Phoronix

With Mesa 17.1 branching this weekend I figured it would be a fun Easter running benchmarks of Mesa Git compared to previous branches with a Radeon RX 470 Polaris graphics card. Here are these Mesa 17.1 benchmarks while other tests and on more GPUs is forthcoming.

Over the years we have seen many mobile/smartphone focused Linux efforts come and go from OpenMoko, Moblin/MeeGo, webOS, Firefox OS, and most recently Ubuntu Touch while others like Sailfish OS and Plasma Mobile appear to be somewhat stagnate or at least not gaining much marketshare nor advancing rapidly. But what if more of these mobile Linux efforts were to collaborate on a common base? There's a new effort being worked on in this area...

GNU IceCat 52.0.2 was released today as the first new release of this GNU version of Mozilla Firefox since version 45...

Chris Lamb has unseated Mehdi Dogguy as the next Debian Project Leader...

With there being many Rustlang fans reading Phoronix, many of you will probably be interested in Relm: a new GUI library for Rust...

Ben Skeggs has merged the code for enabling HDMI Stereoscopic 3D support within the Nouveau DRM driver...

There's another weekly update available to the Vulkan API, but this Easter update is on the small side...

The UBports community are among those planning to fork the work on Unity 8 and they've already made ambitious plans like porting Unity 8 to Wayland. More details were revealed today...

Mesa 17.0.4 will be released as soon as this weekend with more than two dozen fixes...

Intel's Jason Ekstrand has posted 21 new Mesa patches for adding the VK_KHX_external extensions to their ANV Vulkan driver. He believes the patches are now ready for merging and plans to land them for what will become Mesa 17.2...

Not to be confused with the KDE Elisa music player written about just two weeks ago as a new alternative to Juk, Amarok, Cantata, and other KDE music/media player projects, the latest effort is called Babe...

Debian developers are preparing for the final phase of the development freeze on Debian 9.0 "Stretch" and it's looking like the official release might not be too far out...

Intel's OpenSWR graphics software rasterizer living within Mesa now has experimental support for MSAA...

Last week we reported on Intel Cannonlake patches for their DRM kernel driver while published today were patches for bringing up the next-generation Intel graphics within Mesa...

For those still using Intel "Ivy Bridge" class processors with integrated graphics, Mesa 17.1 will take the hardware from OpenGL 3.3 to OpenGL 4.2...

TrueOS developers continue working on their Lumina Desktop Environment and coming up soon is the v1.3 release of their Qt5-powered desktop environment...

Ahead of the planned branching and release candidate of Mesa 17.1 in just hours, Rob Clark has landed some last minute work for the Freedreno Gallium3D driver that provides open-source support for Qualcomm Adreno hardware...

One of the immediate requests that usually comes in with each new Ubuntu release is a comparison of the Linux gaming performance when trying out the different desktop options. From yesterday's Ubuntu 17.04 release, here are Steam Linux gaming tests with Budgie, GNOME Shell, KDE Plasma 5, MATE, Unity 7, and Xfce4 when using an AMD Polaris graphics card on the RadeonSI driver stack.

The first development of Phoronix Test Suite 7.2-Trysil is now available for your cross-platform, open-source benchmarking needs...

Next week AMD is expected to roll-out the updated Polaris graphics cards in the form of the Radeon RX 550, RX 560, RX 570, and RX 580 series. The Linux drivers should be ready...

For those excited by yesterday's Wine 2.6 release with D3D CSMT as the long-awaited command-stream multi-threading to boost game performance, don't get your hopes too high with this release...

LLVM contributor Mikhail Zolotukhin has issued a report about the continued evolution of LLVM and its impact on the compiler's performance...

In order to get Mesa 17.1 out on time, branching is happening today for this next quarterly update to Mesa...

If you read enough Phoronix, you know that Mesa and the Linux kernel's DRM graphics drivers continue advancing at a remarkable pace, especially in recent times. Thus if you were an Ubuntu 16.10 user but planning to upgrade to Ubuntu 17.04, here are some benchmark results showing the performance improvements you can expect with the Radeon/AMDGPU DRM and RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. Plus there are also some results when using the Oibaf PPA on Ubuntu 17.04 to show what more performance can be tapped by switching to Mesa 17.1-dev.

Wine 2.6 is now available and it's a very exciting development update!..

Facebook developers have put out their latest release of HHVM to empower this PHP interpreter as well as what powers their Hack programming language...

Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 was released today alongside the other Ubuntu 17.04 flavors, but for those wondering what's happening to Ubuntu GNOME now that Ubuntu 18.04 will use GNOME with Unity being dropped, the Ubuntu GNOME flavor is winding down...

With the DRM driver features settled for Linux 4.12, I was curious about the size of these Direct Rendering Manager drivers...

The 2017 X.Org Elections have ended. Here are the results...

Qt 5.9 is moving closer to release so the release schedule planning around Qt 5.10 is now happening...

While Intel's Beignet is a terrific project especially when it comes to being a leading open-source OpenCL implementation that works with OpenCL 2.0 on GPUs (something that can't be said for Radeon with its open-source OpenCL stack consistently lacking and Nouveau not really being usable either), the sad part of it is that Beignet is consistently slow in supporting new versions of LLVM...

Ubuntu mirrors are now live with the final builds of 17.04 "Zesty Zapus" for those wanting to upgrade to this latest six-month release of Ubuntu Linux...

This week Unigine Corp released the much anticipated Superposition benchmark and it's a darn beautiful OpenGL 4.5 Linux-friendly graphics test. But, sadly, didn't have any Vulkan rendering option...

With Ubuntu 17.04 having switched to X.Org Server 1.19 at the last minute, I ran some classic 2D tests from the Zesty Zapus to see how the 2D X11 performance has been impacted thanks to the GLAMOR optimizations that took place for the xorg-server 1.19 cycle...

Timothy Arceri, working for Valve on the open-source Mesa graphics stack primarily around Radeon hardware support, has posted early patches on his latest OpenGL extension upbringing...

Elie Tournier, the GSoC student developer who last year worked via GSoC on "soft" FP64 double-precision support for older GPUs lacking the hardware capabilities, has posted patches wiring up his soft implementation for Intel "Gen 6" (Sandy Bridge) graphics thereby allowing ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 support...

Chrome 59 stable isn't expected until early June, but when this release comes it will bring with it an interesting feature: a headless mode...

Intel's Clear Linux distribution has switched from using the ACPI CPUFreq scaling driver for recent generations of Intel hardware to now using the P-State CPU frequency scaling driver...

Kent Overstreet continues developing Bcachefs as what he hopes will be a next-generation Linux file-system code that's originally derived -- but now distantly removed -- from the Bcache code-base...

With the end of feature material for DRM-Next having passed for Linux 4.12, here is a look at some of the changes you will be able to find with the Direct Rendering Manager code when the cycle begins for the Linux 4.12 kernel...

A new release is available of the nginx web server that's continuing to take on Apache with reportedly now having around a 33% web server market-share while Apache has dipped below 50%...

Last week we were the first to exclusively report that Jane Silber would be out as Canonical's CEO with Mark Shuttleworth returning to the role as CEO. Today, Jane Silber has publicly announced she's indeed stepping down...

Released at the end of last week was a long-awaited update to the Radeon hybrid Linux driver, AMDGPU-PRO. The AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 update brings support for newer kernel releases so this driver finally deploys nicely on Ubuntu 16.04.2 / 16.10 and also has a number of fixes. Here are some benchmark results of this latest AMDGPU-PRO release compared to the latest open-source Radeon Linux driver stack in the form of the Linux 4.11 kernel and Mesa 17.1-dev with OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks.

Matthias Clasen has announced the first point release to last month's big GNOME 3.24 desktop release...

While there was the KDE-aligned Shashlik effort for trying to get Android apps running on the Linux desktop, Anbox is a new initiative made public this week by a Canonical developer for running Android programs on the Linux desktop...

Comparing the hybrid AMDGPU-PRO proprietary Linux driver to the RadeonSI Gallium3D open-source driver stack with the newly-released OpenGL 4.5-using Unigine Superposition has shown how far the open-source driver stack has come...

The folks behind StreamComputing BV are looking to strengthen the OpenCL compute ecosystem by improving the documentation and code samples as well as better overviews for those wishing to learn this Khronos compute standard...

Intel's compiler team is working on getting an Altera Nios II back-end mainlined within LLVM...

Canonical developer Alan Griffiths has been blogging a lot in recent days about the Mir display server. He's been trying to get the community to support Mir and even potentially add native Wayland client support. His latest post is entitled "Why Mir" with many still wondering why they should care about Mir when Wayland has proven to be the tested and widely-adopted path forward...

Blender 2.79 is under development and it sounds like this release should be quite exciting for those into performance improvements or better OpenCL support...