Phoronix

While NX bit has been around for many years with AMD64 for marking page tables as no-execute or not, the DragonFlyBSD kernel is now only making use of it...

After Linus Torvalds was upset about the DRM pull request for Linux 4.11, the deadlines of new feature changes for the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) code targeting Linux 4.12 is being strictly enforced...

The monthly status report on the BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system reveals their latest efforts...

More and more recently we have found ourselves talking about Mir's abstraction layer, MirAL. It turns out that this set of interfaces to Mir has advanced from being a hobby project by a Canonical developer to now being a formal project within the organization and more of Unity 8 is making use of MirAL's API/ABI...

Over the past few days I have posted some RX 480 tests and R9 Fury OpenGL/Vulkan tests for the new AMDGPU code slated for Linux 4.12. I've also carried out some R9 285 "Tonga" tests and happy to report seeing some performance gains there too...

For getting April started, here is a fresh comparison of various BSDs and Linux distributions tested on an Intel Core i7 6800K Broadwell-E box. Tested operating systems included Antergos, Clear Linux, DragonFlyBSD 4.8, FreeBSD 11.0, Scientific Linux 7.3, TrueOS 20160322, Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS, and Ubuntu 17.04 20170330.

Just as planned, Mesa 17.0.3 was released this weekend...

Apple has been the largest customer of Imagination Technologies with continuing to rely upon PowerVR graphics IP in their chips, but it looks like that is changing and Apple could be rolling out their own GPUs...

Last week when writing about the release schedule for GNOME 3.26, one of the first questions was about what features are coming to this next installment of the GNOME desktop...

As reported last month, KDE's speech recognition software is being revived and released today is a new development release...

If you have never made use of Linux's perf subsystem, it can provide some valuable insight to what is slowing down your game/application...

Following last month's ioquake3 security issue, the project has been reassessing their state of security and could use some help on that front as well as other matters...

ARM has open-sourced a new compute library with GPU support via OpenCL as well as CPU support with NEON usage. This library has basic arithmetic functions but also goes further to offer color manipulation, convolution filters, SVM, SGEMMs, convolutional neural network building blocks, and more...

Linus Torvalds has just announced the fifth weekly RC test release to the upcoming Linux 4.11 kernel...

A Phoronix reader pointed out that last month Google developers landed some significant multi-threading performance improvements into their official VP9 video encoder...

On Friday I posted some early AMDGPU benchmarks of the DRM-Next code slated for Linux 4.12 using a Radeon RX 480 "Polaris" graphics card. As some additional reference points, here are some Linux 4.10 vs. 4.11 vs. (4.12; DRM-Next) code with an R9 Fury "Fiji" graphics solution...

It looks like the recent Linux game releases of DiRT Rally, HITMAN, and Civilization VI along with the debut of SteamVR for Linux was enough for Linux gamers to fire up their Steam clients in March...

For those interested in a fancy dock for your desktop if trying to make it look perhaps more like macOS, the developers behind Now Dock and Candil Dock have joined forces to create a new dock solution called Latte Dock. Today marks the first release of this Qt/KDE-focused Latte Dock offering...

An independent developer wrote a message on the Wayland mailing list this weekend how Wayland should "move away from C." While Rust is all the fun these days to those looking towards a "safer" programming language, it was suggested Wayland be re-implemented in Haskell...

A few days ago I wrote about Inputfd as a new Wayland protocol proposal for better supporting gaming devices. Peter Hutterer who drafted the proposal has now released a larger overview on this proposed addition...

Intel has queued changes for their GVT-g graphics driver stack for Linux 4.12, allowing some improvements around their newly-mainlined graphics virtualization tech support for running VMs with accelerated graphics capabilities...

Matthias Clasen on Friday released version 3.90.0 of the GTK+ tool-kit...

It's been more than one year since an update to Xonotic, the open-source first person shooter formerly from Nexuiz, but that changed today with the v0.8.2 release...

For student developers wishing to look for an interesting summer project while being paid by Google, the GSoC application deadlines are on Monday, 3 April. Sadly, the X.Org/Wayland/Mesa turnout so far for applicants are very low...

AMD's Ryzen launch was hands-down the most popular topic for Linux enthusiasts and gamers reading Phoronix in March...

Keith Packard recently released a blog post covering changes he's making to DRM/X for VR head mounted displays to better support them as part of his working with Valve and wanting to ensure these virtual reality headsets don't get in the way of window managers and allow VR apps/games to directly interface with them. He's published another update to his work...

For those interested in the NixOS Linux distribution built off the Nix package manager, the 17.03 release is now available...

Croteam has done the full release of Serious Sam VR: The First Encounter, taking it out of early access...

With the big Radeon/AMDGPU pull request having been accepted into DRM-Next, here are some early tests of this new AMDGPU DRM code to premiere in Linux 4.12...

The Khronos Group is ending out March by releasing Vulkan 1.0.46...

Yesterday game porter firm Feral Interactive released a public beta of Mad Max that features a Vulkan renderer in place of its OpenGL API for graphics rendering on Linux. In addition to Radeon Vulkan numbers, I posted some NVIDIA Mad Max Linux benchmarks with both renderers. Those results were exciting on the few Pascal cards tested so I have now extended that comparison to feature a line-up of 14 NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards from Kepler, Maxwell, and Pascal families while looking at this game's OpenGL vs. Vulkan performance.

Wine 2.5 is now available as the newest bi-weekly development release of Wine...

Earlier this week I posted some Ryzen 7 1800X DDR4 memory scaling Linux tests now that MSI pushed out an updated BIOS for that X370 motherboard that allows running the system at higher -- but still rather limited -- DDR4 memory frequencies. Here are some similar tests with my Ryzen 7 1700 and a B350 motherboard...

The latest RadeonSI OpenGL extension work done by AMD developer Nicolai Hähnle is on the useful ARB_shader_ballot extension...

For those enjoying the Total War games on Linux, Total War: WARHAMMER II was announced today and it looks like it will receive Linux support...

Unity 5.6 is now available as the last feature release for this cross-platform game engine in the Unity 5 series...

It's been fun benchmarking Vulkan vs. OpenGL with Mad Max, Feral's first Linux game port featuring a beta Vulkan renderer. With the Radeon benchmarks and many NVIDIA Pascal tests yesterday an Intel Core i7 Kabylake CPU was used while for this article is a Mad Max run with AMD's Ryzen 7 1800X.

With the upcoming Linux 4.11 kernel release there is better support for Intel Turbo Boost Max 3.0 after originally it didn't look like this feature would be available for Linux. Under Linux 4.11, my Core i7 6800K + MSI X99A WORKSTATION box is now working with "ITMT" enabled, so here are some quick benchmarks...

One of the many new features for the upcoming Qt 5.9 is an OpenVG renderer for hardware acceleration on some embedded platforms that lack OpenGL capabilities...

The Kdenlive video editor project in the KDE camp has published a new status update concerning the health of the project...

SQLite 3.18 is now available as the newest feature release to this open-source embedded database library...

After entering public beta last November, X-Plane 11 is now officially available...

As reported yesterday, the Radeon RX Vega AMDGPU code was staged for pulling into DRM-Next along with other features that amount to 398,656 lines of new code in the kernel. David Airlie has honored that pull request and that feature work is now residing in DRM-Next...

Linux input expert Peter Hutterer of Red Hat has published a draft proposal for a new Wayland protocol simply dubbed Inputfd...

Version 2.3 of the OpenShot open-source non-linear video editor is now available for all supported platforms...

Hours ago I posted some RADV vs. RadeonSI results on Mad Max which showed much progress for this first Feral Interactive Vulkan Linux game while the NVIDIA results do show much more impressive performance capabilities with this new graphics API. Here are some of my initial NVIDIA GeForce results for OpenGL vs. Vulkan with Mad Max on Linux while additional tests are on the way.

It's been a while since last having any Phoronix meet-ups due to not really traveling in the past few years due to various constraints, but next month on business will be available for a Russian Phoronix reader meet-up...

Alex Deucher has submitted a big pull request to DRM-Next for additional Radeon and AMDGPU updates for DRM-Next...

Earlier this week NVIDIA quietly released a new version of their Vulkan beta driver for Windows and Linux...

Feral Interactive today released their first Linux ported game into public beta that features a Vulkan renderer. Mad Max on Linux now supports Vulkan and OpenGL, making for some fun driver/GPU benchmarking. Up first are some Radeon RX 480 and R9 Fury Vulkan vs. OpenGL benchmarks for Mad Max when using Mesa 17.1-dev Git.