Phoronix

With GCC7 feature development ending, this week I conducted some benchmarks of the latest GCC 7 snapshot against that of the past three major release series of the GNU Compiler Collection: 6.3.0, 5.4.0, and 4.9.4. All tests were done on Ubuntu Linux x86_64 with an Intel Core i7 6800K processor.

One of the latest Fedora 26 changes being worked on is enabling TRIM/Discard by default for newly-created encrypted disks via dm-crypt...

For C++ developers, the Vulkan space is quite vibrant as aside from the official Vulkan-Hpp C++ library there are a growing number of abstraction layers for Vulkan C++ development...

The libvirt virtualization API saw a major 3.0 release this week to succeed its earlier v2.5 milestone...

The Solus Linux developers have been working on their "Linux Steam Integration" for Steam and improvements around the Steam runtime, with this being one of the distributions interested in good Linux performance and making use of some Clear Linux optimizations, while their next step is looking at Flatpak-packaging up of libraries needed by the Steam runtime to fork a Flatpak-happy Linux gaming setup...

For those still looking to escape systemd, the BSDs remain free and the FreeBSD-based TrueOS is currently working on making use of OpenRC...

There's some early feature development work that's landed in Mesa Git this Friday as the initial feature development towards Mesa 17.1...

The sixth and likely final release candidate of Wine 2.0 is now available for testing...

Intel developers today announced the release of Beignet 1.3 and it's by far their most significant release yet for this open-source OpenCL implementation for Intel graphics hardware...

Intel's Mesa driver is at OpenGL 4.5 compliance but there are many extensions still left to be implemented that haven't appeared in a formal OpenGL specification. One of those extensions now being implemented is ARB_transform_feedback_overflow_query...

Libdrm has some new patches this morning from a NVIDIA developer...

For those curious about the current Kabylake graphics performance between Windows 10 and Linux, here are some OpenGL benchmark results under each operating system. Windows 10 Pro x64 was tested and the Linux distributions for comparison were Ubuntu 16.10, Clear Linux, Antergos, Fedora 25 Xfce, and openSUSE Tumbleweed.

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is entering its "stage four" development for GCC 7 with the stable GCC 7.1 release expected in March or April...

Alex Deucher has sent in another batch of fixes for the Radeon and AMDGPU DRM drivers for the Linux 4.10 kernel...

With Mesa 17.0 up to its release candidates and being under a feature freeze, I explored this morning how the size of the changes for Mesa 17.0 compare to earlier Mesa milestones...

For those that were interested in Linux.Conf.Au 2017 in Hobart, Tasmania, the videos are now available online...

Chrome/Chromium users on x86 dealing with H.264 encoding from the browser should notice faster performance coming down the pipe...

The latest development release is now available of the work leading up to the GNOME 3.24 desktop in March...

David Airlie has published a set of 31 patches for testing that provide initial support for geometry shaders within the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver...

With Qt 5.8 that's due to be released next week there is the new Qt Speech as a "tech preview" of text-to-speech for this tool-kit...

Peter Hutterer has announced the latest stable version of libinput, the input handling library commonly used across modern X.Org / Wayland / Mir systems...

At the beginning of 2017 Valve released a Steam client beta with noteworthy Linux improvements. With today's Steam stable client update, all of those changes are included...

Librecore is a new project aiming to be a new Coreboot downstream with a focus remaining on providing fully-free system firmware. Separately, Minifree/Libreboot has been accused (and admitted by Leah Rowe) to not paying a vendor for a completed contract...

Our friends and Linux-friendly PC vendor, CompuLab, have announced a new "IPC" line-up of their small form factor computers now with Intel Kabylake processors...

Earlier this week I posted some benchmarks of GPUOpen's new Radeon Open Compute ROCm OpenCL stack that premiered last month and they are working to make completely open-source. In those initial benchmarks I compared the ROCm 1.4 OpenCL performance to the existing AMDGPU-PRO OpenCL implementation on Linux. For those wondering how these two Radeon OpenCL stacks compare to NVIDIA, here are some fresh benchmarks.

It was widely expected that Linux 4.9 would be a "LTS" (Long Term Support) kernel release while now it's been made official...

The first release candidate of Mesa 17.0 (formerly known as Mesa 13.1) is now available for testing...

With it looking certain now that Oracle is ending Solaris feature development with the cancelling of Solaris 12, here's a look back at the most popular Solaris news and milestones for the project over the years on Phoronix...

With the forthcoming Linux 4.10 kernel there is finally support for Turbo Boost Max 3.0 as featured in some newer Intel CPUs. But, unfortunately, the code in Linux 4.10 doesn't work for all TBM3-capable systems out there, but a new kernel patch is being worked on for Linux 4.11 or later to make it work with more hardware...

Pekka Paalanen of Collabora has merged his patch-set into Weston for supporting initially positioned windows with XWayland, a feature that some X11 apps rely upon for correct functionality...

Coincidentally, yesterday Stereoscopic 3D patches emerged not only for the Nouveau driver but also the AMDGPU driver too...

With AMD having not yet opened up their Catalyst Control Center / Radeon Software Center for AMDGPU Linux, using RadeonTop is one of the third-party ways to see your GPU utilization...

After a very exciting development cycle, Mesa 17.0 was branched yesterday, officially marking the end of feature development for this next Mesa release due out in February...

Well, that happened sooner than anticipated...

Adding to the list of Mesa 17.0 features is enough functionality in the reverse-engineered Etnaviv Gallium3D driver for running OpenGL 2.0 games...

With this week Clear Linux now being able to run Steam, I was excited to see how this performance-minded Linux distribution out of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center would compare to other more popular Linux distributions when it comes to Intel Linux gaming performance. Here are some benchmarks of this traditionally workstation/server-oriented Intel Linux distribution running some Steam Linux games.

As reported a few hours ago, it's the day for a new NVIDIA Linux driver beta series. Meet the NVIDIA 378.09 driver release and it's pretty darn exciting for both OpenGL and Vulkan...

At the beginning of December there were rumors of Oracle canning Solaris and now that's finally been confirmed by Oracle more or less as they will not be delivering Solaris 12...

NVIDIA today is releasing their first Linux 378.xx driver series beta and alongside that new beta driver they are publishing their EGL External Platform interface and Wayland library...

The GCC Steering Committee has approved of the RISC-V port being included in GCC...

Hans Wennborg of Google, serving as the LLVM release manager, has announced the tagging of the first release candidate of the forthcoming LLVM 4.0...

It's been a half year since the debut of PulseAudio 9.0 while the release of PulseAudio 10 is coming soon...

Nouveau continues advancing on the display front: beyond getting DP MST and atomic mode-setting support in the Linux 4.10 kernel, there are now patches available for wiring this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver up to supporting stereoscopic 3D output via HDMI...

With the Linux 4.10 kernel having initial but limited Intel Graphics Virtualization Tech support, you can begin playing with the experimental virtual GPU support using the upstream kernel and libvirt...

The Khronos Group has published their booth information and sessions that will happen at this year's Game Developers Conference (GDC 17) at the start of March in San Francisco...

The Genode Operating System Framework has announced their planned roadmap for this year as the involved developers continue working on this original OS initiative...

While GNOME / Red Hat developers have been leading the Flatpak app sandboxing initiative, KDE developers are making progress too with embracing Flatpak as a more convenient and secure way of securely packaging Linux desktop apps...

X.Org Server 1.19 was released last November while today there was finally an X.Org developer giving some love to the older DDX drivers for those still with vintage GPUs and wanting to run the modern xorg-server...

Gabe Newell of Valve wrapped up his latest Reddit "Ask Me Anything" where he faced a variety of questions. There were a number of users asking various SteamOS / Linux questions, but not much in the way of answers...

Google developers are proposing the addition of a Gaming Input Protocol to Wayland...