Phoronix

Collabora is strengthening their graphics development team with a former Canonical developer working on Mir who was laid off during the Ubuntu maker's recent restructuring...

Now with the motherboards having arrived, we can move on to our Intel Core-X Linux benchmarking. Here is an initial look at the Intel Core i7 7740X Kabylake-X processor.

NVIDIA has made their TensorRT 2 library publicly available today as the newest major update to their deep-learning inference optimizer and run-time...

Thanks to today's Radeon Vega Frontier Edition launch, AMD has released an updated AMDGPU-PRO Linux hybrid driver...

With the Linux 4.13 merge window likely to open next week and the DRM-Next cutoff already having passed for new material that in turn wants to target 4.13, here are some initial benchmarks with a Polaris and Fiji graphics cards for this new AMDGPU DRM code.

GStreamer now has a plug-in for supporting accelerated video decoding using NVIDIA's VDPAU-successor, NVDEC...

The Radeon Vega Frontier Edition has begun shipping today as the Vega-based compute card geared to go up against the Titan Xp and P100 accelerators for compute/workstation workloads. This is the first Vega GPU card to market, but will come at a hefty cost...

MATE developer Martin Wimpress has shared that they are talking to Mir developers about how Mir could be used as a Wayland compositor...

Valve developer Samuel Pitoiset appears quite motivated to see Dawn of War 3 running well under Linux with the RadeonSI driver stack...

While Vulkan is most often talked about for being a high-performance graphics API, it also has integrated compute capabilities -- and in fact, may be the future of OpenCL -- and is quite capable for GPGPU computing. There are countless Vulkan graphics tutorials and code samples out there, but for those interested in just Vulkan for compute, a Phoronix reader pointed me to a new simple/easy project...

Broadcom developer Eric Anholt has shared another weekly update concerning his summer 2017 hacking on the VC4 open-source driver stack that is most notably used by the Raspberry Pi...

After carrying out the P-State/CPUFreq governor comparison with a focus on OpenGL and Vulkan Linux games, next I ran some fresh numbers seeing how well modern OpenGL/Vulkan Linux games are scaling across multiple CPU cores.

This weekend I posted a comparison of OpenGL/Vulkan performance for Radeon and NVIDIA GPUs with Serious Sam 3: BFE now that it's updated to the Vulkan-enabled "Fusion" 2017 update. For those curious about the Intel HD Graphics gaming potential for this game, here are some results...

Igor Stoppa of Huawei continues working on a new kernel feature to provide read-only protection for dynamic data...

TrueOS-aligned Lumina Desktop Environment 1.3 is now available as the latest stable release for this Qt-powered desktop environment...

For those wondering about the impact on gaming of the different CPUFreq vs. P-State CPU frequency scaling drivers and their different governors, here are some fresh tests using an Intel Skylake CPU with Radeon RX Polaris graphics when using the latest Linux 4.12 kernel and Mesa 17.2-dev.

Nicolai Hähnle of AMD has posted his set of 92 patches for implementing an experimental NIR back-end within the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

GNU is home to a wide variety of free software projects, some more notable than others. One of the lesser known GNU projects is Motti, a "simple multiplayer strategy game."..

AES-128-CBC support is coming to fscrypt, the generic file-system crypto code in the Linux kernel that's currently in use by F2FS and EXT4 for offering native file-system encryption support...

Rob Clark continues doing great work on the Freedreno Gallium3D driver for open-source, reverse-engineered Qualcomm Adreno graphics as well as the related MSM DRM driver for display support with Snapdragon SoCs...

It looks like the first AMD-powered Chromebook might be getting closer to reality...

The LLVM Clang compiler toolchain now has mainline support for the Ananas platform...

Back in May we talked about ARB_gl_spirv / NIR Support Being Worked On For RadeonSI while now we have more details from AMD's Nicolai Hähnle regarding these plans...

Back in March we reported about LLVM 5.0 anticipating better AMD Ryzen performance thanks to a proper scheduling model slated to land. But months later, AMD still hasn't produced the code...

Linus Torvalds has announced Linux 4.12-rc7 with what could be the final release candidate prior to declaring the stable Linux 4.12 kernel...

On Friday marked Croteam's latest game update to their "Fusion" 2017 update, Serious Sam 3: BFE. Like the other Fusion 2017 game updates from Croteam, there are a number of engine-level updates and arguably most notable is the introduction of a Vulkan renderer. Here are some fresh NVIDIA/Radeon benchmarks of Serious Sam 3: BFE under OpenGL and Vulkan with this latest release.

The Debian project is warning Intel Skylake and Kaby Lake users to disable Hyper Threading (HT) on their CPUs due to a possible issue affecting those with out-of-date microcode...

On Friday we launched the 2017 Linux Laptop Survey and as of this morning we're at nearly 12,000 results so far (11,879 as of writing). While there's still more than one week left to fill in the survey, here's how things are looking so far...

A fair amount of new device support and other improvements are getting ready for the Linux 4.13 kernel via the HID and input trees...

It's looking like the EXT4 file-system updates for the upcoming Linux 4.13 cycle could be a bit more interesting this time around...

The latest Git code for FFmpeg now supports VA-API accelerated VP9 encoding...

Latte Dock, the desktop dock based on KDE's Plasma Framework and Qt, is preparing for their next release at the end of August...

The third beta for the upcoming FreeBSD 11.1 is available for testing this weekend...

A patch series posted on Friday could help games suffering from visible video memory pressure when using the AMDGPU DRM driver...

Needing to replace a failed hard drive in one of our server room benchmark systems, I decided to try out the ADATA SU800 as something new. It's an affordable SATA 3.0 SSD and in not trying out an ADATA SSD in a while, I decided to purchase this one and run some benchmarks on it prior to commissioning it to its new home.

Purism has announced their privacy-minded Coreboot-friendly Librem laptops have reached a general availability state...

We recently reported on Ubuntu planning to finally ship video acceleration by default, at least for Intel hardware, and they have made progress in this area...

Georges Stavracas' latest work on GNOME is making the GNOME Music player less slow...

System76 continues working on improvements to the GNOME stack as part of their transition in-step to using it over Unity 7, in line with Canonical's decision to switch Ubuntu over to GNOME and abandon their grand Unity 8 ambitions...

Wine 2.11 has arrived as the latest bi-weekly development release for this program to handle Windows games/applications on Linux and other operating systems...

Marek Olšák's changes to make Rocket League and Witcher 2 happy on the RadeonSI OpenGL driver are now in place...

Serious Sam 3: BFE has been upgraded (for now, the non-VR version) against the Serious Sam 2017 "Fusion" engine changes, which means Vulkan for this latest Croteam game...

While waiting for my motherboards to arrive for the new Core i7 7740X and Core i9 7900X, I've been re-testing many of my AMD/Intel boxes with Ubuntu 17.04 on the latest Linux 4.12 kernel for comparison to Intel's new high-end processors. Here is a look at 12 of the existing systems when running on the Linux 4.12 kernel as well as all of the systems have the latest BIOSes, etc.

Here is some more complementary data to this week's Vulkan vs. OpenGL On Linux With Core i5, Core i7, Ryzen 7...

Remember that "openSUSE Tablet" last year that was seeking crowd-funding and even advertised by the openSUSE crew for being a Linux tablet as cheap as $200 USD? Sadly, it's not a reality while the company still appears to be formulating something...

Given the continued flow of KHR_no_error patches hitting Mesa 17.2 Git by Valve developers, here is a fresh comparison using the just-updated Padoka PPA with comparing the impact of using this support via the MESA_NO_ERROR=1 switch...

The Baikal renderer is a newly-released, open-source implementation of the AMD Radeon ProRender API. Baikal has evolved into a fully-functional rendering engine and its only hardware requirement is on OpenCL 1.2...

It has been a few years since last running any Linux hardware surveys on Phoronix, as overall the ecosystem has rather matured nicely while of course there are still notable improvements to be had in the areas of GPUs and laptops. (Additionally, OpenBenchmarking.org provides a plethora of analytic capabilities when not seeking to collect subjective data / opinions.) But now we are hosting the 2017 Linux Laptop Survey to hopefully further improvements in this area...

Continuing in our benchmarks of Debian 9, here is a comparison when re-testing 6.0.10 "Squeeze", Debian 7.11 "Wheezy", Debian 8.8 "Jessie", and the newly-released Debian 9.0 "Stretch".

As part of the switch over to the GNOME Shell desktop environment by default for Ubuntu 17.10, they are also abandoning the LightDM display/log-in manager in favor of GNOME's GDM...