Phoronix

Mesa release manager Emil Velikov announced the availability today of Mesa 12.0.5, just another point release and what he expects will be the last of the Mesa 12.0.x releases...

With the GCC 7 compiler having entered its stage three, feature development is basically over so it's a great time to begin running more benchmarks of this big compiler update that will be officially released as GCC 7.1.0 in early 2017. Up today are benchmarks of the latest GCC 7.0 development snapshot compared to GCC 6.2 and GCC 5.4 on an Intel Core i7 6800K Broadwell-E system running Ubuntu 16.10.

This week I provided a look at some of the interesting Vulkan engines/renderers on GitHub created by the community in the months since the Vulkan unveil. After that article forum goers and those on Twitter shared some other promising Vulkan projects worth looking at too if you are just looking for some Vulkan demos to watch, learn more about the Vulkan API yourself, etc...

In addition to Red Hat's Benjamin Otte working on a Vulkan renderer for GTK4's GSK, he's also been working on a big refactoring of the OpenGL code that's now been merged to master...

Following SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as being available in a 64-bit edition catered to the Raspberry Pi 3, openSUSE developers have now released a 64-bit image of Leap 42.2 for the RPi3...

A Vulkan back-end is in development for GNOME's GTK's tool-kit new GTK Scene Kit (GSK) code...

As pointed out by this week's LLVM Weekly, the LLVM Linker (LLD) received a rather nice performance optimization this past week...

It's been quite a while since last having anything to report on the KDE Calligra open-source graphics/office suite while surprisingly this morning it was pleasant to see Calligra 3.0 tagged for release...

For fans of Netperf or just looking for another networking benchmark to add to your arsenal, the netperf client can now be automated and run via the Phoronix Test Suite...

There was too much churn in the mainline Linux kernel Git tree that Linus Torvalds today released 4.9-rc8 rather than declaring Linux 4.9 as ready to ship...

Last week I shared some 2016 Holiday Gift Ideas For Linux Enthusiasts, Gamers. Since then more ideas came to mind with other interesting tech gift ideas, particularly for Linux/open-source enthusiasts, as well as other favorite gadgets and interesting devices I've come across in the past year. So here are some more ideas of stocking stuffers and other fun purchases for the holidays...

The iRulu BL20 is a low-cost projector 1080p/HD projector that supports a projection distance up to six meters, dual built-in speakers, and a screen size up to 200 inches. Retailing for about $165 USD, this isn't a high-end projector but is rather decent for the price. Here's a quick write-up about my experience with this budget projector.

There have been many small GitHub projects the past several months aspiring to be a good, open-source Vulkan game engine, but many of them don't tend to see commits too often or don't come close to realizing their dream. In my usual weekend "fun" of digging through GitHub looking for fascinating Vulkan projects of interest, I decided to provide a quick overview on some of the more promising Vulkan open-source engine projects...

This past week marked the availability of the first alpha release of Trisequel 8.0 "Flidas", the latest installment of the Free Software Foundation endorsed GNU/Linux distribution...

GCC developers have been working to support the compiler-side changes for dealing with ARMv8-M Security Extensions...

A few days back I wrote about a Vulkan renderer for a PlayStation emulator being worked on and now the code to that Vulkan renderer is publicly available...

While there are many open-source game engines these days, many of which were formerly closed-source/commercial engines, one of the big bottlenecks for community-driven game projects continue to be on the art assets/models and/or their reliance upon the commercial game assets for game engines that were later opened up. ET: Legacy continues making progress on free, modernized assets inspired off the original Wolfenstein Enemy Territory game...

A few days ago I wrote about how Apple's 2016 MacBook Pro and Linux Don't Mix, but prior to returning it to the sponsor, I did run a few more benchmarks under macOS beyond what was found in the original article...

Etnaviv is the latest DRM driver having its code ready for DRM-Next to in turn land for Linux 4.10...

Ubuntu is preparing Mesa 12.0.4 for Ubuntu Xenial and Yakkety users. It's not as great as Mesa 13, but at least there are some important fixes back-ported...

With Wine having moved to annual, time-based releases, the code freeze is indeed imminent for the next stable release, Wine 2.0...

When benchmarking Intel's Clear Linux distribution earlier this year we found its Intel graphics performance to be quite good and slightly faster than other Linux distributions even when Clear was using an older version of Mesa. Now with Clear Linux having switched to Mesa 13, I decided to run some fresh Intel OpenGL benchmarks on it compared to other distributions.

With today's PHP 7.1 release, performance isn't highlighted as much as language improvements to this first major update to PHP7, but I decided to run some PHP 7.1, PHP 7.0, PHP 5.6, PHP 5.5, and HHVM benchmarks of our open-source Phoronix Test Suite code-base...

A new version of MirAL is now available, the Ubuntu project for making it easier to develop new Mir servers by offering a stable ABI and other shared/common components...

Jolla engineers have spent the past few weeks porting Sailfish OS to an Android smartwatch as they feel their Linux-based OS is particularly suited for small screens...

Earlier this week I wrote about a release schedule coming out for Mesa 13.1 that culminates with this next big Mesa update being out in February. Some Mesa developers have now shared the work they still hope to see in this next release...

Rob Clark has landed his code for supporting EGL_ANDROID_native_fence_sync in Mesa and his Freedreno Gallium3D driver is the first in-tree Mesa/Gallium3D driver to support the native fence FD support, even beating out the Intel driver...

Mark Shuttleworth has written a new blog post where he's outlining a dispute Canonical is having with a European cloud provider over a breach of contract and "publishing insecure, broken images of Ubuntu" for its cloud customers...

A set of 27 patches published this week for GBM and the Intel Mesa driver provide for significant bandwidth savings...

PHP 7.1 is now officially available...

With the start of the new month comes updated statistics from Valve with their Steam Survey...

Gtkmm, the project providing the de facto C++ interface for GTK+, is preparing for the GTK+ 4.0 era...

AMD's big display abstraction layer (DAL) code-base that's used by AMDGPU-PRO but not yet mainlined in the Linux kernel for providing HDMI 2.0, future FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync, HDMI/DP audio, and other modern display features is DAL no more...

Last month I shared that Linux tests of the 2016 MacBook Pro would be coming and now I've finally managed to complete a few, but I highly encourage you not to get the new MacBook Pro if you plan on using anything other than macOS as the experience is a wreck. This is one laptop I don't mind seeing returned!

Oracle might be pulling the plug on the Solaris operating system, at least according to some new rumors...

Google today is rolling out a public beta of OSS-Fuzz, their new program to provide continuous fuzzing of core open-source software code-bases...

Razer is the latest company looking to promote open, cross-platform industry standards by joining The Khronos Group...

Just a few notes to get December kicked off on Phoronix, including good news for Phoronix Forums participants...

A new release of Ardour is available, the widely-praised, open-source digital audio workstation software...

The Haiku OS developer community have issued their latest activity report to cover what's going on with this open-source BeOS-compatible operating system...

A new DRM driver is being baked for supporting the video processing unit for Amlogic Meson SoCs...

Intel developers are proposing the introduction of a new pseudo file-system intended as a better fit for Direct Rendering Manager drivers rather than the mix of sysfs/debugfs usage currently used...

Mesa release manager Emil Velikov has laid out his draft of a release schedule for the next major Mesa release...

Unity 5.5 is now available and one of its big features is something that won't be too interesting to Linux folks: Microsoft HoloLens is now officially support...

Amazon Web Services today revealed more information about their EC2 Elastic GPUs support they are working to implement in the cloud...

The latest installment of the ten-year-old Genode open-source operating system framework is now available with low-level improvements, support for smart cards, and kernel improvements to the NOVA hypervisor...

Two days ago we brought up Devuan, the systemd-free fork of Debian turned two years old, and now it seems they are celebrating the anniversary by the release of the second beta...

Fresh from the libdrm 2.4.74 release that had some Etnaviv API changes, the Etnaviv Gallium3D driver has been proposed for mainline Mesa as the open-source, reverse-engineered 3D effort for Vivante graphics cores...

The Qt Company today issued the first release candidate for the Qt Creator 4.2 integrated development environment release...

With having published some Darktable OpenCL benchmarks at the beginning of the week with 20 different GPUs (plus more follow-up benchmarks), it didn't take long before requests came in to see some fresh OpenCL Blender benchmarks.