Phoronix

Wine 2.19 is available as the project's latest bi-weekly development release for running Windows games/programs on Linux and other operating systems...

Intel compiler engineers have begun mainlining "Knights Mill" enablement within the LLVM compiler stack...

One of the latest server platforms under our bombardment of Linux benchmarks recently has been the Tyan Tempest HX S7100 (S7100AG2NR) motherboard which at the moment is paired with an Intel Xeon Silver 4108 processor. This ~$430 Xeon Scalable processor has eight cores plus Hyper Threading to yield 16 threads, a low 1.8GHz base frequency but with 3.0GHz turbo, 11MB L3 cache, six-channel memory support, AVX-512 capabilities, and has a 85 Watt TDP.

Lucas Stach has sent in the Etnaviv DRM driver changes to DRM-Next for the Linux 4.15 kernel. This is one of the bigger pull requests for this reverse-engineered, open-source Vivante graphics driver...

Intel has been sending in feature updates for their Direct Rendering Manager driver of new material that will debut in Linux 4.15. A third and final feature update is expected next week for DRM-Next...

Daniel Vetter has sent in the latest feature pull request of new drm-misc-next material for staging in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 4.15 kernel cycle...

Our latest benchmarking of Intel's 8th Gen Core "Coffee Lake" processors entailed seeing how well the i7-8700K performs on a variety of modern Linux distributions. Tested for this comparison was Ubuntu 17.10, Antergos 17.10, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Clear Linux, Debian Testing, Solus 3, and Fedora 26.

X.Org Server 1.19.5 was released today to fix nearly one dozen new security vulnerabilities from recent CVE tickets...

For fans of the Rust "safe, concurrent, practical systems language", the Rust 1.21 update is available today with some modest updates and additions...

Fedora is now able to bundle and offer a specific AAC audio codec implementation as a package for its Linux distribution...

There's a new version available of pfSense, the popular BSD-based operating system common to network appliances / firewalls / routers...

Feature development for Mesa 17.3 will be over soon in order to get this quarterly update to Mesa3D shipping next month...

If you are looking to build a small HTPC system, NAS / network device, or other petite system, the ASRock Z370M-ITX/ac is a bargain motherboard for Intel's new Coffee Lake LGA-1151 processors. This brand new motherboard retails for around $130 USD while offers dual Gigabit NICs, dual HDMI + DisplayPort, 820.11ac WiFI, 6 x SATA 3.0 ports, and a M.2 slot all within a mini-ITX form factor.

The widely-used, cross-platform Unity game engine is out with their newest feature release...

The GNOME team has firmed up the release schedule for the in-development GNOME 3.28 desktop environment...

Just over one month since the release of Qt Creator 4.4, the 4.5 beta is now available as the latest feature testing release for this Qt/C++ focused integrated development environment...

There's one week to go until the official Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" release and it looks like Mir 0.28 will land in the nick of time...

While Timothy Arceri working for Valve was busy wiring up an on-disk shader cache for RADV, Samuel Pitoiset working for this gaming giant has been tackling some additional optimizations...

The RADV Radeon Vulkan driver in Mesa now supports an on-disk shader cache...

NVIDIA has today released an updated version of their Linux Graphics Debugger to help game/application developers in analyzing issues and performance problems around OpenGL 4.x on GeForce/Quadro GPUs...

A video decoder driver for the NVIDIA Tegra is closer to the mainline kernel, but is focused on the (older) Tegra 2 chips...

Another set of Intel Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver updates were mailed in to DRM-Next today for the eventual Linux 4.15 kernel cycle...

While we've long been told that Mir 1.0 would happen for Ubuntu 17.10 -- even as recently as last month -- and then earlier this week was a Mir 1.0 tag and the v1.0.0 milestone in Launchpad, that version is being pulled back in favor of calling it Mir 0.28...

Published earlier this week was the Intel Core i3, i5, i7 With NVIDIA vs. AMD Radeon For Linux Gaming results that are quite interesting while in this article is looking at the OpenGL vs. Vulkan Linux gaming performance using NVIDIA's first-rate binary driver while also doing this graphics API/renderer comparison across the Intel Coffeelake processors from low-end to high-end.

Just a friendly reminder that if you are interested in participating in the Phoronix Oktoberfest 2017 deal to help support all our Linux hardware review / benchmarking / game testing work, only a few days are left to enjoy the deeply discounted deals...

The Facebook-developed Zstd compression algorithm was added to the Linux 4.14 kernel and hooked up for Btrfs/Squashfs file-system compression. Support is now being worked on so Zstandard can be used for compressing/decompressing the Linux kernel image...

Towards the beginning of this year NVIDIA donated their "DRIVE Design Studio" software to Qt to serve as the basis of Qt 3D Studio, a new editor for Qt 3D content. The code to this new Qt 3D Studio is now available in pre-release form...

The OVR_multiview OpenGL Extension developed via the OpenVR initiative has been around for several months in an incomplete form for allowing more efficient virtual reality (VR) rendering while now the extension is complete...

A few days back I initially wrote about a SUSE developer working on Zen tuning patches for GCC. That work has continued with more compiler patches coming for optimizing the GNU's compiler for Ryzen / Threadripper / EPYC processors...

While today's release of KDE Plasma 5.11 brings with it many Wayland improvements, KWin maintainer Martin Flöser (né Gräßlin) is proposing to get the Plasma 5.12 support into better shape on Wayland...

AMDGPU DC is expected for Linux 4.15 assuming Linus Torvalds has no objections to merging the code. We hope it won't, but the code-base for this new AMD display code is outright massive at more than 120,000 lines of code over hundreds of patches. Today another 103 new patches were published...

The initial "VC5" Gallium3D driver for next-generation Broadcom graphics hardware has been merged into mainline Mesa...

There's no announcement to break today, but besides there being an uptick in RADV performance work, there are some whispers and other indications of new Vulkan Linux titles likely dropping soon...

Earlier this year was word of BUS1 working on a D-Bus Broker while announced in late August was this D-Bus Broker project as a high performance message bus...

We have begun in delivering many Linux benchmarks of AMD EPYC, but for those of you interested in the BSD operating systems or even the "open-source Solaris" Illumos/OpenIndiana, I have run some basic tests the past few days using the high-end EPYC 7601 64-thread processor on the TYAN Transport SX TN70A-B8026.

For those wondering which Intel Coffeelake processors would make the most sense for a Linux gaming rig, I took the new Core i3 8100, Core i5 8400, and Core i7 8700K processors and tested them each with two Radeon and two NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards for looking at the overall Linux OpenGL/Vulkan gaming performance.

Jakub Jelinek of Red Hat today announced the release of GCC 5.5 compiler that also marks the end of the GCC5 series...

Yesterday a new batch of AMD EPYC processors arrived for testing at Phoronix...

The KDE developers have today announced the stable release of Plasma 5.11 as their autumn feature update...

Now being into Q4, I've been meaning to run some fresh Mesa Git development statistics to see how this year is pacing for this important piece of the open-source graphics ecosystem and Linux desktop...

The first development release of the next quarterly feature update to the Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software is now available...

There is just one week to go until the Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" release but it looks like the Mir 1.0 release will still happen in time...

The new OpenGL extension MESA_tile_raster_order proposed by Eric Anholt at Broadcom has now been merged to the Khronos registry...

Last year the GNU Debugger's code-base was converted from the C programming language (C90) to now using C++11. At last month's GNU Tools Cauldron was an update on this process...

With two weeks left in the crowdfunding campaign, Purism's Librem 5 smartphone initiative crossed its $1,500,000 USD funding goal...

OpenBSD 6.2 has managed to release a few days ahead of schedule...

For fans of the 2012 video game Spec Ops: The Line that was brought to Linux in 2015, this Unreal Engine 3 powered title should run faster with the newest Mesa...

Richard Hughes has announced the release of fwupd 1.0.0 today, the utility increasingly being used by many vendors for supporting updating of device firmware/microcode on Linux...

Phoronix reader Thomas Frech has shared with us an article he wrote about his new Ethereum mining work on two systems using AMD Threadripper processors and a total four Radeon RX Vega 64 GPUs under Linux...

QupZilla 2.2 has been released as the last feature release for this open-source web-browser project prior to its re-branding initiative under the KDE umbrella as the Falkon project...