Phoronix

The Genode Operating System Framework has announced their planned roadmap for this year as the involved developers continue working on this original OS initiative...

While GNOME / Red Hat developers have been leading the Flatpak app sandboxing initiative, KDE developers are making progress too with embracing Flatpak as a more convenient and secure way of securely packaging Linux desktop apps...

X.Org Server 1.19 was released last November while today there was finally an X.Org developer giving some love to the older DDX drivers for those still with vintage GPUs and wanting to run the modern xorg-server...

Gabe Newell of Valve wrapped up his latest Reddit "Ask Me Anything" where he faced a variety of questions. There were a number of users asking various SteamOS / Linux questions, but not much in the way of answers...

Google developers are proposing the addition of a Gaming Input Protocol to Wayland...

Last month with AMD/GPUOpen's ROCm 1.4 release they delivered on OpenCL support, albeit for this initial release all of the code is not yet open-source. I tried out ROCm 1.4 with the currently supported GPUs to see how the OpenCL performance compares to just using the AMDGPU-PRO OpenCL implementation.

For more than the past decade, the Free Software Foundation has been maintaining a list of high priority projects. Today they have a brand new list...

A few weeks back we learned of Intel's Clear Linux distribution working towards Steam support. While Clear Linux is a performance-oriented workstation/server/cloud distribution, repeatedly in our tests it performs among the top Linux distributions even when it comes to Intel OpenGL Linux gaming, so being able to game with it isn't a far stretch with Steam support -- there is also Vulkan support now too...

Mesa 17.0 (formerly known as Mesa 13.1) was supposed to enter its feature freeze last weekend, but that milestone and branching of the code-base didn't happen due to last minute feature work...

Alan Griffiths of Canonical today posted a year-in-review for Mir during 2016 and a look ahead to this year...

While Kodi 17 "Krypton" hasn't even shipped yet, feature work is building already for Kodi 18 "Leia" and it sure should excite those wanting to play games from their HTPC...

Fedora Linux has been pursuing a path of modularity whereby modules provide different software purpose/functionality and are integrated/tested at the module level and a unit of delivery itself. With the Fedora 26 release they are hoping to provide a Fedora Modular Server preview build...

GNOME developer Georges Stavracas has shared his thoughts on the state of the GTK4 tool-kit with the recent work involving a Vulkan renderer, including which also now works on Wayland...

Yesterday I published a number of OpenGL/Vulkan benchmarks from Mesa Git in Mesa Git Delivering Faster Intel Vulkan Performance, Closer To OpenGL Driver Speed. Those tests were with Skylake desktop graphics so for some follow-up reference tests I also fired up Mesa Git on an Intel Broadwell ultrabook...

For those running older Intel "Ivy Bridge" hardware on Linux, OpenGL 4.0 support soon should arrive...

It's been a while since last hearing much excitement around Google's Dart programming language that's an alternative to JavaScript. This ECMA-approved language is now being used with IoT devices, can still be source-to-source compiled for JavaScript, and the latest is that the Google developers have been experimenting with wiring it into LLVM...

With the Linux 4.10 kernel there is initial mainline support for Intel GVT-G (Graphics Virtualization Technology) while it will become more usable in future updates...

Open-source driver developer Bas Nieuwenhuizen has posted a patch for allowing the open-source Radeon Mesa Vulkan driver (RADV) to support multiple devices...

As a quick update from this morning's article about Intel's Mesa driver getting ready for OpenGL 4.5 on Haswell, that code has now landed...

In addition to Nouveau Gallium3D seeing a performance boost last week, last week Intel's Vulkan driver also seen some interesting work around HiZ. Here are some fresh benchmarks showing recent performance improvements to the Intel "ANV" Mesa Vulkan driver plus some fresh OpenGL benchmarks too.

While RadeonSI in Mesa Git exposes OpenGL 4.5, it hasn't yet formally passed the OpenGL 4.5 Conformance Test Suite (CTS) for certifying the OpenGL driver. But now it looks like this open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver has about all OpenGL CTS failures addressed...

With the recent news over the Nouveau Maxwell performance improvements and reaching OpenGL 4.3, among other milestones for this community-driven, open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver, you may be wondering what else is on the road-map for this driver...

The MSI X99A RAIDER is a sub-$200 LGA-2011 v3 motherboard. I've been using it for almost two months now on one of the daily Linux benchmarking systems and it's been running great.

A new spin/flavor has been proposed for Fedora 26, one integrating the LXQt desktop environment...

The Raspberry Pi Foundation this morning announced the Compute Module 3 (CM3) as the successor to their original Compute Module...

Broadcom developer Eric Anholt has begun writing code within the VC4 open-source driver stack to make use of NEON in its acceleration code-paths...

It was just two weeks ago that Intel's Mesa driver finally crossed the threshold with Haswell for supporting OpenGL 4.0 and then last week OpenGL 4.2 was crossed for this older generation of Intel graphics hardware. Now, it looks like OpenGL 4.5 will be enabled for Haswell with the i965 Mesa driver...

Wine-Staging 2.0-RC5 was released on Sunday as the newest version of this experimental/testing Wine build. This time around there are some exciting new patches...

The fourth weekly test release of the Linux 4.10 kernel is now available...

Linux.Conf.Au 2017 kicked off a short time ago in Hobart, Tasmania...

GIMP contributor Alexandre Prokoudine published a lengthy blog post today looking back at what were the accomplishments for this open-source image manipulation program in 2016 and some of what's ahead for the program this year...

DragonFlyBSD has been working on its (U)EFI support and with the latest Git code its installer now has basic UEFI support...

Landing this week in Mesa 17.0-devel Git was OpenGL 4.3 for NVC0 Maxwell and a big performance boost as well for these GeForce GTX 750 / 900 series NVIDIA "Maxwell" graphics processors. Here are some before/after benchmarks of the performance improvements, which the patch cited as "1.5~3.5x better", when testing a GeForce GTX 750 Ti and GTX 980.

There's a patch pending for the Intel DRM driver that in extreme select cases can boost the graphics performance by up to 60% but for most OpenGL workloads the gains will be much smaller...

While Calligra 3.0 was tagged in early December, finally today we are seeing an official announcement from the project...

When firing up Intel's Beignet OpenCL implementation on Clear Linux this weekend, I was surprised to see it was happily chugging along with many of our different CL benchmarks...

I'm still running more benchmarks in investigating the Core i5 7600K Linux performance and with even its graphics performance being slower than Skylake. I fired up Clear Linux on this Kaby Lake system this weekend and it's indeed faster than Ubuntu, though there still is some sort of fundamental issue at play with these new CPUs on Linux. But what is clear is that there are cases where the P-State CPU frequency scaling driver does perform very poorly over the mature, generic CPUFreq scaling driver...

For many months now there's been work on an AMD HSA IL front-end for GCC with supporting the BRIG binary form of the Heterogeneous System Architecture Intermediate Language (HSA IL). It's getting late into GCC 7 development and onwards to its final development stage while this new front-end has yet to be merged...

For those curious how much power is consumed with our constant flow of benchmarks and working 365 days per year, 2016 rang in at 25,943 kWh...

The Debian Installer is getting ready for the 9.0 "Stretch" release...

Arch Linux fans can now find this week's X.Org Server 1.19.1 available from the extra repository plus other pending X.Org changes...

For those riding Debian 8 "Jessie" until the stable debut of Debian 9 "Stretch", Debian 8.7 is available this weekend...

NVIDIA this week released updated Vulkan beta drivers for Windows and Linux...

Andres Rodriguez, a former AMD engineer who joined Valve back in November to begin working on their Linux efforts, has begun landing commits into Mesa Git for the RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver...

One would think the graphics of a Core i5 7600K "Kaby Lake" processor would be faster than the Core i5 6600K "Skylake" or even a Core i5 6500, but that's not always the case with the current state of the Linux driver support for the newest-generation Intel hardware.

Yesterday I spent a fair amount of time updated some existing test profiles as well as pushing out some new test profiles onto OpenBenchmarking.org for use by those doing their open-source, cross-platform benchmarking with the Phoronix Test Suite...

For those following the progress of the RISC-V open-source and royalty-free processor ISA, a new port of the GNU Compiler Collection for this architecture is now available...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) approved more features for Fedora 26 at Friday's meeting...

Wayland 1.13 has been in development since September while the plans today were firmed up for releasing it in February...

It looks like Valve may be moving closer to debut their Linux VR support, which they demonstrated at the 2016 Dev Days and we've known they've been working on further -- including improvements to AMDGPU/RadeonSI/RADV...