Phoronix

On Thursday the RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver was merged into mainline Mesa and I provided bleeding-edge RADV vs. AMDGPU-PRO benchmark results for these two independent AMD Linux Vulkan driver implementations, plus comparison results to the OpenGL drivers in the same games. For those that have been wondering how the NVIDIA proprietary Vulkan driver compares to AMD's two Vulkan driver options, here are some fresh benchmark results.

KDE Frameworks 5.27 is now available as the latest version of these add-on libraries from the KDE camp to complement Qt5 functionality...

This morning the protection keys syscall interface was submitted for the Linux 4.9 merge window, the last step of adding Protection Keys support to the Linux kernel...

With "Vulkan Next" likely not debuting until 2017, the Vulkan 1.0.x point releases continue with minor fixes to the Vulkan documentation...

There is support for a number of new ARM platforms with the in-development Linux 4.9 kernel...

The MD subsystem updates were sent out earlier this week for the Linux 4.9 kernel merge window with a few improvements/features to note...

GDB 7.12 is now available as the latest feature release of the GNU Debugger...

Back on Wednesday I wrote about how RadeonSI and Nouveau NVC0 completed their OpenGL 4.5 extension changes but were still being held up from exposing OpenGL 4.4 due to the incomplete ARB_enhanced_layouts extension. Well, that is about to change with 13 patches published today that effectively finish it up...

For those sticking to Wine 1.8.x stable releases until Wine 2.0 is released around the end of the year, Wine 1.8.5 is the latest and greatest...

Intel's "ANV" Mesa Vulkan Linux driver now has basic support for HiZ, an important performance feature...

Back in August Fedora 25 switched to using Wayland by default in time for the project's alpha release. With next week's beta release, Fedora 25 is still using Wayland by default and it looks like it will remain that way unless any showstoppers appear...

While GNOME is frequently brought up for its well-vetted Wayland support when using the latest packages, the Enlightenment desktop has also been progressing very well with its Wayland compositor and they continue making improvements to their display stack. One of these important pieces has been the Ecore_Drm2 library...

For those fond of the open and free RISC-V instruction set architecture, the basic changes have been made so systemd now supports this CPU architecture...

With Intel's 3D Xpoint Optane technology beginning to appear as extremely fast non-volatile memory and other advancing efforts in the NVDIMM space like ReRAM, persistent memory was a popular topic at this week's LinuxCon Europe event in Berlin...

Thanks to the ongoing compute-focused work by independent Nouveau contributor Samuel Pitoiset, the NVC0 Gallium3D driver is the first driver in Mesa supporting the ARB_compute_variable_group_size extension...

The Intel Integrated Sensor Hub (ISH) is supported in the Linux 4.9 kernel code for benefiting Cherrytrail mobile/convertible/ultrabook hardware and newer...

The F2FS (Flash-Friendly File-System) and EXT4 file-system feature updates have been sent in for the Linux 4.9 merge window...

Today the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver is landing in mainline Mesa and just hit the Git code minutes ago. Merging the RADV driver came up just over the past few weeks in time for next month's Mesa stable release while this community-based driver was developed over the summer by David Airlie and Bas Nieuwenhuizen. This "unofficial" Radeon Vulkan open-source driver is now becoming part of the Mesa code-base with it being able to support the few Vulkan Linux games but isn't yet a fully conformant driver. Here are fresh benchmarks of the RADV driver compared to the RadeonSI OpenGL driver and benchmarks compared to AMD's hybrid closed-source AMDGPU-PRO driver on several different graphics cards.

Last week news came out that the FreeBSD 11.0 release wasn't going to happen as planned but it needed to be respun due to security issues. The release was supposed to happen on 3 October, but three days later we find out it needed to be re-spun again and is still going through testing...

The beta of Fedora 25 will be released on-time next week...

Linux's power management and ACPI subsystems maintainer Rafael Wysocki presented at this week's LinuxCon Europe event in Berlin about the state and future of power management in the Linux kernel...

Xen and KVM are the latest pull requests hitting the mailing list for the Linux 4.9 kernel...

If you have a GCN 1.0 Southern Islands or GCN 1.1 Sea Islands graphics card and have been wanting to play with the experimental AMDGPU kernel DRM driver as an alternative to the Radeon DRM driver, here's an opportunity for Ubuntu/Debian users...

With the Linux 4.9 staging pull request comes the addition of the Greybus subsystem. A major user of the Greybus subsystem was to be Google's Project Ara modular smartphone, but with that initiative recently being canned, it may seem like Greybus is dead but that's not actually the case...

We've been expecting many last minute Gallium3D Nine / D3D9 patches ahead of the Mesa 13.0 branching and yesterday the bulk of those patches were sent out...

The input subsystem is the latest pull request to talk about for the forthcoming Linux 4.9 kernel development cycle...

Dave Chinner has submitted his XFS file-system updates for the Linux 4.9 kernel. This time around most of the changes are internal to the open-source file-system rather than boasting new end-user features...

Pending no last minute issues, the RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver will be merged into mainline Mesa tomorrow...

OpenBenchmarking.org crossed the milestone this afternoon of serving more than twenty million test profile and test suite downloads for open-source, automated benchmarking via the Phoronix Test Suite...

A number of last minute XWayland improvements/fixes landed today in the Git code-base ahead of this month's X.Org Server 1.19 release...

Takashi Iwai sent in the sound subsystem updates for the Linux 4.9 kernel. This cycle there continues to be changes all over the place...

With this month's Ubuntu 16.10 "Yakkety Yak" release, Unity 7 on the X.Org Server is used by default on the desktop while an alternate Unity 8 + Mir session is installed by default, but while it's available is not used unless logging into this newer desktop stack. Here's my few minutes of trying it out this morning with all of the latest Ubuntu 16.10 packages.

José Fonseca of VMware has added basic support for AVX2 to Gallivm, the driver-independent portion of LLVM integration with Gallium3D...

Thanks to work done by AMD's Nicolai Hähnle, the Mesa Gallium3D state tracker exposes support for the GL_KHR_robustness extension...

Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in the staging subsystem pull request for the Linux 4.9 kernel and it's quite big in part due to the addition of the Greybus subsystem...

Just one day after KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS was released, openSUSE Leap 42.2 Beta 3 is shipping and uses this new KDE desktop update by default...

The FUSE kernel module update has been sent in for Linux 4.9 as the kernel code responsible for supporting file-systems in user-space on Linux...

Jolla is looking to push out Sailfish OS releases faster and thus today announced "Fiskarsinjoki" in early access form...

The Mad Max game is being released for Linux later this month on 20 October...

NVIDIA has been pushing for a new Unix Device Memory Allocator API as an alternative to GBM, which could be used by Wayland compositors instead and would be a superior API that NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver would be willing to support...

While not yet merged into the mainline Linux kernel and so far not seen as favorable by upstream DRM kernel veterans, Samsung developers have been working on a picture processing API for the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM). At this week's LinuxCon Europe, they are presenting their API proposal...

The libvirt Linux virtualization API has been updated to version 2.3 today with some new features and plenty of bug fixes...

Published earlier today was AMDGPU vs. Radeon DRM benchmarks on DRM-Next for GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics cards that have experimental support available via Kconfig switches to enable this alternative open-source DRM driver over the long-standing Radeon driver. Here are some fresh Git benchmarks using the R9 290 "Hawaii" GPU that's been in a regressed state on the default Radeon driver...

Fedora 24 users are advised against currently updating your system using the common dnf update command when running GNOME, KDE, or any other graphical desktop. Due to an awkward bug being explored, it could leave your system in an unhappy state...

The GNOME 3.24 release schedule has been firmed up and is now publicized...

LXQt developers have done a desktop memory consumption comparison to show that Qt programs are not necessarily bloated...

Back in 2013 we heard how X.Org security is worse than it looks and how for a period there were many X.Org security issues. It's been a while since last seeing a number of X.Org security vulnerabilities come about at once, but that's changed with this morning's disclosure...

With the forthcoming Linux 4.9 kernel there is experimental AMDGPU Southern Islands support so that original AMD GCN 1.0 GPUs can optionally work with the newer AMDGPU DRM driver rather than the mature Radeon DRM driver. In this article are tests of some AMD graphics cards from GCN 1.0/1.1 era comparing the performance impact of switching the Radeon/AMDGPU kernel driver with this DRM-Next code for Linux 4.9.

The Khronos Group, the organization behind OpenGL, Vulkan, and other industry standards, is expanding their footprint when it comes to new neural network initiatives...

Version 10 of the Secure Memory Allocation Framework (SMAF) is now available as a large patch-set by Linaro for addressing secure-related memory allocation on Linux...