Phoronix

Longtime GNOME developer Emmanuele Bassi has pleaded his case that Vala is a "dead" language and that new applications/developers should look at alternatives or first work on improving this GNOME-centered language...

This September will mark 10 years since the public launch of the RadeonHD DDX driver (xf86-video-radeonhd) that was developed by SUSE during the Radeon X1000 and HD 2000/3000 days in conjunction with ATI/AMD. While we've talked about what started AMD's open-source strategy in the past and dozens of other RadeonHD articles, new stories are still coming to light...

Mesa 17.0 is now officially available...

We've been talking about WireGuard for months and it's hoping to go mainline in the Linux kernel this calendar year. Earlier this month at FOSDEM was a status update on the project...

An early feature for LLVM Clang 5.0 is a prototype implementation of clangd, a server component for the compiler...

The Linux 4.10 kernel didn't end up being released today, but was pushed back by an extra week. However, in looking forward to next weekend, here are ten of the features that excite us about Linux 4.10...

In the past on Phoronix we have mentioned ToaruOS a few times. It's a "hobby" kernel and operating system written mostly from scratch yet supports Mesa, GCC, Python, and more. It's been in development since 2011 while now the operating system's 1.0 release finally took place...

While many were hoping that Linux 4.10 would be released today, instead it's been pushed back to next Sunday...

This was one of the busiest weeks in Firefox's history with having more than ~10,000 change-sets affecting ~97,000 file changes...

In yesterday's Core i3 2100 "Sandy Bridge" vs. Core i3 7100 "Kabylake" comparison I included all of the power consumption and performance-per-Watt results. If you are looking for additional power numbers from other Kabylake CPUs, here is some additional data...

There's going to be fresh AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce Windows 10 vs. Linux comparisons on Phoronix in the week ahead. Here are the early details and a RFC for our patrons...

The patch landed in Intel's drm-intel-next-queued branch this week for enabling atomic support by default on the hardware platforms where it's fully supported...

Just a quick note for anyone who routinely builds the latest X.Org Server from Git, the video driver ABI has been broken again, thus you'll need to rebuild your dependent DDX drivers assuming they have been modified for this new ABI...

While Raptor Engineering was unsuccessful with their Talos Secure Workstation effort to build a high-end, libre POWER8 workstation, they are now backing a more realistic effort: opening the Baseboard Management Controller of an ASUS server motherboard still on the market...

Xfce developers have restored work on their Parole Media Player as the primary media player for this lightweight desktop environment...

Available this weekend is the newest release of the Ardour digital audio workstation software for Linux, macOS, and Windows...

OpenBenchmarking.org, the cloud component to the Phoronix Test Suite for providing a centralized results storage location for analysis as well as hosting all of the test profiles and test suites so they can be downloaded independently of the Phoronix Test Suite version, has reached a new milestone. Just moments ago, OpenBenchmarking.org crossed the threshold of delivering 22 million test profile and test suite downloads since the Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 premiere in February of 2011...

Vulkan 1.0.40 is now available as the newest minor version bump to the Vulkan 1.0 API specification. This isn't nearly as exciting as the significant Vulkan 1.0.39 update but does include a new extension...

At the end of January I published my initial Core i3 7100 Linux benchmarks while for those still on older Sandy Bridge hardware and thinking of upgrading to a Core i3 Kabylake, here are some interesting comparative benchmarks. For these weekend tests are raw performance and performance-per-Watt metrics for the Core i3 2100 Sandy Bridge to the Core i3 7100 Kabylake processors.

Having now published RADV/RadeonSI Mesa 17.0 benchmarks and Intel i965/ANV Mesa 17.0 benchmarks compared to Mesa 13.0 and 17.1-devel, here are now benchmarks of the Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D driver for seeing how this open-source NVIDIA 3D driver performs on the imminent Mesa 17.0 release...

GNOME developers continue investing in the Meson Build System and the results continue to be much faster than Autotools and generally other build systems too...

Google developers have been working on a number of open-source projects in the Vulkan space and one of their latest is SPIR-V processing with Rust...

Vulkan is going on one year old and while the hardware driver support has continued to advance, we haven't yet seen a software implementation of Vulkan for running on a CPU. Of course, not for expecting any performance miracle or the like, but as a vendor-neutral platform for being able to test Vulkan's behavior, certain fallback scenarios, and other use-cases like Mesa's LLVMpipe/swrast/Softpipe software rasterizers...

Besides approving the Fedora 27 release schedule, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) approved GLVND support landing in Fedora 25 as an update...

With Mesa 17.0 due to be released any day now, here are fresh benchmarks of Mesa 17.0's Git code as of Friday compared to Mesa 12.0.6, Mesa 13.0.4, and the current Mesa 17.1-devel Git master code. Not only is the i965 OpenGL driver performance being examined but also the ANV Vulkan driver present since Mesa 12.

While Fedora 26 isn't even being released until June, today the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved the initial release schedule for Fedora 27...

With Intel Kabylake graphics on Mesa working (albeit very slowly) for Aspyr Media's latest Linux game port, Civilization VI, and RadeonSI Gallium3D running too albeit at a less than desirable speed, I decided to try running the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver with this latest AAA Linux game release...

Intel's open-source developers maintaining GVT-g for Linux graphics virtualization support for their hardware are working on migrating their development workflow from this code that's been out-of-tree since its inception to now being mainline...

In addition to AMD having open-sourced their UMR debugger a few days back, over in their "GPU Open" team they open-sourced the Radeon GPU Analyzer...

Here is a fresh round of some out-of-the-box Linux distribution tests when focusing on different server/workstation workloads. Featured in this comparison is Antergos 17.2-Rolling, Clear Linux 13200, Fedora 25, Scientific Linux 7.3, Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS, Ubuntu 16.10, and openSUSE Tumbleweed 20170205.

In continuation of this morning's article about Valve Planning To Carry Mesa GL Thread Feature On SteamOS, Per-Game Features, it looks like the developers working for Valve on the open-source Linux graphics driver stack are looking to do more in the per-game profile space...

It's looking like Valve will begin carrying some out-of-tree patches for their Mesa packages they use on SteamOS...

Since yesterday's release of Civilization VI for Linux, ported by Aspyr Media, we have published a 14-way NVIDIA GPU comparison with this newest high-profile Linux game release. This morning I also shared some Intel Kabylake game figures for Civilization 6 while now the focus is on RadeonSI.

AMDGPU's DC display code (better known as DAL) received some fresh patches on the public mailing list this week to improve its atomic mode-setting implementation...

The second release candidate to the forthcoming LLVM 4.0 compiler stack and Clang 4.0 C/C++ compiler front-end are now available...

There had been rumors the past few years of the city of Munich switching back to Windows and away from their widely-known Linux environment while now it looks like that is indeed taking place...

I was very surprised to find out that I was able to get Intel HD Graphics working with Aspyr Media's latest Linux game port, Civilization VI. Here are some benchmark results...

Android-x86 has been an open-source project for the past 7+ years for providing suitable Intel/AMD hardware support for Google's Android operating system. Unfortunately, its project leader may be stepping away...

Valve developers have been working to deliver Linux VR support and even significantly improving the AMDGPU+RadeonSI/RADV Linux driver stack for VR use-cases. Their motives are becoming more clear with Valve working on at least three new games making use of virtual reality...

Motivated by KDE Plasma Leaning Towards Focusing On Flatpak Over AppImage/Snaps and this lengthy, contentious forum thread, a KDE contributor has taken a closer look at the Flatpak versus Snaps versions available in different Linux distributions...

Aspyr Media today released their native Linux port of Civilization VI. Here are benchmarks of fourteen different NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards from Kepler to Pascal for seeing how well this game performs. Benchmarks with (not officially supported) RadeonSI and Intel Mesa graphics will be coming up next.

It feels like the work on power management / clock-gating / PowerPlay is a never-ending mission within the AMDGPU DRM driver -- more work has been queued up for the next kernel cycle...

The Linux port of Civilization VI by Aspyr Media has finally been released...

Ahead of Mobile World Congress (MWC17) happening later this month, Jolla has released Sailfish OS 2.1...

Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS was already twice delayed for different technical reasons. Approaching one month late from the original time table, 16.04.2 was supposed to ship today but that will no longer happen...

With Mesa 17.0 due to be released in the days ahead, I've been running fresh benchmarks of this latest user-space 3D driver stack on Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau. For your viewing pleasure this Thursday are the RadeonSI benchmarks comparing the Mesa 17.0 Git code to that of the latest Mesa 13.0 branch with a few different AMD graphics cards. There are also some tests of the RADV Vulkan driver.

Marek Olšák has posted a set of patches today to the Mesa mailing list and they should help some Linux games, at least Rocket League...

Libinput is the input handling library that originated with Wayland but has since been adopted by Mir as well as X.Org when using the xf86-input-libinput handling driver. This xf86-input-libinput adaptation for X.Org Servers has seen a new release today...

Feral announced earlier this week they are releasing HITMAN for Linux while today they have just published the system requirements for the Linux port...

Riding off last week's Wine 2.1 release as the first post-2.0 bi-weekly development snapshot, Wine-Staging 2.1 has been released that continues to incorporate all of its various experimental/testing patches...