Phoronix

The TTY/serial patches were mailed in earlier this week by Greg KH for the Linux 4.11 kernel merge window. Normally this isn't a pull request with much interest from us as it's generally not too interesting, but this time around it introduces a new bus...

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes have arrived for the Linux 4.11 kernel and there is a lot of them with over 200 commits and the introduction of new features for many of the supported architectures...

David Airlie submitted the main DRM driver updates for the Linux 4.11 kernel, but Linus Torvalds isn't happy about the code quality of a new addition and is considering not accepting the DRM changes for this next kernel release...

Ubuntu derivatives opting to do so have issued their 17.04 "Zesty Zapus" Beta 1 releases tonight...

Serious Sam VR: The First Encounter has been put into public beta today by Croteam for those interested in Linux VR gaming...

While hearing "ASPM" may still scare some of you from the Linux kernel power management woes of a few years ago, ASPM PCI-E L1 PM substate support is coming to Linux 4.11 to hopefully help with power savings for idle PCI Express devices...

Fedora is slowly getting ready for sending the Linux 4.10 kernel down the pipe to supported stable releases of its distribution...

Intel's "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver has landed the support for enabling MSAA compression...

Takashi Iwai has submitted the sound subsystem updates for the Linux 4.11 kernel with most of that work happening in the audio driver space...

On Wednesday the RadeonSI/R600g shader cache landed for on-disk caching of TGSI IR while one day later the caching is already being expanded and may soon be enabled by default...

With the competitive RadeonSI vs. NVIDIA performance for HITMAN on Linux there have been some Premium reader requests for also taking a look at the CPU/RAM usage and other vitals while running this latest Feral game port on the different GPUs/drivers...

The JavaScript engine performance wars are not over with Google preparing to make some significant changes to their V8 JavaScript engine used by Chrome and friends...

Jerome Glisse and others have been working on the rather cool Heterogeneous Memory Management support for the Linux kernel going back several years. While Jerome hoped to see HMM merged for Linux 4.11, it will be sitting out at least one more cycle...

With Radeon R9 Fury X graphics cards, their integrated red LEDs will now light-up according to the load of the GPU...

Dmitry Torokhov has submitted the input feature updates for the Linux 4.11 kernel merge window...

While SHA1 is still much better off than MD5, developers really should think about moving to SHA256 or other crypto hashes with Google now demonstrating the first SHA1 collision...

LLVM 4.0 was supposed to have been released by now, but it's running late due to open blocker bugs...

TinyDRM has been queued in DRM-Next for landing with the in-development Linux 4.11 kernel...

Peter Hutterer announced the first release candidate on Wednesday for the upcoming libinput 1.7.0, the input handling library that's widely-used by Wayland / X.Org / Mir systems...

For those interested in the Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system project, a brief status update was posted today...

The Qt Company today announced the much-anticipated release of the Qt 5.9 Alpha...

While DRM-Next hasn't even been submitted yet for the Linux 4.11 merge window, I ran some benchmarks today of an AMD Radeon RX 470 graphics card comparing Linux 4.10.0 to the current DRM-Next state...

Timothy Arceri who has been working on the Mesa on-disk shader cache for months and most recently began working for Valve on the AMD Linux driver stack has landed support in Mesa 17.1-devel for the GLSL/TGSI on-disk shader cache for the R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers...

There was some work years ago for supporting Intel's own INTEL_performance_query OpenGL extension it was dropped in January for a rework and now is back in Mesa 17.1-devel...

Last week Feral Interactive released the much anticipated Linux port of HITMAN, which debuted for Windows last year. Now that there's benchmark support for HITMAN on Linux, I have been running a number of tests for this game that's powered by the Glacier Engine and making use of OpenGL for rendering on Linux. In this article are our initial AMD Radeon performance figures making use of the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver compared to NVIDIA's driver and the assortment of GeForce results published yesterday.

Greg KH sent out his Linux 4.11 pull requests today for the different areas of the Linux kernel he maintains, including the staging area updates...

CVE-2017-6074 was made public today as a DCCP double-free vulnerability that could allow for kernel code execution from an unprivileged process...

With Valve having published a binary-only RADV Radeon Vulkan driver build for their beta of SteamVR on Linux, I did some poking out of curiosity to see the differences to the mainline RADV driver in Mesa. Out of curiosity I also did a comparison to see how the Vulkan capabilities compare to the proprietary AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan driver...

AMD Ryzen 7 CPUs are available for pre-ordering today and these long-awaited "Zen" CPUs will be shipping on 2 March...

Another pull request worth mentioning for the Linux 4.11 kernel is the media subsystem updates...

XDC 2017, the annual X.Org Developers' Conference, was announced last year for happening in Mountain View, California and hosted by Google but given the current US political climate, the X.Org Foundation was questioning whether to move the event outside of the United States...

David Miller has mailed out the rather big set of updates to the networking subsystem for the Linux 4.11 kernel...

Tuukka Turunen of The Qt Company has shared some of the project's goals for the 2017 calendar year in delivering Qt 5.9 and Qt 5.10 along with more point releases...

Wine-Staging 2.2 is now available as the latest version of Wine that carries various testing/experimental patches re-based atop the latest Wine bi-weekly development snapshot...

Last week Feral Interactive released the much anticipated port of HITMAN for Linux. While at first it didn't look like this Linux game port would work out for our benchmarking requirements, thanks to Feral it does indeed work for another interesting Linux gaming test perspective. For our initial HITMAN Linux benchmarks are tests from 12 NVIDIA GeForce GPUs while our Radeon tests will come tomorrow.

While Wayland 1.13 was released today, Bryce Harrington today opted against releasing the Weston 2.0 reference compositor and instead issue a second release candidate...

Valve has begun rolling out their SteamVR Linux support by announcing today a beta/developer build of their VR support for Linux...

Google today announced an experimental project called Upspin that's aiming for next-generation file-sharing in a secure manner...

The XFS file-system updates have been submitted for the Linux 4.11 merge window...

Wayland 1.13 is now available thanks to release management by Samsung OSG's Bryce Harrington...

AMD today released the Radeon Pro Software 17.Q1 driver for Windows and Linux users running FirePro / RadeonPro workstation graphics cards...

For those stuck with older Intel Sandy Bridge hardware, the integrated graphics with Mesa Git should be capable of supporting WebGL 2.0...

The latest pull request worth mentioning for the Linux 4.11 merge window are the Xen virtualization feature updates...

Last week I published some Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux Radeon benchmarks and Windows vs. Linux NVIDIA Pascal tests. Those results were published by themselves while for this article are the AMD and NVIDIA numbers merged together and normalized to get a look at the relative Windows vs. Linux gaming performance.

The (U)EFI support continues to evolve within the Linux kernel and with the 4.11 release will be new and improved functionality...

Red Hat's David Airlie keeps to work on improving the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver...

Rafael Wysocki has submitted the ACPI and power management feature updates for the Linux 4.11 kernel...

James Morris has filed the security subsystem feature updates targeting the Linux 4.11 merge window...

Timothy Arceri, who is now working for Valve on the open-source AMD Linux stack, has sent out the latest patches for wiring in Mesa's GLSL on-disk shader cache for R600g/RadeonSI drivers...

In a similar effort to Ubuntu itself not issuing alpha/beta releases the past few years as they focused on the quality of their daily ISOs instead, Fedora developers have been discussing a similar maneuver of beginning to drop alpha releases from their schedule...