Phoronix

Two days ago we brought up Devuan, the systemd-free fork of Debian turned two years old, and now it seems they are celebrating the anniversary by the release of the second beta...

Fresh from the libdrm 2.4.74 release that had some Etnaviv API changes, the Etnaviv Gallium3D driver has been proposed for mainline Mesa as the open-source, reverse-engineered 3D effort for Vivante graphics cores...

The Qt Company today issued the first release candidate for the Qt Creator 4.2 integrated development environment release...

With having published some Darktable OpenCL benchmarks at the beginning of the week with 20 different GPUs (plus more follow-up benchmarks), it didn't take long before requests came in to see some fresh OpenCL Blender benchmarks.

Collabora's latest patch series for Wayland/Weston is implementing support for initial XWayland window positioning with the Weston compositor...

On Tuesday was the MSM-Next submission by Red Hat developer Rob Clark of these Freedreno MSM changes to be sent to mainline for the Linux 4.10 kernel...

Mesa DRM library updates aren't usually too notable, but that's different with this evening's libdrm 2.4.74 release...

Ubuntu's kernel team will likely be targeting the Linux 4.10 kernel for April's release of Ubuntu 17.04...

Git 2.11 has been released as the newest version of this most widely used open-source version control system by free software projects...

Earlier this year the LibRetro crew unveiled their work on a Vulkan renderer for their Nintendo 64 emulator while now they have been working on a Vulkan renderer for a PlayStation One emulator, and it's already working...

Earlier this month ARM announced an updated Mali Graphics Debugger that includes Vulkan 1.0 tracing support on Linux...

A growing number of GNOME projects have been exploring Meson as a next-gen build system with one of the benefits being much faster build times. Now Daniel Stone at Collabora is exploring using Meson for Wayland and its Weston Weston compositor...

Last week marked the release of libSoftFloat 1.0, the library working to implement double-precision operations in pure GLSL 1.30 via bit twiddling operations and integer math. This is the most hopeful effort yet for getting OpenGL FP64 support exposed for older GPUs that lack native support...

The latest target of our Linux benchmarking at Phoronix are running various performance benchmarks under different Docker operating system images. The images used for benchmarking were the latest of Ubuntu, Clear Linux, CentOS, Debian, and Alpine while comparing the benchmark results to running on the bare metal host.

Eric Anholt at Broadcom has been focusing his latest VC4 driver efforts on performance tuning...

In addition to the big Mesa shader cache patch series hitting the mailing list over night, Ian Romanick at Intel sent out another big patch series: his revised work on ARB_gpu_shader_int64 support...

Intel's high-performance Clear Linux distribution is now auto-updating by default, including for packages like Mesa and the X.Org Server...

Intel had already sent in two feature pull requests of new features/changes improvements to their DRM driver for Linux 4.10 (pull requests one and two) while now another feature pull has been submitted and there's also expected to be a last-minute fourth pull request...

Timothy Arceri of Collabora has now revised the massive patch-set implementing an on-disk shader cache for Mesa with the work nearing completion, at least for the Intel i965 driver...

Last week I published some fresh Vulkan vs. OpenGL benchmarks of AMD/NVIDIA GPUs in AMDGPU-PRO vs. NVIDIA On Linux With OpenGL and Vulkan, but for those wanting some fresh Intel OpenGL vs. Vulkan Linux numbers, I have some fresh data to share this evening...

Similar to past Ubuntu LTS (Long Term Support) releases, Ubuntu 16.04.2 and beyond will feature hardware enablement kernels back-ported from newer Ubuntu releases in order to allow new hardware to work on these older LTS releases, but now the Xenial Xerus is switching to a concept of a "rolling HWE kernel."..

There's now patches for bringing up open-source graphics driver support in the Freedreno stack for Qualcomm's latest-generation Adreno graphics hardware...

This morning I posted a 20-way Darktable OpenCL comparison for this open-source digital photography workflow software that can make great use of GPUs. Those results were well-received and there were requests for more CPU data, so here are some Darktable benchmarks on more Linux boxes...

For those riding the stable Mesa release train, Mesa 13.0.2 is now available as the newest Mesa 13.0 point release...

Most talk these days of Ubuntu's Unity 8 next-gen desktop experience and their Mir display server goes hand-in-hand since the change-over is planned in-step before Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, but there's a new Ubuntu Insights blog post up working to promote Mir as more than just tech for the Unity 8 desktop...

Devuan, the Debian fork that frees the system of systemd, is now two years old...

There was a C++ standards meeting recently in Issaquah, Washington and a report on it is now available with the latest on C++17 and early work around what will form C++20...

Laminar Research has released their first public beta of the massive X-Plane 11.0 flight simulator update. It's a huge update and expect some bugs at this stage, but should be a very exciting release...

The third and likely final planned development release of Phoronix Test Suite 6.8-Tana is now available for your cross-OS, fully-automated and reproducible benchmarking needs...

With the holiday season in full swing, whether you are just a casual photographer or professional, Darktable is easily one of the best photography workflow applications and it's free software! Darktable has offered OpenCL acceleration for providing faster performance on GPUs and with the imminent Darktable 2.2 release there is even better OpenCL results. For those curious about the OpenCL performance of Darktable, I've done some Darktable 2.2-RC1 benchmarks on a variety of NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards under Ubuntu Linux.

Just a quick PSA that if you were busy last week and didn't notice the earlier post, we're currently running a heavily-discounted, holiday special for Phoronix Premium where you can access the ad-free version of our site, multi-page articles on a single page, and more. But the big holiday discount expires at the end of today in 24 hours!..

The Linux 4.9-rc7 test kernel is now available although it's yet undecided whether there will be an RC8 before declaring it gold...

If you are looking for any gift ideas this 2016 holiday season for a Linux gamer/enthusiast or just a casual user looking for some friendly PC hardware, here are my favorites for this holiday season...

If you are planning to upgrade your graphics card in a Linux system this holiday season, here are some fresh benchmarks of several different AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards with various Linux gaming tests under Ubuntu. The AMD tests were done both with the latest RadeonSI Gallium3D stack as well as the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver.

This week the first public beta of LibreOffice 5.3 rolled out for testing ahead of the open-source office suite's big official update in early February...

For those invested in OpenGL and don't want to abandon it so soon for Vulkan, a few Phoronix readers pointed out a blog post this week filled with various OpenGL rendering tips and tricks...

Vulkan 1.0.35 was released on Friday as the latest stable documentation update to the Vulkan high-performance graphics API. Aside from correcting some issues with the documentation, it also incorporates the VK_NVX_device_generated_commands extension documentation...

Anyone who read any number of my reviews from a few years ago, when I interned here at Phoronix, should know that I have been a fan of AMD and their open source efforts for a very long time. I remember the years of trying to get Catalyst to work under Arch or Fedora, usually only to have it blow up in my face. I remember the struggle holding back kernel and X server updates, hoping that none of those updates contained security fixes that were pertinent to me.

The next release of DragonFlyBSD will feature better EFI support...

While we have been talking a lot lately about performance optimizations and improvements to Intel's "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver, not all focus has been lost on the i965 Mesa OpenGL driver. In fact, a lot of code landed on Friday for i965...

Feral Interactive released Total War: WARHAMMER for Linux this week. On launch-day we provided NVIDIA Linux benchmarks as well as RadeonSI GPU benchmarks for this game over many different GPUs. Also landing on launch-day in Mesa Git were support for compiling optimized shader variants asynchronously in RadeonSI. So here are some benchmarks with the very newest Git to show the performance difference, which some have claimed is up to 25% faster. [This article was previously only available to Phoronix Premium members while is now available to everyone.]..

Wine 1.9.24 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release of this program for running Windows binaries on Linux and other operating systems...

Several times in the past few weeks I've heard Phoronix readers claim the LLVM 4.0 SVN code causes "slow performance" or has rendering issues. Yet it's gone on for weeks and I haven't seen such myself, so I decided to run some definitive tests at least for the OpenGL games most relevant to our benchmarking here...

As some more exciting benchmarks to carry out this US holiday week, here are benchmarks of all major Mesa releases from Mesa 11.0 from mid 2015 through the latest Mesa 13.1-dev code as of this week. Additionally, the latest AMDGPU-PRO numbers are provided too for easy comparison of how the open-source AMD GCN 3D driver performance has evolved over the past year. It's a huge difference!

Earlier this year I exclusively reported on the "Radeon Settings" GUI control panel may be open-sourced for AMD Linux users but since then I hadn't heard anything publicly or privately about getting this graphics driver control panel on Linux for AMDGPU-PRO and the fully-open AMDGPU stack. But it looks like that it's still being worked on internally at AMD...

It had been a few weeks since last seeing any new enablement patches for AMD's DAL display abstraction layer code, which is a big requirement for HDMI/DP audio, HDMI 2.0, potential FreeSync support, and also needed for next-generation GPUs. The lack of fresh DAL patches changed though this week when new patches were sent out and already another round of revising to this display code has now been mailed out for review...

For those following GCC's offloading capabilities to devices like GPUs, more work continued being mainline this week. We are onto stage 3 development of GCC 7 but items that were still being reviewed at that time are still being allowed to land. It looks like in 2017 we may finally see more GCC support come to reality when it comes to AMD HSA support and OpenMP / OpenACC offloading to NVIDIA GPUs...

The second release candidate of FreeDOS 1.2 is now available, approximately one month after FreeDOS 1.2-RC1 and twenty-two years after the FreeDOS open-source project began...

For those riding the Mesa 13.0 stable release train rather than the adventurous Mesa 13.1-dev Git code, the Mesa 13.0.2 stable update is right around the corner with many fixes...

Aside from all the WARHAMMER benchmarking being done in the past few days on Phoronix since Feral Interactive released this latest Total War game for Linux, earlier this month the porting company also released another AAA title finally for Linux OpenGL gamers: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Here are some fresh benchmarks of that game using the newest Mesa Git code for RadeonSI, the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver, and NVIDIA's proprietary driver.