Phoronix

With yesterday's lengthy AMD Radeon RX 480 Linux review and the follow-up posts for this Polaris graphics card launch, I didn't have too much time to run OpenCL compute tests. However, here are some fresh OpenCL Polaris numbers with the AMDGPU-PRO driver stack for those curious about the compute potential of this $199+ graphics card...

The first official builds are now available of Linux Mint 18, the latest installment of the popular Linux distribution and now derived from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS...

Here are some 1080p OpenGL results (as opposed to our plethora of 1440p and 4K data today) for the brand new Radeon RX 480 and available via OpenBenchmarking.org so you can easily compare your own Linux system(s) performance against these reference numbers using the open-source driver stack...

As a follow-up to this morning's article about a new driver beta program, the sign-up application is now available...

Some exciting non-Polaris news today is that Google has open-sourced SwiftShader, the library they use for high-performance graphics rendering on the CPU...

AMD made good on their word and released the AMDGPU-PRO 16.30 Hybrid Linux Graphics Driver today...

After weeks of anticipation, AMD's high-end Radeon RX 480 "Polaris" graphics card is officially launching today! This graphics card starts at just $199 USD (or $239 USD for the 8GB version) and has day-one Linux support! There's available open-source driver support as well as an AMDGPU-PRO update that's expected today for those wanting to make use of this newer hybrid Linux driver stack. I've been testing the Radeon RX 480 under Linux the past week under both driver stacks and have my initial results to share this morning.

Besides the Radeon RX 480 "Polaris" performance numbers no longer being under NDA (see our 12-page Radeon RX 480 Linux review!), also being made public today are the Radeon Software improvements to Radeon Settings around WattMan, the successor to PowerPlay for overclocking/underclocking via the Radeon GUI control panel. But isn't Radeon Settings Windows-only? Yes, for now, but they are looking at the possibility of opening up Radeon Settings for Linux users...

For years AMD had a very active, community-driven semi-private beta program for their (Catalyst, at the time) drivers but in recent years while going through tough financial times they cut back the program. However, they will now be working to restore this program and they will be looking for Linux participants too...

Our just-published 12-page AMD Radeon RX 480 Linux review features a wealth of interesting OpenGL/OpenCL/Vulkan Linux benchmarks along with performance-per-Watt and performance-per-dollar metrics and more. Check it out if you haven't already. This article are just some extra Steam Linux gaming benchmarks for the RX 480 vs. various NVIDIA graphics cards in the games that can't be fully-automated like Tomb Raider, Shadow of Mordor, and Company of Heroes 2 where the benchmarks had to be manually executed...

Valve last night released the SteamOS 2.83 Brewmaster Beta, which includes AMDGPU-PRO RC2 and the NVIDIA 367.27 driver...

Ubuntu developers are once again pondering the possibility of dropping support for i386 (32-bit x86) as installation media for their Linux distribution...

One day ahead of the Radeon RX 480 "Polaris" launch, the necessary firmware updates for the production graphics card support have landed in linux-firmware.git...

For those making use of DRI PRIME for multi-GPU systems (mainly in the context of iGPU + dGPU notebooks), the xorg-server's PRIME code now has synchronization support and double buffering...

If you have been in the market for a dual LCD monitor mount but the price has set you off, there's a great deal right now on such a monitor mount...

Jason Donenfeld announced today WireGuard, what he describes as a next-generation secure network tunnel for the Linux kernel...

With the first half of 2016 quickly coming to an end, here's a look at the most popular open-source and Linux news covering H1-2016 on Phoronix with our daily coverage that so far this year has included 1,695 original news articles and 126 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured articles...

For those still using Libav over FFmpeg, this multimedia library has added a wrapper for OpenH264 decoder support...

For your viewing pleasure this afternoon are some fresh NVIDIA GeForce GTX 900/1000 benchmarks with the 367.27 display driver compared to various Radeon GCN GPUs using a patched Linux 4.7 kernel and Mesa 12.1-dev Git as of this past weekend...

For months there's been talk of a Servo/Browser.html technical preview in June and there's just one week left to the month... It looks like Mozilla is still planning on meeting this milestone!..

It's been two years since the last stable OpenMandriva Lx release and more than one year since Lx 3 Alpha was released but coming out today is finally the second beta of this Mandriva-derived Linux distribution...

Succeeding the PHP 7.1 Alpha release that happened earlier this month is now the second alpha build of this significant update to the PHP programming language...

Microsoft is today releasing the open-source .NET Core 1.0 milestone...

The folks at MediaTek in Hsinchu announced the Helio X20 Development Board today as the first development board using a tri-cluster, deca-core design...

FFmpeg 3.1.0 is now available with the latest features for this widely-used open-source multimedia library...

The fifth weekly test release to the Linux 4.7 kernel is now available for testing...

With doing a lot of tests for next week's Radeon RX 480 Linux review, here are the numbers of some current AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards (obviously excluding the RX 480 that's still under NDA) under Linux with the performance-per-Watt...

Yesterday's article about a new OS kernel being written in the D programming language led to a Phoronix reader pointing out that Vulkan support has also come to the D language...

The AMD developers still have a few more weeks to get their new feature material ready for the Linux 4.8 kernel while here is an early look at some of the code merged so far...

This week saw the release of Dolphin 5.0 as a big update to this open-source emulator for Nintendo GameCube/Wii titles. While there is an experimental Direct3D 12 back-end, not present for this release was any Vulkan support, but it's being developed...

If you are hoping to get your hands on a Radeon RX 480 "Polaris" graphics card when they begin shipping in a few days, here are the upgrades you need to make to your Linux system if you are wanting to make use of the open-source AMD Linux graphics stack...

There was a 30~40% drop in some of the SPEC Java benchmarks when using the Linux 4.7 development code, but fortunately this regression has now been discovered and addressed...

The HAMMER2 file-system is going on four years in development by the DragonFlyBSD crew, namely by its founder Matthew Dillon. It's still maturing and taking longer than anticipated, but this is yet another open-source file-system...

There's a lot of benchmarking going on this weekend at Phoronix in preparation for next week's Radeon RX 480 Linux review. Here are some fresh results on the NVIDIA side showing the current performance-per-dollar data for the NVIDIA Maxwell and Pascal graphics cards for seeing what the RX 480 "Polaris 10" card will be competing against under Linux...

If you missed the article earlier this month about Building A Massive L-Shaped Desk For A Better Workflow, More Monitors and Space, the second desk is now completed...

From 22 to 26 June, the openSUSE Conference has been taking place in Nürnberg. There's been live video streams for those not in Bavaria while now the video recordings are being uploaded for your enjoyment at your convenience...

Following the recent Windows vs. Linux AMDGPU-PRO / RadeonSI testing, GTX 1080 Windows vs. Linux results, and yesterday's Intel Windows vs. Linux benchmarks, here is a look at all three sets of numbers when using some OpenBenchmarking.org magic to merge the data-sets and normalize the results...

We've already seen Redox OS as an operating system and micro-kernel written in the Rust programming language. With just about every newer programming language we've seen ambitious developers take to the lengthy and complicated process of writing a kernel and the start of an OS in their new favorite language. With PowerNex, the D programming language is being used to write an OS kernel...

The Khronos Group has continued with their weekly updates to the Vulkan 1.0 documentation, but hopefully we're only one month away from where at SIGGRAPH 2016 we could see major new versions of the Vulkan and OpenGL specifications released...

The fifth alpha release of the huge FreeBSD 11.0 operating system update is now available for testing...

While Xen 4.7 was released this week as the latest for this virtualization hypervisor, the independent Xen Orchestra software that provides a web interface to Xen Server is out with its version 5.0 milestone...

As part of the celebrations with Phoronix turning 12 years old earlier this month I ran some fun tests looking at the Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux gaming performance with the new NVIDIA Pascal GPUs and also a Windows 10 vs. RadeonSI Gallium3D vs. AMDGPU-PRO comparison on the AMD side. To finish things up, here is a fresh comparison of Intel Skylake HD Graphics under Windows 10 and Ubuntu 16.04.

Matthias Klose has provided an update concerning plans for having GCC 6 become the default compiler of Debian 9.0 "Stretch."..

The Wine camp is out with their latest bi-weekly development release where they have continued focusing on some of the same work items they've been trying to address the past few releases...

This summer there has been two summer projects being worked on under the X.Org Foundation via this year's Google Summer of Code...

Version 5.0 of the open-source Dolphin Emulator for playing Nintendo GameCube and Wii games on Windows/Linux/OSX is now available...

For those of you not paying attention to Weston Git or the mailing lists, this reference Weston compositor has been going through a period of refactoring...

With the Linux 4.7 kernel there is an initial Mediatek DRM display driver while further improvements to this open-source code are coming for Linux 4.8...

Earlier this week there were some last minute AMDGPU DRM kernel patches submitted that were needed for AMD's imminent Radeon RX 480 "Polaris" launch while today some last minute Mesa patches have materialized...

Following last month's PostgreSQL 9.6 Beta 1 release, a second beta is now available for testing...