For those that shared your hopes for Ubuntu Phones in 2017, some of you were right: those that guessed nothing or very little. There isn't going to be any new Ubuntu Phone releases or major OTA updates until there is a Snap-based image down the road...
Fresh off their work on landing the long-awaited Haswell FP64 support followed by today enabling OpenGL 4.0 for Haswell (along with revised Float64 patches for Intel's Vulkan driver), there is now the FP64 patches for Ivy Bridge with the patches that ultimately enable OpenGL 4.0 on this generation-older hardware...
AMD isn't using CES 2017 to launch their Ryzen (Zen) processors or Vega graphics cards, but at least they have opened up more Vega architecture details for this busy week in Las Vegas...
Now that Igalia developers have landed their Haswell FP64 support and thereby hitting OpenGL 4.0 for these older generation Intel graphics processors, the latest Float64 patches have been sent out for the Intel Vulkan "ANV" driver...
With Linux 4.10 going through its stabilization process, I've begun testing it on more and more systems. For your viewing pleasure today are some OpenGL and Vulkan results when testing Skylake HD Graphics 530 hardware with Linux 4.10 and Mesa 13.1-dev Git...
With FP64 for Haswell having landed in Mesa Git, the remaining patches have now been placed into Mesa Git as well for finally turning on OpenGL 4.0 for older Intel Haswell HD Graphics 4000 era hardware...
There's a new release available of the HarfBuzz text shaping library used by projects like Qt, Pango, GTK, LibreOffice, Firefox, and many other software projects. HarfBuzz 1.4 is a significant release...
The latest development patches up for testing on Intel's DRM kernel driver is for supporting render decompression on the display engine of Skylake hardware and newer...
The librsvg library for SVG rendering is up to version 2.41.0 and with this milestone it's their first release to port some code to Rust while maintaining the same public API...
The discussion has come up before about supporting Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers in user-space rather than having to be tied within the Linux kernel while that outlook was reignited today with a new patch series wiring in said support...
Fitting nicely into the related discussion of Should Tarballs Be On Their Way Out The Door In 2017?, Intel developer Arjan Van De Ven of the Clear Linux project has compared various data compression options...
LLVM's LLD linker has been making a lot of progress over the past year and now it's hit the milestone of being able to link the entire FreeBSD/amd64 base system...
It's been about one year since the last Inkscape release while now available is version 0.92 as a relatively big update to this open-source vector drawing program...
Just days after writing about how Valve's Steam Linux project was the hardest one veteran game developer had ever worked on, Rich Geldreich has begun blogging some more of the back-stories to the Linux project at Valve...
With the Linux 4.10 kernel there remains experimental Kconfig switches for being able to build the Linux kernel with GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" and GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" support in the newer AMDGPU DRM driver rather than the mature Radeon DRM driver. For your viewing pleasure today are benchmarks of a few GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs when testing the Linux 4.10 Git kernel with Radeon DRM and then the experimental AMDGPU DRM driver while both kernel drivers were tested in conjunction with the same Mesa 13.1-dev snapshot as of this week.
Often times whenever mentioning a new security vulnerability in any piece of open-source/Linux software, it generally gets brought up in our forums "they should write that software in Rust" or similar comments about how XYZ project should see a rewrite in Rust for its memory-safety features. But is it really worthwhile porting your codebase to Rust?..
In addition to working on sharply improving the performance of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided when using the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, Marek Olšák has published some patches for improving The Witcher 2 with the open-source AMD driver stack...
It was only last month that FreeSync support came to Linux via the hybrid AMDGPU-PRO driver while the open-source FreeSync support for AMDGPU atop DAL/DC has yet to be published. But today the Radeon Technologies Group is already rolling out FreeSync 2...
Broadcom developer Eric Anholt has issued his first weekly progress report of the new year for the VC4 open-source graphics driver supported by the Raspberry Pi...
On a CVE basis for the number of distinct vulnerabilities, Android is ranked as having the most vulnerability of any piece of software for 2016 followed by Debian and Ubuntu Linux while coming in behind them is the Adobe Flash Player...
Those making use of Intel Haswell graphics on Linux can rejoice this morning as the massive Igalia patch-set for wiring in ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 support has finally landed in Mesa Git...
With Microsoft having begun to mandate TPM2 (Trusted Platform Module 2) support be present in all platforms for newer versions of Windows, these chips are going to become a lot more common to laptops and desktops. Thus veteran kernel developer James Bottomley is looking closely at the current and future support for TPM2 on Linux...
With the post Christmas ad rate slowdown I finally found the time to run some fresh tests on my Radeon R9 290 that since around Linux 4.7 has been performing abnormally slow but has been working fine with AMDGPU-PRO. I carried out some tests with Linux 4.10 and also ensured linux-firmware.git was the latest, but still it's somewhat of a mystery...
The DawnCC project is out of the UFMG University and aims to provide automatic parallelization of code for mobile devices and other supported software/hardware of OpenACC and OpenMP...
Kirigami is KDE's set of UI components and philosophy / patterns announced last year for developing "intuitive and consistent apps that provide a great user experience" and do have convergence applications in mind. Now ringing in 2017, the first beta of Kirigami 2.0 is now available...
While we've already shared the most popular news and reviews on Phoronix for 2016, here's our usual monthly recap for those wondering what dominated the headlines in December. Of the 3,336 news articles on Phoronix in 2016, December yielded 323 original news articles and 32 featured articles/reviews for Linux enthusiasts...
The .tar archive file format has been around for decades, but GNOME / free software developer Jussi Pakkanen suggests that it's time for a modern solution...
Going from the Linux 4.5 kernel merge window that was open in last January to the Linux 4.10 merge window that closed this past Christmas, here is a look back at the prominent features added to the kernel in 2016...