Phoronix

Skylake and newer hardware is set to have frame-buffer compression (FBC) enabled by default when the Linux 4.11 kernel rolls around in a few months. This feature can reduce power consumption while reducing memory bandwidth needed for screen refreshes...

Skylake and newer hardware is set to have frame-buffer compression (FBC) enabled by default when the Linux 4.11 kernel rolls around in a few months. This feature can reduce power consumption while reducing memory bandwidth needed for screen refreshes...

Mozilla's experimental layout engine, Servo, is working on figuring out their goals for 2017...

After Aspyr Media left a lot of uncertainty in 2016 about the viability of bringing Sid Meier's Civilization VI game to Linux, they officially confirmed today that they are bringing this latest Civilization title to Linux...

Valve appears to be ramping up their open-source AMD Linux graphics driver work, but they are looking for more Linux games that currently don't work atop the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

There was talk last year of Mesa moving to a date-based version scheme and that's now official with Mesa in Git being 17.0-devel rather than 13.1-devel...

Igalia developers have been doing a lot of work this past week from seeing their FP64 Haswell patches merged, issuing new Ivy Bridge FP64 patches for testing, Float64 support for the Intel Vulkan driver, and related work. The newest from Juan Suarez Romero on behalf of Igalian developers are the 11 patches needed for taking Intel's Mesa driver for Haswell to the OpenGL 4.2 milestone...

Jonathan Riddell has released a new KDE Plasma Wayland ISO for those wishing to try the latest KDE development packages atop Wayland rather than the X.Org Server...

With the Talos Secure Workstation not set to hit its goal, I was curious this morning about how the MJ Technology's openSUSE-powered "First True Linux x86 and x64 Tablet" was doing, but that too has failed to materialize...

It doesn't look like the Talos Secure Workstation will see the light of day with it's crowdfunding campaign ending this week and it's coming up more than three million dollars short of its financing goal. Now there's another effort to offer a libre system but using off-the-shelf x86 hardware...

Continuing on from this weekend's open-source Nouveau vs. closed-source NVIDIA Linux driver performance are results now added in with showing AMD's open-source vs. closed-source driver performance with the same tests.

Jakub Jelinek of Red Hat has provided the latest status report concerning the state of the GNU Compiler Collection 7 code compiler...

The ARMv8.3 specification is adding support for nested virtualization and already kernel developers have been working to take use of this feature on future ARM CPUs within the Linux kernel...

The work on supporting shaderFloat64 within Intel's "ANV" Mesa driver is now complete and merged into Mesa Git...

A new release is now available of the Jailhouse 0.6 partitioning hypervisor that remains an out-of-tree option for Linux server admins...

The first release candidate of the upcoming NetBSD 7.1 is now available for testing...

Linux 4.10-rc3 is now available as the latest weekly update to the Linux 4.10 kernel...

The Intel developer working on UMIP (User-Mode Instruction Prevention) support for the Linux kernel has been collaborating with Wine developers about this security-minded feature to be introduced with future Intel CPUs...

In preparation for Intel Kaby Lake socketed CPU benchmark results soon on Phoronix, the past number of days I have been re-tested many of the systems in our benchmark server room for comparing to the performance of the new Kaby Lake hardware. For those wanting to see how existing Intel and AMD systems compare when using Ubuntu 16.10 x86_64 and the latest Linux 4.10 Git kernel, here are those benchmarks ahead of our Kaby Lake Linux CPU reviews.

On Saturday I published Intel IvyBridge / Haswell /Broadwell / Skylake OpenGL and Vulkan Benchmarks On Linux 4.10 + Mesa 13.1 using various Core CPUs. But for some fun benchmarks this Sunday morning are GL/VLK results when using a Xeon E3 v5 Skylake CPU with HD Graphics P530...

Jason Donenfeld who has been working on the WireGuard secure network tunnel for Linux has also been working on another security enhancement: adding the SipHash PRF to the Linux kernel...

Just in case any of you now are thinking about building a Xeon E3 v5 "Skylake" workstation-ish system now that the prices are getting lower, I just wanted to pass along that the MSI C236A WORKSTATION motherboard is still serving me very reliably and ended up picking up another one of these boards when a Supermicro Skylake board stopped working...

For those in need of a professional-grade Linux video editor, the Lightworks 14 release is near as the latest feature-update that is more than powerful enough if needing to do any simple home video editing or of holiday videos...

Earlier this week I posted some benchmarks showing the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver performance on Linux 4.10 with the new NvBoost capability for finally being able to hit the "boost" clock frequencies with Kepler graphics cards when using this reverse-engineered driver. While the manual re-clocking and enabling NvBoost is able to increase the Nouveau driver's performance, how do these results compare to using the closed-source NVIDIA Linux driver? These benchmarks answer that question.

With running fresh benchmarks on all of my Intel systems for comparison with my upcoming Kaby Lake desktop CPU Linux reviews, this weekend I have some fresh results of the past few generations of Intel hardware when looking at their HD/Iris Graphics performance when using the latest Linux driver code as of Linux 4.10 Git and Mesa 13.1-devel Git from this week.

With Marek's optimizations having landed in Mesa Git that targeted Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, I ran benchmarks and found Deus Ex: MD is generally much faster and can be 2~3x faster, much more than the 70% originally thought by Marek. Now that more time has passed, I have carried out some more Linux gaming tests...

AMD is looking to land initial support for upcoming "Polaris 12" graphics processors into the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel...

It appears Valve Linux developers are doing a bit more tinkering with the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver...

The soft freeze is now upon us for Debian 9.0 "Stretch" while the full freeze will happen in February...

For those interested in the BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system, they have issued their latest monthly progress report to end out 2016...

With Marek's latest set of RadeonSI Gallium3D patches, which are said to improve the Deus Ex: Mankind Divided performance by around 70%, having landed in Mesa Git, here are some fresh benchmarks with a Radeon RX 480 and R9 Fury...

It's been a good week for users of older Intel Haswell graphics on Linux: beyond landing FP64 support and then exposing OpenGL 4.0 support, this older generation of Intel graphics now has a couple more OpenGL ES 3.2 extensions...

This week Intel launched the desktop/socketed Kaby Lake CPUs. Over the next week will be many Linux CPU benchmarks on Phoronix so here is your last opportunity to put in any special benchmark requests...

The fourth release candidate is now available for Wine 2.0 while the official stable release remains on track for debut later this month...

As mentioned earlier when posting some fresh AMD Kaveri vs. Intel Linux graphics benchmarks, I have some fresh AMD A10-7850K "Kaveri" APU numbers with running the latest Ubuntu 16.10 + Linux 4.10 + Mesa 13.1-dev stack on many of my benchmarking systems in the basement server room. With having an A10-7850K Kaveri system running with the latest Linux open-source driver code, I figured I'd compare it to some of my older Kaveri results.

Jerome Glisse of Red Hat has published his first set of Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) revisions for 2017...

According to one popular NSFW web-site, the 53rd most popular web-site in the world ranked by Alexa, their Linux traffic went up 14% in 2016...

Qiang Yu of AMD has been baking a new feature for the xf86-video-modesetting DDX: MS_ALL_IN_ONE...

I'm in the process of testing a lot of my different CPUs/APUs in preparation for some Kaby Lake Linux benchmarks next week with the Core i5 7600K and Core i7 7700K. Along the way with the different CPU benchmarks I've also been running some fresh integrated Linux graphics tests on the newer and interesting hardware...

For those that have been looking forward to running Deus Ex: Mankind Divided on Linux with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, you'll want to fire up Mesa Git...

The work to run Linux on the PlayStation 4 continues to advance and previously we reported on those behind it managing to exploit the Radeon graphics found on the AMD APU powering the PS4. The latest milestone is they now have Vulkan running on the PS4...

Most often when running any regular NVIDIA Linux benchmarks with Vulkan/OpenGL, it's usually just with the newest Pascal GPUs and then the older Maxwell GPUs for reference. But if you are curious about the OpenGL vs. Vulkan performance for GTX 600/700 "Kepler" graphics processors, I have some fresh results today...

Valve pushed out an updated Steam Linux client beta today that includes some useful changes for Linux gamers...

After the Nouveau DRM driver updates didn't make it for the Linux 4.9 merge window, this open-source NVIDIA graphics kernel driver saw significant updates for Linux 4.10. Nouveau in Linux 4.10 has atomic mode-setting, DP MST support, a LED driver for controlling the cards that have the illuminated "GeForce" logo, NvBoost support for hitting the higher boost frequencies on supported cards, and many other changes. Here are some fresh benchmarks of Nouveau with the Linux 4.10 kernel.

The drama over Libreboot, a downstream of Coreboot, wanting to leave the GNU has come to an end...

Emil Velikov of Collabora has announced the first stable Mesa release of 2017...

For those that shared your hopes for Ubuntu Phones in 2017, some of you were right: those that guessed nothing or very little. There isn't going to be any new Ubuntu Phone releases or major OTA updates until there is a Snap-based image down the road...

Fresh off their work on landing the long-awaited Haswell FP64 support followed by today enabling OpenGL 4.0 for Haswell (along with revised Float64 patches for Intel's Vulkan driver), there is now the FP64 patches for Ivy Bridge with the patches that ultimately enable OpenGL 4.0 on this generation-older hardware...

AMD isn't using CES 2017 to launch their Ryzen (Zen) processors or Vega graphics cards, but at least they have opened up more Vega architecture details for this busy week in Las Vegas...

Now that Igalia developers have landed their Haswell FP64 support and thereby hitting OpenGL 4.0 for these older generation Intel graphics processors, the latest Float64 patches have been sent out for the Intel Vulkan "ANV" driver...