Phoronix

A few days ago I wrote about HID improvements for Microsoft's Surface 3/4 tablets coming with Linux 4.10 while now there is additional driver work landing to benefit the Microsoft Surface 3 2-in-1 computer...

In addition to big end-of-year AMD Radeon Linux benchmarks and the forthcoming NVIDIA data points among other interesting EOY comparisons, there is also ongoing fresh Intel Linux benchmarks as we end out 2016. For your viewing pleasure today are the latest Intel OpenGL vs. Vulkan Linux benchmark results using last week's Dota 2 7.00 game release...

During last month's SuperComputing 2016 conference in Salt Lake City was the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure in HPC workshop being hosted for its third year. The slides from that event were recently made available and one of the talks interesting me the most was about the state of Clang OpenMP offloading, including for GPUs...

There is an early GNU Christmas with the release of GNU Hurd 0.9 joined by GNU Mach 1.8. Yep, another rare released update to Hurd...

There are two noteworthy pieces of KDE news as the weekend comes to an end...

Bas Nieuwenhuizen has reached another big milestone in the RADV project that's the unofficial open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux. As of this weekend, Bas has compute queues working with this Vulkan driver...

It's sad that DOOM hasn't seen a native Linux port with id Software having a falling out with Linux in recent years, particularly after they were acquired by ZeniMax. But fortunately there is now a patch for being able to run DOOM with Wine...

With 2016 soon drawing to an end, it's time for all of my year-end recaps now of Linux drivers that I have been doing for the past 12 years. Today are benchmarks of a wide assortment of AMD graphics cards on both R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers when using Mesa 13.1-dev + LLVM 4.0 SVN and the Linux 4.9 kernel for providing a bleeding-edge look at the open-source AMD Linux graphics performance across hardware going from the Radeon HD 4890 series all the way up through the RX 480 and R9 Fury hardware. Here's a fun look at the OpenGL driver performance across this range of GPUs.

The subject of remote Wayland displays with hardware-acceleration is again back to being talked about, this time initiated by the developer of VirtualGL...

In recent days there have been a few Phoronix readers inquiring why I am not testing with my Radeon R9 290 graphics card in all our frequent comparisons and driver benchmarks. The short story is that the regression since Linux 4.7 remains and for my Radeon R9 290 and others with select Hawaii graphics cards, there still is a performance regression. Though over Christmas I hope to finally find the time to bisect it...

Well this weekend is exciting for AMDGPU users and open-source AMD fans. Yesterday was the news we published about Valve looking to improve AMDGPU/RADV for their Vulkan-based VR experience while the latest is work from AMD that implements GPU virtualization support within the AMDGPU driver...

Takashi Iwai submitted all of the sound driver updates on Wednesday for the Linux 4.10 kernel. Intel Skylake audio continues to be refined but there is also a lot of other hardware driver work...

The PCI subsystem updates for the Linux 4.10 merge window were sent in a few days ago...

The promising VK9 project for implementing the Direct3D 9 API over Vulkan continues progressing and has hit its sixth milestone just ahead of Christmas...

Earlier in the week the KVM and Xen updates were sent in for the Linux 4.10 kernel to add to the list of changes so far for Linux 4.10...

For those curious how various Linux file-systems have evolved since Linux 4.6, here are some fresh benchmarks of the Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS file-systems being tested on Linux 4.6 vs. 4.7 vs. 4.8 vs. 4.9 with a solid-state drive for looking at any performance changes.

Warsow had been an open-source, cross-platform first-person shooter video game in development since 2005, but unfortunately it appears work on it has ended...

This week I posted many Dota 2 7.00 benchmarks with different AMD graphics cards while testing Mesa 13.1-dev + Linux 4.9 with both the RADV Vulkan driver and RadeonSI OpenGL driver. Here are some tests of the latest The Talos Principle build while comparing those OpenGL and Vulkan numbers...

NetworkManager 1.5.3 was released this week as the new development release with a lot of feature work in stepping towards NetworkManager 1.6 in 2017...

The BeOS-compatible Haiku operating system continues working on a big feature not present during the original BeOS days: UEFI...

The input driver updates for Linux 4.10 are most exciting for those with laptops having newer Synaptics technology...

A developer at Valve has issued a request for comments on a proposal to implement high priority scheduling in the AMDGPU kernel driver in order to benefit their Linux VR efforts...

In case you didn't hear, last week a nine year old Mesa bug was fixed that ended up causing stability issues for RadeonSI and was one of the reasons Valve's Team Fortress 2 game wasn't running stable on the open-source AMD driver in quite a while. With Mesa Git now running Team Fortress 2 on RadeonSI without any stability problems, here are fresh benchmarks of that game when using Mesa 13.1-dev and Linux 4.9...

One week after going into a code freeze and releasing Wine 2.0-rc1, the second release candidate is now available...

Adding to the list of changes so far for Linux 4.10 are the Btrfs file-system updates...

While rumors have recently come back up about the financial health of Crytek, at least this week they managed to deliver on their CryENGINE 5.3 release but it's coming about one month later than initially anticipated...

Here is a look at the new features so far of the Linux 4.10 kernel, less than one week into the two-week merge window process. There is a lot of great improvements and additions to Linux 4.10, but we'll see if it ends up being a bigger release than Linux 4.9...

While it took a long time for Intel's Mesa driver to begin supporting the ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 extension for double-precision floating-point data types in shaders, fortunately it looks like Intel should soon land the Float64 support in their Vulkan driver soon...

With the big Dota 2 7.00 update having been released at the start of the week bringing some performance changes, I have carried out a number of fresh benchmarks of Mesa 13.1-dev with AMD Radeon graphics when testing the OpenGL renderer using RadeonSI and the Vulkan renderer with RADV paired with Linux 4.9 AMDGPU. Tests on several different Radeon graphics cards.

Ubuntu is going to begin making use of swapfiles in place of swap partitions on new (non-LVM) based installations...

The media updates for the Linux 4.10 kernel merge window includes promoting a lot of code from staging into the mainline area...

Kernel developer Arnd Bergmann has started a discussion over upping the minimum GCC version that's supported for building the Linux kernel. He's been testing every GCC compiler release from 4.0 through GCC 7 to see the results when building the Linux kernel...

A new release of SCST, the out-of-tree, alternative SCSI subsystem for the Linux kernel, is now out with its version 3.2 update...

For fans of the Ubuntu-based Linux Mint distribution, the 18.1 "Serena" release is now officially available with the desktop flavors so far being for Cinnamon and MATE...

Egosoft, the studio behind the X Universe game franchise with their titles long being Linux friendly going back many years, is developing a new title and will feature a Vulkan renderer...

If you have been interested in the Talos Secure Workstation as a fully open system down to the firmware and based upon the POWER8 architecture but have been put off by the $3,700+ USD price simply to obtain the motherboard, they have extended their crowdfunding campaign by another thirty days with only having hit 12% of their goal...

The big batch of ARM changes for the Linux 4.10 kernel have been submitted, including some new ARM platform support and early code for NVIDIA's next-generation Tegra SoC...

The latest pull request to talk about for the Linux 4.10 kernel merge window are the x86 platform driver updates...

The KDE community banded together today to issue their big KDE Applications 16.12 update...

The main feature addition to UBIFS with Linux 4.10 is native file encryption support...

We are just half way through December yet it's been a very exciting month already due to the Linux 4.9 release, the never-ending work on open-source graphics drivers, the Linux 4.10 merge window, and much more. So far this month I've already written 152 original news articles as well as a dozen Linux hardware reviews / featured multi-page articles...

Back during the summer we wrote about the Bareflank Hypervisor as a new open-source hypervisor written in C++11/14 and served as more of a hypervisor framework. Today the company behind that effort, Assured Information Security, announced a new version of Bareflank...

The Lightworks cross-platform video editor for Linux/macOS/Windows is on the verge of a big new release with Lightworks 14.0 while out today is a new beta release...

As of this week the Samsung 960 EVO NVMe M.2 SSDs have begun shipping for those interested in high-performance solid-state storage. For our benchmarking fun today I am looking at the Samsung 960 EVO 250GB NVM Express M.2 SSD (MZ-V6E25) with tests under Ubuntu 16.04 while using the Linux 4.9 kernel.

OpenRISC continues progressing as an open-source ISA derived from RISC. While still waiting for more hardware to appear, the OpenRISC continues moving along for the Linux kernel...

It looks like GCC developers are making good on their effort to release GCC 6.3 by Christmas...

LLVM developers are moving ahead with their new versioning scheme where they will always be bumping the major version component with each six-month release. Thus LLVM 4.0 and LLVM 5.0 are expected in 2017...

Dave Chinner sent in the XFS file-system changes for the Linux 4.10 kernel...

A few days ago I shared some fresh AMDGPU+RadeonSI benchmarks of Tomb Raider, Shadow of Mordor, and some other Linux games that need to be benchmarked manually due to shortcomings with these games. That earlier article with the open-source numbers was reserved for just Phoronix Premium supporters while available now to the public are those results compared to the new AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 Linux driver.

The Linux MD/RAID code was updated today in Git for the Linux 4.10 kernel with new functionality...