Phoronix

Most talk these days of Ubuntu's Unity 8 next-gen desktop experience and their Mir display server goes hand-in-hand since the change-over is planned in-step before Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, but there's a new Ubuntu Insights blog post up working to promote Mir as more than just tech for the Unity 8 desktop...

Devuan, the Debian fork that frees the system of systemd, is now two years old...

There was a C++ standards meeting recently in Issaquah, Washington and a report on it is now available with the latest on C++17 and early work around what will form C++20...

Laminar Research has released their first public beta of the massive X-Plane 11.0 flight simulator update. It's a huge update and expect some bugs at this stage, but should be a very exciting release...

The third and likely final planned development release of Phoronix Test Suite 6.8-Tana is now available for your cross-OS, fully-automated and reproducible benchmarking needs...

With the holiday season in full swing, whether you are just a casual photographer or professional, Darktable is easily one of the best photography workflow applications and it's free software! Darktable has offered OpenCL acceleration for providing faster performance on GPUs and with the imminent Darktable 2.2 release there is even better OpenCL results. For those curious about the OpenCL performance of Darktable, I've done some Darktable 2.2-RC1 benchmarks on a variety of NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards under Ubuntu Linux.

Just a quick PSA that if you were busy last week and didn't notice the earlier post, we're currently running a heavily-discounted, holiday special for Phoronix Premium where you can access the ad-free version of our site, multi-page articles on a single page, and more. But the big holiday discount expires at the end of today in 24 hours!..

The Linux 4.9-rc7 test kernel is now available although it's yet undecided whether there will be an RC8 before declaring it gold...

If you are looking for any gift ideas this 2016 holiday season for a Linux gamer/enthusiast or just a casual user looking for some friendly PC hardware, here are my favorites for this holiday season...

If you are planning to upgrade your graphics card in a Linux system this holiday season, here are some fresh benchmarks of several different AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards with various Linux gaming tests under Ubuntu. The AMD tests were done both with the latest RadeonSI Gallium3D stack as well as the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver.

This week the first public beta of LibreOffice 5.3 rolled out for testing ahead of the open-source office suite's big official update in early February...

For those invested in OpenGL and don't want to abandon it so soon for Vulkan, a few Phoronix readers pointed out a blog post this week filled with various OpenGL rendering tips and tricks...

Vulkan 1.0.35 was released on Friday as the latest stable documentation update to the Vulkan high-performance graphics API. Aside from correcting some issues with the documentation, it also incorporates the VK_NVX_device_generated_commands extension documentation...

Anyone who read any number of my reviews from a few years ago, when I interned here at Phoronix, should know that I have been a fan of AMD and their open source efforts for a very long time. I remember the years of trying to get Catalyst to work under Arch or Fedora, usually only to have it blow up in my face. I remember the struggle holding back kernel and X server updates, hoping that none of those updates contained security fixes that were pertinent to me.

The next release of DragonFlyBSD will feature better EFI support...

While we have been talking a lot lately about performance optimizations and improvements to Intel's "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver, not all focus has been lost on the i965 Mesa OpenGL driver. In fact, a lot of code landed on Friday for i965...

Feral Interactive released Total War: WARHAMMER for Linux this week. On launch-day we provided NVIDIA Linux benchmarks as well as RadeonSI GPU benchmarks for this game over many different GPUs. Also landing on launch-day in Mesa Git were support for compiling optimized shader variants asynchronously in RadeonSI. So here are some benchmarks with the very newest Git to show the performance difference, which some have claimed is up to 25% faster. [This article was previously only available to Phoronix Premium members while is now available to everyone.]..

Wine 1.9.24 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release of this program for running Windows binaries on Linux and other operating systems...

Several times in the past few weeks I've heard Phoronix readers claim the LLVM 4.0 SVN code causes "slow performance" or has rendering issues. Yet it's gone on for weeks and I haven't seen such myself, so I decided to run some definitive tests at least for the OpenGL games most relevant to our benchmarking here...

As some more exciting benchmarks to carry out this US holiday week, here are benchmarks of all major Mesa releases from Mesa 11.0 from mid 2015 through the latest Mesa 13.1-dev code as of this week. Additionally, the latest AMDGPU-PRO numbers are provided too for easy comparison of how the open-source AMD GCN 3D driver performance has evolved over the past year. It's a huge difference!

Earlier this year I exclusively reported on the "Radeon Settings" GUI control panel may be open-sourced for AMD Linux users but since then I hadn't heard anything publicly or privately about getting this graphics driver control panel on Linux for AMDGPU-PRO and the fully-open AMDGPU stack. But it looks like that it's still being worked on internally at AMD...

It had been a few weeks since last seeing any new enablement patches for AMD's DAL display abstraction layer code, which is a big requirement for HDMI/DP audio, HDMI 2.0, potential FreeSync support, and also needed for next-generation GPUs. The lack of fresh DAL patches changed though this week when new patches were sent out and already another round of revising to this display code has now been mailed out for review...

For those following GCC's offloading capabilities to devices like GPUs, more work continued being mainline this week. We are onto stage 3 development of GCC 7 but items that were still being reviewed at that time are still being allowed to land. It looks like in 2017 we may finally see more GCC support come to reality when it comes to AMD HSA support and OpenMP / OpenACC offloading to NVIDIA GPUs...

The second release candidate of FreeDOS 1.2 is now available, approximately one month after FreeDOS 1.2-RC1 and twenty-two years after the FreeDOS open-source project began...

For those riding the Mesa 13.0 stable release train rather than the adventurous Mesa 13.1-dev Git code, the Mesa 13.0.2 stable update is right around the corner with many fixes...

Aside from all the WARHAMMER benchmarking being done in the past few days on Phoronix since Feral Interactive released this latest Total War game for Linux, earlier this month the porting company also released another AAA title finally for Linux OpenGL gamers: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Here are some fresh benchmarks of that game using the newest Mesa Git code for RadeonSI, the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver, and NVIDIA's proprietary driver.

This week marks the Darktable 2.2.0-RC1 release as the developers of this open-source photography workflow software prepare for its official release, just in time if you are planning to get some new camera gear this holiday season...

For those curious about the Intel Skylake graphics performance between Mesa 12.0 and now, here are some fresh Git OpenGL benchmarks...

While Qt 5.8 hasn't even been released yet, there is already release planning that is happening around Qt 5.9...

In the absence of AMD open-sourcing their Vulkan driver code, the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver led by David Airlie and Bas Nieuwenhuizen continues to flourish. There is yet more exciting work that's landed this week for improving this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver...

It's been a while since last covering Zapcc as a new, super-fast C/C++ compiler yet it has evolved and now the latest beta is reporting to show even more impressive performance gains...

They missed Tuesday's GNOME 3.23.2 release, but available as of Wednesday evening is Mutter 3.23.2 and GNOME Shell 3.23.2...

As some more fun benchmarks today -- yes, to make sure you're thinking about returning the favor via our Thanksgiving premium offer -- after some AMDGPU-PRO vs. NVIDIA Vulkan/OpenGL Linux benchmarks published this morning, here are some fresh OpenGL vs. Vulkan graphics API performance numbers on the Intel side with their Mesa "ANV" driver...

Last month AMD sent out their big feature pull to DRM-Next for staging ahead of Linux 4.10 while now a secondary feature pull request has been sent in of more material for this next kernel development series...

With Croteam recently having released an updated Talos Principle with better Vulkan performance and the NVIDIA 375.20 and AMDGPU-PRO 16.40 both having come out recently, here is a fresh OpenGL and Vulkan graphics API performance comparison when using Valve's Dota 2 and The Talos Principle, both of which games on Linux offer both graphics API renderers.

While many in our forums and other Linux communities want to see "AMDGPU-PRO die" or for AMD to stop supporting the hybrid/proprietary driver given the pace of RadeonSI development for OpenGL and the emerging RADV for (unofficial) Vulkan support, OpenCL remains one of AMDGPU-PRO's strongholds. AMD has been working on opening up their proprietary compute stack, but for now it's there. Here are some fresh AMDGPU-PRO 16.40 benchmarks versus NVIDIA in LuxMark, one of the real-world OpenCL workloads where the AMD blob does very well...

David Airlie's latest hacking on the RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver code has led to basic PRIME support for this unofficial driver...

For those curious how openSUSE Leap 42.2, which was released last week, compares performance-wise to Leap 42.1 and the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed, here are some benchmarks today for your viewing pleasure. Also included with this openSUSE performance comparison was Intel's Clear Linux distribution as an independent metric of a distribution that's generally among the fastest thanks to the aggressive optimizations by default.

Thankful for all of our content provided 365 days per year at Phoronix with not a 24+ hour break in nearly four years? Appreciate all of our prompt benchmarks of the latest enthusiast computer hardware and more? Like all of our original work on advancing open-source benchmarking via the Phoronix Test Suite, OpenBenchmarking.org, Phoromatic, and more? Here is your chance to help out...

It's been a busy week for Intel's open-source developers working on their Vulkan "ANV" Linux driver with a number of the recent patch series having been merged a short time ago into mainline Mesa Git...

Shortly after Total War: WARHAMMER was released for Linux by Feral Interactive we had out NVIDIA Linux WARHAMMER benchmarks. Now having more time since that OpenGL Linux game port release on Tuesday, here are benchmarks when using the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver stack with various AMD GCN graphics cards.

GNOME 3.23.2 was released today as the latest development snapshot in the road to next March's GNOME 3.24 release...

For those interested in greater Python performance, the Dropbox team responsible for the Pyston project that's interpreting Python using JIT techniques with LLVM, has announced a new release...

With Feral Interactive releasing Total War: WARHAMMER for Linux this morning, you are probably curious how well this Linux OpenGL game port will perform with your graphics card prior to spending $60 USD for the game. Up now are my NVIDIA GeForce benchmarks for Total War: WARHAMMER on Ubuntu Linux with nine different graphics cards. In the hours ahead will be the relevant AMD tests with this newest AAA Linux game as soon as I finish up that testing.

Fedora 25 was officially christened this morning...

Back in 2014~2015 was talk of an Ubuntu Tablet inspired by the failed Ubuntu Edge smartphone campaign and the company would just send along prototype pictures and specifications along with some pricing goals. That tablet never materialized but now that same group of folks is trying a crowdfunding campaign for an openSUSE tablet...

Right on schedule, Feral Interactive has released Total War: WARHAMMER for Linux...

After a number of commits landed in mainline Mesa Git in the early hours of this morning, cull and clip distance support has been enabled for the open-source Intel Vulkan "ANV" Linux driver...

David Airlie has pulled the newest DRM/KMS driver into DRM-Next for merging in the Linux 4.10 kernel...

While AMD hasn't been doing much work lately on the Clover-based OpenCL support with focusing their open-source OpenCL efforts around ROCm / Radeon Open Compute, Edward O'Callaghan has been working on some much-needed love for the Clover OpenCL Gallium3D state tracker...