Phoronix

Motivated by KDE Plasma Leaning Towards Focusing On Flatpak Over AppImage/Snaps and this lengthy, contentious forum thread, a KDE contributor has taken a closer look at the Flatpak versus Snaps versions available in different Linux distributions...

Aspyr Media today released their native Linux port of Civilization VI. Here are benchmarks of fourteen different NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards from Kepler to Pascal for seeing how well this game performs. Benchmarks with (not officially supported) RadeonSI and Intel Mesa graphics will be coming up next.

It feels like the work on power management / clock-gating / PowerPlay is a never-ending mission within the AMDGPU DRM driver -- more work has been queued up for the next kernel cycle...

The Linux port of Civilization VI by Aspyr Media has finally been released...

Ahead of Mobile World Congress (MWC17) happening later this month, Jolla has released Sailfish OS 2.1...

Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS was already twice delayed for different technical reasons. Approaching one month late from the original time table, 16.04.2 was supposed to ship today but that will no longer happen...

With Mesa 17.0 due to be released in the days ahead, I've been running fresh benchmarks of this latest user-space 3D driver stack on Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau. For your viewing pleasure this Thursday are the RadeonSI benchmarks comparing the Mesa 17.0 Git code to that of the latest Mesa 13.0 branch with a few different AMD graphics cards. There are also some tests of the RADV Vulkan driver.

Marek Olšák has posted a set of patches today to the Mesa mailing list and they should help some Linux games, at least Rocket League...

Libinput is the input handling library that originated with Wayland but has since been adopted by Mir as well as X.Org when using the xf86-input-libinput handling driver. This xf86-input-libinput adaptation for X.Org Servers has seen a new release today...

Feral announced earlier this week they are releasing HITMAN for Linux while today they have just published the system requirements for the Linux port...

Riding off last week's Wine 2.1 release as the first post-2.0 bi-weekly development snapshot, Wine-Staging 2.1 has been released that continues to incorporate all of its various experimental/testing patches...

NethServer 7 is a CentOS derived Linux distribution designed for SOHO use-cases and makes it easy to setup a mail server, web server, DNS/DHCP server, and other common networking tasks via its modular design and web-based administrative interface...

Mesa developer Thomas Helland is looking at reviving an old set of Mesa patches that could help out in some CPU-bound scenarios...

One day after the Wayland 1.13 Beta, the reference Weston compositor is updated to its 2.0 beta state...

Marek Olšák volleyed the 26 patches needed for Mesa supporting threaded OpenGL dispatch onto the Mesa mailing list for some additional public review...

Five AMD/NVIDIA graphics cards tested on five different Intel Kabylake processors from a low-end $40 Celeron CPU to a high-end Core i7 7700K is the focus of today's Linux benchmarking. Various OpenGL and Vulkan Linux gaming benchmarks were run to see how the RadeonSI and NVIDIA Linux performance evolves from a Celeron G3930 to Pentium G4600 to Core i3 7100 to Core i5 7600K to Core i7 7700K.

Longtime GNOME developer Richard Hughes has announced a new release of fwupd, the open-source utility for updating firmware on Linux in a safe, automatic, and reliable manner...

Nicolai Hähnle has been working on OpenGL ARB_sparse_buffer support within the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver stack along with the necessary core Mesa changes for this extension as well as some AMDGPU kernel changes...

Veteran KDE developer Sebastian Kügler has written a blog post following the Plasma Sprint that just happened recently in Stuttgart. A few interesting details were shared...

Inki Dae has submitted the Exynos DRM driver changes to DRM-Next as material for the upcoming Linux 4.11 cycle...

Croteam is working on a "Serious Fusion 2017 update" that for ALL of their games will feature Linux/SteamOS/OSX support along with Vulkan support, among other improvements...

Many Phoronix readers and open-source enthusiasts have complained when hearing of Jolla's Sailfish OS that this Linux-based smartphone OS isn't fully-open and the company hadn't delivered on its promises to open-source more of it, including its user-interface and apps. According to their CEO, that's still looking to happen...

Bryce Harrington at Samsung's Open-Source Group has announced the release of the Wayland 1.13 beta...

On the desktop there's now Vulkan for Linux/Android systems, Direct3D 12 for Windows, and Metal for macOS systems as the latest-generation, performance-focused graphics APIs. On the web front, WebGL is the current dominant API that's derived from OpenGL ES but Apple is pushing an initiative for a new graphics API...

As a quick update to yesterday's article about RADV fast clears by default was being proposed, that change-over just happened in Mesa 17.1-devel Git...

The roll-out of GLVND support in Mesa as a Fedora 25 update was arguably botched, but it's an important feature and is still being discussed...

If these patches land soon, the Raspberry Pi could beat newer AMD graphics cards to having mainline HDMI audio support via their respective Linux kernel DRM drivers (with the AMDGPU audio support still being held up by DAL/DC mainlining efforts). Eric Anholt managed to finally put out the VC4 HDMI audio code for review...

For those that wait until point releases before upgrading your KDE desktop stack, Plasma 5.9.1 is now available...

Civilization VI and DiRT Rally were recent AAA Linux game announcements and now HITMAN is the latest game receiving a confirmed Linux game port...

When Aspyr Media announced yesterday that Civilization VI is shipping for Linux this week it was confirmed that only NVIDIA graphics are supported by this latest AAA Linux game release. But they later clarified that AMD "works", but with issues. But it doesn't sound too bad...

Opera Software today announced that the Opera 43 web-browser is shipping, assuming you are still running this closed-source web-browser on Linux...

Unigine Engine 2.4 was made available today by Unigine Corp. This release is exciting because there are a ton of new features and this engine update will be used by the soon-to-be-released Unigine Superposition Benchmark...

While the Ubuntu Phone efforts are basically on-hold until migrating to a Snap-based Ubuntu Phone/Touch image, OTA-15 was released today...

Timothy Arceri of Collabora has sent out his latest patches to Mesa in regards to the ongoing work for shader caches. The 40 patches published over night do benefit RadeonSI and R600g...

The third development milestone release of Phoronix Test Suite 7.0-Ringsaker is now available for your open-source, cross-platform benchmarking needs...

Qt WebEngine remains the primary module on modern Qt5 tool-kit versions for having web capabilities provided by Chromium. The migration from Qt WebKit to WebEngine happened around four years ago but there still are some developers pursuing out-of-tree support for Qt WebKit...

Freedreno founder Rob Clark has sent in the MSM DRM driver changes to DRM-Next for Linux 4.11. Separately, Qualcomm's Code Aurora is prepping more contributions for this open-source Qualcomm Adreno driver for Linux...

The open-source RADV Radeon Vulkan driver is going to be flipping on fast clears by default...

OpenSUSE's Tumbleweed rolling-release distribution continues rolling forward with new package updates and other features...

Last month the RISC-V GCC port was approved for landing in GCC 7 while today that merge finally happened...

Back in December marked the release of CrossOver 16.0 and powered by Wine 2.0. Shipping today is CrossOver 16.1...

Intel's open-source Mesa DRI driver has passed The Khronos Group's process for certifying it as a conformant OpenGL 4.5 implementation. This now rounds out the Intel open-source Linux stack with OpenGL 4.5, OpenGL ES 3.2, and Vulkan 1.0 certification...

Aspyr Media announced earlier today that Civilization VI for Linux is finally shipping this week...

Five years ago we wrote about a project to run Mac OS X binaries on Linux, for what Wine is for allowing Windows programs on Linux/macOS/etc, Darling wants to let Mac binaries run under Linux. It's been a while since last having anything to report on for the project, but they are making new progress in 2017...

Emil Velikov has kicked off the new release by announcing the third release candidate to the upcoming Mesa 17.0...

Last week Feral Interactive announced DiRT Rally is coming to Linux while now they've announced the system requirements...

While Linux is the most prominent operating system each year at the Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM), it's not a conference limited to just Linux. Once again there was a developer room dedicated to other operating systems like the Rust-written Redox OS...

With the Linux benchmarks at Phoronix there is a wide-range of Linux distributions (as well as BSDs, macOS, and the occasional Solaris and Windows) tested, but the operating system I end up running on my most-important production system is still Fedora Workstation. Recently I was interviewed by Fedora Magazine about my thoughts on the Red Hat backed distribution and more...

GNU ddrescue continues work on being a capable data recovery tool for copying data from a file or block device to another, doing more than just the dd command. GNU ddrescue 1.22 was released over the weekend as the newest version of this tool...

Ilia Mirkin's weekend hacking on the Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D driver has led to ARB_gpu_shader_int64 support coming for this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver...