Phoronix

Quietly landing last week into the mainline Linux kernel as part of the AMDGPU fixes is support for tear-free PRIME offloading between Intel and AMDGPU...

Last month the Talos Secure Workstation launched on crowd-funding as a fully-open libre, modern system powered by a POWER8 processor priced at $4k for the motherboard or $18k for the complete system. They have only raised less than 10% of their funding goal so far but have now cut costs a bit...

The accepted participants and their projects for the Outreachy Winter 2016 session were announced earlier this month for helping females and other under-represented groups engage in free software development...

With the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) that allows for "Bash on Windows" via the Windows 10 Anniversary update, Ubuntu is the default choice while a new WSL-Distribution-Switcher open-source project makes it easy to now load the distribution of your choice under Windows...

Building off the input attachments work earlier this week for the Intel open-source Vulkan driver (covered in More Intel ANV Vulkan Code Hits Mesa Git, Other Patches Pending), there are now patches up for review to implement support for fast clears...

Red Hat has been working on a new statx system call for the Linux kernel to provide "enhanced" file information...

Without a doubt, the Radeon RX 480 is a great ~$200 USD graphics card for someone caring a lot about open-source driver support. But with the Pascal-based NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 also costing about the same, what's the better decision for a Linux gamer who may not be religious about his driver choices? Here is some food for thought...

A developer's effort to implement Direct3D 9 (D3D9) over the Vulkan API has now reached its "fourth milestone" but a lot of work remains...

Jerome Glisse has sent out the latest version of his patches now for Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM), which he's been working on the Linux kernel since 2014...

Rob Clark on Friday sent out the patches for implementing the EGL_ANDROID_native_fence_sync extension within Mesa's EGL and Gallium3D code...

Earlier this week we reported on the Btrfs RAID5/RAID6 code being fixed, well, it appeared to. However, now the Btrfs developers have clarified that the situation isn't entirely resolved...

Earlier this week was the X.Org Server 1.19 release as a major update with development going on for one year. Now, X.Org Server 1.20 development is open...

KDE Applications 16.12 is now in beta while this collection of KDE software is under a dependency and feature freeze ahead of next month's official release...

NVIDIA today issued the 375.20 Linux driver release as their first in the stable 375 driver series for Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD...

Last month when Ubuntu 16.10 was released I ran some desktop gaming benchmarks with Intel Skylake graphics under Unity, GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, KDE, Openbox, and MATE. Following that article a few Phoronix Premium readers requested similar tests be done under the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver stack, so here are those numbers.

With Mesa drivers this year really improving a lot and reaching OpenGL ~4.5 compatibility for most drivers as well as the Intel and RADV Vulkan drivers getting into shape, they are becoming usable for day-to-day Linux gamers. While not all new Feral Linux game releases work with the Mesa drivers, a growing number of their games work well on Mesa 13.0+, and as such they are hoping Ubuntu will adopt a policy of making it easier to switch to newer Mesa releases...

In addition to the Radeon and AMDGPU DDX updates yesterday, other X.Org drivers are seeing releases this week in order to support the brand new X.Org Server 1.19...

I've been running some fresh benchmarks of the recently released openSUSE Leap 42.2 compared to the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed and friends. Those benchmarks will be posted shortly, but after using the Nouveau experience on Tumbleweed I found the need to comment...

Support for Intel's low-power Quark SE micro-controller has been added to the GNU Compiler Collection...

The Linux 4.10 features so far continue to be expanded with the Broadcom VC4 DRM driver most notably used by Raspberry Pi hardware picking up some new functionality...

With LLVM's LLD linker continuing to gain ground, there's now talk of it enabling multi-threading support by default...

QEMU 2.8.0-rc0 was released on Thursday as the first step towards getting this next update out the door for improving the Linux virtualization stack...

It's been another busy day in Mesa Git for Intel's "ANV" Vulkan open-source Linux driver...

Back when The Khronos Group published the Vulkan 1.0 specification in February, we were told by a Canonical developer Vulkan support on Mir would come for Ubuntu 16.04. That didn't happen for Ubuntu 16.04 nor for last month's Ubuntu 16.10 and it looks like it may still be months before seeing support for using Vulkan on the Mir display server...

Today's Go/No-Go meeting for Fedora 25 turned out much better than last week and has been cleared for release...

While waiting for a new API that can succeed GBM and is agreed upon by both NVIDIA and the open-source community, GNOME developers have gone ahead and merged support for using EGLStreams into their Mutter compositor so that the current proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver will work with GNOME on Wayland...

For the latest benchmarking off MSI's Cubi 2 with Core i5 Kaby Lake CPU are some GCC and LLVM Clang compiler benchmarks on Intel's Clear Linux distribution.

GNU Octave 4.2 is now available as a major update to this scientific programming language that remains largely compatible with the widely-used MATLAB...

With Firefox 50 having been released this week, Mozilla put Firefox 51 in beta...

Necessitated by the new X.Org Server 1.19 release are new official releases to xf86-video-amdgpu and xf86-video-ati. But besides adding support for the xorg-server 1.19, there are also new features with these being infrequent updates to the DDX driver...

Red Hat developer David Howells has wrangled up a set of patches by him and other developers to provide a "Kernel Lockdown" mode to prevent the user-space from the possibility of modifying the running kernel image...

Adding to the list of new features coming for Linux 4.10 is support for explicit fencing for atomic DRM drivers...

Mesa 3D founder Brian Paul has added a relatively simple but useful improvement to core Mesa for dumping more debugging and performance information...

While GCC 7 feature development is officially over, one of the late patches to land for GCC 7.1 in trunk are improvements to the NVIDIA NVPTX back-end...

The days of the xf86-video-freedreno DDX driver are numbered, at least for end-user relevance...

Earlier this summer Cypress semiconductor acquired Broadcom's wireless "Internet of Things" business. With that associated IP, Cypress has begun making public NDA-free data-sheets on associated chipsets...

Wine-Staging has been running a bit behind on their announcements for new versions of this Wine branch carrying various experimental/testing patches while today they announced both versions 1.9.22 and 1.9.23...

ReactOS 0.4.3 is now available as the newest version of this open-source OS that seeks to re-implement the interfaces of Windows...

Just under 50 Intel Vulkan driver related commits hit Mesa master a short time ago plus other "ANV" Vulkan driver improvements are still pending...

Prolific Mesa developer Marek Olšák has published a new set of 20 patches today for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver in order to further optimize this driver for AMD GCN GPUs...

Over the summer we wrote about Btrfs RAID 5/6 code was found to be unsafe and likely would need a rewrite. Months later, patches have finally emerged to fix the faulty Btrfs RAID 5/6 code...

Alongside the announcement of Microsoft joining the Linux Foundation, at Connect 2016 today they announced the public preview of SQL Server for Linux, which they originally announced earlier this year, and they also rolled out .NET Core 1.1...

Discussed today during the Ubuntu 17.04 Online Summit was the dwindling state of PowerPC (32-bit PPC) and i386 (x86 32-bit) support for Ubuntu and overall Linux for that matter. Images are still being produced but likely for not much longer although the package archives are anticipated to remain...

Microsoft announced at their 2016 Connect event today they are joining the Linux Foundation...

Daniel Stone of Collabora has published the latest version of his massive patch series for supporting atomic mode-setting by Wayland's Weston compositor...

Earlier this year Ubuntu developers announced Netplan as a new, consolidated network configuration tool. Netplan was added to Ubuntu 16.10 and more improvements are on the way for Ubuntu 17.04...

While Android already supports Vulkan, Chrome/Chromium OS currently does not support this newest graphics API from The Khronos Group. However, there is work underway in supporting Vulkan on Chromium OS...

The Linux 4.9 kernel will be officially released in about three weeks but there is already new features/functionality to get excited about for Linux 4.10...

Hitting the web this morning is the official release of openSUSE Leap 42.2...

A few days back I wrote about Qualcomm Falkor support coming to GCC while now the LLVM compiler stack has received the similar treatment...