Last week was the disclosure of the Linux kernel's Dirty COW vulnerability while the latest high-profile open-source project going public with a new security CVE is GNU's Tar. Tar CVE-2016-6321 is also called POINTYFEATHER according to the security researchers...
The Nouveau DDX X.Org driver, xf86-video-nouveau, hasn't supported NVIDIA's GTX 750/900 Maxwell graphics processors even though there's been the reverse-engineered, open-source support within the Nouveau DRM kernel driver and NVC0 Gallium3D Mesa driver. Patches revised today implement Maxwell support for the X.Org driver...
Earlier this week I published Linux 3.9 through Linux 4.9 kernel benchmarks looking at the raw performance of various subsystems when testing each of the major kernel releases as far back as this Core i7 Haswell system was supported. From that same system, today is a look at testing the kernels going back to Linux 3.11 when Haswell graphics support was first in good shape for this Core i7 4790K box while looking at the raw power consumption and performance-per-Watt for these 19 major kernel releases.
The first development milestone test release of the upcoming Phoronix Test Suite 6.8-Tana is now available for your open-source, cross-platform benchmarking needs...
In addition to RadeonSI re-enabling SDMA for Carrizo and Sea Islands GPUs yesterday, Marek Olšák made another change to fix the issue of random GPU hangs happening with Hawaii and Fiji graphics processors...
Back in September the Enlightenment project's EFL library added atomic mode-setting and nuclear page-flipping support to provide a "perfect rendering" and a "buttery smooth" experience. Earlier this month was then an update on the Ecore_Drm2 state while coming out this week is a Samsung OSG blog post explaining more about the atomic mode-setting details...
Last month was the controversy over some Lenovo Yoga laptops not working with Linux that was first alleged to be due to a Microsoft "Signature PC" requirement that later turned out to be incorrect. Well, the good news now is that Lenovo has issued a BIOS update and should allow for better Linux compatibility...
Well known Intel open-source developer Ian Romanick has published a massive set of 59 patches for enabling GL_ARB_gpu_shader_int64 within core Mesa and their i965 DRI driver...
The GeForce GTX 1050 graphics cards are beginning to ship today. As mentioned in yesterday's NVIDIA 375.10 vs. Linux 4.8 + Mesa 13.1-dev AMD GPU Benchmarks, I unfortunately don't have any Linux reviews to publish today due to waiting on the hardware but will have GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti reviews in the days ahead. The first GTX 1050 card to be tested is a Zotac GTX 1050 Mini, which might be great for a living room HTPC or 1080p "Steam Machine" on a budget...
With the in-development Linux 4.9 kernel showing signs of some performance improvements, I've gone ahead and tested the last 21 major kernel releases on the same system. From Linux 3.9 to Linux 4.9, each of the major kernel releases was tested from the same Intel Core i7 desktop with a variety of benchmarks.
For those still using the Opera web-browser, Opera 41 is now available as the latest stable release and seems primarily focused on performance improvements...
For those needing to access a Btrfs file-system from a Microsoft Windows OS, the independent WinBtrfs project provides a native driver for being able to access Btrfs from Windows...
In prepping for the GeForce GTX 1050 Linux graphics card reviews this week, I've been re-testing my various AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards atop the very latest driver stacks. As a precursor while waiting for the GeForce GTX 1050 Linux review in the days ahead, here are those fresh benchmarks of the other graphics cards.
Valgrind 3.12.0 has been released as the latest major version of this widely-used, cross-platform utility by developers for memory profiling/debugging/checking...
Ever hear of the Intrinsic game engine? Neither have we, until The Khronos Group mentioned it this morning as a new game engine focused on Vulkan support that was open-sourced last week...
Last week the Intel Turbo Boost Max 3.0 patches were updated for the Linux 4.9-rc1 kernel. While it won't be mainlined until Linux 4.10 at least, I decided to try out these TBM 3.0 / ITMT patches with a Core i7 6800K Broadwell-E CPU...
Back in September Feral Interactive announced Deus Ex: Mankind Divided for Linux and macOS. This game under Windows is one of the few titles using Direct3D 12 and Feral announced their macOS port would be making use of Apple's low-level Metal graphics API. Unfortunately, it's still not clear yet whether the Linux port will feature Vulkan support -- the open, cross-platform equivalent to Metal and D3D12 -- or just have an OpenGL renderer...
For the past number of months the LLVM project has been considering a move from their SVN-based development process to Git with a focus on GitHub. That effort continues moving forward...
We're only up to Linux 4.9-rc2 but as usual Daniel Vetter has already prepared a pull request of drm-intel-next to begin staging Intel kernel graphics/display driver changes for Linux 4.10...
Coreboot 4.5 is now available as the latest version of this open-source BIOS/firmware implementation project for those looking toward the bi-annual releases rather than Git...
When having out the Core i5 "Sandy Bridge" HP EliteBook this weekend besides comparing fresh OpenGL numbers to early Sandy Bridge results going back to 2012, I also compared Ubuntu 16.10 / Linux 4.8 and Linux 4.9 compared to older kernel benchmarks I did with the same system...
Not mentioned in my earlier features you won't find in the Linux 4.9 mainline kernel is support for Intel's Cache Allocation Technology (CAT) but at least it was revised this weekend in still working towards mainline integration...
One of my "hobbies" when news is light and there isn't any fun/new/exciting hardware keeping me busy on a given weekend is checking out the various Vulkan projects on GitHub. It's been great seeing all of the independent graphics renderers/engines being tried by different individuals, tons of different Vulkan samples, and a lot of other innovative projects around Vulkan, many of which I've written about in the past few months on Phoronix. One of the projects I see being regularly updated when checking on weekends and haven't written about yet is LLGL, the Low-Level Graphics Library...
Earlier this year patches were posted for a new /dev/random implementation for the Linux kernel dubbed LRNG -- simply, the Linux Random Number Generator. The LRNG work has yet to be merged in the mainline kernel but the code has now been updated for Linux 4.9...
This weekend I pulled out a Core i5 powered HP EliteBook that served as Intel's Software Development Vehicle for Sandy Bridge. I hadn't touched this laptop in a long time but decided to see how the current Linux + Mesa graphics stack on Ubuntu 16.10 compares to the older Linux distributions when Sandy Bridge hardware was more relevant...
Following EXT4 file-system encryption and F2FS per-file encryption support, the UBIFS file-system is also bringing in encryption support built off this fscrypto framework used by EXT4/F2FS...
This week I was shopping for a solid state drive to replace a hard drive on one of my backup/archival systems and ended up settling for the Crucial MX300 in getting 525GB of storage for just $120 USD. Here are some benchmarks of the Crucial CT525MX300SSD1 compared to some other SSDs on Linux for those curious.
While Mesa 13.0 is coming along for release next month with exciting features like OpenGL 4.5 for Intel, unofficial GL 4.4/4.5 for RadeonSI/NVC0, and the addition of the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver, there is some functionality that sadly won't be found in this release...
With the GNOME 3.24 desktop that's currently in development the latest GNOME Shell code has support for easily letting the user launch an app on a dedicated GPU when applicable for handling NVIDIA Optimus use-cases of having integrated and discrete GPU laptops...
An Intel developer has published testing patches for providing a SoundWire bus driver within the Linux kernel, which implements the MIPI SoundWire 1.1 specification...
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