Phoronix

Interest is growing around shipping software as LLVM IR and will be discussed at this year's LLVM Developers' Meeting...

Development on the GTK+ 4.0 tool-kit continues moving along and this weekend has seen 100+ commits dropping various deprecated and outdated code...

Now that the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver has landed in Mesa Git and Linux 4.9-rc1 is out, I figured it was time for some fresh benchmarks of the Radeon Vulkan driver against the RadeonSI Gallium3D OpenGL driver. Here is the first of that new data.

The Live CD Linux distribution focused on showcasing the potential of Wayland across different desktops, toolkits, and applications is out with a new ISO release...

Lighttpd 1.4.42 was released this Sunday morning as the newest version of this open-source, lightweight HTTP web-server...

Earlier this week was a discovery of a "serious performance fix" For the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver by disabling ReZ. That change landed in Mesa Git already so I ran some before/after benchmarks...

VK9 is the project formerly known as SchaeferGL as an open-source project implementing Direct3D 9 over Vulkan...

Linus Torvalds decided to release the Linux 4.9-rc1 kernel today as opposed to tomorrow (Sunday) to fend off any subsystem maintainers from submitting last minute feature pull requests...

The past week or two in our forums and elsewhere there's been a lot of comments about Khronos' conformance testing for OpenGL 4.4/4.5 with the Mesa drivers finally reaching that point, concern over Khronos' fees being prohibitive for open-source projects (particularly in cases like Nouveau where it's community driven without a main corporate backer), and some FUD related to this matter. I've now received some clarification from The Khronos Group to lay these concerns to rest...

Chad Versace, the Intel OTC developer turned Googler who is part of the Chrome OS driver team, has been baking the EGL_MESA_platform_surfaceless extension and its implementation inside Mesa...

The Talos Secure Workstation that we previously have covered on Phoronix has now launched on crowd-funding where they hope to raise close to four million dollars to make this POWER8 system that's free down to the firmware a reality...

Fedora 25 has been on track for using Wayland by default and that was better firmed up this week. It's looking almost definitive next month's Fedora 25 release will be the first tier-one desktop Linux distribution using Wayland by default on supported systems in place of the X.Org Server...

Intel's Mesa OpenGL driver now officially enables OpenGL 4.5 support for Broadwell "Gen 8" hardware and newer...

Wine 1.9.21 is available this Friday as the latest bi-weekly release of this software for running Windows programs on Linux and other operating systems...

Rafael Wysocki sent in a secondary pull request today of more power management updates for the Linux 4.9 kernel...

It's been a while since last delivering any open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) Gallium3D driver benchmarks but for your viewing pleasure this Friday are some fresh Kepler and Maxwell test results for this reverse-engineered NVIDIA Linux driver code against the proprietary NVIDIA driver in various OpenGL test cases.

SQLite 3.15.0 is now available as the latest feature release of this widely-used, embed-able SQL database library...

Mesa 3D development has been exciting this year with seeing OpenGL 4.3 support in Mesa 12.0 and the next Mesa release having OpenGL 4.4 and 4.5 support (pending the passing of the Khronos CTS conformance), which has meant a lot of new code going into Mesa. Aside from modernizing the OpenGL 4.x support by these open-source drivers, there's been the addition of the Intel and Radeon Vulkan drivers and much more...

For women and other select groups, the GNOME Outreachy Winter 2016 internship program has its application deadline due next week for those wishing to get involved in open-source / free software development...

While C++17 hasn't even been officially released yet, this specification also known as C++1z, has nearly all of the expected features implemented in the GCC 7 and Clang compiler releases...

The 14th of October marks the KDE project's 20th birthday! In celebration, the last KDE 1.x release has been re-released with compatibility for the latest Linux distributions...

Coming out of the second and final day of Steam Dev Days 2016 are some photos on Twitter from Valve's Linux VR demonstration...

With the Mesa 13.0 feature freeze expected to happen before the weekend, it's been another exciting day in the Git development tree of landing last-minute features for next month's Mesa release...

It's been a few months since Next Thing Co's C.H.I.P. computer was successfully funded on Kickstarter as "the world's first $9 computer" along with the PocketCHIP, a C.H.I.P. powered, battery-backed handheld with physical keyboard. Next Thing Co shipped to their backers over the summer whole in November they expects to begin shipping mass production orders on the CHIP and PocketCHIP. Over the past few weeks I've been playing with these low-cost ARM devices.

With today's Ubuntu 16.10 release one of the exciting spins we've been looking forward to is Ubuntu GNOME 16.10, which has an experimental Wayland session available but is not the default. I spent a few minutes trying out Ubuntu GNOME 16.10 this morning...

Besides Ubuntu 16.10 being released today and it being the second day of Steam Dev Days 2016, also exciting for today is the release of the Chrome/Chromium 54 web-browser release...

Ubuntu 16.10 "Yakkety Yak" is now officially available as the latest version of this popular Linux distribution...

There are a number of exciting package updates for the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling-release Linux distribution...

For those not paying attention to the #SteamDevDays tweets from the many developers at the Seattle event, the first day of Valve's 2016 conference appears to have been a huge success and the overall focus was on VR...

The UBI/UBIFS pull request for the Linux 4.9 kernel for those interested in the Unsorted Block Image tech on Linux...

The OpenWrt Summit took place today in Berlin. For those that weren't able to make the event or unaware of it but interested in Linux networking, the slides and videos are now available...

Andrew Morton's pull request for Linux 4.9 has landed some improvements for kernel threads...

Marek Olšák, the prolific longtime contributor to Mesa and AMD developer, published a patch today with a big performance improvement that he says has been discovered by luck...

The work by Nicolai Hähnle on finishing up the GL_ARB_enhanced_layouts extension for Gallium3D is now in Git. This officially marks RadeonSI done with OpenGL 4.4 and is effectively done with OpenGL 4.5 although the new version string is yet to be advertised...

While we found out today Valve is finally expected to show a VR Linux demo likely using the HTC Vive, it turns out Collabora has been working on their own Linux VR effort with a focus on a fully open-source driver for the HTC Vive for the OSVR platform...

Now that the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver is part of mainline Mesa, it's increasingly easy to experiment with this unofficial, open-source Vulkan driver on rolling-release distributions and through third-party package archives/repositories...

For those on rolling-release distributions that tend to wait until the first point release before upgrading your desktop environment, GNOME 3.22.1 is now available as the first update since last month's GNOME 3.22 debut...

The latest Raspberry Pi graphics driver hacking by Eric Anholt of Broadcom has been working to support QPU shaders by this open-source driver stack. QPUs are the shader core of the graphics hardware found in the Raspberry Pi SoC, but come up short of supporting OpenCL or OpenGL compute shaders...

Building off last week's XFS updates for Linux 4.9 is now a specific feature merge for this file-system: shared data extents...

Qt 5.6.2 was released today as the latest point release to the Qt 5.6 Long-Term Support release series...

The HTC Vive was supposed to ship with Linux support but that hadn't materialized... But it looks like it now has. Valve is expected to show off a VR Linux demo during this week's Steam Dev Days event in Seattle...

The Fedora QA team is organizing a Fedora 25 Workstation Wayland Test Day for tomorrow, 13 October. This is to find any last-minute bugs with next month's Fedora 25 Workstation release still set to utilize this next-gen successor to X11 by default...

David Airlie a short time ago submitted the Linux 4.9 DRM subsystem update, including the much sought after open-source Direct Rendering Manager driver improvements. There's a lot of good stuff in here, but sadly the Nouveau changes look like they're going to have to wait until Linux 4.10...

Google has begun sharing early details about the forthcoming Android 7.1 Nougat update...

Back in April I did tests showing how Intel's Clear Linux distribution showed much potential for HD/Iris Graphics performance, something that intrigued many Phoronix readers since Clear Linux would generally be seen as a workstation/cloud/container-optimized Linux distribution and something with not much emphasis on the desktop or gaming. Those earlier tests were with Ubuntu 16.04, bur with Ubuntu 16.10 coming out this week, here are some fresh tests of Clear Linux and Ubuntu Yakkety Yak on an Skylake HD Graphics system.

Chris Mason sent in the Btrfs file-system changes this morning for the Linux 4.9 kernel merge window...

The beta release of the upcoming Fedora 25 is now officially available...

Chad Versace, the former Intel OTC developer now employed by Google on the Chromium team, has published the latest patches for implementing the EGL_ANDROID_native_fence_sync extension within Mesa's Intel driver...

While Fedora 25 isn't even being released until mid-November, with now being past the change completion deadline for F25 and Rawhide continuing to move along, early Fedora 26 features are beginning to be talked about...

The 75 patches for Gallium3D's Nine state tracker improvements (D3D9) have now landed in Mesa Git master ahead of the branching for the next Mesa release at the end of the week...