Phoronix

Yesterday The Khronos Group hosted a one-day workshop in Vancouver, Canada with all things Vulkan...

Ending out January, the KDE crew has announced the release of Plasma 5.9...

Ben Skeggs at Red Hat has begun aligning the latest Nouveau DRM patches that in turn will be submitted to DRM-Next for the Linux 4.11 kernel merge window...

Eric Anholt continues working on the open-source VC4 graphics driver stack for adding additional features and improving the OpenGL performance of the Broadcom GPU on the Raspberry Pi...

For those continuing to make use of the FFmpeg-forked Libav project, a number of VA-API improvements have landed in recent days...

Another late feature addition to GCC 7 is C++ support for libcc1...

It's been quite a few days for the RADV Mesa Vulkan driver with receiving patches to support spilling yesterday and then today seeing new RADV patches land. Nearing the end of the day, there's now geometry shaders support on Mesa master for this open-source Vulkan driver...

Developers working on the FreeBSD-derived GhostBSD distribution are working to get their 11.0 release out the door that's based off last year's FreeBSD 11.0 code-base...

Following last week's AMDGPU-PRO 16.60 hybrid driver release I delivered some early AMDGPU-PRO vs. AMDGPU+RadeonSI benchmark results using the newest driver code. After a few more days of testing, in this article is a larger OpenGL and Vulkan comparison when testing AMDGPU-PRO 16.60 and AMDGPU+RadeonSI of Mesa 17.1 + Linux 4.10 on various Radeon GPUs. On the NVIDIA side are fresh GeForce tests with the company's newest 378.09 beta driver.

Google developers have been investing in improvements to their rendering pipeline of Chrome in order to yield better performance, lower input latency, smoother scrolling, and more...

Some KDE developers are embracing Ubuntu's Snap packaging technology and are beginning to offer KDE Applications via the Ubuntu Snap Store...

If you have been curious how well Intel's new Core i7 7700K "Kabylake" processor performs under Linux, I received this CPU a few days ago and have begun putting it through its paces. Here are my initial i7-7700K Linux benchmarks compared to various other Intel CPUs running Clear Linux.

While many Phoronix readers cringe when hearing "Imagination Tech" or "PowerVR" due to past Linux driver issues and the lack of a full-featured open-source driver, one of their developers is now requesting commit rights to Mesa...

Samuel Pitoiset, former Nouveau contributor who is now working for Valve on AMD open-source Linux driver optimizations, landed some improvements this morning in Mesa Git...

LibreOffice 5.3 is expected to be released this week as the latest feature update to this cross-platform, open-source office suite. Here's a quick feature overview look for those interested in LibreOffice 5.3...

For older Intel i915~i945 graphics hardware, the Linux Mesa driver has exposed OpenGL 2.1 support while under Windows these ~12+ year old integrated graphics have only exposed OpenGL 1.4. Mesa now though might withdraw its OpenGL 2 support by default for older hardware on the i915 driver...

The RADV Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver has seen some code land in Mesa Git while other patches are being staged on Mesa-dev as January comes to an end...

Linus Torvalds has released the sixth weekly test release of the forthcoming Linux 4.10 kernel...

Last week marked the release of Intel's Beignet 1.3, their open-source project implementing OpenCL acceleration atop modern CPUs with HD/Iris Graphics. Significant with Beignet 1.3 is that they've finally implemented OpenCL 2.0 support! OpenCL 2.0 is now available for Skylake hardware and newer. Beignet 1.3 also has other new features, runtime improvements, LLVM 3.9 support, new extensions, and much more. Thus time for some benchmarking of this new Beignet release.

Bas Nieuwenhuizen has posted some new feature patches this weekend for the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver...

Linux game porter and SDL developer Ryan "Icculus" Gordon has shared some performance measurements when bringing SDL's new audio conversion support within web-browsers using EmScripten...

While I have already posted some single-disk file-system benchmarks on Linux 4.10, for some benchmarking fun this weekend I decided to run some fresh tests of Btrfs RAID capabilities using four solid-state drives (SSDs).

If you are looking for some experimental fun this weekend, the Linux kernel can be linked with LLVM's LLD linker...

The ZTE DRM driver is set to receive new features for Linux 4.11 after this Direct Rendering Manager driver was added to the Linux 4.10 kernel...

The VK9 project that's working to implement Direct3D 9 over Vulkan that's been under heavy development the past few months has reached new development milestones...

When we are usually running our cross-distribution/OS Linux comparisons, we are generally using Intel Xeon or Core i5/i7 CPUs and whatever else is the latest and greatest hardware, since that's what excites us the most. But a Phoronix Premium member recently inquired whether Intel's performance-oriented Clear Linux distribution would also be of benefit on lower-end hardware. So for some benchmarking fun this weekend, here are some Ubuntu 16.10 vs. Clear Linux results on an older Pentium system...

Last week talk of Solaris heated up again with Solaris 12 being removed from the Oracle road-map, after rumors of Oracle canning Solaris occurred in early December, meanwhile there are also more layoffs happening at Oracle. Oracle finally issued a blog post this week with a bit more clarification on the matter...

LLVM Clang 4.0 is set to be released in February while GCC 7 will be released as stable in March~April. For those curious how both compilers are currently performing, here is our latest installment of GCC vs. LLVM Clang benchmarking on Linux x86_64.

Mesa developers have been working on support for the new extensions of Vulkan 1.0.39 and the latest one to be wired up in Mesa Git is VK_KHR_get_physical_device_properties2 for RADV...

The libdrm 2.4.75 library is now available as the important component sitting between the user-space drivers and the kernel DRM...

Next week is the annual Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) taking place in Brussels, Belgium...

After last month's planned Ubuntu 17.04 Alpha 1 release for opt-in flavors didn't happen, the Zesty Alpha 2 debut happened today as what is now the only alpha release for the upcoming Zesty Zapus...

Given yesterday's release of the AMDGPU-PRO 16.60 driver I've been busy running various benchmarks on this first AMD Linux hybrid driver release of 2017. A number of OpenGL benchmarks will be published this weekend compared to the latest Mesa RadeonSI Git driver while for your viewing pleasure today is a look at the Vulkan performance of AMDGPU-PRO 16.60 compared to the Linux 4.10 + Mesa 17.1-dev driver stack for Dota 2 and The Talos Principle.

For those curious how Intel's flagship Core i7 7700K "Kabylake" processor is performing under Linux, my sample arrived yesterday and I've begun putting the CPU through its paces...

Alex Deucher of AMD sent in the Radeon/AMDGPU DRM driver changes today to DRM-Next for then merging into the Linux 4.11 kernel a few weeks down the road...

There's a new open-source project in the works aiming to be a software-based 2D renderer that uses JIT pipeline construction...

For those curious about the latest Linux gaming performance numbers for the latest Linux 4.10 Git kernel plus Mesa 17.1-devel on Git master for Radeon GPUs compared to the latest NVIDIA Linux driver release (378.09 beta), here are some fresh benchmarks. A range of OpenGL and Vulkan performance tests showing the latest NVIDIA and AMD Linux graphics performance with the newest drivers as of this week.

Not only are Solus Linux developers busy porting the Budgie desktop away from GNOME and switching to Qt but they are also continuing to work on more performance optimizations...

Within Mesa Git this morning is another feature flipped on for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver: ARB_gpu_shader_int64...

The release of Kodi 17.0 "Krypton" is near and today the fourth release candidate is now available for testing...

VK_KHR_maintenance1 is one of the new extensions added to the big Vulkan 1.0.39 update. A Valve developer has fired off a series of patches for making the necessary changes for supporting it with the RADV Radeon Vulkan Mesa driver...

Debian Linux is now available for running on NVIDIA's Jetson TX1 developer board powered by their Tegra X1 SoC...

For users of Scientific Linux, the 7.3 release is now available based off Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3...

AMDGPU-PRO 16.60 is now available as the latest version of the hybrid AMDGPU-based Radeon Linux graphics driver stack...

It looks like Aspyr Media could soon be releasing their Linux port of the highly-anticipated Civilization VI...

For those Linux gamers interested in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, a new Linux update is available...

For those that may be thinking about picking up an Intel Kabylake processor and trying to justify if DDR4-2400 memory is worthwhile for your budget, or even faster DDR4 memory via XMP profiles / overclocking, here are some tests using a Kabylake CPU and testing DDR4 memory at frequencies from 1600MHz up to 3333MHz.

For KDE fans not interested in setting up a KDE-based Linux distribution on your own laptop and worrying about potential graphics driver bugs with Plasma or other possible headaches, there is now a "KDE laptop" backed by the KDE community...

Daniel Vetter, the i915 DRM kernel maintainer from Intel's Open-Source Technology Center, has announced their final set of feature changes to be queued in DRM-Next for the Linux 4.11 kernel...

Based off the just-released Wine 2.0 is now the Wine-Staging 2.0 release with its many experimental/testing patches carried atop the upstream Wine code-base...