Phoronix

After already making a ton of improvements to the RadeonSI Gallium3D stack this month, Marek Olšák is looking to end the month on a high note with yet more fixes to the open-source AMD driver...

Seen as silly to come, the stock compiler of FreeBSD doesn't (at least not yet) ship with OpenMP support enabled by default...

The Mir display server may already be ready for working with AMD's FreeSync or VESA's Adaptive-Sync, once all of the other pieces to the Linux graphics stack are ready...

Version 2.78 of the Blender open-source modeling software is coming soon and it adds NVIDIA Pascal support on top of fixing some Maxwell performance issues...

Two or so years back or so it was looking hopeful that the mainline Linux kernel would finally have a proper VIA DRM/KMS driver for the unfortunate ones still have VIA x86 hardware and using the integrated graphics. However, that work was ultimately abandoned but there is talk of it being restored...

The Linux kernel to now hasn't provided proper support for NVMe power-savings via APST, Autonomous Power State Transitions, but it's coming...

The Vulkan 1.0.x release train has been slowing down a bit with not seeing releases every week now but sometimes it's now every other week...

As alluded to earlier and on Twitter, the past few days I have been working on a fresh Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux graphics/gaming performance comparison. This time it's looking at the latest Radeon performance using an R9 Fury and RX 480. Tests on Windows were obviously done with Radeon Software Crimson Edition while under Linux were the two latest AMD/RTG Linux driver options: the hybrid AMDGPU-PRO driver and the fully open-source driver via Linux 4.8 and Mesa 12.1-dev.

Continuing his Sunday tradition, Linus Torvalds released a few minutes ago the Linux 4.8-rc4 kernel...

As I wrote about a few days ago, I'm in the process of my first Broadwell-EP Linux build and for it I had purchased the Xeon E5-2609 v4, a CPU that costs just $300 USD and has eight physical cores while a combined TDP of just 85 Watts, but it lacks Turbo Boost and clocks up to just 1.7GHz. But how does it perform?..

There's an active proposal to incorporate a back-end into LLVM for AAP, a processor ISA for deeply-embedded Harvard architectures...

Early on LLVM's Clang compiler offered much better debugging / error messages than GCC but in the past few years the GNU Compiler Collection developers have been working on generating more helpful messages too. With GCC 7 there will will be more improvements in this space and more...

The Simple Desktop Display Manager has released version 0.14 of their project that's used by Hawaii, some KDE installations, and more as the login/display manager...

With the sync validation framework leaving the staging area in Linux 4.9 and other work going on around the Android sync framework and explicit fencing, this functionality is becoming a reality that ultimately benefits the Linux desktop...

For those interested in C/C++ compiler performance, for some fun numbers to dive into this weekend are LLVM Clang vs. GCC benchmarks atop FreeBSD 11.0 RC1 AMD64 on an Intel Xeon Haswell system.

One of the exciting innovations within the Linux kernel in the past few years has been extending the Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) to become a more generalized in-kernel virtual machine. The eBPF work with recent versions of the Linux kernel allow it to be used by more than just networking so that these programs can be used for tracing, security, and more...

The open, upgradeable ARM development board that traces back to the failed KDE Vivaldi project managed to pass its funding goal just in time. This open-source hardware project currently powered by some older Allwinner hardware managed to raise more than $170k...

There was another long-time Intel open-source Linux graphics driver developer that left the company earlier this summer and is now working at Google on the Chrome/Chromium OS graphics stack...

LLVM 3.9 isn't being released as it was hoped for, but it appears the final release is still just days away...

As a quick follow-up to OpenGL ES 3.1 coming for Intel Haswell graphics, those patches have now landed in Mesa Git...

The former developers of ownCloud who forked the project to Nextcloud have today released Nextcloud 10, just two months after the Nextcloud 9 release...

KDE Connect is the interesting project for integrating notifications and more from your phone or other mobile device onto the KDE desktop. With KDE Connect you can receive smartphone notifications on your computer as well as using your phone as a remote control to the desktop...

Today marks the release of the third development milestone release of the upcoming Phoronix Test Suite 6.6-Loppa version...

Yesterday I posted some benchmarks showing how the AMDGPU / R9 Fury performance has jumped up in the past few months just since the April release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. For those wondering how the open-source AMD OpenGL performance has evolved over the longer term, I took a Radeon R9 270X graphics card and re-did tests going back to Ubuntu 15.04 for looking at the RadeonSI Gallium3D performance for the past year and a half.

It's off to a good Friday so far in Mesa Git for open-source Radeon users...

Earlier this month David Herrmann sent out two kernel patches to hide "legacy" DRM drivers behind a new Kconfig switch and make these DRI1 drivers depend upon the kernel's "BROKEN" option. Not all are happy about these patches...

The developers within the Sunxi camp working on better Allwinner SoC support under Linux have been reverse-engineering Allwinner's "Cedar" video engine. Their project is being called Cedrus with a goal of "100% libre and open-source" video decode/encode for the relevant Cedar hardware...

David Airlie and Bas Nieuwenhuizen continue making good progress on the open-source, community-driven RADV Vulkan driver for providing Radeon Vulkan support for newer GCN GPUs in the absence of AMD making available their Linux Vulkan driver as open-source...

For those of you using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS in conjunction with the stock AMDGPU driver for open-source driver support on newer graphics cards like the Radeon R9 Fury and R9 285/380, here are some benchmarks showing out the performance you are missing out on by not upgrading your kernel or Mesa after just a few months of development...

Today -- on Linux's 25th birthday -- marks the release of Ubuntu 16.10 Beta 1 for opt-in flavors participating in this "Yakkety Yak" milestone...

Unfortunately Intel Corp hadn't sent over any Broadwell-EP hardware earlier this year when launching these new Xeon E5-2600 V5 server processors nor when it came to the high-end consumer Broadwell-E processors. However, I ended up buying a Xeon E5-2609 v4 Broadwell-EP this week for a new system and will be running a variety of upcoming tests...

Marc Merlin of Google presented at this week's LinuxCon 2016 event in Toronto how the company has -- and continues to -- contribute to open-source software...

OpenSSL 1.1.0 was released today as a major update to this free software cryptography and SSL/TLS toolkit...

Given the underlying work that's been happening in the CPUFreq/scheduler area and the introduce of the new Schedutil CPUFreq governor, I decided to run some fresh performance benchmarks of P-State and CPUFreq with the different governor options when testing from a Linux 4.8 Git kernel atop the current Fedora 25 development packages and using a Core i5 Skylake processor.

Most Phoronix readers know PC-BSD as the BSD operating system derived from FreeBSD that aims to be user-friendly on the desktop side and they've done a fairly good job at that over the years. However, the OS has been in the process of re-branding itself as TrueOS...

Just as a quick notice if you've had problems registering the past few days in the forums, etc...

It looks like some newer Intel laptops will be much happier when S3 suspended with the upcoming Linux 4.8 kernel...

The Qt Company announced the release today of Qt Creator 4.1 as the newest version of its popular, cross-platform IDE...

The second release candidate to the upcoming FreeBSD 11 is now available for testing...

25 years ago to the day Linus Torvalds announced the creation of his kernel that would become Linux...

For those running Intel Haswell processors, hope is not lost in seeing new versions of OpenGL extensions with the Intel Mesa driver. New patches will bring Haswell up to OpenGL ES 3.1...

The first pull request has been submitted of new Radeon and AMDGPU DRM driver updates to be queued in DRM-Next for landing with the Linux 4.9 kernel...

Just months after the NetworkManager 1.2, the next major installment is now available...

For more than the past year I've been very much looking forward to AMD's Opteron ARM-based development boards. Sadly, these boards -- namely the HuskyBoard and LeMaker Cello -- are silently absent...

Up until running the tests for today's article, I can't remember the last time I touched a hard drive... It's been many months ago at least. Nearly all of our tests at Phoronix are from solid state storage, but I decided to pick up a new HDD for running some Linux file-system tests on a conventional hard drive for those not having an SSD.

While the support has been steadily improving, one of the more criticized areas of KDE Plasma 5 has been around the multi-monitor support with various bugs being present. Fortunately, improvements are on the way with KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS...

In time for next month's GNOME 3.22 release, the drawing tablet support for GNOME on Wayland is getting into shape...

Earlier this month Intel submitted their first batch of i915 DRM driver updates to DRM-Next that in turn is now targeting the Linux 4.9 kernel. A second batch of new feature material was submitted today...

For those with a TITAN X or other high-end GPUs that have a configurable light-up "GeForce" LED sign along the edge of the graphics card, a new Nouveau driver allows manipulating those LEDs...

The Aubinator tool has been added to the Mesa tree for helping Intel graphics driver developers debug problems...