Phoronix

Besides approving the Fedora 27 release schedule, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) approved GLVND support landing in Fedora 25 as an update...

With Mesa 17.0 due to be released any day now, here are fresh benchmarks of Mesa 17.0's Git code as of Friday compared to Mesa 12.0.6, Mesa 13.0.4, and the current Mesa 17.1-devel Git master code. Not only is the i965 OpenGL driver performance being examined but also the ANV Vulkan driver present since Mesa 12.

While Fedora 26 isn't even being released until June, today the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved the initial release schedule for Fedora 27...

With Intel Kabylake graphics on Mesa working (albeit very slowly) for Aspyr Media's latest Linux game port, Civilization VI, and RadeonSI Gallium3D running too albeit at a less than desirable speed, I decided to try running the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver with this latest AAA Linux game release...

Intel's open-source developers maintaining GVT-g for Linux graphics virtualization support for their hardware are working on migrating their development workflow from this code that's been out-of-tree since its inception to now being mainline...

In addition to AMD having open-sourced their UMR debugger a few days back, over in their "GPU Open" team they open-sourced the Radeon GPU Analyzer...

Here is a fresh round of some out-of-the-box Linux distribution tests when focusing on different server/workstation workloads. Featured in this comparison is Antergos 17.2-Rolling, Clear Linux 13200, Fedora 25, Scientific Linux 7.3, Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS, Ubuntu 16.10, and openSUSE Tumbleweed 20170205.

In continuation of this morning's article about Valve Planning To Carry Mesa GL Thread Feature On SteamOS, Per-Game Features, it looks like the developers working for Valve on the open-source Linux graphics driver stack are looking to do more in the per-game profile space...

It's looking like Valve will begin carrying some out-of-tree patches for their Mesa packages they use on SteamOS...

Since yesterday's release of Civilization VI for Linux, ported by Aspyr Media, we have published a 14-way NVIDIA GPU comparison with this newest high-profile Linux game release. This morning I also shared some Intel Kabylake game figures for Civilization 6 while now the focus is on RadeonSI.

AMDGPU's DC display code (better known as DAL) received some fresh patches on the public mailing list this week to improve its atomic mode-setting implementation...

The second release candidate to the forthcoming LLVM 4.0 compiler stack and Clang 4.0 C/C++ compiler front-end are now available...

There had been rumors the past few years of the city of Munich switching back to Windows and away from their widely-known Linux environment while now it looks like that is indeed taking place...

I was very surprised to find out that I was able to get Intel HD Graphics working with Aspyr Media's latest Linux game port, Civilization VI. Here are some benchmark results...

Android-x86 has been an open-source project for the past 7+ years for providing suitable Intel/AMD hardware support for Google's Android operating system. Unfortunately, its project leader may be stepping away...

Valve developers have been working to deliver Linux VR support and even significantly improving the AMDGPU+RadeonSI/RADV Linux driver stack for VR use-cases. Their motives are becoming more clear with Valve working on at least three new games making use of virtual reality...

Motivated by KDE Plasma Leaning Towards Focusing On Flatpak Over AppImage/Snaps and this lengthy, contentious forum thread, a KDE contributor has taken a closer look at the Flatpak versus Snaps versions available in different Linux distributions...

Aspyr Media today released their native Linux port of Civilization VI. Here are benchmarks of fourteen different NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards from Kepler to Pascal for seeing how well this game performs. Benchmarks with (not officially supported) RadeonSI and Intel Mesa graphics will be coming up next.

It feels like the work on power management / clock-gating / PowerPlay is a never-ending mission within the AMDGPU DRM driver -- more work has been queued up for the next kernel cycle...

The Linux port of Civilization VI by Aspyr Media has finally been released...

Ahead of Mobile World Congress (MWC17) happening later this month, Jolla has released Sailfish OS 2.1...

Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS was already twice delayed for different technical reasons. Approaching one month late from the original time table, 16.04.2 was supposed to ship today but that will no longer happen...

With Mesa 17.0 due to be released in the days ahead, I've been running fresh benchmarks of this latest user-space 3D driver stack on Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau. For your viewing pleasure this Thursday are the RadeonSI benchmarks comparing the Mesa 17.0 Git code to that of the latest Mesa 13.0 branch with a few different AMD graphics cards. There are also some tests of the RADV Vulkan driver.

Marek Olšák has posted a set of patches today to the Mesa mailing list and they should help some Linux games, at least Rocket League...

Libinput is the input handling library that originated with Wayland but has since been adopted by Mir as well as X.Org when using the xf86-input-libinput handling driver. This xf86-input-libinput adaptation for X.Org Servers has seen a new release today...

Feral announced earlier this week they are releasing HITMAN for Linux while today they have just published the system requirements for the Linux port...

Riding off last week's Wine 2.1 release as the first post-2.0 bi-weekly development snapshot, Wine-Staging 2.1 has been released that continues to incorporate all of its various experimental/testing patches...

NethServer 7 is a CentOS derived Linux distribution designed for SOHO use-cases and makes it easy to setup a mail server, web server, DNS/DHCP server, and other common networking tasks via its modular design and web-based administrative interface...

Mesa developer Thomas Helland is looking at reviving an old set of Mesa patches that could help out in some CPU-bound scenarios...

One day after the Wayland 1.13 Beta, the reference Weston compositor is updated to its 2.0 beta state...

Marek Olšák volleyed the 26 patches needed for Mesa supporting threaded OpenGL dispatch onto the Mesa mailing list for some additional public review...

Five AMD/NVIDIA graphics cards tested on five different Intel Kabylake processors from a low-end $40 Celeron CPU to a high-end Core i7 7700K is the focus of today's Linux benchmarking. Various OpenGL and Vulkan Linux gaming benchmarks were run to see how the RadeonSI and NVIDIA Linux performance evolves from a Celeron G3930 to Pentium G4600 to Core i3 7100 to Core i5 7600K to Core i7 7700K.

Longtime GNOME developer Richard Hughes has announced a new release of fwupd, the open-source utility for updating firmware on Linux in a safe, automatic, and reliable manner...

Nicolai Hähnle has been working on OpenGL ARB_sparse_buffer support within the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver stack along with the necessary core Mesa changes for this extension as well as some AMDGPU kernel changes...

Veteran KDE developer Sebastian Kügler has written a blog post following the Plasma Sprint that just happened recently in Stuttgart. A few interesting details were shared...

Inki Dae has submitted the Exynos DRM driver changes to DRM-Next as material for the upcoming Linux 4.11 cycle...

Croteam is working on a "Serious Fusion 2017 update" that for ALL of their games will feature Linux/SteamOS/OSX support along with Vulkan support, among other improvements...

Many Phoronix readers and open-source enthusiasts have complained when hearing of Jolla's Sailfish OS that this Linux-based smartphone OS isn't fully-open and the company hadn't delivered on its promises to open-source more of it, including its user-interface and apps. According to their CEO, that's still looking to happen...

Bryce Harrington at Samsung's Open-Source Group has announced the release of the Wayland 1.13 beta...

On the desktop there's now Vulkan for Linux/Android systems, Direct3D 12 for Windows, and Metal for macOS systems as the latest-generation, performance-focused graphics APIs. On the web front, WebGL is the current dominant API that's derived from OpenGL ES but Apple is pushing an initiative for a new graphics API...

As a quick update to yesterday's article about RADV fast clears by default was being proposed, that change-over just happened in Mesa 17.1-devel Git...

The roll-out of GLVND support in Mesa as a Fedora 25 update was arguably botched, but it's an important feature and is still being discussed...

If these patches land soon, the Raspberry Pi could beat newer AMD graphics cards to having mainline HDMI audio support via their respective Linux kernel DRM drivers (with the AMDGPU audio support still being held up by DAL/DC mainlining efforts). Eric Anholt managed to finally put out the VC4 HDMI audio code for review...

For those that wait until point releases before upgrading your KDE desktop stack, Plasma 5.9.1 is now available...

Civilization VI and DiRT Rally were recent AAA Linux game announcements and now HITMAN is the latest game receiving a confirmed Linux game port...

When Aspyr Media announced yesterday that Civilization VI is shipping for Linux this week it was confirmed that only NVIDIA graphics are supported by this latest AAA Linux game release. But they later clarified that AMD "works", but with issues. But it doesn't sound too bad...

Opera Software today announced that the Opera 43 web-browser is shipping, assuming you are still running this closed-source web-browser on Linux...

Unigine Engine 2.4 was made available today by Unigine Corp. This release is exciting because there are a ton of new features and this engine update will be used by the soon-to-be-released Unigine Superposition Benchmark...

While the Ubuntu Phone efforts are basically on-hold until migrating to a Snap-based Ubuntu Phone/Touch image, OTA-15 was released today...

Timothy Arceri of Collabora has sent out his latest patches to Mesa in regards to the ongoing work for shader caches. The 40 patches published over night do benefit RadeonSI and R600g...