Phoronix

NVIDIA today issued the 375.20 Linux driver release as their first in the stable 375 driver series for Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD...

Last month when Ubuntu 16.10 was released I ran some desktop gaming benchmarks with Intel Skylake graphics under Unity, GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, KDE, Openbox, and MATE. Following that article a few Phoronix Premium readers requested similar tests be done under the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver stack, so here are those numbers.

With Mesa drivers this year really improving a lot and reaching OpenGL ~4.5 compatibility for most drivers as well as the Intel and RADV Vulkan drivers getting into shape, they are becoming usable for day-to-day Linux gamers. While not all new Feral Linux game releases work with the Mesa drivers, a growing number of their games work well on Mesa 13.0+, and as such they are hoping Ubuntu will adopt a policy of making it easier to switch to newer Mesa releases...

In addition to the Radeon and AMDGPU DDX updates yesterday, other X.Org drivers are seeing releases this week in order to support the brand new X.Org Server 1.19...

I've been running some fresh benchmarks of the recently released openSUSE Leap 42.2 compared to the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed and friends. Those benchmarks will be posted shortly, but after using the Nouveau experience on Tumbleweed I found the need to comment...

Support for Intel's low-power Quark SE micro-controller has been added to the GNU Compiler Collection...

The Linux 4.10 features so far continue to be expanded with the Broadcom VC4 DRM driver most notably used by Raspberry Pi hardware picking up some new functionality...

With LLVM's LLD linker continuing to gain ground, there's now talk of it enabling multi-threading support by default...

QEMU 2.8.0-rc0 was released on Thursday as the first step towards getting this next update out the door for improving the Linux virtualization stack...

It's been another busy day in Mesa Git for Intel's "ANV" Vulkan open-source Linux driver...

Back when The Khronos Group published the Vulkan 1.0 specification in February, we were told by a Canonical developer Vulkan support on Mir would come for Ubuntu 16.04. That didn't happen for Ubuntu 16.04 nor for last month's Ubuntu 16.10 and it looks like it may still be months before seeing support for using Vulkan on the Mir display server...

Today's Go/No-Go meeting for Fedora 25 turned out much better than last week and has been cleared for release...

While waiting for a new API that can succeed GBM and is agreed upon by both NVIDIA and the open-source community, GNOME developers have gone ahead and merged support for using EGLStreams into their Mutter compositor so that the current proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver will work with GNOME on Wayland...

For the latest benchmarking off MSI's Cubi 2 with Core i5 Kaby Lake CPU are some GCC and LLVM Clang compiler benchmarks on Intel's Clear Linux distribution.

GNU Octave 4.2 is now available as a major update to this scientific programming language that remains largely compatible with the widely-used MATLAB...

With Firefox 50 having been released this week, Mozilla put Firefox 51 in beta...

Necessitated by the new X.Org Server 1.19 release are new official releases to xf86-video-amdgpu and xf86-video-ati. But besides adding support for the xorg-server 1.19, there are also new features with these being infrequent updates to the DDX driver...

Red Hat developer David Howells has wrangled up a set of patches by him and other developers to provide a "Kernel Lockdown" mode to prevent the user-space from the possibility of modifying the running kernel image...

Adding to the list of new features coming for Linux 4.10 is support for explicit fencing for atomic DRM drivers...

Mesa 3D founder Brian Paul has added a relatively simple but useful improvement to core Mesa for dumping more debugging and performance information...

While GCC 7 feature development is officially over, one of the late patches to land for GCC 7.1 in trunk are improvements to the NVIDIA NVPTX back-end...

The days of the xf86-video-freedreno DDX driver are numbered, at least for end-user relevance...

Earlier this summer Cypress semiconductor acquired Broadcom's wireless "Internet of Things" business. With that associated IP, Cypress has begun making public NDA-free data-sheets on associated chipsets...

Wine-Staging has been running a bit behind on their announcements for new versions of this Wine branch carrying various experimental/testing patches while today they announced both versions 1.9.22 and 1.9.23...

ReactOS 0.4.3 is now available as the newest version of this open-source OS that seeks to re-implement the interfaces of Windows...

Just under 50 Intel Vulkan driver related commits hit Mesa master a short time ago plus other "ANV" Vulkan driver improvements are still pending...

Prolific Mesa developer Marek Olšák has published a new set of 20 patches today for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver in order to further optimize this driver for AMD GCN GPUs...

Over the summer we wrote about Btrfs RAID 5/6 code was found to be unsafe and likely would need a rewrite. Months later, patches have finally emerged to fix the faulty Btrfs RAID 5/6 code...

Alongside the announcement of Microsoft joining the Linux Foundation, at Connect 2016 today they announced the public preview of SQL Server for Linux, which they originally announced earlier this year, and they also rolled out .NET Core 1.1...

Discussed today during the Ubuntu 17.04 Online Summit was the dwindling state of PowerPC (32-bit PPC) and i386 (x86 32-bit) support for Ubuntu and overall Linux for that matter. Images are still being produced but likely for not much longer although the package archives are anticipated to remain...

Microsoft announced at their 2016 Connect event today they are joining the Linux Foundation...

Daniel Stone of Collabora has published the latest version of his massive patch series for supporting atomic mode-setting by Wayland's Weston compositor...

Earlier this year Ubuntu developers announced Netplan as a new, consolidated network configuration tool. Netplan was added to Ubuntu 16.10 and more improvements are on the way for Ubuntu 17.04...

While Android already supports Vulkan, Chrome/Chromium OS currently does not support this newest graphics API from The Khronos Group. However, there is work underway in supporting Vulkan on Chromium OS...

The Linux 4.9 kernel will be officially released in about three weeks but there is already new features/functionality to get excited about for Linux 4.10...

Hitting the web this morning is the official release of openSUSE Leap 42.2...

A few days back I wrote about Qualcomm Falkor support coming to GCC while now the LLVM compiler stack has received the similar treatment...

While Linux 4.9 will be released in just a few weeks, the remaining Reiser4 file-system developers have just updated their code to support the Linux 4.8 stable kernel...

The sun4i DRM driver changes have been submitted for inclusion in DRM-Next to in turn land in Linux 4.10...

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is finishing up the removal of Java / GCJ support ahead of next year's GCC 7 release...

A few weeks back we wrote briefly about Enlightenment landing a new launcher named Luncher. The Samsung developers have now posted more details about this project...

Today during the Ubuntu Online Summit for Ubuntu 17.04 was a convergence Q/A talk where Unity 8 and delivering a all-Snaps image (no Debian packages) were talked about for nearly one hour...

It's been more than one year since the release of X.Org Server 1.18 was released and several weeks past the planned release of X.Org Server 1.19, but nevertheless it's out there today under the "Cioppino" codename...

Epic Games announced the release of Unreal Engine 4.14 today as the newest version of this incredibly powerful, cross-platform game engine...

With last week's CMake 3.7 release one of the less-advertised features is the build system's server-mode functionality, which is sure to excited integrated development environments (IDEs)...

The KDE community has today announced the release of KDE Frameworks 5.28.0 as the latest update to this massive collection of add-on library components to complement Qt5...

CVE-2016-4484 was disclosed on Monday as a Cryptsetup issue that allows users to easily gain access to a root initramfs shell on affected systems in a little over one minute of simply hitting the keyboard's enter key...

The second development milestone/test release of the upcoming Phoronix Test Suite 6.8-Tana is now available for your cross-platform, open-source benchmarking needs...

Intel's SDK for OpenCL Applications 2016 Release 3 was quietly made available earlier this month and it offers some interesting Linux changes...

The latest Chromium open-source browser development code adds support for motion sensors under Chrome OS and Linux...