Phoronix

Now that Igalia developers have landed their Haswell FP64 support and thereby hitting OpenGL 4.0 for these older generation Intel graphics processors, the latest Float64 patches have been sent out for the Intel Vulkan "ANV" driver...

With Linux 4.10 going through its stabilization process, I've begun testing it on more and more systems. For your viewing pleasure today are some OpenGL and Vulkan results when testing Skylake HD Graphics 530 hardware with Linux 4.10 and Mesa 13.1-dev Git...

With FP64 for Haswell having landed in Mesa Git, the remaining patches have now been placed into Mesa Git as well for finally turning on OpenGL 4.0 for older Intel Haswell HD Graphics 4000 era hardware...

There's a new release available of the HarfBuzz text shaping library used by projects like Qt, Pango, GTK, LibreOffice, Firefox, and many other software projects. HarfBuzz 1.4 is a significant release...

The release candidate is out for the upcoming Samba 4.6 version of this open-source SMB/CIFS implementation...

Jen-Hsun Huang's keynote presentation for NVIDIA is going on tonight at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2017)...

As part of the ongoing battle with bufferbloat are some improvements to the ath9k WiFi driver with the Linux 4.10 kernel...

The latest development patches up for testing on Intel's DRM kernel driver is for supporting render decompression on the display engine of Skylake hardware and newer...

The librsvg library for SVG rendering is up to version 2.41.0 and with this milestone it's their first release to port some code to Rust while maintaining the same public API...

The HDMI Forum announced from CES today the upcoming release of the HDMI 2.1 specification...

Google's open-source team today announced Grumpy, a Python runtime written in the Go programming language...

The discussion has come up before about supporting Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers in user-space rather than having to be tied within the Linux kernel while that outlook was reignited today with a new patch series wiring in said support...

For those making use of GNU's Stream Editor, Sed, for non-interactive command-line text editing there is a new release available...

The GTK toolkit's Vulkan renderer continues making quick progress...

Fitting nicely into the related discussion of Should Tarballs Be On Their Way Out The Door In 2017?, Intel developer Arjan Van De Ven of the Clear Linux project has compared various data compression options...

Being announced today on the kernel mailing list is the KSM hypervisor, what's self-described as "a hackable x86-64 hypervisor."..

LLVM's LLD linker has been making a lot of progress over the past year and now it's hit the milestone of being able to link the entire FreeBSD/amd64 base system...

It's been about one year since the last Inkscape release while now available is version 0.92 as a relatively big update to this open-source vector drawing program...

Just days after writing about how Valve's Steam Linux project was the hardest one veteran game developer had ever worked on, Rich Geldreich has begun blogging some more of the back-stories to the Linux project at Valve...

With the Linux 4.10 kernel there remains experimental Kconfig switches for being able to build the Linux kernel with GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" and GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" support in the newer AMDGPU DRM driver rather than the mature Radeon DRM driver. For your viewing pleasure today are benchmarks of a few GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs when testing the Linux 4.10 Git kernel with Radeon DRM and then the experimental AMDGPU DRM driver while both kernel drivers were tested in conjunction with the same Mesa 13.1-dev snapshot as of this week.

Often times whenever mentioning a new security vulnerability in any piece of open-source/Linux software, it generally gets brought up in our forums "they should write that software in Rust" or similar comments about how XYZ project should see a rewrite in Rust for its memory-safety features. But is it really worthwhile porting your codebase to Rust?..

A new release of Lumina is now available to ring in 2017, the BSD-first Qt-powered open-source desktop environment...

In addition to working on sharply improving the performance of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided when using the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, Marek Olšák has published some patches for improving The Witcher 2 with the open-source AMD driver stack...

A new version of the musl libc standard library is available for those interested in this lightweight alternative to glibc and others...

Today Intel officially unveiled their 7th Generation "Kaby Lake" desktop CPU line-up at CES...

It was only last month that FreeSync support came to Linux via the hybrid AMDGPU-PRO driver while the open-source FreeSync support for AMDGPU atop DAL/DC has yet to be published. But today the Radeon Technologies Group is already rolling out FreeSync 2...

Broadcom developer Eric Anholt has issued his first weekly progress report of the new year for the VC4 open-source graphics driver supported by the Raspberry Pi...

On a CVE basis for the number of distinct vulnerabilities, Android is ranked as having the most vulnerability of any piece of software for 2016 followed by Debian and Ubuntu Linux while coming in behind them is the Adobe Flash Player...

Those making use of Intel Haswell graphics on Linux can rejoice this morning as the massive Igalia patch-set for wiring in ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 support has finally landed in Mesa Git...

With Microsoft having begun to mandate TPM2 (Trusted Platform Module 2) support be present in all platforms for newer versions of Windows, these chips are going to become a lot more common to laptops and desktops. Thus veteran kernel developer James Bottomley is looking closely at the current and future support for TPM2 on Linux...

For those using KDevelop as the KDE-aligned integrated development environment, version 5.1 Beta 1 is now available for testing...

Marek Olšák is off to a good start with performance optimizations of the RadeonSI Gallium3D open-source driver stack in 2017...

With the post Christmas ad rate slowdown I finally found the time to run some fresh tests on my Radeon R9 290 that since around Linux 4.7 has been performing abnormally slow but has been working fine with AMDGPU-PRO. I carried out some tests with Linux 4.10 and also ensured linux-firmware.git was the latest, but still it's somewhat of a mystery...

The DawnCC project is out of the UFMG University and aims to provide automatic parallelization of code for mobile devices and other supported software/hardware of OpenACC and OpenMP...

Kirigami is KDE's set of UI components and philosophy / patterns announced last year for developing "intuitive and consistent apps that provide a great user experience" and do have convergence applications in mind. Now ringing in 2017, the first beta of Kirigami 2.0 is now available...

While we've already shared the most popular news and reviews on Phoronix for 2016, here's our usual monthly recap for those wondering what dominated the headlines in December. Of the 3,336 news articles on Phoronix in 2016, December yielded 323 original news articles and 32 featured articles/reviews for Linux enthusiasts...

A developer has published a set of 14 patches providing copy propagation optimizations for Mesa's GLSL/Nir code...

Prolific GNOME developer Matthias Clasen has written a blog post about recent and ongoing work for GTK4 at the start of 2017...

The .tar archive file format has been around for decades, but GNOME / free software developer Jussi Pakkanen suggests that it's time for a modern solution...

SQLite 3.16.0 was released today and it's quite a feature-packed release for being the first update of 2017...

In addition to Valve publishing the top-grossing games on Steam for 2016, they have also published their Steam Survey statistics for December 2016...

Linus Torvalds has issued the second test release of the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel. Linux 4.10-rc2 marks the first kernel release of 2017...

Valve has published a list of the top-grossing games by revenue on Steam for the 2016 calendar year...

Going from the Linux 4.5 kernel merge window that was open in last January to the Linux 4.10 merge window that closed this past Christmas, here is a look back at the prominent features added to the kernel in 2016...

Zlib 1.2.9 was released this weekend as the first update to this data compression library in more than three years...

Back in June we reported on WireGuard as a next-generation secure network tunnel for the Linux kernel. We haven't heard much on WireGuard in recent months, but this New Year's morning we received a message from their lead developer with a status update...

Last year I had written about the The Open-Source Linux Letdowns of 2015 and then Other Letdowns For Linux / Open-Source Users From 2015, which ended up being among the most viewed articles of 2016. So I figured I'd once again share a list of what personally was disappointing not to see happen in 2016 within the Linux/open-source space...

Yesterday I published Skylake Iris Pro Graphics benchmarks on Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Antergos, and Clear Linux using a Skull Canyon NUC. That was fun but then I decided to ring in the new year by running even more benchmarks, so if you're curious how the Debian 9 "testing" performance fits among these other distributions, here are those results...

The Xiph.Org crew rung in 2017 by releasing FLAC 1.3.2 as the newest version of this free lossless audio codec...

The twelfth year is now in the books at Phoronix. In 2016 on Phoronix there were 3,336 original news articles and 248 featured multi-page articles and Linux hardware reviews. That puts our total now at more than 21.3k news articles and 3.3k Linux hardware reviews and other featured articles. Happy New Year to all and 2017 will hopefully be even better.