Phoronix

With GNOME/GTK+ 3.22 having been released at the end of September, developer focus is beginning to shift to GNOME 3.24 or in the case of GTK+ developers it's about GTK+ 4.0 development per the toolkit's new development process...

Iago Toral Quiroga of Igalia has sent out the second version of his massive 103 patches for implementing FP64 support for Intel Haswell hardware within the i965 Mesa driver in order to expose OpenGL 4.0 support...

It's not as important as NVIDIA publishing new signed firmware images, but then again it's not every day we see NVIDIA developers contribute to the open-source Nouveau driver stack. Nevertheless, today a new set of patches were published for the Nouveau DRM driver...

The non-volatile DIMM (NVDIMM) support has been updated for the Linux 4.9 kernel merge window...

The developers at Unigine Corp are making public some screenshots and a brief video from their upcoming Superposition Benchmark that's powered by Unigine Engine 2...

Following the recent delays, FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE is now officially available...

Microsoft today announced the Skype Linux Alpha 1.10 release that brings basic support for video calls...

The ongoing development of a RISC-V back-end for the LLVM compiler stack continues making progress and stepping closer to merging to mainline...

With traditional software package management solutions like APT and Yum showing their age and not adapting well to the embedded world and the slew of new areas for Linux like IoT, a new generation of atomic-based Linux software update solutions continue to be worked on. Matt Porter of the Konsulko Group is presenting at this week's Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2016 with a comparison of these update technologies...

It's been just over two weeks since GNOME 3.22 was released while already a ton of feature work has been landing in Epiphany, GNOME's Web Browser...

Tom Hacohen of Samsung's Open-Source Group is presenting at this week's Embedded Linux Conference about Enlightenment's EFL as a UI toolkit for the embedded world...

While running the fresh NVIDIA vs. AMD Vulkan Linux benchmarks (that also included some OpenGL numbers too), I had also taken the opportunity to run some fresh OpenCL compute benchmarks of the latest NVIDIA 370 proprietary Linux driver against AMDGPU-PRO on different graphics cards...

With catching up on the OpenGL extensions, Marek Olšák of AMD has been spending a fair amount of time on performance optimizations for the AMD's open-source OpenGL driver and some code that benefits Mesa as a whole too. One of his latest patch series is on optimizing Mesa's GLSL compiler performance...

The perf subsystem is seeing some new feature work landing with the Linux 4.9 development cycle...

Ubuntu/Canonical developers have been discussing plans and requirements for Mir Version 1 including stable ABIs and licenses...

Building off the exciting patches published Friday for completing ARB_enhanced_layouts that finish off the RadeonSI OpenGL 4.4~4.5 support, the Nouveau NVC0 support is basically done too with the finishing up of that final extension being done in the Mesa state tracker...

X-Plane, one of the most realistic flight simulators that continues to be cross-platform, will be released "this holiday season" and it offers more flying improvements and much better visuals...

On Thursday the RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver was merged into mainline Mesa and I provided bleeding-edge RADV vs. AMDGPU-PRO benchmark results for these two independent AMD Linux Vulkan driver implementations, plus comparison results to the OpenGL drivers in the same games. For those that have been wondering how the NVIDIA proprietary Vulkan driver compares to AMD's two Vulkan driver options, here are some fresh benchmark results.

KDE Frameworks 5.27 is now available as the latest version of these add-on libraries from the KDE camp to complement Qt5 functionality...

This morning the protection keys syscall interface was submitted for the Linux 4.9 merge window, the last step of adding Protection Keys support to the Linux kernel...

With "Vulkan Next" likely not debuting until 2017, the Vulkan 1.0.x point releases continue with minor fixes to the Vulkan documentation...

There is support for a number of new ARM platforms with the in-development Linux 4.9 kernel...

The MD subsystem updates were sent out earlier this week for the Linux 4.9 kernel merge window with a few improvements/features to note...

GDB 7.12 is now available as the latest feature release of the GNU Debugger...

Back on Wednesday I wrote about how RadeonSI and Nouveau NVC0 completed their OpenGL 4.5 extension changes but were still being held up from exposing OpenGL 4.4 due to the incomplete ARB_enhanced_layouts extension. Well, that is about to change with 13 patches published today that effectively finish it up...

For those sticking to Wine 1.8.x stable releases until Wine 2.0 is released around the end of the year, Wine 1.8.5 is the latest and greatest...

Intel's "ANV" Mesa Vulkan Linux driver now has basic support for HiZ, an important performance feature...

Back in August Fedora 25 switched to using Wayland by default in time for the project's alpha release. With next week's beta release, Fedora 25 is still using Wayland by default and it looks like it will remain that way unless any showstoppers appear...

While GNOME is frequently brought up for its well-vetted Wayland support when using the latest packages, the Enlightenment desktop has also been progressing very well with its Wayland compositor and they continue making improvements to their display stack. One of these important pieces has been the Ecore_Drm2 library...

For those fond of the open and free RISC-V instruction set architecture, the basic changes have been made so systemd now supports this CPU architecture...

With Intel's 3D Xpoint Optane technology beginning to appear as extremely fast non-volatile memory and other advancing efforts in the NVDIMM space like ReRAM, persistent memory was a popular topic at this week's LinuxCon Europe event in Berlin...

Thanks to the ongoing compute-focused work by independent Nouveau contributor Samuel Pitoiset, the NVC0 Gallium3D driver is the first driver in Mesa supporting the ARB_compute_variable_group_size extension...

The Intel Integrated Sensor Hub (ISH) is supported in the Linux 4.9 kernel code for benefiting Cherrytrail mobile/convertible/ultrabook hardware and newer...

The F2FS (Flash-Friendly File-System) and EXT4 file-system feature updates have been sent in for the Linux 4.9 merge window...

Today the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver is landing in mainline Mesa and just hit the Git code minutes ago. Merging the RADV driver came up just over the past few weeks in time for next month's Mesa stable release while this community-based driver was developed over the summer by David Airlie and Bas Nieuwenhuizen. This "unofficial" Radeon Vulkan open-source driver is now becoming part of the Mesa code-base with it being able to support the few Vulkan Linux games but isn't yet a fully conformant driver. Here are fresh benchmarks of the RADV driver compared to the RadeonSI OpenGL driver and benchmarks compared to AMD's hybrid closed-source AMDGPU-PRO driver on several different graphics cards.

Last week news came out that the FreeBSD 11.0 release wasn't going to happen as planned but it needed to be respun due to security issues. The release was supposed to happen on 3 October, but three days later we find out it needed to be re-spun again and is still going through testing...

The beta of Fedora 25 will be released on-time next week...

Linux's power management and ACPI subsystems maintainer Rafael Wysocki presented at this week's LinuxCon Europe event in Berlin about the state and future of power management in the Linux kernel...

Xen and KVM are the latest pull requests hitting the mailing list for the Linux 4.9 kernel...

If you have a GCN 1.0 Southern Islands or GCN 1.1 Sea Islands graphics card and have been wanting to play with the experimental AMDGPU kernel DRM driver as an alternative to the Radeon DRM driver, here's an opportunity for Ubuntu/Debian users...

With the Linux 4.9 staging pull request comes the addition of the Greybus subsystem. A major user of the Greybus subsystem was to be Google's Project Ara modular smartphone, but with that initiative recently being canned, it may seem like Greybus is dead but that's not actually the case...

We've been expecting many last minute Gallium3D Nine / D3D9 patches ahead of the Mesa 13.0 branching and yesterday the bulk of those patches were sent out...

The input subsystem is the latest pull request to talk about for the forthcoming Linux 4.9 kernel development cycle...

Dave Chinner has submitted his XFS file-system updates for the Linux 4.9 kernel. This time around most of the changes are internal to the open-source file-system rather than boasting new end-user features...

Pending no last minute issues, the RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver will be merged into mainline Mesa tomorrow...

OpenBenchmarking.org crossed the milestone this afternoon of serving more than twenty million test profile and test suite downloads for open-source, automated benchmarking via the Phoronix Test Suite...

A number of last minute XWayland improvements/fixes landed today in the Git code-base ahead of this month's X.Org Server 1.19 release...

Takashi Iwai sent in the sound subsystem updates for the Linux 4.9 kernel. This cycle there continues to be changes all over the place...

With this month's Ubuntu 16.10 "Yakkety Yak" release, Unity 7 on the X.Org Server is used by default on the desktop while an alternate Unity 8 + Mir session is installed by default, but while it's available is not used unless logging into this newer desktop stack. Here's my few minutes of trying it out this morning with all of the latest Ubuntu 16.10 packages.

José Fonseca of VMware has added basic support for AVX2 to Gallivm, the driver-independent portion of LLVM integration with Gallium3D...