Phoronix

The first release candidate for Wine 2.0 is now available and marks the start of the code freeze ahead of this next stable Wine release...

With the Linux 4.10 kernel merge window expected to open this weekend, I was digging around to see whether there was anything new on the BUS1 front and whether we might see it for the next kernel cycle...

Jonathan Riddell has announced the KDE Neon User LTS Edition availability. Rather than tracking the bleeding-edge KDE developments as KDE Neon traditionally does, the User LTS Edition tracks Plasma 5.8 LTS...

For those curious how the latest open-source AMDGPU+RadeonSI driver code is comparing to yesterday's AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 release, here are some fresh OpenGL Linux driver benchmarks from a few AMD graphics cards.

Released yesterday was the newest build of vkQuake, the open-source game project developing a Vulkan renderer for the original Quake game based upon the QuakeSpasm code-base...

Waking up this morning I was pleasant surprised to see that OpenBenchmarking.org has now served over 21 million test profile and test suite downloads via the Phoronix Test Suite! As of writing there have been 21,011,121 downloads!..

This week's news of Qualcomm sampling a 10nm 48-core ARMv8 SoC for servers made me wonder where are AMD's ARM SoCs -- and the long-awaited development boards -- and thus been following up with a few sources this week...

There have been some new commits to Google's Chromium code-base this week worth pointing out...

Intel developers are working on "five level paging" to overcome the x86_64 limitation of 256 TiB of virtual address space and 64 TiB of physical address space. While you may not have that much memory in your desktop, that limitation is being hit but can be increased through 5-level paging...

A nine-year-old Mesa bug has now been squashed by Marek Olšák. This Mesa bug ended up affecting the RadeonSI driver and causing stability issues, which has now been addressed and should help open-source AMD Linux gamers run titles like Team Fortress 2 and Batman Arkham: Origins (Wine)...

While AMD developers have been working to improve their "DAL" (now known as "DC") display code for the better part of the past year and this code is needed for new hardware support as well as supporting HDMI/DP audio on existing AMDGPU-enabled hardware plus other features, it's still not going to be accepted to the mainline kernel in its current form...

Google has announced the release of the Chrome 56 beta and it comes with a good amount of changes...

This morning's AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 preview included some 16.40 vs. 16.50 hybrid driver benchmarks, but for those wondering how 16.50 compares to Mesa 13.1-dev for RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan, here are some preliminary tests for the two current Vulkan AAA Linux games...

AMD ran into a snag getting out the updated proprietary hybrid Linux driver stack this morning, but it's now available for download from AMD...

Toward the end of November was a discussion that started about potentially dropping all of the FBDEV Linux kernel drivers that are currently in the staging area, but it doesn't look like that will go through, at least until the relevant hardware has seen basic DRM driver ports...

While it was disappointing that Fedora 25 shipped with Mesa 12.0, the Mesa 13.0 version has now been sent down as a stable release update...

AMD developers sent out a "request for comments" of their Display Core (DC, formerly known as DAL) code-base that they are hoping to merge soon as it's needed for the bring-up of future GPU support. It looks like they will initially merge the code just for the yet-to-be-released GPUs and will then gradually switch it on for currently supported Radeon GPUs...

The embargo has just expired on the Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition release, which had leaked out a few days ago elsewhere. While Crimson ReLive Edition is a big update for AMD Windows users, on the Linux side there's less to talk about but it's still a rather big release. I've been testing the AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 release the past two weeks and overall it's a sizable update for those using this hybrid AMD Linux driver.

There is a new DRM driver merged into DRM-Next for the Linux 4.10 merge window...

David Airlie is prepping the latest round of work to the open-source RADV Radeon Vulkan driver...

Bruno Friedmann has announced the end to AMD proprietary driver fglrx support in openSUSE while also announcing they don't plan to support the hybrid proprietary AMDGPU-PRO stack either...

Prolific Gallium Nine developer Axel Davy has published a massive patch-set today implementing support for internal multi-threading in this Direct3D 9 state tracker...

The Xen Project Hypervisor 4.8 release was announced today as their first to be done off a six-month release cycle. There is a lot of ARM work in Xen 4.8 but also a lot of other enhancements...

The Bluetooth SIG today announced the core specification release for Bluetooth 5...

While Chrome 55 has JavaScript async/await support, the Firefox support isn't coming until the Firefox 52.0 stable release in March while currently it's available in the latest Firefox Developer Edition and early alpha builds...

SIGGRAPH Asia 2016 is happening this week in Macau and it's from that event where yesterday they announced their new VR initiative. The Khronos slides from their presentation are now available plus another VR company has already become a member of The Khronos Group for helping to push this new, open, cross-vendor VR standard...

With now having netperf in the Phoronix Test Suite as well as iperf3 for the latest open-source benchmarks in our automated cross-platform benchmarking framework, I couldn't help but to run some networking benchmarks on a system when trying out a few different Linux distributions and BSDs to see how the performance compares. The operating systems ran with these networking benchmarks included Debian 8.6, Ubuntu 16.10, Clear Linux 12020, CentOS 7, and Fedora 25. The BSDs tested for this comparison were FreeBSD 11.0 and DragonFlyBSD 4.6.1.

Qualcomm announced this morning they have begun sampling the world’s first 10nm server processor...

With more laptops abandoning DVD drives, USB-based flash drive installers being well supported and widely-used, and CD/DVDs just being far less popular these days, Fedora developers are discussing the future of the official status for optical images in future Fedora releases...

The rumor is back that Intel and AMD have reached a deal for future Intel CPUs to be paired with integrated AMD Radeon graphics...

With the Linux 4.9 kernel expected for release this coming weekend, here is a recap of some of the most interesting changes for this next big kernel release...

Intel's Mesa driver has wired in support for two more OpenGL extensions not part of an official OpenGL specification release. These two new extensions are supported for Skylake and newer...

It is arriving a few weeks late, but the latest over-the-air update to Ubuntu Touch is now available for the select Ubuntu phones and tablets this holiday season...

Mesa developers are discussing the idea of removing the Intel "ILO" Gallium3D driver from Mesa since it hasn't been maintained in a while and provides only limited functionality...

There is yet another new Linux kernel vulnerability being disclosed today that allows for unprivileged processes to gain kernel code execution abilities...

NVIDIA has released a major new version of their Linux Graphics Debugger for helping game developers and others wishing to optimize OpenGL 4.x workloads on a variety of Linux distributions...

The latest patches for the AMDGPU DRM driver's DC code -- what was previously known as DAL -- have been published and they reduce the size of the code-base some more...

It's been a while since publishing any fresh Intel Core i7 5775C benchmarks, the socketed Broadwell CPU with Iris Pro 6200 graphics, since normally it's busy in the daily benchmarking churn of the server room for Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org / LinuxBenchmarking.com efforts. But with having been doing some maintenance on that system this week and loading a clean install of Ubuntu 16.10, I did some fresh benchmarks of the Iris Pro 6200 graphics using Mesa 13.1-dev and Linux 4.9, including a look at the OpenGL vs. Vulkan performance for the Iris Pro graphics.

For those looking toward the next maintenance release of GCC 6, the GNU Compiler Collection 6.3 is aiming to be out by Christmas...

The Khronos Group is going public this morning with a call for participation of companies that are not yet Khronos members but looking to join a new initiative: developing a new, cross-vendor VR standard to allow for better virtual reality interoperability of hardware devices, game engines, and more...

For those following the development of the Raspberry Pi VC4 open-source graphics driver stack, more progress continues on bringing up various features...

Overall the Nouveau DRM updates for Linux 4.10 are significant after they missed out on any feature changes for Linux 4.9. Given all the churn, there's been a last minute pull into DRM-Next of some more fixes and other minor activity...

There have been some rare updates today to the xf86-video-intel X.Org driver, including the addition of the PCI IDs for supporting next year's Geminilake hardware...

The latest change request coming in for Fedora 26 is to update the default C/C++ compiler flags...

Phoronix Test Suite 6.8.0 is now available as the latest version of our open-source, fully-automated, reproducible benchmarking software for Linux, BSD, Solaris, macOS, Windows, and other operating systems...

Version 0.98 of the GNOME-aligned GStreamer-powered Pitivi non-linear video editor was tagged today as the newest development milestone...

NVIDIA has confirmed that their next proprietary driver update for Linux will introduce support for Vulkan rendering outside of the X.Org Server...

Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller has offered some statistics about the Fedora 25 launch to date and is proposing some possible changes to release scheduling for the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution, including the possibility of moving to doing one major release per calendar year...

Just as a quick follow-up to adding Netperf to the Phoronix Test Suite, the iperf3 client is now available as an additional networking benchmark via PTS...

Hans Wennborg has laid out plans to release the LLVM 4.0 (and Clang 4.0, along with other LLVM sub-projects) toward the end of February...