Phoronix

Acer's CXI2 Chromebox line-up is now supported by mainline Coreboot...

The GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. have joined the Advisory Board of The Document Foundation...

Wine 1.8.3 is now the latest stable version of this open-source software for running Windows programs and games on Linux and other operating systems...

The first release candidate is out today of the SuperTuxKart 0.9.2 open-source racing game inspired by Mario Kart...

Qt 5.7 is now officially available as the latest version of the Qt5 tool-kit...

Now that my Linux reviews of the GeForce GTX 1070 and GeForce GTX 1080 have been published, next on my agenda this week are running some fresh Windows vs. Linux graphics benchmarks with these Pascal graphics cards...

There is a new dedicated mailing list for AMDGPU DRM driver patches...

OpenSUSE's Tumbleweed rolling-release distribution will soon join the likes of Fedora 24 and Clear Linux as being an early adopter of the new GCC 6...

I had a bit of a surprise waiting for me as I walked out of lunch today: Ubuntu's snapper packaging utility had accepted the necessary patches to work on non-Ubuntu distros. The list of supported distributions now includes Arch, Gentoo, Debian, and Fedora.

Yesterday NVIDIA released the 367.27 long-lived driver release to succeed the earlier 367 betas. That driver arrived too late for my initial round of GeForce GTX 1070 / 1080 Linux testing with that GTX 1070 review published this morning. However, since then I decided to fire up this stable driver release on Pascal...

Patches are landing in LLVM Clang to improve the compiler's support for musl libc as an alternative to glibc on Linux-based systems...

Coming out yesterday from the start of GNOME's latest GTK+ hackfest were details on GTK+ 4.0 and future releases whereby they would change how they enforce API stability and how frequently they do major stable releases of the toolkit...

If you were amazed by the GeForce GTX 1080 performance under Linux but its ~$699 USD price-tag is too much to handle, the GeForce GTX 1070 is now shipping for $399~449 USD. NVIDIA sent over a GeForce GTX 1070 and I've been putting it through its paces under Linux with a variety of OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan benchmarks along with CUDA and deep learning benchmarks. Here's the first look at the GeForce GTX 1070 performance under Ubuntu Linux.

If you were amazed by the GeForce GTX 1080 performance under Linux but its ~$699 USD price-tag is too much to handle, the GeForce GTX 1070 is now shipping for $399~449 USD. NVIDIA sent over a GeForce GTX 1070 and I've been putting it through its paces under Linux with a variety of OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan benchmarks along with CUDA and deep learning benchmarks. Here's the first look at the GeForce GTX 1070 performance under Ubuntu Linux.

Less than two weeks after ownCloud was forked into Nextcloud, the project today did their version 9 release...

Henrik Austad of Cisco has published very early code for implementing a TSN core driver in the Linux kernel. TSN is short for Time Sensitive Networking and was formerly known as Audio/Video Bridging (AVB)...

The upcoming release of Fedora 24 isn't shipping with PHP 7.0 but for Fedora 25 later in the year is when they plan to migrate to PHP7 for its speed improvements and more...

It appears that Intel's Vulkan open-source Linux driver is finally in good enough shape for being able to handle Valve's Dota 2 game...

KDE Frameworks 5.23 was announced today as the latest major update to this collection of add-on libraries complementing Qt5...

Git 2.9.0 was announced today by Junio Hamano as the latest stable version of this distributed revision control system...

With WWDC happening this week, in addition to the macOS Sierra and iOS 10 news, there's also a bit of low-level tech of interest to us: Apple File-System...

AMD's Lisa Su is taking the stage right now at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) to talk more about the Radeon RX series. Thus the embargo has expired concerning today's announcements so here are all the details...

At WWDC, Apple just announced that OS X is being renamed to macOS. That renaming of their desktop OS comes after weeks of rumors that Apple would be going with the new macOS name. Besides announcing the name change, they also lifted the lid on "Sierra" as their annual update to the desktop stack...

NVIDIA has released the 367.27 Linux driver as their first stable release in the 367 driver series...

At a GTK+ hackfest this week the developers have come up with a new plan for delivering major releases of the GTK+ tool-kit every two years, e.g. GTK4, GTK5, GTK6, etc...

Both the Intel i965 and AMD RadeonSI drivers within Mesa have seen separate work done over the past day for boosting the performance of compute shaders with these open-source OpenGL drivers...

Just found a nugget of news from an Intel representative in case you have been eyeing an Intel Broadwell-E processor: there are no driver plans for Linux for the new Turbo Boost Max 3.0 functionality...

A few years back we covered the Nemoshell for Wayland and back in 2014 how NEMO-UX was working on a futuristic, multi-user Wayland experience. It's been a while since hearing anything about Nemo, but we've received some information today from the newly-formed company that's trying to push this Wayland experience further...

Reports are once again circulating that Samsung is looking at easing its reliance on Google's Android by switching more of their devices over to running on their Linux-based Tizen project...

With the imminent release of Qt 5.7 expected, this updated tool-kit release will bring a new Qt Wayland Compositor API in tech preview form...

Version 1.0 of the LLVM D Compiler (LDC) was quietly released earlier this month as a huge step forward for the D programming language...

Developers behind the Unity Game Engine have announced the 2D Experimental Preview with new features...

For those wondering about the stable release of LLVM should you be interested in it for packaging Clang, the latest AMDGPU back-end, or other reasons, there is now a tentative release plan...

An ambitious developer has begun a project to rewrite Minecraft's Java-based OpenGL renderer and in its place use a Vulkan renderer...

For the Phoronix 12th birthday and in trying to make a more efficient workflow and some general improvements to reinvigorate my general 100 hour work weeks across the span of Phoronix Media, I decided to set out on building a new desk this past week. Here's the result with having a massive, 8 and 10 foot sides to a L-shaped wooden and steel desk.

Following yesterday's Deep Learning and CUDA Benchmarks On The GeForce GTX 1080 Under Linux one of the Phoronix reader inquiries was about the OpenCL vs. CUDA performance on the GTX 1080... Is one GPGPU compute API faster than the other with NVIDIA's proprietary driver? Here are some side-by-side benchmarks...

Linus Torvalds announced the release this morning of the Linux 4.7-rc3 kernel...

A few days back I posted a fresh comparison of AMDGPU-PRO against NVIDIA's binary driver on various GPUs. Those numbers didn't include any direct AMDGPU-PRO vs. open-source Radeon/AMDGPU + RadeonSI numbers, but here they are on a couple GPUs if you are curious about the state of Linux 4.7 Git and Mesa 12.1-dev...

Within the upstream Qt tool-kit, the WebKit module was dropped in favor of Qt WebEngine that's powered by Google's Chromium "Blink" engine. While Qt WebEngine is still working out well for new development projects, it looks like Qt WebKit is being worked on for a revival...

Many have hypothesized over implementing Direct3D over Vulkan for helping out the Linux gaming scene and as an alternative to Wine's Direct3D-to-OpenGL wrapper while a developer appears to have taken up the challenge and has been making progress in writing a Direct3D 9 compatibility layer over Vulkan...

Last week I published the first Linux review of the GeForce GTX 1080 followed by some performance-per-Watt and OpenGL results from the GTX 1080 going as far back as the 9800GTX, among other interesting follow-up tests with OpenGL/Vulkan/OpenCL. Since then one of the most popular requests has been for doing some deep learning benchmarks on the GTX 1080 along with some CUDA benchmarks, for those not relying upon OpenCL for open GPGPU computing. Here are some raw performance numbers as well as performance-per-Watt in the CUDA space.

Faithful Phoronix readers should recall POCL as the Portable Computing Language project working to provide an open-source OpenCL implementation that can be run on CPUs and other targets. One of the initiatives being worked on more recently by POCL developers is an HSA driver...

Timothy Arceri of Collabora published his second version of patches on Friday for implementing ARB_enhanced_layouts packing support for Mesa's Intel i965 driver...

Chrome 52 Beta may have just been released, but I'm already looking forward to Chrome 53 for very significant performance improvements!..

For those wanting to play The Talos Principle this weekend, Croteam has released a significant update to the game...

Valve released a stable Steam client update on Friday evening with all of the changes we've been seeing from the frequent beta releases...

The Free Software Foundation is a bit late to the party, but have finally come out publicly against Intel's Management Engine (ME)...

While Firefox beta users are busy trying out Electrolysis by default, Google engineers today released their 52 Beta for Chrome early testers...

Linux kernel developer Andy Grover who is employed by Red Hat has written a lengthy blog post making the case for using the Rust programming language for low-level Linux...

Just like clock work, the latest bi-weekly development build of Wine is available this morning...