Phoronix

The Khronos Group has announced their session line-up for SIGGRAPH 2017...

The latest quarterly update to the pkgsrc cross-platform package manager is now available with a variety of new packages as well as some infrastructure improvements...

Last week the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver added an option to enable SISCHED, the LLVM SI Machine Instruction Scheduler that for a while has been a non-default option for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

Epic Games has released the first public preview of the upcoming Unreal Engine 4.17 game engine upgrade...

While it's yet another Fedora release shipping several weeks late (in fact, more than one month later than anticipated), the release is once again worth the wait. I've been evaluating the near-final state of Fedora 26 on several of my test systems the past few days and it's working like a champ.

Unity Tech has made available their first updated game engine released under the Unity 2017 branding as part of their new versioning scheme...

Ubuntu's Mir display server is out today with version 0.27 that is an interim step before Mir 1.0 with Wayland client support. Mir 0.27 contains functionality that was a work-in-progress during Canonical's recent restructuring and shift in focus...

Jonas Ã…dahl has announced the release of Wayland-Protocols 1.9 as the newest version of the protocol definitions for Wayland...

Eric Anholt has written his usual weekly update concerning his happenings on the open-source graphics driver stack for the Raspberry Pi devices and other Broadcom-powered hardware...

Last week we reported that RISC-V developers hoped their kernel port would land in Linux 4.13 but it doesn't look like that is going to happen...

The F2FS file-system changes for Linux 4.13 are fairly exciting...

SPI, Software in the Public Interest, has released their annual report covering 2016. SPI, for the uninitiated, serves as the steward to many open-source projects from Arch Linux to the X.Org Foundation to OpenMPI and LibreOffice...

Darrick Wong has sent in the XFS file-system updates slated for the Linux 4.13 kernel...

Complementing last week's 2017 Linux Laptop Survey results, here are some complementary numbers you may be interested in that are collected by OpenBenchmarking.org based on Phoronix Test Suite activity...

Unity has announced that with their Unity 2017.3 game engine later this year they will be dropping DirectX 9 support. It has a few possible implications for Linux gamers...

Given the recent release of ROCm 1.6 and this being the OpenCL stack providing the exclusive compute support for Vega GPUs and newer, I ran some benchmarks of ROCm 1.6 on the various supported Radeon GPUs and compared them to different GeForce graphics cards atop NVIDIA's latest Linux driver release.

AMD's GPUOpen team has announced their v1.0 release of the Vulkan Memory Allocator...

The Human Interface Device (HID) subsystem changes for the Linux 4.13 kernel have now been submitted...

David Airlie has written a post on his new blog concerning a deferred rendering demo in Vulkan and how he managed to take the RADV driver from about half the speed of the AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan driver up to performance parity...

David Airlie has submitted the staged Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver updates for the Linux 4.13 kernel merge window...

Marek Olšák's work on OpenGL multi-threading is now ready for more wide-scaling testing and will be enabled on a whitelist-basis for games capable of benefiting from this approach...

Bjorn Helgaas has submitted a big batch of PCI updates for the Linux 4.13 kernel merge window...

KDE developer Adriaan de Groot continues making progress on improving the support when running this desktop environment on FreeBSD. Adriaan has even been experimenting with Wayland/Weston on FreeBSD...

The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) student developers working on projects under the X.Org umbrella continue making progress, although one of the efforts has been officially dropped...

EXT4 on Linux 4.13 is supporting its new "large directory" feature...

FreeBSD developers have announced the second release candidate of the upcoming FreeBSD 11.1...

In yesterday's Windows 10 Radeon Software vs. Ubuntu 17.04 + Linux 4.12 + Mesa 17.2-dev comparison I tested both Ubuntu 17.04 out-of-the-box and then upgraded it to the Linux 4.12 kernel and Mesa 17.2-dev. Here are some complementary tests I did with a larger set of Linux games...

Dmitry Torokhov submitted the input subsystem updates today for the Linux 4.13 kernel merge window...

At the end of June I posted some Vulkan vs. OpenGL Linux Game CPU Core Scaling using RADV/RadeonSI with a Polaris graphics card. At that time I also carried out some NVIDIA CPU core scaling results in a Vulkan vs. OpenGL manner, but simply forgot to post those numbers until now...

Needing to replace a failed hard drive in one of the older benchmarking systems, I decided to try out my first DREVO brand solid-state drive with frankly the I/O performance on this particular system not being too important and being curious how well this sub-$40 SSD performs...

I previously reported on Btrfs RAID 5/6 fixes for Linux 4.12 to work on fixing some potentially bad Btrfs RAID 5/6 problems. These changes for Linux 4.12 were enough to elevate the rating of this functionality...

Will Cooke of Canonical has shared another weekly status update for the work going into the GNOME desktop for Ubuntu 17.10 and their other efforts this cycle...

Endless OS 3.2 is now available as the newest feature release for this GNOME-based Linux operating system that ships on the budget-friendly Endless Computers and is also available for free to all users...

A variety of POWER architecture updates have been submitted for the Linux 4.13 kernel merge window...

When comparing differences between the RADV Vulkan driver and the AMDGPU-PRO still-proprietary Vulkan driver, David Airlie has uncovered a new area to explore for potentially getting closer performance out of the open-source driver...

Emil Velikov of Collabora has reiterated his release plans for Mesa 17.2 in making it the latest quarterly release to this growing 3D graphics stack...

The Free Software Foundation has endorsed fifteen "new" devices under their Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification...

Wine 2.12 is now available as the latest bi-weekly snapshot leading up to the Wine 3.0 release late into the year or early 2018...

The Qt tool-kit has merged support for WebGL streaming...

With having carried out a new Windows 10 install this week for the latest Windows 10 WSL / VirtualBox benchmarking, I used this as a fresh opportunity for some new Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux benchmark figures.

Glibc has added a per-thread cache to malloc and enabled it by default...

Valve developer Andres Rodriguez has updated his patch-set for wiring in support for OpenGL External Objects (EXT_external_objects) into Mesa...

Following the two week survey process, here are the results from our inaugural Linux Laptop Survey. There are 30,171 responses, a lot of data to now sift through while in this article is an overview of the initial findings. There may be some additional follow-up articles in the days/weeks ahead when sifting through more of the data.

OpenSUSE Leap 42.3 has the finish line in sight and it's scheduled to cross that line by the last week of July. Here's a look at the new features...

With Fedora 27 we are likely to see broader support for Flatpaks and more of Fedora's graphical applications distributed in Flatpak form...

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) now has support for the ARMv8-R architecture...

The Device Mapper (DM) updates have been pulled into mainline Git for the Linux 4.13 merge window...

The RADV Vulkan driver now has an option for being able to enable the LLVM SI machine scheduler...

Fedora 26 will be officially released next week!..

NIR expert Connor Abbott who is working for Valve this summer and in particular RADV Vulkan features has published a new patch series today that also confirms another upcoming Feral Linux game using Vulkan...