Phoronix

Making the rounds this weekend online as a "new" ARM Mali open-source driver is what we wrote about back in June as A New Mali-400 Open-Source Graphics Driver Is In Development...

The digital artists working on the Blender 3D modeling software have released a new benchmark file for stressing CPUs and GPUs by rendering an advanced scene...

Topi Pohjolainen of Intel has been working on adding proper FP16/half-precision support to Mesa's GLSL code...

Building off the work by Mario Kleiner, AMD developer Marek Olšák has been working on 10-bit color visual support within Mesa/Gallium3D...

Intel UMIP support landed in Linux 4.15 as part of the x86 updates. User-Mode Instruction Prevention is for preventing certain instructions from being executed outside of ring level zero and will be supported by future Intel CPUs. Support for UMIP within the KVM virtualization space though will have to wait until Linux 4.16...

Wine 2.22 is now available as the latest development release of this program to run Windows games/applications on Linux and other operating systems...

For those using the NVIDIA 387 "short-lived" driver series, the 387.34 release is now available with just three changes noted...

The Oracle developers behind VM VirtualBox have released a new maintenance build in the VirtualBox 5.2 series that is a bit more exciting than their usual point releases...

While Canonical abandoned their work on the Unity desktop environment in favor of the Unity-inspired customized GNOME Shell that debuted in Ubuntu 17.10, some within the community have remained interested in maintaining Unity 7 and even getting it into an official spin/flavor of Ubuntu...

For those that may be looking at purchasing an AMD Threadripper this holiday season, especially with the recent price drops, here are some fresh memory tests on the Threadripper 1950X while running Debian GNU/Linux.

Not only is AMD Stoney Ridge audio (finally) being supported by the Linux 4.15 kernel, but it also looks like Raven Ridge audio should now be working too...

Normally I don't bother mentioning new Linux kernel point releases on Phoronix unless there are some significant changes, as is the case today with Linux 4.14.2...

While the massive AMDGPU DC infrastructure has been merged for Linux 4.15, the flow of improvements to this display code continues and it looks like the next few kernel cycles at least could be quite busy on the AMD front...

While Mesa 17.3 is imminent and should be released as stable within the next few days, Mesa 17.2.6 is being prepped for release as the current point release...

There are a lot of reasons to love Munich from Augustiner to the wiesn and Bavarian culture, but their leading use of Linux / open-source software via their LiMux initiative that began in 2003 is no more...

It's the Christmas shopping season and in the US there is Thanksgiving and the Black Friday and Cyber Monday events... Here's a Phoronix Premium special and a few reminders...

A Mozilla engineer has put out a prototype library in working on the Vulkan Portability Initiative for allowing low-level 3D graphics support that's backed by Vulkan / Direct3D 12 / Metal...

Earlier today I wrote about the experimental HTML5 Wayland compositor. While that may be more like an experimental toy at this point, for those wanting to run GTK3/GTK4 applications within a web-browser, there's the longstanding Broadway HTML5 back-end to the GTK tool-kit. Broadway received a number of significant improvements for GTK4 today...

Intel's SA-00086 Detection Tool has Linux support and will confirm whether your system is vulnerable to the recently published Management Engine (ME) security issues...

Besides a lot of NVDEC code landing for the next FFmpeg release, there's also been a number of OpenCL improvements that were just committed to this multimedia library's codebase...

Earlier this year we covered the Westfield project as Wayland for HTML5/JavaScript by providing a Wayland protocol parser and generator for JavaScript. Now that code has morphed into Greenfield to provide a working, in-browser HTML5 Wayland compositor...

Canonical developers working on the Mir display server want feedback from the community about the direction Mir should pursue in the future now that it's getting basic Wayland support in place...

Currently if plugging in the HTC Vive for a virtual reality experience on Linux, the head-mounted display (HMD) is treated just as a conventional display. But now with a new set of changes for Linux 4.15, the kernel will know it's a "non-desktop" display...

Updated firmware files for the command processor (CP) on AMD Polaris graphics cards have landed in linux-firmware.git...

While the Radeon RX Vega discrete graphics cards are making use of the ultra-fast HBM2 memory, it appears the newly-launched AMD "Raven Ridge" APU featuring Zen CPU cores and Vega graphics is not using HBM2 memory...

The TrueOS BSD folks working on their Qt5-powered Lumina Desktop Environment have issued a new feature update of their open-source desktop...

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon has been enjoying its time on Linux 4.15. In addition to the recent boot time tests and kernel power comparison, here are some raw performance benchmarks looking at the speed from Linux 4.10 through Linux 4.15 Git...

Earlier this month the FFmpeg project landed its initial NVDEC NVIDIA video decoding support after already supporting NVENC for video encoding. These new NVIDIA APIs for encode/decode are part of the company's Video Codec SDK with CUDA and is the successor to the long-used VDPAU video decoding on NVIDIA Linux boxes. That NVDEC support has continued getting into shape...

The Qt Company has issued Qt 5.9.3 as the latest tool-kit update in the Qt 5.9 Long-Term Support series...

With AMDGPU DC having been merged a few days ago for the Linux 4.15 merge window, it's now possible to run the Radeon RX Vega graphics cards with display support using the mainline kernel without having to resort to using a patched/third-party kernel build or using the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver. Here are some tests I have carried out with the Radeon RX Vega 56, RX Vega 64, and other graphics cards from Linux 4.15 Git compared to a few NVIDIA GPUs.

Free software developer Roderick Colenbrander has made public his Wine-Vulkan repository that he is using to stage his work around better Vulkan support within Wine...

With GCC 8 feature development over and onto bug fixing, here is a look at some of the changes to find with the GCC 8 compiler stack that will be released as stable early next year in the form of GCC 8.1...

While LibreOffice Calc for a while now has been offering OpenCL support for speeding up spreadsheet computations, with not all drivers/GPUs supporting OpenCL, this Microsoft Office alternative is finally receiving proper multi-threading support...

Following in the steps of Ubuntu 17.10 dropping 32-bit desktop images and other Linux distributions also lessening their focus on 32-bit support, OpenMandriva has issued its final i586 release...

In addition to looking at system boot times from Linux 4.6 to Linux 4.15, while doing this kernel testing session on the Lenovo ThinkPad I also took some battery power consumption measurements...

If you are looking out for a SATA 2.5-inch HDD/SSD to USB3 adapter, the Sabrent EC-SS31 is quite simple, works with Linux, supports USB 3.1, and retails for about $10 USD...

Phoronix Test Suite 7.6 Milestone 3 is now available as the last planned development release ahead of the stable debut of 7.6.0-Alvdal...

If you are using the NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver and anxious to try out the Linux 4.15 kernel for its many new features/improvements, unfortunately you will need to wait a few days as the current public driver is broken against this latest code...

Marek Olšák's latest project has been adding support for multi-context applications to the Gallium3D Heads-Up Display (HUD)...

Last week we presented our initial benchmarks of the Intel Optane SSD 900P on Linux and it offers mighty performance potential for those using I/O heavy workloads thanks to the use of 3D XPoint memory. But is a solid-state drive like this really worth the price if you are just a Linux gamer? Here are some tests comparing load times and boot times between a HDD, SATA 3.0 SSD, NVMe SSD, and this 3D XPoint NVMe U.2 SSD.

It's been a while since last doing any Linux boot speed comparisons while this morning I have some numbers to share when looking at the boot performance from the Linux 4.6 kernel through Linux 4.15 Git to see how it's changed over time,..

After apologizing how they handled the EGLStreams proposal for NVIDIA Wayland support, James Jones of NVIDIA is trying to get the development of their proposed generic device memory allocator library back on track...

Here are some early AMD Radeon Linux gaming benchmarks using the in-development Linux 4.15 kernel. Unfortunately, there are a few performance regressions...

Intel continues bringing up support for the 2019 Icelake processors within the open-source compiler toolchains...

Just days after David Airlie landed R600g image shader support and other patches for this Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 series open-source driver, he's enabled support for another GL4 extension...

As some additional work past the KVM changes for Linux 4.15 submitted last week, a few more feature items have been queued...

Of the many changes coming for Linux 4.15, as detailed this weekend Radeon GPU and AMD CPU customers have a lot to be thankful for with this new kernel update currently in development. Here are some initial benchmarks of the Linux 4.15 development kernel using an AMD EPYC 7601 32-core / 64-thread setup...

Here's our latest Linux distribution comparison with this time looking at the out-of-the-box performance of six Linux distributions while running a range of enterprise/workstation-focused benchmarks while using two systems. One system is a high-end Core i9 7980XE desktop system and the other a Tyan 1U Xeon Scalable server with dual Xeon Gold 6138 processors.

The Mesa 17.3 release game is in overtime but it should be wrapping up in the days ahead...

If you have been wanting to build a new system before the end of the year, AMD Ryzen CPU prices -- including the high-end Threadripper -- have been dropping in recent days in at least the US and EU...