sizable feature update...

Version 6.3 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has been released as scheduled...

The Go Series, made up by Hitman Go, Lara Croft Go, and Deus Ex Go, are a series of puzzle games by Square Enix. While Hitman Go and Lara Croft go are available on all platforms, Deus Ex is limited to iOS and Android...

The Nmap Network Mapper security scanner program has done a holiday release "in case your Christmas break plans involve a lot of port scanning."..

QEMU 2.8 is now available as a significant update to this important piece of the Linux virtualization stack...

A huge series of patches landed in Mesa Git today for benefiting the Gallium3D Nine state tracker for Direct3D 9 support on Linux...

The latest installment of our year-end benchmarks is focusing upon the performance of the NVIDIA Linux driver against the open-source Radeon Vulkan (RADV) driver found within Mesa 13.1-dev. This comparison is particularly interesting given the continuous flow of improvements into Mesa Git, the NVIDIA 375.26 driver release from last week, the big Dota 2 7.00 update debuted earlier this month, and Croteam's Vulkan improvements have rolled into TTP stable.

RISCVEMU is a RISC-V system emulator designed by the talented developer Fabrice Bellard. This RISC-V emulator supports RISC-V to the extent it can boot the Fedora spin for this architecture...

While Chromebook / ChromeOS fans have been looking forward to the Kabylake-based "Eve" device, it looks like another device is possibly forthcoming making use of these latest-generation Intel CPUs...

It's not as exciting as seeing a massive patch series arrive for like the OpenGL shader cache or other key features, but Collabora's Timothy Arceri sent out a set of 70 patches today providing some clean-ups and bug fixes for Mesa...

Reproducible builds have been a big theme in particularly the last year or two with being able to verify the binaries offered by open-source projects are bit-for-bit the same against the same set of sources. With the latest Coreboot work, all of their generated images are now reproducible from source...

There's an AMDGPU Linux branch in development for supporting HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection) security and the PSP (Platform Security Processor)...

A wonderful Christmas present this year for Fedora users is the release of DNF 2.0 and it's joined by the DNF-PLUGINS-CORE 1.0 release...

There's a new version of The Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux before closing out 2016...

It's not as exciting as seeing a brand new Linux game port released before the holidays, but for those hoping to do some Linux gaming over Christmas, the Realm of the Wood Elves DLC is now available...

The open-source VC4 driver stack with DRM/KMS driver and Gallium3D driver for the Raspberry Pi hardware continues stepping closer to feature parity with the original binary blob graphics driver, particularly when it comes to mode-setting related functionality...

Following last week's Btrfs / EXT4 / XFS / F2FS benchmarks using the Linux 4.6 through 4.9 kernels, some requests came in for doing some fresh Btrfs mount option comparison benchmarks. Thus for your viewing pleasure ahead of the holidays are some Btrfs mount option tests with the Linux 4.9 kernel.

Google developers today pushed a bunch of their Chrome on iOS code into the upstream Chromium Git repository...

An Intel developer has sent out the latest version of his patches for implementing the Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) protocol support for the Linux kernel...

Patches were published today for supporting "Polaris 12" graphics cards within the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver on Linux...

Since Nintendo's Switch game console launch powered by the NVIDIA Tegra we have suspected they were making use of Vulkan as the graphics API, particularly with Nintendo joining The Khronos Group, now it's been pretty much firmed up...

This past weekend I published a number of year-end 2016 AMD Linux benchmarks on a wide-range of AMD GPUs going back many generations while using the Linux 4.9 kernel on Ubuntu along with the Mesa 13.1-development code for having the newest open-source Gallium3D drivers. Those results were very interesting and go check them out now if you haven't done so already. For this article is a sub-set of those tests carried out again while monitoring the AC power consumption, GPU temperature, and CPU utilization while also automatically calculating the performance-per-Watt.

The Radeon Open Compute platform has been updated and quietly released prior to the weekend. The ROCm 1.4 release comes with preliminary OpenCL support...

For users of libav, the latest development code now supports hardware-accelerated HEVC/H.265 video decoding with the Video Acceleration API (VA-API)...

While Matthias Clasen is usually busy working on GTK+, improving GNOME Wayland support, and other core engineering tasks, recently he's been working on a new GNOME application: GNOME Recipes...

Peter Hutterer has an early Christmas present for users of libinput on mobile devices with touchpads: much-improved touchpad acceleration...

I now have my first dead NVM Express SSD and it only lasted one week... It's already time to RMA the Samsung 960 EVO and unfortunately lost a number of benchmarks that I was working on this weekend...

While the CryENGINE 5.x game engine is supported on Linux, to date their sandbox editor isn't compatible with Linux but it looks like eventually there could be said support...

A few days ago I wrote about HID improvements for Microsoft's Surface 3/4 tablets coming with Linux 4.10 while now there is additional driver work landing to benefit the Microsoft Surface 3 2-in-1 computer...

In addition to big end-of-year AMD Radeon Linux benchmarks and the forthcoming NVIDIA data points among other interesting EOY comparisons, there is also ongoing fresh Intel Linux benchmarks as we end out 2016. For your viewing pleasure today are the latest Intel OpenGL vs. Vulkan Linux benchmark results using last week's Dota 2 7.00 game release...

During last month's SuperComputing 2016 conference in Salt Lake City was the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure in HPC workshop being hosted for its third year. The slides from that event were recently made available and one of the talks interesting me the most was about the state of Clang OpenMP offloading, including for GPUs...

There is an early GNU Christmas with the release of GNU Hurd 0.9 joined by GNU Mach 1.8. Yep, another rare released update to Hurd...

There are two noteworthy pieces of KDE news as the weekend comes to an end...

Bas Nieuwenhuizen has reached another big milestone in the RADV project that's the unofficial open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux. As of this weekend, Bas has compute queues working with this Vulkan driver...

It's sad that DOOM hasn't seen a native Linux port with id Software having a falling out with Linux in recent years, particularly after they were acquired by ZeniMax. But fortunately there is now a patch for being able to run DOOM with Wine...

With 2016 soon drawing to an end, it's time for all of my year-end recaps now of Linux drivers that I have been doing for the past 12 years. Today are benchmarks of a wide assortment of AMD graphics cards on both R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers when using Mesa 13.1-dev + LLVM 4.0 SVN and the Linux 4.9 kernel for providing a bleeding-edge look at the open-source AMD Linux graphics performance across hardware going from the Radeon HD 4890 series all the way up through the RX 480 and R9 Fury hardware. Here's a fun look at the OpenGL driver performance across this range of GPUs.

The subject of remote Wayland displays with hardware-acceleration is again back to being talked about, this time initiated by the developer of VirtualGL...

In recent days there have been a few Phoronix readers inquiring why I am not testing with my Radeon R9 290 graphics card in all our frequent comparisons and driver benchmarks. The short story is that the regression since Linux 4.7 remains and for my Radeon R9 290 and others with select Hawaii graphics cards, there still is a performance regression. Though over Christmas I hope to finally find the time to bisect it...

Well this weekend is exciting for AMDGPU users and open-source AMD fans. Yesterday was the news we published about Valve looking to improve AMDGPU/RADV for their Vulkan-based VR experience while the latest is work from AMD that implements GPU virtualization support within the AMDGPU driver...

Takashi Iwai submitted all of the sound driver updates on Wednesday for the Linux 4.10 kernel. Intel Skylake audio continues to be refined but there is also a lot of other hardware driver work...

The PCI subsystem updates for the Linux 4.10 merge window were sent in a few days ago...

The promising VK9 project for implementing the Direct3D 9 API over Vulkan continues progressing and has hit its sixth milestone just ahead of Christmas...