Phoronix

Bas Nieuwenhuizen has posted some new feature patches this weekend for the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver...

Linux game porter and SDL developer Ryan "Icculus" Gordon has shared some performance measurements when bringing SDL's new audio conversion support within web-browsers using EmScripten...

While I have already posted some single-disk file-system benchmarks on Linux 4.10, for some benchmarking fun this weekend I decided to run some fresh tests of Btrfs RAID capabilities using four solid-state drives (SSDs).

If you are looking for some experimental fun this weekend, the Linux kernel can be linked with LLVM's LLD linker...

The ZTE DRM driver is set to receive new features for Linux 4.11 after this Direct Rendering Manager driver was added to the Linux 4.10 kernel...

The VK9 project that's working to implement Direct3D 9 over Vulkan that's been under heavy development the past few months has reached new development milestones...

When we are usually running our cross-distribution/OS Linux comparisons, we are generally using Intel Xeon or Core i5/i7 CPUs and whatever else is the latest and greatest hardware, since that's what excites us the most. But a Phoronix Premium member recently inquired whether Intel's performance-oriented Clear Linux distribution would also be of benefit on lower-end hardware. So for some benchmarking fun this weekend, here are some Ubuntu 16.10 vs. Clear Linux results on an older Pentium system...

Last week talk of Solaris heated up again with Solaris 12 being removed from the Oracle road-map, after rumors of Oracle canning Solaris occurred in early December, meanwhile there are also more layoffs happening at Oracle. Oracle finally issued a blog post this week with a bit more clarification on the matter...

LLVM Clang 4.0 is set to be released in February while GCC 7 will be released as stable in March~April. For those curious how both compilers are currently performing, here is our latest installment of GCC vs. LLVM Clang benchmarking on Linux x86_64.

Mesa developers have been working on support for the new extensions of Vulkan 1.0.39 and the latest one to be wired up in Mesa Git is VK_KHR_get_physical_device_properties2 for RADV...

The libdrm 2.4.75 library is now available as the important component sitting between the user-space drivers and the kernel DRM...

Next week is the annual Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) taking place in Brussels, Belgium...

After last month's planned Ubuntu 17.04 Alpha 1 release for opt-in flavors didn't happen, the Zesty Alpha 2 debut happened today as what is now the only alpha release for the upcoming Zesty Zapus...

Given yesterday's release of the AMDGPU-PRO 16.60 driver I've been busy running various benchmarks on this first AMD Linux hybrid driver release of 2017. A number of OpenGL benchmarks will be published this weekend compared to the latest Mesa RadeonSI Git driver while for your viewing pleasure today is a look at the Vulkan performance of AMDGPU-PRO 16.60 compared to the Linux 4.10 + Mesa 17.1-dev driver stack for Dota 2 and The Talos Principle.

For those curious how Intel's flagship Core i7 7700K "Kabylake" processor is performing under Linux, my sample arrived yesterday and I've begun putting the CPU through its paces...

Alex Deucher of AMD sent in the Radeon/AMDGPU DRM driver changes today to DRM-Next for then merging into the Linux 4.11 kernel a few weeks down the road...

There's a new open-source project in the works aiming to be a software-based 2D renderer that uses JIT pipeline construction...

For those curious about the latest Linux gaming performance numbers for the latest Linux 4.10 Git kernel plus Mesa 17.1-devel on Git master for Radeon GPUs compared to the latest NVIDIA Linux driver release (378.09 beta), here are some fresh benchmarks. A range of OpenGL and Vulkan performance tests showing the latest NVIDIA and AMD Linux graphics performance with the newest drivers as of this week.

Not only are Solus Linux developers busy porting the Budgie desktop away from GNOME and switching to Qt but they are also continuing to work on more performance optimizations...

Within Mesa Git this morning is another feature flipped on for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver: ARB_gpu_shader_int64...

The release of Kodi 17.0 "Krypton" is near and today the fourth release candidate is now available for testing...

VK_KHR_maintenance1 is one of the new extensions added to the big Vulkan 1.0.39 update. A Valve developer has fired off a series of patches for making the necessary changes for supporting it with the RADV Radeon Vulkan Mesa driver...

Debian Linux is now available for running on NVIDIA's Jetson TX1 developer board powered by their Tegra X1 SoC...

For users of Scientific Linux, the 7.3 release is now available based off Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3...

AMDGPU-PRO 16.60 is now available as the latest version of the hybrid AMDGPU-based Radeon Linux graphics driver stack...

It looks like Aspyr Media could soon be releasing their Linux port of the highly-anticipated Civilization VI...

For those Linux gamers interested in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, a new Linux update is available...

For those that may be thinking about picking up an Intel Kabylake processor and trying to justify if DDR4-2400 memory is worthwhile for your budget, or even faster DDR4 memory via XMP profiles / overclocking, here are some tests using a Kabylake CPU and testing DDR4 memory at frequencies from 1600MHz up to 3333MHz.

For KDE fans not interested in setting up a KDE-based Linux distribution on your own laptop and worrying about potential graphics driver bugs with Plasma or other possible headaches, there is now a "KDE laptop" backed by the KDE community...

Daniel Vetter, the i915 DRM kernel maintainer from Intel's Open-Source Technology Center, has announced their final set of feature changes to be queued in DRM-Next for the Linux 4.11 kernel...

Based off the just-released Wine 2.0 is now the Wine-Staging 2.0 release with its many experimental/testing patches carried atop the upstream Wine code-base...

Chrome 56 is shipping tonight to stable users of Google's web-browser...

With now being able to benchmark ArrayFire via the Phoronix Test Suite, I've been having fun running a number of OpenCL graphics card tests with the 300+ available AF tests. The tests over the past week have been using the NVIDIA Linux driver while here are our first Radeon benchmark results using the AMDGPU-PRO driver stack.

GNOME developer Jonas Ã…dahl has begun landing his work on a new monitor configuration system in Mutter for the GNOME 3.24 desktop release...

The developers working on NetworkManager have rolled out their big v1.6 feature update...

Ubuntu 17.04, the Zesty Zapus, is still planning to ship Linux 4.10 for its kernel when the OS ships in April...

AMD developer Christian König is working on 10-bit HEVC video decoding support for the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver stack...

The second release candidate is now available for the upcoming Mesa 17.0...

For a while now there have been some requests to post GPU benchmarks from some modern low-end and higher-end CPUs while testing different graphics cards, particularly to see the impact of the Vulkan API. With all the recent Kabylake testing, I've run some open-source AMD graphics tests using a Core i3 7100 and Core i5 7600K for those that may be weighing CPU options for a Linux gaming system upgrade.

For those that were too excited about Wine 2.0 and its new features that you went off to download it before reading the rest of the email announcement, moving forward they are changing their versioning scheme...

Unigine will soon be releasing their much-anticipated Superposition benchmark. This is their first tech demo / benchmark powered by Unigine Engine 2 and will be stunning for Linux users and don't mind stressing their high-end graphics card and OpenGL driver...

Bryce Harrington of Samsung's Open-Source Group has announced the alpha release of Wayland 1.13 along with the Weston 2.0 alpha release. Rather than it being Weston 1.13, it's bumping to Weston 2.0 for this reference Wayland compositor...

There are some new boards now supported by mainline Coreboot...

For those interested in Google's WebP lossy/lossless image format that tends to deliver much superior compression vs. quality results to JPEG, a new release is on approach...

The Solus desktop environment has delivered innovations on a number of fronts, including its work on the Budgie desktop that has a growing following. While Budgie Desktop started off as being based upon GNOME, now the developers are working to decouple from GNOME and begin making use of the Qt tool-kit...

Timothy Arceri of Collabora is close to finally merging the massive OpenGL on-disk shader cache. A majority of that work is for common Mesa but for the initial work it's just been wired into Intel's i965 Mesa driver. But, fortunately, this Collabora developer is planning to wire up the GLSL shader cache for benefiting the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

One day after The Khronos Group revealed Vulkan 1.0.39 with various new extensions, the Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver within mainline Mesa adds support for VK_KHR_maintenance1...

Wine 2.0 is now officially available...

For those looking to purchase a newer Intel Z270 motherboard for use with the new Kabylake processors, the ASUS PRIME Z270-P is what I've been using the past two weeks for my initial Kabylake benchmarking. So far it's been working out great and haven't run into any issues.

The OpenGL and OpenGL ES Conformance Test Suites (GL CTS) from The Khronos Group have finally went the way of their Vulkan CTS... open-source!..