Phoronix

Back in December a patch rolled out for supporting ETC2 and ASTC texture compression by the Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D driver. Today that patch was finally merged for benefiting newer NVIDIA GPUs...

We've already looked at the GeForce 900 series performance on Nouveau with the Linux 4.6 kernel that finally has the necessary bits for supporting 3D hardware acceleration on these Maxwell GPUs. Those GTX 900 series results didn't end up being particularly exciting since there isn't yet any re-clocking support on this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver. For complementing those results are some GeForce 600/700 "Kepler" graphics card results when comparing Nouveau on Linux 4.6 with Mesa 11.3-devel and using re-clocking then compared to the latest NVIDIA proprietary driver.

Mesa 11.2 is arriving a month late, but it's now available this morning as the latest ~3 month update for the project. Mesa 11.2 does have many improvements, but it doesn't advance the OpenCL core support level for any of the prominent hardware drivers...

Anastasia Stulova of ARM's Media Processing Group has provided an outline of their work on enabling OpenCL 2.0 support within the LLVM/Clang compiler stack...

Last month Croteam open-sourced the Serious Engine 1 with the original support for Windows. Now though Serious Engine 1 with its open-source code-base is running along on Linux and OS X...

Last year LLVM developers made significant progress on developing a new ELF linker for Linux/Unix-like systems. Since then, this high-performance linker from LLD (dubbed "LLD") has continued maturing and gaining additional functionality...

FreeBSD 10.3 is now out in stable release form...

If you are interested in getting involved in Linux graphics driver development outside of initiatives like Outreachy and GSoC, here are some resources...

Building off Friday's release of Wine 1.9.7 is now a new release of Wine-Staging...

Linus Torvalds has issued the second weekly release candidate for the Linux 4.6 kernel...

Two weeks ago NVIDIA released their 364 Linux driver with initial support for Wayland and Mir. Some have asked why there aren't benchmarks yet or if GNOME 3.20 on Wayland supports the NVIDIA driver, but the short answer is the NVIDIA developers are still debating their implementation preferences with upstream Wayland developers...

Patches surfaced this morning on the Linux Kernel Mailing List for implementing a new kernel subsystem...

Speaking of not taking a day off from work in over three years, six years ago this weekend was a lighter schedule when there was the Phoronix tour of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site...

Here are benchmarks of ten different ARM SBCs/boards including the Banana Pi M3, ODROID-XU4, ODROID-C2, Raspberry Pi 3, Orange Pi PC, Orange Pi Plus, Orange Pi One, ODROID-C1+, Banana Pi M2, and the Raspberry Pi 2 using their respective flavors of Ubuntu/Debian/Raspbian/Armbian...

Vulkan 1.0.8 has been released as another small revision to the Vulkan API...

Samsung developers have been working on implementing client-side post processing effects for Wayland. This is to achieve similar effects like "wobbly windows" as were common to the Linux desktop going back many years with AIGLX / Compiz / Beryl...

To the wife on April Fools' Day I told her I was going to take the day off of work... Hah, what a joke. But led me to generate some statistics on the number of Phoronix articles each day and figuring out when was the last time I didn't write an open-source or Linux articles in a given day...

The Debian community has come out today with Debian GNU/Linux 7.10 and Debian GNU/Linux 8.4...

Bas Nieuwenhuizen has published a patch-set for implementing an important OpenGL 4.3 feature: compute shaders for RadeonSI!..

For some lighthearted weekend reading and sure to make for some interesting discussions in the forums is what was volleyed today onto the kernel mailing list: "The most insane proposal in regard to the Linux kernel development." It's about shaking up the way the Linux kernel development happens, but almost surely the proposal won't end up resulting in changes...

A Phoronix reader wrote in excitingly that there have been a few Lima commits this week. Lima, of course, being the open-source, reverse-engineered graphics driver for ARM Mali hardware...

The Steam survey results are out for March 2016 and indicate a further reduction in the Linux gaming market-share...

With the exception of the GK110 graphics processor, NVIDIA's Kepler and Maxwell GPUs now support OpenGL compute shaders (GL_ARB_compute_shader) with the latest Nouveau driver code in Mesa...

The xf86-video-openchrome 0.4 release has finally happened! It's been more than two years since this VIA x86 X.Org driver was last updated...

ARM developers today posted their first public version of a DRM driver for their Mali Display Processors...

With trying out Fedora 24 Alpha this week and it going well, I decided to run a few benchmarks on the same system to see how the performance compared to Fedora 23...

The third beta of the Slackware-based Zenwalk 8.0 Linux distribution is now available for testing...

Wine 1.9.7 is now available as the latest bi-weekly development release of this program for running Windows programs on Linux and other operating systems...

While the Linux 4.6 kernel is still a number of weeks away from being released with the merge window only having recently closed, the Intel OTC developers responsible for the i915 DRM graphics driver have already begun aligning their first round of updates for DRM-Next to in turn target Linux 4.7...

The folks at LoveRPi.com recently sent over an Orange Pi One when they had also sent over the ODROID-C2 $40 64-bit ARM development board for review. Here are some benchmarks of the Orange Pi One compared to several other ARM boards.

NixOS 16.03 is codenamed "Emu" and it's out today as the latest stable release of this interesting Linux distribution...

Better ownCloud integration is coming for Plasma 5.7...

The LLVM compiler infrastructure now has support for Intel's Lakemont processor...

The 0 A.D. real-time strategy game is out with its 20th alpha release codenamed "Timosthenes" and is a rather hefty update...

With Linux 4.6 entering development, AMD releasing their new "PRO" hybrid driver stack, Raspberry Pi 3 and other 64-bit ARM boards becoming popular, NVIDIA releasing their new driver with Mir and Wayland support, and other open-source milestones reached, March 2016 was another exciting month for Linux enthusiasts...

Trailing the Fedora 24 Alpha x86 release by a few days is now the secondary architecture spins for POWER and AArch64 (64-bit ARM)...

Red Hat has announced they are making Red Hat Enterprise Linux and associating offerings available to developers at no-cost...

With testing Fedora 24 Alpha this week, I also spent some time test driving the GNOME on Wayland experience even though developers have already decided F24 will continue to use the X.Org Server by default...

ALSA 1.1.1 is out today as the newest version of this Linux audio library, utilities, plugins, and tinycompress for the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture...

Since Tuesday's release of Fedora 24 Alpha I've been having a wonderful time trying out this test release with all of the exciting changes building up for Fedora 24...

This week is Microsoft's BUILD Conference and a day after announcing Ubuntu for Windows 10, Microsoft today announced it will be providing Xamarin free to all Visual Studio users and that they intend to open-source its technology too...

Epic Games is ending out the month by releasing the newest version of UE4, Unreal Engine 4.11...

CodeWeavers this morning announced the release of CrossOver 15.1 as the latest version of their software to allow Windows programs to run on Linux and OS X. CrossOver 15.1 is now powered by Wine 1.8.1...

With yesterday's Nouveau Kepler vs. Maxwell Performance On Linux 4.6 + Mesa 11.3-dev benchmarks, a number of Phoronix readers expressed their surprise how well the GeForce 600/700 "Kepler" series hardware was performing on the open-source Nouveau driver once manually re-clocking these graphics cards. It's certainly much better than the GTX 900 series performance on Nouveau as the Maxwell GPUs don't have any re-clocking support on Nouveau at all. I'm working on some fresh Nouveau vs. NVIDIA Kepler tests and for one Steam Linux game, this reverse-engineered NVIDIA open-source driver is able to beat out the "binary blob" from NVIDIA...

Each month we look at the estimated Linux gaming marketshare based upon Valve's Steam Survey. Generally the reported Linux market-share on Steam is hovering around 1%, which a number of Linux enthusiasts claim is inaccurate and under-represented. Well, Unity's survey information is much the same and pegs the percentage of Linux users running games based upon Unity as much lower than 1%...

The interesting slides from this month's Game Developers Conference (GDC) are now available online...

The GLX_EXT_libglvnd extension for the X.Org Server's GLX is now within the xorg-server code-base for the upcoming 1.19 release series...

If you are looking for some Wayland drama, check out the most commented on mailing list thread this week: collaboration on standard Wayland protocol extensions...

It seems we're currently pacing at a rate where almost each day there is new OpenGL 4.x or OpenGL ES 3.2 activity reaching Mesa Git master...

Following a two week delay to the schedule, the list of nominees for the X.Org 2016 Board of Directors elections was published this morning...