Independent developer Kevin Brace took over maintaining the OpenChrome DDX driver earlier this year to improve the open-source VIA Linux graphics support while over the summer he's slowly been getting up to speed on development of the OpenChrome DRM driver...
The 2016 X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC2016) wrapped up Friday in Helsinki, Finland. Here is a summary of the major happenings for those that may have missed it or didn't yet watch the video streams.
In addition to the Nouveau status update talk at XDC2016, Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst had carried out an additional presentation on Friday dedicated to this open-source NVIDIA driver's work on power management and re-clocking...
It's been one week since the Libreboot downstream of Coreboot announced it would leave the GNU and denounced the FSF over supposedly a transgendered individual having been fired by the this free software group. Both Richard Stallman and the FSF denounced these claims made by Libreboot maintainer Leah Rowe. Since then, no actual proof has been presented to back up these claims by the Libreboot maintainer but the drama around it has seemingly continued...
At the GNU Tools Cauldron earlier this month in the UK there was a presentation on forthcoming improvements to the GNU Tools, presented by Nick Clifton as part of the Red Hat Tools Team...
This summer the student developer Elie Tournier participated in Google Summer of Code to develop a "soft" double-precision floating-point library for Mesa. While GSoC is past, it appears he is committed to seeing this library through and getting into Mesa. With potential soft/emulated ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 support, this could be good news for those GPUs lacking real double precision support...
It has been nearly one year since the LXQt 0.10 release while today it was succeeded by LXQt v0.11, the newest version of this lightweight, Qt-powered desktop environment...
On the first day of the XDC2016 conference this week in Finland NVIDIA presented over their GBM vs. EGLStreams debate that's been ongoing for months with NVIDIA's lack of GBM API support by their driver being what's preventing the binary blob from working with current-generation Wayland compositors. In that session they called for a new community-driven API to suit the needs of device memory / surface allocation and could succeed the Generic Buffer Manager. By the end of XDC2016, some progress has already been made...
The OpenSolaris-derived Illumos project is rolling out its new bootloader project to use on new systems in place of its old GRUB (v0.97) legacy bootloader...
Last month Intel introduced the 600P Series solid-state drives as the most competitively-priced NVMe SSDs launched to date. Here are a few Linux comparison benchmarks from my initial testing of the SSDPEKKW256G7X1 M.2 SSD on Linux.
It's been one year since Frictional Games launched SOMA as their latest science fiction survival horror game. The game is supported on Windows, OS X, Linux, and PlayStation 4. This game saw close to half a million sales, but just over 1% of them were from Linux gamers...
In addition to being the organizer of XDC2016, Martin Peres also participated in several presentations at this week's conference in Helsinki. One of these pesentations by Martin was concerning 2D X.Org acceleration...
Besides Nouveau developers being frustrated by NVIDIA's signed firmware blobs, at XDC2016 they also made other remarks about their focus on OpenGL and performance while Vulkan support isn't expected anytime soon...
Harry Wentland of AMD just presented at the XDC2016 conference about DAL, the big Display Abstraction Layer code-base, which many AMD Linux users have been waiting to see merged in order to have Polaris audio support and this is one of the stepping stones for seeing FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync and other modern display capabilities...
Earlier this month LunarG published up-to-date Vulkan Sample Tutorials for those wanting to learn more about using this high-performance Khronos graphics API...
The AMDGPU DRM code for Linux 4.9 is already queued in DRM-Next with virtual display support and other features as well as experimental GCN Southern Islands support while today another feature pull request was submitted to DRM-Next with more Radeon/AMDGPU changes...
Intel Open-Source Technology Center developer Jason Ekstrand presented earlier today at XDC2016 with a presentation entitled "The Anatomy of a Vulkan Driver" where he covers how he and fellow Intel developers brought up the first open-source Vulkan driver and had it ready for launch-day when Khronos formally unveiled the specification earlier this year...
Last week marked the ratification of the first cross-vendor SPIR-V extension, the Khronos intermediate representation used by Vulkan and OpenCL 2.1+...
The latest stable release of the Nouveau X.Org driver is now available for users of this open-source NVIDIA DDX component in conjunction with the Nouveau DRM kernel driver...
While still in its early stages, there's a port in the works of the GNU Compiler Collection for AMD's GCN (Graphics Core Next) instruction set architecture...
The X.Org Foundation Board of Directors held their annual in-face meeting today at XDC2016 in Helsinki, Finland. At this meeting they have decided to accept Google's invitation to host XDC2017 at the Googleplex...
Intel Open-Source Technology Center developer Kevin Rogovin just finished presenting at this year's XDC2016 conference in Helsinki. Rogovin presented on the promising 01.org project FastUIDraw...
The second beta of the upcoming openSUSE 42.2 Linux distribution is now available. One notable change is that 42.2 has switched to the KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS beta...
The Lenovo N21 Chromebook is now supported by mainline Coreboot. But then again that's not a huge surprise considering Google's focus on Chromebook/Chromebox support in Coreboot...
Nouveau developers Samuel Pitoiset, Karol Herbst, Pierre Moreau, and Martin Peres presented their status update on this open-source, reverse-engineered NVIDIA Linux graphics driver during the second day of the XDC2016 conference. Nouveau developers had a few words for the NVIDIA developers in the room...
Covered so far today on Phoronix, the first day of XDC2016 Helsinki, were NVIDIA's work on Linux HDR support, how Google's Android Runtime on Chrome uses Wayland, and the NVIDIA surface allocation API debate continued as a prerequisite to seeing mainline NVIDIA Wayland support in the compositors. There were also other notable presentations today...
Intel's Mesa driver has supported all of the extensions required by the OpenGL ES 3.2 specification, but only today is the support being officially advertised...
While I've tested out various indoor WiFi-based security cameras over the past decade on Phoronix, outdoor WiFi cameras have been a different story. Either through my contacts from Phoronix or through my own personal searching, I've never found an outdoor WiFi security camera that I've liked either due to poor build quality, poor video quality / viewing angles, or other issues but most of the time has revolved around not being well-engineered. That has changed with the Nest Cam Outdoor that was announced earlier this year by the Google/Alphabet-owned company while this week it's finally begun shipping to consumers. I certainly like the Nest Cam Outdoor from a hardware perspective, but the software could still use some improvements.
James Jones of NVIDIA just finished taking the stage at XDC2016 where he was talking about Unix device memory allocation, which comes down to the big EGLStreams vs. GBM debate... A.k.a. NVIDIA pushing a different approach for their Wayland support from the Wayland compositors currently focusing around GBM for buffers. This debate is leading towards the development of a new API...
Google developer David Reveman presented at this morning's XDC2016 conference in Finland about the Android Runtime for Chrome making use of Wayland (ARC++) and how the rest of its graphics stack looks for running Android programs on Chrome OS...
NVIDIA supports HDR displays on Windows and Android, but not currently under Linux for the infrastructure not being in place to support High Dynamic Range displays from the Linux desktop. NVIDIA though is looking at working towards ultimately supporting HDR displays on Linux...
For those craving some fresh Mesa Git benchmarks, here are a few OpenGL tests I carried out with some AMD Radeon GPUs when comparing the out-of-the-box Ubuntu 16.04 LTS performance to what's offered currently by Linux 4.8 and Mesa 12.1-dev Git...
Lately I've heard a few reports of some newer PCs being less than friendly with Linux, namely a number of Lenovo devices who have issues with installing Linux. Based upon new information that's come to light from a Phoronix reader, it appears that PCs receiving Microsoft's "Signature Edition" tag are being locked-out from running non-Windows platforms...
Version 1.5.1 of the libjpeg-turbo library is now available. For those that have somehow managed to never hear of it, libjpeg-turbo is a BSD-licensed, faster JPEG image codec than libjpeg and has various other feature differences...
While it's coming a few days later than anticipated, Wayland 1.12 along with the adjoining Weston 1.12 compositor update is now officially available...
If all goes well, GNOME 3.22 will be officially released tomorrow, 21 September. Here is a recap of some of the new features and improvements made over this past six month development cycle plus some screenshots of the near-final desktop that will power the upcoming Fedora 25 Workstation.
Those wishing to use Coreboot on a modern Intel system (albeit with the closed-source FSP) will soon have another option to consider with an open-source, physically secure computer powered by a Skylake-Y SoC moving ahead with a port to Coreboot...
XDC2016 begins tomorrow in Helsinki, Finland as the annual X.Org / Wayland / Mesa conference. For those not able to enjoy the event in person, a livestream is planned...
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