Phoronix

With today's release of F1 2015 for Linux as the popular Formula One racing game, only NVIDIA graphics are listed as supported but I decided to try this game anyways with the AMDGPU-PRO and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers...

Earlier this week I published some Dota 2 Vulkan vs. OpenGL benchmarks with AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards under Linux. Since then I received some feedback from Valve with regards to Dota 2 on the Source 2 Engine testing along with a better demo to use for benchmarking and also using the latest Dota 2 Vulkan DLC updates. So here is a fresh look at the OpenGL vs. Vulkan performance for this popular Valve game on an assortment of NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards.

Version 1.9 of the Rust programming language is now available...

Feral Interactive has made the Linux port of the F1 2015 Formula One racing game available now via the Steam Store and their own Feral Store...

Earlier this month we learned of a new game coming that's powered by Unigine after first the developers were looking to make use of Unreal Engine 4. We've already confirmed there will be a Linux port of this Unigine-powered MMORPG and this week the developers published the first screenshots...

Since yesterday all 12+ of my systems running daily mainline Linux kernel benchmarks have failed to boot when using Linux 4.7 Git...

Something's happening at ownCloud Inc, the company behind this popular open-source alternative to Dropbox and other cloud hosting services...

Not only is Feral expected to launch today F1 2015 for Linux but they've also put out a hefty update to Tomb Raider...

The third development milestone release of Phoronix Test Suite 6.4 "Hasvik" is now available...

The Linux and OS X builds of Valve's Counter-Strike: Global Offensive are finally 64-bit!..

Dave Chinner has submitted the XFS file-system updates for the Linux 4.7 kernel merge window...

Out now is the SteamOS 2.80 Brewmaster Beta update for those using Valve's Linux distribution for gaming. SteamOS 2.80 most notably brings the AMDGPU-PRO driver...

Google has officially released the Chrome 51 web-browser update...

The Dropbox engineers working on their Pyston project as a high-performance JIT implementation today announced version 0.5 of the software...

The Linux Kernel's PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) interface now has an atomic API for those writing drivers for fans, LEDs, vibrators, and other supported devices...

Intel has been rapidly advancing their OpenGL 4.x support and OpenGL 4.5 is even in sight now...

The Ubuntu MATE folks have laid out some of their plans for their next release of this desktop derivative of Ubuntu...

The latest KWin/Wayland hacking project by Martin Gräßlin is adding virtual keyboard support to KWin for the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.7 release...

The second alpha release of the FreeBSD-based GhostBSD 10.3 operating system is now available...

The Linux kernel has been working on many Year 2038 fixes for a while now but the work is not over. Another pull request was sent in for the Linux 4.7 kernel in trying to prepare the VFS layer with Y2038 fixes...

Ted Ts'o has sent in his pull request of EXT4 file-system updates targeting the Linux 4.7 kernel merge window...

It was just last week that Intel crossed OpenGL 4.2 in Mesa and earlier today the needed Intel OpenGL 4.3 patches landed while tonight there are patches pending for the OpenGL 4.4 changes for Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver...

The first alpha release for openSUSE 42.2 Leap is now available...

Bryce Harrington announced the release today of the release candidates for Wayland 1.11 and the reference Weston 1.11 compositor...

Yesterday marked the public availability of Dota 2 with a Vulkan renderer after Valve had been showing it off for months. This is the second commercial Linux game (after The Talos Principle) to sport a Vulkan renderer and thus we were quite excited to see how this Dota 2 Vulkan DLC is performing for both NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards. Here are our initial Dota 2 benchmarks with Vulkan as well as OpenGL for reference when using the latest Linux graphics drivers on Ubuntu.

While the NVIDIA 367 Linux driver series is where the very latest proprietary driver features from the green team can be found, if you have been sticking to the NVIDIA 361 driver series since it's the current long-lived branch, a new release is now available...

Version 1.11 of the open-source, high-performance Nginx web-server is now available...

Feral Interactive just announced via Twitter that F1 2015 will be released for Linux this week...

Following last week's AMDGPU-PRO 16.20.3 "Beta 2" driver release of AMD's new hybrid driver stack for Linux that makes use of the AMDGPU open-source kernel DRM driver with the closed-source OpenGL driver derived from Catalyst / Radeon Software, I set out to do a fresh open vs. closed-source driver comparison. For the Radeon R9 285, R9 290, and R9 Fury, I compared the performance of this new AMDGPU-PRO driver against Mesa 11.3-devel Git and Linux 4.6 for the latest open-source driver stack.

A few days ago when delivering benchmarks of the new CPUFreq "Schedutil" governor in Linux 4.7 the P-State comparison results on this Git kernel looked particularly terrible. I've since done some P-State tests on the same system using the Linux 4.5 and 4.6 kernels that further point towards a regression having taken place...

Last week's release of systemd 230 ended up shipping with a change that made it more easy for processes running as a user to snoop on frame-buffer devices. That change has already been reverted for the next systemd update...

Coming up in a short while I have some fresh AMDGPU-PRO BETA 2 (the fresh -PRO "hybrid" driver release) for OpenGL graphics performance while here are some quick OpenCL compute metrics...

Yesterday marked the official start of the projects for this year's Google Summer of Code and the summer round of the Outreachy (formerly the Outreach Program for Women) projects...

It looks like in the past few days Crytek has made their CryENGINE game engine available via GitHub,..

The recent release of QEMU 2.6 has support for allowing guests to do bursts of I/O for a configurable amount of time, whereby the I/O level exceeds the normally allowed limits...

A slew of patches hit mainline Mesa over the night that take care of various OpenGL 4.x related work items...

As expected, Dota 2 with Vulkan rendering support is now available...

Another one of the interesting pull requests this week for the Linux 4.7 merge window is the addition of ZAC (Zone ATA Command) support for Singled Magnetic Recording (SMR) devices...

Released on Saturday was the new AMDGPU-PRO Linux beta driver release for the AMD GCN 1.2 graphics cards. Given the time that's passed since the first beta of this "hybrid" open/closed driver stack, I've been running some fresh benchmarks...

The DRM subsystem updates have been submitted for the Linux 4.7 kernel. This is a big pull with more than 80,000 lines of new code for the mainline kernel!..

Version 15.17 of the Gentoo-based Calculate Linux distribution was released this past week...

A change made in the recent release of systemd 230 makes it easy for rogue user processes to be able to spy on your desktop, assuming a few conditions are met...

For those using the open-source Roundcube software for your webmail needs, Roundcube 1.2 is now available as the latest stable version...

Version 1.4 of the Wayland Protocols package has been released with a new protocol extension...

Version 4.2 of GNU's Make was released this Sunday...

This past week I showed how Intel Broadwell graphics are much faster with Mesa 11.3 but this new Mesa version doesn't do much for Haswell. Similar to Broadwell, Mesa 11.3 is a big win if you are on Intel's latest-generation Skylake hardware.

New to the upcoming Mesa release is the OpenSWR software rasterizer developed by Intel and geared for faster performance, at least for the workloads of most interest to the Intel engineers working on this driver...

The Btrfs and F2FS file-system updates were submitted this weekend for the Linux 4.7 kernel merge window...

Developers behind the Glasgow Haskell Compiler announced their first "super-major version" of the compiler in six years...

A new release of the AMD GPU-PRO "hybrid" Linux graphics driver stack is now available...