Phoronix

With Akademy 2017 happening this week, Qt consulting firm KDAB has released version 1.2 of Clazy, its Clang-based static analyzer geared for showing Qt coding mistakes and inefficiencies...

Mesa release manager Emil Velikov went ahead and branched Mesa 17.2 from Git master with new developments now being for Mesa 17.3...

Mesa Git is usually relatively sane for Linux gamers wanting the bleeding-edge open-source driver experience for best OpenGL/Vulkan features and performance, but at the moment it's a bit of a headache with what in effect are two blocker bugs for Mesa 17.2...

David Airlie and Bas Nieuwenhuizen have been landing some more last minute RADV Vulkan driver fixes ahead of the Mesa 17.2 branching...

NVIDIA and Carnegie Mellon University have developed a new open-source shading language in step with a new compiler framework...

The Boost C++ libraries is planning for a new build system, but they aren't going for Meson that's been the recent trend among open-source projects...

The second release candidate of the Linux 4.13 kernel is now available for testing...

A few days back I posted some fresh AMD Ryzen compiler benchmarks of LLVM Clang now that it has its new Znver1 scheduler model, which helps out the performance of Ryzen on Linux with some of the generated binaries tested. But it was found still that Haswell-tuned binaries are sometimes still faster on Ryzen than the Zen "znver1" tuning itself. For continuing our fresh compiler benchmarks from AMD's new Ryzen platform, here are the latest GCC numbers.

Those using Radeon graphics for your Steam VR Linux gaming experience will soon be able to use the mainline Mesa stack with the necessary RADV changes almost all being in place...

Here are some numbers about how much weight the kernel gained during the Linux 4.13 merge window that closed last week...

Mattia Rizzolo has written a status update concerning Debian's Reproducible Builds project for ensuring the package archive can be rebuilt bit-for-bit in a verified and reproducible path from source code to binary...

It's been a while since last reporting on VK9 as the independent effort to run Direct3D 9.0 over the Vulkan graphics API while this weekend the lead developer of this open-source project has issued a new update...

Debian GNU/Linux 9.1 and 8.9 were both released today...

Community developer and Phoronix reader Aaron Watry has continued providing some much needed attention to Clover, the Gallium3D state tracker implementing OpenCL, notably for R600g/RadeonSI hardware not receiving ROCm OpenCL support...

PHP 7.2 Beta 1 was released yesterday as the next step towards this next refinement to PHP7 that is expected to be officially released in November. I couldn't help but to run some initial benchmarks...

At Friday's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) there were yet more features approved for the current Fedora Linux development cycle...

With my recent tests of Intel Kabylake graphics on Linux 4.13 showing no change in performance, it was asked whether the Intel Linux graphics driver has plateaued for reaching maximum performance. It hasn't...

It looks like Chrome on the Linux desktop could finally be seeing Intel GPU video acceleration support with the web browser having patches pending for VA-API...

Khronos' SIGGRAPH announcements are coming up in just over one week but today we have the Vulkan 1.0.56 release...

Nouveau re-clocking/power expert Karol Herbst has published a set of patches today implementing thermal throttling support for this open-source NVIDIA DRM driver...

The merging fun for Mesa 17.2 will continue through the weekend...

Honoring another request of a Phoronix Premium supporter is looking at the performance impact of full-disk encryption using LUKS when using an AMD Ryzen processor. For this round of testing I used an AMD Ryzen 5 1400 running Fedora 26 and backed by an Intel 545s 512GB SATA 3.0 SSD.

If Wine 2.0.2 with 60+ bug fixes doesn't interest you, perhaps the Wine 2.13 development update will get you more excited...

GNOME 3.25.4 is the latest development snapshot available of this open-source desktop environment in the road towards GNOME 3.26...

Open-source driver contributor Samuel Pitoiset for Valve has published a set of 101 new patches for implementing more KHR_no_error support...

In needing to make more room for Ryzen/Epyc/ThreadRipper and Core-X Series, the StarTech 12U rack was the latest investment. This 12U rack can, fortunately, fit quite comfortable under my custom-made desk.

Daniel Stone of Collabora has published a new set of 14 patches implementing DRI3 v1.1's modifiers support inside Mesa with support for EGL X11 and Vulkan X11/Wayland...

Canonical is running a survey in trying to figure out what should be the default applications for next year's Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release...

Yesterday I posted benchmarks of Clang 4 vs. Clang 5 with AMD Ryzen now that LLVM 5 has received the initial AMD Zen "znver1" scheduler model. That scheduler model and improvements to LLVM/Clang 5.0 yielded some performance improvements, but still there are cases where using "-march=haswell" for tuning and running those generated binaries on Ryzen leads to better performance...

With Mesa 17.2 expected to be branched before the week is through, expect a lot of last-minute feature activity for new work getting into this next quarterly update for Mesa 3D...

Earlier this week I wrote about Adam Jackson's work at Red Hat on a prototype of an X.Org server-side GLVND implementation. NVIDIA has also now announced their coincidentally similar work...

A frustrated Phoronix reader pointed out a bug report that's been open nearly two years regarding AMD Grenada (basically, Hawaii cards in the R9 300 series) support on the open-source Linux driver being in a tough position for a subset of users...

For those looking to use Intel Kabylake hardware with Intel's Graphics Virtualization Technology, it looks like that support will finally be here come Linux 4.14...

Just in time for this weekend's expected Mesa 17.2 branching, the Intel "i965" Mesa driver has landed support for the ARB_shader_ballot OpenGL extension...

Besides testing the Radeon/AMDGPU work in Linux 4.13, here are some fresh benchmarks of Intel Kabylake GT 2 / HD Graphics 630 from this new in-development kernel...

The Wine project has today announced Wine 2.0.2 as the newest stable update for running Windows programs on Linux, macOS, and other operating systems...

With the Linux 4.13 kernel currently under development there are new module parameters that can make it easier switching from the Radeon DRM default on GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 GPUs to instead using the newer AMDGPU DRM driver, but Radeon remains the default. Here's my test experiences and benchmark results of AMDGPU vs. Radeon for GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs.

With C++20 feature talk heating up, GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) developers are beginning to prepare working on more of the new compiler functionality for this next standard due out in a few years...

For users of Fedora 25 and Fedora 26, the Linux 4.12 kernel will soon be sent down as a stable release update...

Just prior to LLVM 5.0 being branched yesterday, the AMD Zen scheduler model finally landed in LLVM and has the potential of boosting the performance of generated binaries targeting AMD's Zen "znver1" architecture. Here are some benchmarks of LLVM Clang 4.0 compared to the latest LLVM Clang compiler code when testing with both generic x86-64 optimizations and then optimized builds for the first-generation Zen CPUs, tested on a Ryzen 7 processor.

The Qt Company has announced the first public beta of the Qt Creator 4.4 integrated development environment...

RADV developer Bas Nieuwenhuizen has landed support for some new Vulkan extensions introduced by Vulkan 1.0.54...

With the GNOME 3.25.4 development milestone this week, new versions of GNOME Shell and Mutter are among the packages checked-in for release...

We are one step closer to the release of GTK4 with today's GTK+ 3.91.1 tool-kit release...

GNOME Games, the application for the GNOME desktop to serve as a game library for browsing installed games as well as integrating with some game emulators and other features, is seeing new feature activity for the GNOME 3.26 cycle...

Intel announced their 545s series SSD last month and it's been making plenty of rounds on Windows. Curious about the Linux performance, I picked up the Intel 545s 512GB SATA 3.0 SSD for benchmarking on Linux.

Purism, the company that started out with the Librem laptops that are Linux-friendly and now pre-loaded with Coreboot, has long had ambitions for expanding into tablets, smartphones, and other devices. It looks like the first Purism Phone might soon be announced...

A new version of libdrm is available today, the library that sits between the kernel Direct Rendering Manager and the user-space clients like Mesa and others. This libdrm 2.4.82 release is a bit more notable than some of the other point releases as it does have some interesting additions...

It was coming down to the wire for the new AMD Zen scheduler model in LLVM 5.0 but now it's managed to land just hours before the LLVM 5.0 branching...

The GnuPG project has announced libgcrypt version 1.8 as the newest version of this Gcrypt library...