Phoronix

While all routine Phoronix readers should be well aware of the fact that there still isn't any open-source accelerated support for the GTX 900 "Maxwell" graphics cards yet as the Nouveau developers are blocked on waiting signed firmware from NVIDIA, the GTX 750 series does have some basic support as the original Maxwell GPUs. Here is a look at using this unofficial open-source driver on a GTX 750 with the Linux 4.5 kernel and Mesa 11.2-devel...

A new release of the Raspberry Pi's Debian-based "Raspbian" Linux distribution is now available. This release based off Debian Jessie adds in experimental support for the Pi's new open-source, OpenGL Linux graphics driver stack!..

Dell is moving forward with offering natively UEFI firmware flashing from the Linux desktop...

Well this comes as bit of a surprise... Our friends at Amazon have announced Lumberyard, a new AAA game engine they have been developing that's free and with the source code being public...

If you want to try out Wayland from a Live DVD/USB device, RebeccaBlackOS has seen a new release and ships the very latest Wayland/Weston components as well as for the high-profile software making use of Wayland...

The VC4 DRM kernel open-source driver for providing display support on Raspberry Pi devices is in the process of getting runtime power management and GPU reset capabilities...

As a quick PSA, while you may be wanting to try out DRI3 support with the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver as it is capable of enhancing the performance, so far my latest attempts have been marred by rendering issues...

Red Hat's Adam Jackson today announced the release of X.Org Server 1.18.1 as the first point release building off last year's X.Org Server 1.18 debut...

With the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA still not enabling the experimental AMDGPU PowerPlay or CIK (Sea Islands / GCN 1.1) support in their kernel builds (although they basically are both off by default at runtime), here is my spin of the newly-released Linux 4.5-rc3 kernel with these features turned on...

It has been a while since hearing much anything about HP's "The Machine" computing architecture and its associated Linux++ project, but that changed this past week...

While I'm in the middle of a big Nouveau Linux 4.4 vs. Nouveau Linux 4.5 vs. NVIDIA proprietary driver comparison with multiple NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards, I just wanted to pass along a bit of good, non-performance news about Nouveau on Linux 4.5...

The latest feature added to the popular Vim text editor is asynchronous processing...

Topi Pohjolainen of Intel posted a set of 23 patches today for providing compression of single-sampled color surfaces / lossless compression within the Intel Mesa driver for Skylake "Gen9" and newer...

As part of the GPUOpen initiative that AMD launched last month is an introduction to the Heterogeneous Compute Compiler (HCC) for writing code to take advantage of AMD's new LLVM-based compiler for offloading the work to the GPU...

In just less than two weeks The Khronos Group will be hosting a "special webinar" about Vulkan...

Last week I brought up the Talos Secure Workstation as a $3100 USD system that's fully free and open down to the firmware and with an open-source friendly processor design while being high performance. Since then, I've had access to test out the hardware making up this POWER8-powered system to see how fast a fully-open system can be. Here is more information on the proposed Talos Workstation along with a few early Linux benchmarks.

David Airlie has been putting out some ARB_arrays_of_arrays patches this weekend for Mesa that implement this OpenGL 4.3 extension for all Gallium3D drivers supporting GLSL 1.30...

Karol Herbst has published a set of patches for implementing PMU engine counters, which will be needed for supporting dynamic re-clocking with newer GPUs...

Linux.Conf.Au 2016 ran last week from 1 to 5 February in Geelong, Australia. If you weren't able to go to this annual Linux conference down under, the videos from all of the presentations have now been uploaded...

The team working on the Unvanquished open-source first person shooter released their 48th monthly alpha release on Sunday night. At least it's looking like a beta release is getting closer...

With the UI freeze being imminent for GNOME 3.20, we will soon have a good idea for how this desktop environment update due out next month will look. To get started, here's a look at the Nautilus 3.20 file manager changes for this six-month GNOME update...

You have more than likely read about the atomic push by DRM/KMS drivers over the past few years. If you still are craving to learn more about it, here's the perfect opportunity...

Linus Torvalds has found better things to do than watching Super Bowl 50 by releasing the RC3 for the Linux 4.5 kernel...

With yesterday's NVIDIA GeForce GT 710 Linux testing was just the start of our tests for this sub-$50 USD graphics card powered by a cut-down Kepler GPU. Yesterday's article just included some basic NVIDIA binary driver tests while today's article includes Nouveau performance figures...

Alongside FOSDEM, the Czech events like this week's DevConf.cz, one of the interesting and longstanding German Linux events that pairs open-source/Linux with beer is the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage that's happening next month...

With the upcoming Linux 4.5 kernel, the process of manually re-clocking your NVIDIA graphics card using the open-source NVIDIA driver is slightly different compared to previous kernels...

Happening the past few days in Brno, Czech Republic has been the Red Hat sponsored DevConf.cz developers conference. For those that missed it and the live streaming, the videos are available to watch on YouTube...

A few days ago I posted a number of LLVM Clang optimization level benchmarks using the latest code for the upcoming Clang 3.8 release. Those tests went from -O0 to -O3 -march=native, but many Phoronix readers wanted -Ofast so here are those results too...

One of the most frequent topics I'm emailed about is any brand recommendations among NVIDIA and AMD AIB partners for graphics cards. For Linux users, is there a particular brand preference for graphics cards?..

Alex Goins of NVIDIA has spent the past several months working on PRIME synchronization support to fix tearing when using this NVIDIA-popular multi-GPU method. The latest patches were published this week...

Samuel Pitoiset has published a set of twelve patches for implementing compute shaders support within the Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D driver for the GeForce 400/500 "Fermi" graphics processors...

At the end of January NVIDIA rolled out the GeForce GT 710. This isn't some shiny new low-end Maxwell card, but rather from the Kepler lineage and retails for under $50 USD as a discrete solution to compete with integrated Intel and AMD graphics. Here are some initial benchmarks of a passively-cooled ASUS GeForce GT 710 under Linux.

For those that haven't heard yet, MaruOS is a new open-source project that seeks to provide users with a Debian-based desktop environment when connecting your Android smart-phone to an external display...

FreeBSD developers have released today their first official development media for the upcoming FreeBSD 10.3...

AMD's Marek Olšák has begun exploring an interoperability interface for OpenGL within Mesa and having a non-Mesa OpenCL implementation (not Clover OpenCL Gallium3D)...

Last weekend at FOSDEM, Lennart Poettering was one of the keynote speakers where he presented on systemd's user-space plans for the years...

The race is on to see if any of the Mesa/Gallium3D hardware drivers (or core Mesa itself) will reach any new version levels for Mesa 11.2...

It was just last week we got to write about VLC 3.0 features and early planning for VLC 4.0 while this weekend in Git there is another feature to add to the list...

While it took a while past the November release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2, available this weekend is Scientific Linux 7.2...

A few days back was the news about Croteam's intentions for supporting the Vulkan graphics API. They confirmed they intend to support Vulkan for Serious Sam 4 and will also be supporting it with their Talos Principle game. Today they confirmed this information again...

Docker is reportedly going to be migrating all of their official images from an Ubuntu base to now using Alpine Linux...

As I'm in the process of retiring an old AMD Opteron dual-socket system, prior to decommissioning it, I figured it would be fun to go back and re-benchmark all of the Ubuntu LTS releases going all the way back to the legendary 6.06 Dapper Drake release. So here are some fresh benchmarks of this AMD Shanghai system with eight cores and 16GB of RAM when re-benchmarking the releases from Ubuntu 6.06 through the latest Ubuntu 16.04 LTS development state.

As some recent GCC 5.2 compile tuning tests with various CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS were of interest to a number of Phoronix readers, hare are some benchmarks with a number of different compiler flag tests when using the LLVM Clang 3.8 compiler...

As the final planned development version before the official Phoronix Test Suite 6.2 "Gamvik" release, 6.2 Milestone 5 was released this morning...

Wine 1.9.3 is out today as the newest bi-weekly Wine development release...

For the past few years Mozilla has been on a solid six week cadence for shipping new Firefox releases while for the remainder of the releases in 2016 they are tweaking that schedule slightly...

While Next Thing Co is still working to fulfill orders on the C.H.I.P. $9 computer over the next several months, I noticed that some benchmarks of this cheap Raspberry Pi competitor have begun appearing on OpenBenchmarking.org via the Phoronix Test Suite. Here are some of those benchmark results for this ARB single-board computer...

Recently a NVIDIA engineer blogged about shader resource binding with Vulkan. The latest NVIDIA blog post about this next-gen graphics API is on memory management...

Raptor Engineering is working on the Talos Secure Workstation, which is being advertised as a high-performance, open-to-the-firmware system that is much better than the commonly antiquated "freed" x86 systems. However, getting a high-performance, free software friendly workstation doesn't come cheap...

Well, at least we know now that Vulkan should be released before August...