It was just with GCC 6 that MPX support was flipped on with Intel's Memory Protection Extensions (MPX) just premiering with Skylake CPUs. But now GCC developers are thinking about potentially deprecating this feature...
Merged last month into Mesa Git and improved since then with follow-up commits has been KHR_no_error support for reducing the overhead of the OpenGL drivers by disabling certain error handling for OpenGL games/applications. This in turn can free up some CPU utilization and possibly lead to power-savings too...
With Btrfs RAID 5/6 seeing fixes in Linux 4.12, if you are re-evaluating the setup of a Btrfs native RAID array, here are some fresh benchmarks using four solid-state drives.
AMD's Harry Wentland has sent out the latest round of patches to the yet-to-be-merged DC display stack (formerly known as "DAL") for the AMDGPU kernel driver...
Igalia developers have been working on improvements to better supporting Google's Chromium/Chrome web-browser under Wayland and should eventually be upstreamed...
Nicolai Hähnle is looking at adding support for ARB_gl_spirv to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and as part of that support for the NIR intermediate representation...
Heterogeneous Memory Management sadly didn't make it for Linux 4.12 as developer Jerome Glisse was aiming for, but now he's out with an updated version to these important HMM patches...
RISC-V developers believe that while their Linux kernel port isn't yet fully complete, they are hoping to get it mainlined now for this open-source CPU ISA...
Valve has pushed out a long-awaited update to SteamOS Brewmaster and in this latest beta update have switched away from the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver in favor of Mesa...
Last week the "Polaris Evolved" Radeon RX 560 graphics card launched. I picked up a Sapphire Radeon RX 560 for Linux testing and have those results to share today for OpenGL and Vulkan workloads under Linux using the 4.12 development kernel and Mesa 17.2-dev compared to a range of Radeon and GeForce graphics cards.
On Friday I posted some benchmarks of AMD's new AOCC code compiler for Ryzen compared to LLVM Clang 4.0/5.0 and GCC 6/7/8. The AOCC 1.0 benchmarks on Ryzen 7 didn't offer much over LLVM Clang for which this "AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler" is based, but in this article are some tuning benchmarks.
The annual International Workshop on OpenCL (IWOCL) conference has concluded this week in Toronto. Slides and other materials from this leading OpenCL conference are now available...
Two weeks from tomorrow will mark the 13th birthday since starting Phoronix.com and also nine years since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0. What better way to celebrate than by running more of our big, annual benchmarks from Windows vs. Linux comparisons to other interesting hardware tests...
The developers behind the Rust-based Redox operating system continue working on the "TFS" file-system that they hope will compete with the long-standing ZFS file-system, but TFS isn't being tied to just Redox OS...
AMD's GPUOpen has been working on the HIP compiler to allow NVIDIA CUDA code to be executed on AMD GPUs, but now there's a separate and more universal effort: Coriander...
While Linux graphics drivers have been improving a lot, they are still not a trouble-free experience, especially when encountering new OpenGL games/workloads, even with NVIDIA's proprietary driver...
Does the Linux 4.12 kernel bring any performance improvements for Intel graphics? Here are some OpenGL/Vulkan tests for Intel Kabylake graphics with Linux 4.10 vs. 4.11 vs. 4.12 when using Mesa 17.2-dev...
Support for Google's Native Client (NaCl) has been removed from mainline glibc with the GNU toolchain no longer really being maintained or used for compiling code targeting this Chrome-supported sandboxed code execution environment...
Given the RadeonSI/Gallium3D threaded pipe context work having landed earlier this week and there being other performance improvements with Linux 4.12 and Mesa 17.2-dev, here are some fresh benchmarks on an AMD Polaris card comparing this latest open-source graphics driver code as of this week compared to AMD's latest hybrid driver, AMDGPU-PRO 17.10.
Last year we covered some interest by Qt developers in potentially having virtual reality support for Qt 3D with OpenGL. It appears that work is getting closer to fruition...
Given the big changes of the Linux 4.12 kernel and a lot of that being block/file-system-related work, here are some fresh benchmarks of the Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS file-systems compared to their performance on past kernel releases when using a solid-state drive.
Enlightenment / Samsung OSG developers have been experimenting with running Wayland within a tool-kit widget. E.g. running the Weston terminal within an EFL tool-kit widget that in turn could be running on X.Org...
Chrome OS has not been using the X.Org Server but there have been some X11/X.Org dependencies still around, which looks like they will be removed soon...
With yesterday's release of the PostgreSQL 10 beta, a number of Phoronix readers and some of my supporters requested benchmarks of this major update to this widely-used SQL database server. Well, for those curious about this early test release, here are some benchmarks...
This week AMD released AOCC 1.0, the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler, with initial support for Ryzen/Zen CPUs. In this article are our first benchmarks of the AOCC compiler compared to the GCC 6/7/8 and LLVM Clang 4/5 compilers.
After announcing SHOGUN 2 for Linux earlier this week, Feral Interactive has now announced the system requirements for this newest Linux game port being released next week...
This week NVIDIA released the GeForce GT 1030 as their newest low-end Pascal card. The GT 1030 cards retail for around $70 USD and you can find them in a low-profile version with some cards even being passively cooled...
It's been a while since delivering any fresh comparison of Intel's open-source OpenGL and Vulkan Linux graphics drivers, so for your viewing pleasure this Friday, here is a fresh comparison while making use of the Linux 4.12 development kernel and Mesa 17.2-dev.