Phoronix

Adam Jackson of Red Hat has sent out the patches implementing support in Mesa/Gallium3D for two of the extensions mandated by OpenGL 4.6 that are currently not exposed by this open-source driver stack...

The GSoC student developer working on "Brooklyn", the protocol-independent chat bridge for KDE systems and written in Java, has declared his project a success. In ending out the GSoC summer work, he has released Brooklyn v0.2 and has deemed it ready for production use...

Last week were the benchmark results showing how the open-source Radeon Linux driver is becoming increasingly competitive with NVIDIA's driver and is very competitive OpenGL-wise with the Radeon Software Windows driver. Here are some more NVIDIA and Radeon benchmarks today under Linux with each vendor's latest drivers using sixteen different graphics cards.

Gurkirpal Singh is the student developer working this summer on porting Gallium3D's OpenMAX state tracker to Tizonia from the outdated Bellagio base. As the summer quickly comes to an end, he's been making progress on getting things in order...

Connor Abbott who has been working for Valve over the summer on the RADV Vulkan driver sent out one of his last patch series before going back to school: VK_AMD_shader_ballot for RADV. This extension paired with other work allows DOOM on Wine to run through an AMD-optimized Vulkan code path...

Last month we reported that Raptor was planning to launch a new POWER workstation and now they have revealed their system specifications and pre-order details...

Btrfs isn't the only Linux file-system taking some heat but the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) is now having a tough week with three CVEs going public...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) made another round of decisions on Friday concerning Fedora 27 and the future...

Mozilla's Firefox 55 web browser is now deemed stable while Firefox 56 enters beta and Firefox 57 is the new nightly build...

Broadcom developer Eric Anholt has written another weekly blog post summarizing his work on the VC4 driver stack as well as the new VC5 driver code-base...

This morning I was on a call with AMD and they are now able to confirm they have reproduced the Ryzen "segmentation fault issue" and are working with affected customers...

Epic Games has pushed out Unreal Engine 4.17, which is exciting for Linux gamers especially thanks to Vulkan renderer improvements...

Last week AMD developers landed experimental NIR support inside RadeonSI as ultimately a step towards ARB_gl_spirv support for this OpenGL Gallium3D driver in being able to re-use the NIR/RADV code-paths. I decided to take the experimental NIR support through a spin to see if it impacted various titles at this point...

I was curious this weekend how Mesa's development was trending this summer so yesterday I ran some fresh GitStats on the growing Mesa code-base...

For those wondering what Valve Linux developer Timothy Arceri has been working on with KHR_no_error settling down and the like, he still is striving towards faster GLSL compilation times to in turn speed up Linux game loading performance...

The third release candidate for the upcoming Mesa 17.2 stable release is now available...

Bas Nieuwenhuizen and David Airlie have been landing several RADV Radeon Vulkan driver fixes into Mesa Git in recent days...

At last week's annual GUADEC GNOME developer conference, the state of the GTK4 tool-kit was a hot discussion item...

The Linux 4.13-rc4 kernel is now available for testing...

SQLite 3.20 was released earlier this week with many improvements to this widely-used, embedded database library...

The SilverStone Petit PT13 is the case manufacturer's smallest mini-ITX chassis with a volume of just 1.4 liters. I picked up the PT13 recently for housing the NVIDIA Jetson TX2 and it's been working out well.

LLVM 5.0 and its sub-projects like Clang 5.0 are due to be released in two weeks, so here's a look back at the features added to this innovative open-source compiler stack over the past half year...

While this year's Google Summer of Code isn't done for a few more weeks, the Piper mouse control user-interface for libratbag has now seen all of its major features completed...

Released this week was the shiny new glibc 2.26 GNU C Library with the notable new feature being the per-thread cache for malloc...

Valve developers Andres Rodriguez and Timothy Arceri have landed their enablement of EXT_memory_object and EXT_memory_object_fd within Mesa 17.3-dev Git...

The second beta is now available for the upcoming PHP 7.2, which will be officially released at the end of November...

Google's Chrome/Chromium web-browser has now enabled support by default for OpenType Variable Fonts...

Red Hat's David Malcom has posted a series of patches for implementing third-party static analysis support within the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)...

In direct continuation of yesterday's article about easily causing segmentation faults on AMD Zen CPUs, I have carried out another battery of tests for 24 hours and have more information to report today on the ability to trivially cause segmentation faults and in some cases system lock-ups with Ryzen CPUs.

EFL 1.20 is now available as the newest version of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries...

Fans of the BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system will see a lot of work going into the open-source OS over the summer...

Zstd (also known as Zstandard) is a lossless data compression developed by Facebook that has been open-source since last year. This BSD-licensed compression algorithm aims to offer compression similar to zip/gzip but with faster speeds both for compression and decompression. Facebook developers are now looking at adding this support to the Linux kernel...

Git 2.14 is now available as the latest feature update to this widely-used, open-source revision control system...

Debian developers are evaluating whether to continue producing "Debian Live" images or not. Should they go away, there would no longer be a Live DVD/CD/USB environment to try out the operating system short of going through the Debian Installer process...

Following my recent Windows 10 WSL CPU scaling benchmarks to see how well Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux for running native Linux binaries compared to various distributions, I did a comparison of Ubuntu and openSUSE on WSL compared to running these distributions bare metal.

The mystery around the future of Solaris, ZFS, and SPARC continues with Oracle reportedly letting go of more developers and other staff members...

NVIDIA is ending out the week with their first release candidate of CUDA 9...

With running a number of new Ryzen Linux tests lately, a number of readers requested I take a fresh look at the reported Ryzen segmentation fault issues / bugs affecting a number of many Linux users. I did and still am able to reproduce the problem...

Nouveau developers continue working to support the GeForce GT 1030 "GP108" graphics processor that unfortunately is lagging behind the other Pascal GPUs in their open-source NVIDIA driver coverage...

Intel developer Jason Ekstrand has posted a set of patches for implementing the Vulkan VK_KHR_external_semaphore extension within the open-source "ANV" driver...

Khronos' glTF 2.0 standard for the "OpenGL transmission format" or a standardized means of exchanging 3D assets continues seeing wide adoption. From Microsoft demonstrating glTF 2.0 support in their products this week at SIGGRAPH to many programs and game engines picking up support for this format, Godot Engine is now the latest...

It's been a while since last having anything to report on the OpenChrome project for providing open-source Linux graphics support for vintage VIA x86 graphics hardware. But it's still going and what is one of the only contributors left on the project has issued an update...

Oracle has pushed into public beta their first snapshot of the upcoming VirtualBox 5.2 virtualization software...

The massive set of AMDGPU "DC" (formerly "DAL") display code has been re-based against their work-in-progress Linux 4.14 DRM code and is residing in amd-staging-drm-next...

Facebook developers have released HHVM 3.21 as their alternate PHP implementation that also powers their Hack programming language. HHVM 3.21 is a long-term support release that will make it maintained for nearly one year...

At the end of July AMD began shipping the Ryzen 3 entry-level Zen processors. While it may not be as exciting as a 16-thread Ryzen 7 or Threadripper, the Ryzen 3 1200 and Ryzen 3 1300X offer surprising value with being quad-core parts priced at just above $100 USD. With Linux users especially craving multi-core systems if running Arch or other distributions where you are frequently compiling your own packages, the Ryzen 3 CPUs can make for a low-cost but practical Linux system. Here are my initial benchmarks of these first two Ryzen 3 processors.

Coming one day early off their bi-weekly Friday release cadence, the Wine 2.14 development release is now available...

Officially out today is Ubuntu 16.04.3 as the newest point release for this Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) release...

DragonFlyBSD 4.8.1 has been released by Justin Sherrill with various minor updates -- particularly for Intel DRM graphics and other kernel improvements -- over the recent v4.8 milestone...

There has been some mixed messages by Ubuntu developers in recent weeks about the default GNOME Shell session planned for Ubuntu 17.10 and whether Wayland would be used. The latest is that Wayland-by-default is still on...