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As some early post-Coreboot 4.5 changes are some work to benefit fans of the RISC-V ISA...

For Vulkan developers concerned about the latest documentation changes for this graphics API, the latest Vulkan 1.0 point release is now available...

Flatpak 0.6.13 is now available as the latest big release of this app sandboxing tech for the Linux desktop previously known as XDG-App...

The GeForce GTX 1050 graphics cards are beginning to ship today. As mentioned in yesterday's NVIDIA 375.10 vs. Linux 4.8 + Mesa 13.1-dev AMD GPU Benchmarks, I unfortunately don't have any Linux reviews to publish today due to waiting on the hardware but will have GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti reviews in the days ahead. The first GTX 1050 card to be tested is a Zotac GTX 1050 Mini, which might be great for a living room HTPC or 1080p "Steam Machine" on a budget...

With the in-development Linux 4.9 kernel showing signs of some performance improvements, I've gone ahead and tested the last 21 major kernel releases on the same system. From Linux 3.9 to Linux 4.9, each of the major kernel releases was tested from the same Intel Core i7 desktop with a variety of benchmarks.

Some Phoronix Premium readers had recently requested some fresh I/O scheduler benchmarks using the Linux 4.9 kernel, so here are those test results...

Rafael Wysocki of Intel has been hacking an interesting improvement into the Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for the Linux kernel...

For those still using the Opera web-browser, Opera 41 is now available as the latest stable release and seems primarily focused on performance improvements...

For those needing to access a Btrfs file-system from a Microsoft Windows OS, the independent WinBtrfs project provides a native driver for being able to access Btrfs from Windows...

In prepping for the GeForce GTX 1050 Linux graphics card reviews this week, I've been re-testing my various AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards atop the very latest driver stacks. As a precursor while waiting for the GeForce GTX 1050 Linux review in the days ahead, here are those fresh benchmarks of the other graphics cards.

Broadcom developer Eric Anholt's latest work on the VC4 DRM kernel driver for Raspberry Pi hardware is for enabling HDMI audio support...

Valgrind 3.12.0 has been released as the latest major version of this widely-used, cross-platform utility by developers for memory profiling/debugging/checking...

The latest Mesa 13.0 weekly release candidate is now available for testing...

Ever hear of the Intrinsic game engine? Neither have we, until The Khronos Group mentioned it this morning as a new game engine focused on Vulkan support that was open-sourced last week...

The Qt Company has made available new snapshots for testing of upcoming releases for the Qt tool-kit...

Last week the Intel Turbo Boost Max 3.0 patches were updated for the Linux 4.9-rc1 kernel. While it won't be mainlined until Linux 4.10 at least, I decided to try out these TBM 3.0 / ITMT patches with a Core i7 6800K Broadwell-E CPU...

Back in September Feral Interactive announced Deus Ex: Mankind Divided for Linux and macOS. This game under Windows is one of the few titles using Direct3D 12 and Feral announced their macOS port would be making use of Apple's low-level Metal graphics API. Unfortunately, it's still not clear yet whether the Linux port will feature Vulkan support -- the open, cross-platform equivalent to Metal and D3D12 -- or just have an OpenGL renderer...

For the past number of months the LLVM project has been considering a move from their SVN-based development process to Git with a focus on GitHub. That effort continues moving forward...

We're only up to Linux 4.9-rc2 but as usual Daniel Vetter has already prepared a pull request of drm-intel-next to begin staging Intel kernel graphics/display driver changes for Linux 4.10...

Coreboot 4.5 is now available as the latest version of this open-source BIOS/firmware implementation project for those looking toward the bi-annual releases rather than Git...

Linux 4.9-rc2 is now available as the latest test release of this forthcoming kernel update...

When having out the Core i5 "Sandy Bridge" HP EliteBook this weekend besides comparing fresh OpenGL numbers to early Sandy Bridge results going back to 2012, I also compared Ubuntu 16.10 / Linux 4.8 and Linux 4.9 compared to older kernel benchmarks I did with the same system...

Not mentioned in my earlier features you won't find in the Linux 4.9 mainline kernel is support for Intel's Cache Allocation Technology (CAT) but at least it was revised this weekend in still working towards mainline integration...

One of my "hobbies" when news is light and there isn't any fun/new/exciting hardware keeping me busy on a given weekend is checking out the various Vulkan projects on GitHub. It's been great seeing all of the independent graphics renderers/engines being tried by different individuals, tons of different Vulkan samples, and a lot of other innovative projects around Vulkan, many of which I've written about in the past few months on Phoronix. One of the projects I see being regularly updated when checking on weekends and haven't written about yet is LLGL, the Low-Level Graphics Library...

Earlier this year patches were posted for a new /dev/random implementation for the Linux kernel dubbed LRNG -- simply, the Linux Random Number Generator. The LRNG work has yet to be merged in the mainline kernel but the code has now been updated for Linux 4.9...

The KDE developer community has firmed up the schedule for the KDE Applications 16.12 release...

This weekend I pulled out a Core i5 powered HP EliteBook that served as Intel's Software Development Vehicle for Sandy Bridge. I hadn't touched this laptop in a long time but decided to see how the current Linux + Mesa graphics stack on Ubuntu 16.10 compares to the older Linux distributions when Sandy Bridge hardware was more relevant...

Following EXT4 file-system encryption and F2FS per-file encryption support, the UBIFS file-system is also bringing in encryption support built off this fscrypto framework used by EXT4/F2FS...

Friday's GCC 7 status report indicates the feature freeze is coming up in just a few weeks...

This week I was shopping for a solid state drive to replace a hard drive on one of my backup/archival systems and ended up settling for the Crucial MX300 in getting 525GB of storage for just $120 USD. Here are some benchmarks of the Crucial CT525MX300SSD1 compared to some other SSDs on Linux for those curious.

While Mesa 13.0 is coming along for release next month with exciting features like OpenGL 4.5 for Intel, unofficial GL 4.4/4.5 for RadeonSI/NVC0, and the addition of the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver, there is some functionality that sadly won't be found in this release...

With the GNOME 3.24 desktop that's currently in development the latest GNOME Shell code has support for easily letting the user launch an app on a dedicated GPU when applicable for handling NVIDIA Optimus use-cases of having integrated and discrete GPU laptops...

The latest GCC 7 development code has an optimization pass now for loop splitting...

An Intel developer has published testing patches for providing a SoundWire bus driver within the Linux kernel, which implements the MIPI SoundWire 1.1 specification...

Those making use of the promising Solus Linux distribution will soon find their BLAS-based workloads are faster...

Google is ending this week by rolling out the Chrome/Chromium 55 web-browser beta...

The BSD-focused, Qt-powered Lumina Desktop Environment is out with its version 1.1 update...

NVIDIA has released the 375.10 Linux driver as their first release in this new 375.xx series...

With Mesa Git and Linux 4.9 I have done AMDGPU vs. Radeon, AMD OpenGL vs. Vulkan benchmarks, and other tests while in this article is our first side-by-side comparison of AMD Radeon GPUs on their open-source driver against NVIDIA GPUs on Nouveau when using Linux 4.9 Git and Mesa Git as of this week.

The perf code for Linux 4.10 is set to receive a new "c2c" tool...

Now that Feral Interactive released Mad Max for Linux yesterday, they are moving forward to push out their next Linux game port - Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. It's coming out in just two weeks...

Earlier this week I posted some benchmarks of a Core i7 6800K Broadwell-E system seeing performance boosts under Linux 4.9 and it turns out it's looking more widespread than just affecting a niche system or two. When testing a more traditional Intel Haswell desktop, Linux 4.9 Git is seeing more wins over Linux 4.8 and 4.7 kernels...

It's easy to run benchmarks on Linux as well as Solaris, BSD, and other operating systems, using our own Phoronix Test Suite open-source benchmarking software...

Earlier this week Canonical announced their Kernel Livepatching Service for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS users. Canonical's service is free for under three systems while another alternative for Ubuntu Linux users interested in a commercial service is CloudLinux's KernelCare...

Intel has updated its currently out-of-tree Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 patches for compatibility against the Linux 4.9-rc1 kernel plus made other improvements to the code...

Plasma 5.8 was only released at the beginning of October but already there has been a number of Wayland improvements queuing up for the next milestone, Plasma 5.9...

It's been a while since last running any major Linux graphics tests with Intel Haswell era hardware, but in preparing for a big Linux 3.x/4.x kernel comparison with a Core i7 Haswell, I ran some fresh graphics benchmarks with OpenGL and Vulkan.

The first alpha release of the upcoming LibreOffice 5.3 open-source office suite was tagged a short time ago in Git...

Nintendo announced their new "NX" portable console today as the Nintendo Switch. While we don't focus on game consoles at Phoronix, hardware and talk of graphics APIs do excite us...

ARM has posted a new video showing off the side-by-side performance of OpenGL ES and Vulkan graphics APIs on ARM hardware...