Phoronix

Linus Torvalds has announced the Linux 4.11-rc4 kernel this evening...

The desktop-focused, performance-oriented Solus Linux distribution has pulled in another component from Clear Linux: clr-boot-manager. The clr-boot-manager is responsible for solid kernel and boot-loader management...

While Ubuntu 17.04 is set to ship next month with Linux 4.10 and Mesa 17.0 as a big upgrade over the open-source graphics stack found in Ubuntu 16.10, if you switch over to using Mesa 17.1 and Linux 4.11 is the potential for even better performance. Here are some Radeon RX 470 tests in different combinations on Ubuntu 17.04...

There is a new feature to talk about for Etnaviv Gallium3D, the open-source reverse-engineered driver designed for Vivante graphics cores...

Every year or so it comes up how some users believe that at Phoronix we should be benchmarking with Antergos/Arch, Debian, or [insert here any other distribution] instead of mostly using Ubuntu for our Linux benchmarking. That discussion has come back up in recent days...

With the first quarter of 2017 drawing to a close next week, here's a look back at the most popular news stories and articles so far this year on Phoronix. Year to date on Phoronix there have already been 842 original news articles and 91 featured articles and Linux hardware reviews...

Google's Chrome / Chromium web-browser has added a native glTF 1.0 parser. The GL Transmission Format, of course, being Khronos' "3D asset delivery format" for dealing with compressed scenes and assets by WebGL, OpenGL ES, and other APIs...

Just as a quick notice for those curious, while Mesa 17.0 has worked its way recently into Ubuntu 17.04 "Zesty Zapus", the Vulkan support isn't enabled by default..

Google is working on Android Studio support atop Chrome OS. With this official Android integrated development environment on Chrome OS, could it make Chromebooks/Chromeboxes a great platform for Android development?..

With Broadwell "Gen 8" graphics and newer, there is better engine reset support in case of problems or hangs. The Intel DRM driver is still being wired up to take advantage of this better support under Linux...

Version 1.0.45 is now the latest version of the Vulkan 1.0 specification...

Red Hat developer Lyude Paul is working on OpenGL NV_fill_rectangle support for Gallium3D and the Nouveau driver...

While the Ubuntu 17.04 final release is expected to happen in just over two weeks and the final freeze is quickly approaching, X.Org Server 1.19 has yet to land as anticipated into the Zesty Zapus...

We heard earlier this month that C++17 is "done" and looked at the new features while now more details have been shared...

Yesterday I published some initial RADV Vulkan benchmarks for Serious Sam 2017, their "fusion" update to Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter. In this article are some comparison NVIDIA Linux Vulkan benchmark figures.

The OpenSSL project is planning to change its software license...

Less than one week after AMDGPU DRM Vega support was published along with the other Vega enablement patches for the Linux driver stack, more Direct Rendering Manager patches are being shot out today...

It may not be as exciting as hearing Dell looking at Coreboot, but another Intel-powered Chromebook is now supported by mainline Coreboot...

ELKDAT is a new Linux kernel project to provide an easy kernel development and testing tool...

Gtef is short for the GTK+ Text Editor Framework and makes it easier to develop text editors and IDEs with GNOME's toolkit...

If you are looking for a new Linux-native game title to pick up this weekend and are into WW2 FPS games, Day of Infamy is now available...

The final beta releases for Ubuntu 17.04 "Zesty Zapus" has just occurred...

While waiting for AMD to open-source their Vulkan Linux driver, we have a new AMD open-source Vulkan project to look at: Anvil...

Given there is just one month to go until the official Ubuntu 17.04 "Zesty Zapus" release and past the ordinary freezes and nearly at the final development milestones, I decided to take a test drive this morning of Unity 8 with Mir atop the latest daily Zesty packages.

CodeWeavers has announced CrossOver 16.2 as the newest release of their Wine-based software for running Windows programs on Linux and macOS...

Fedora 26 was set back by a delay last week and today it's been delayed again for another week...

Tuning the P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for the Linux kernel feels like a never-ending process. While it's been around for years and continues to be refined, for some Intel CPUs on some workloads, the CPUFreq scaling driver leads to be better performance and even Intel's own Clear Linux distribution is using CPUFreq by default. With Linux 4.12, more intel_pstate revisions are taking place...

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver is prepping support for the experimental VK_KHX_multiview extension...

This week marked the roll out of Serious Sam Fusion 2017 into public beta first up with Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter and soon to be followed-up by The Second Encounter and Serious Sam: BFE. The Fusion 2017 update is interesting as it brings these classics Vulkan support, 64-bit only, and other engine improvements.

The first Qt 5.9 tool-kit beta snapshot is now available for testing as the next feature release for this widely-used, cross-platform toolkit...

Dell appears to be using Coreboot on some of their modern Intel Atom motherboards paired with the Intel FSP and TianoCore...

A few days ago we reported on Ubuntu's Mir now supporting drag and drop while now another important desktop feature has come to Ubuntu's Mir abstraction layer, MirAL...

Synopsys has been working on some DRM core infrastructure patches for better handling of HDMI 2.0+ support by DRM drivers...

For those looking for a free software turn-based strategy game, the open-source Battle for Wesnoth project remains under development...

The latest DRM/graphics-related porting effort by François Tigeot in the DragonFly space is bringing over the vga_switcheroo module from the Linux kernel...

Building off the work laid by Timothy Arceri and others for enabling a TGSI (and hardware) shader cache in the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver as well as R600g TGSI shader cache due to the common infrastructure work, the Nouveau driver is now leveraging it to enable the TGSI shader cache for Nouveau Gallium3D drivers...

Peter Hutterer has announced the new release of libinput 1.7.0 as the input handling library most commonly associated with Wayland systems but also with Ubuntu's Mir as well as the X.Org Server via the xf86-input-libinput driver...

Seventeen more "DC" display code patches were published today for the AMDGPU DRM driver, but it's still not clear if it will be ready -- or accepted -- for Linux 4.12...

Fedora Workstation 26 will be receiving official AC3 codec support...

Given all the recent performance work that's landed recently in Mesa Git for Mesa 17.1 plus the Linux 4.11 kernel continuing to mature, in this article are some fresh benchmarks of a few Radeon GPUs with Mesa 17.1-dev + Linux 4.11 as of this week compared to some GeForce graphics cards with the latest NVIDIA proprietary driver.

Matthias Clasen has just announced the official release of GNOME 3.24, codenamed Portland...

Similar to Valve offering their collection of games to Mesa developers (as well as Ubuntu/Debian developers), Feral Interactive is now offering their Linux game collection for free to Mesa developers...

Eevee is the codename for the Blender project to implement a realtime engine with physically-based rendering (PBR) within Blender 2.8...

With Qt 5.8's Qt Wayland Compositor Framework taking shape, more developers are beginning to tailor a Qt Wayland compositor to their use-cases. One of those is a company specializing in farm equipment like combine harvesters, tractors, and harvesters...

Wine-Staging 2.4 is now available as the latest experimental Wine build that incorporates various testing/preliminary patches not yet ready for merging into mainline Wine...

The latest in the hardware enablement work for adding support for the upcoming Radeon RX Vega to the open-source Linux graphics driver are the patches to libdrm for this Mesa DRM library that sits between the DRM kernel drivers and Mesa / xf86-video / other user-space graphics code...

With the big Vulkan 1.0.42 update came a number of new extensions, including for Vulkan multi-GPU/device support. There was some confusion by some that Vulkan's multi-GPU support was limited to Windows 10, but that is not at all the case...

Thanks to the work of community UE4 developer Yaakuro, Unreal Engine 4 on Linux with SteamVR support is advancing and can now be used with Vulkan rendering...

With Mir 1.0 expected to be coming soon, the developers working on this display server for Ubuntu Linux are tackling the remaining work items, some are larger than others...

Coming in late to the Linux 4.11 kernel are support for a few more Corsair gaming peripherals...