Phoronix

David Airlie has managed to figure out some crucial fixes for improving the support of Radeon GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" and GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" hardware with this open-source Vulkan driver...

Linus Torvalds has just announced the fifth weekly release candidate of the upcoming Linux 4.13 kernel...

A little bit late but the beta for next month's GNOME 3.26 is now available for testing...

Ending out the weekend, the KDE crew has released Frameworks 5.37 as the collection of complementary components to Qt5...

GNOME's annual developer conference, GUADEC, wrapped up earlier this month in Manchester. The videos are now available for those that were unable to attend this Linux desktop event...

Intel engineers continue tuning the Sandy Bridge scheduler information within the LLVM compiler infrastructure...

One of the many successful Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects this year by student developers is the work done on Piper, the new GTK3 user-interface for configuring gaming mice under Linux via libratbag...

Those wishing to do some database testing this weekend can try out PostgreSQL 10's third beta update, which was released earlier this week...

Today's guide looks like it should be useful to many of you for How To Setup Your Linux System For The Radeon RX Vega. If you are planning to carry out those instructions this weekend or in the next few days, you may want to add in a few extra Mesa patches...

Student developer Gurkirpal Singh has sent out his OpenMAX "Tizonia" Gallium3D state tracker patches for review by upstream Mesa developers, marking a successful GSoC 2017 project...

Yesterday the embargo expired on showing you the Radeon RX Vega hardware, both the Vega 56 and Vega 64. While the embargo for sharing reviews and performance benchmarks for the Radeon RX Vega doesn't expire until tomorrow (Monday) when the hardware will become available, today I am providing a brief how-to guide for setting up both drivers (AMDGPU+RadeonSI and AMDGPU-PRO) for the RX Vega 56 / 64. So if you are hoping to buy a Radeon RX Vega tomorrow when they become available, this is what you can do today for getting your system(s) ready.

The fourth weekly release candidate of Mesa 17.2 is now available for testing...

This week I ended up receiving the Radeon RX Vega 56 and Radeon RX Vega 64 from AMD. While the embargo on performance figures for the Radeon RX Vega series doesn't expire until Monday, the embargo expires this morning for "unboxing" these consumer Vega cards. I don't quite get those interested in the unboxing hype, but the Radeon RX Vega 64 box did get me smiling (aside from the card itself) for a small gesture.

Mir 1.0 might be close to being released for Ubuntu 17.10, but it doesn't yet have Wayland support...

Vulkan-CPU, the GSoC-born project to basically create a Vulkan software renderer, has begun implementing a graphics pipeline...

Those not regularly using Coreboot may have not realized that it didn't yet have UEFI support, but now it does...

If you have extra time this weekend, you may be interested in watching videos from DebConf17, the annual Debian Developers' conference...

Separate from the AMD Ryzen performance marginality problem affecting Linux users, BSD users have been working on a workaround for their kernels to address problems with how their user stacks are mapped...

Feral Interactive is soliciting requests for what Linux game ports you would like to see from this British game porting firm...

Due to delays in the Fedora 26 release pushing it back by more than one month, the Fedora 27 schedule is rather tight with the change completion deadline having already been earlier this month and the Fedora 27 branching from Rawhide taking place in four days...

Latte Dock, the popular desktop dock powered by Qt5 for KDE systems, is out with a shiny new feature release...

For those drawn by the performance of AMD's Ryzen processors for its performance/value and thinking about building a Kodi/HTPC media box for the living room, a Steam Linux gaming PC / DIY Steam Box, or just want a small form factor PC, Gigabyte's AB350N-GAMING WiFi is a mini-ITX motherboard that plays fine with Linux and offers a lot of functionality for its small size.

A Phoronix reader allowed me to access his Radeon Vega Frontier Edition system when checking on the ROCm OpenCL benchmark and uploaded the data to OpenBenchmarking.org...

Initial enablement of the ARMv8.3-A architecture changes are now in place for the LLVM compiler infrastructure...

For those into real-time tactics video games or titles themed around World War II, Sudden Strike 4 is launching today and Kalypso Media has made good on their word for day-one Linux support...

A few days back I wrote about an open-source Vulkan renderer coming for Doom 3, yes, the classic id Software video game. That Vulkan renderer for the id Tech 4 engine is now available...

It's considered pre-alpha quality so most of you will probably want to avoid it, but those wanting to easily test out the early Qt 5.10 state at least now have a binary package...

For those thinking of switching to the new multi-queue block layer, a.k.a. blk-mq, be forewarned that there are still some regressions outstanding...

The second release candidate has been tagged for the upcoming LLVM 5.0 release...

For those that haven't been following the development of Sway, it's an i3-compatible Wayland compositor that works with existing i3 configuration files and continues supporting the latest Wayland functionality...

The GNOME Shell 3.25.90 release is available today which serves as its v3.26 beta...

The long-awaited Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) work for the Linux kernel may be a step closer to mainlining now that Nouveau patches are in the works for this functionality as part of a seemingly new compute effort for this open-source NVIDIA driver...

While the Radeon RX Vega line-up hasn't even been officially launched yet, AMD's GPUOpen initiative has already made public the instruction set architecture (ISA) of Vega...

AMD's embargo has just expired on the Threadripper performance figures. The Windows numbers at least are very positive...

With earlier this week having delivered our very latest NVIDIA GeForce vs. Radeon OpenGL/Vulkan graphics benchmarks, I have now finished up the very latest OpenCL Linux compute numbers for both vendor's graphics cards on their latest drivers. Radeon cards were tested with their latest ROCm packages on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS while on the NVIDIA side was their long-lived 384.59 driver release.

Those running openSUSE's Tumbleweed rolling-release Linux distribution now have an easier means of maintaining the NVIDIA binary driver on the system...

While TrueOS (formerly PC-BSD) is arguably the most well known desktop variant of FreeBSD, GhostBSD has been gaining ground as well as a FreeBSD-based desktop-friendly operating system. Today marks the availability of GhostBSD 11.1 Alpha...

For those running Ubuntu or one of its derivatives that have been wanting to play with AMDGPU's DC "display code" functionality but can't be bothered to build the branched code, here's a fresh kernel build...

Miguel de Icaza announced today that the Mono Project has been exploring ways to bring Mono to the web using WebAssembly...

Just a quick PSA for NVIDIA binary Linux driver users wishing to play with the latest development kernel.....

The first release candidate of Oracle's Java JDK 9 is now available for testing...

It's looking almost certain that AMDGPU's display code (a.k.a. "DC" and "DAL") will not be merged for the next Linux 4.14 cycle, but work on this massive display code-base is progressing and 120 more patches were published today...

While the June launch of Intel's X-Series processors took the attention with the top-end Core i9 7900X Skylake-X and Core i7 7740X Kabylake-X processors, coming in several hundred dollars less than the i9-7900X is the i7-7820X, which still packs a very hard punch. We have now received a Core i7 7820X for Linux testing at Phoronix and are beginning with a round of benchmarks on Ubuntu.

An id Software programmer is expected to soon release his port of Doom 3 BFG to the Vulkan renderer rather than OpenGL...

Valve dropped a teaser overnight on finally a new, original game... Artifact. They describe it as a "Dota card game" for those interested...

Here are my latest Ethereum Ethminer benchmarks for those interested in mining this cryptocurrency using OpenCL on AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce GPUs...

While we await the Mir 1.0 release with its new target of supporting Wayland clients directly, we noticed there was a re-licensing change this week for the Mir code-base...

Building off last week's Wine 2.14 feature update is now a re-based version of Wine-Staging that also tacks on a few extra features...

GParted, the widely-used GNOME/GTK Partition Editor for Linux systems, is out with a new release and is joined by an updated GParted Live, the live CD/USB Linux distribution for editing your partitions/file-systems...

Bryce Harrington has just tagged the Wayland 1.14 update that is joined by the Weston 3.0 reference compositor release, which is seeing another major version bump due to API/ABI breakage compared to the previous Weston 2.0 release cycle...