Phoronix

GNOME Games 3.21.2 was released this weekend as the newest version of this GNOME desktop application for managing your video games collection...

Greg Kroah-Hartman has sent in his various pull requests for the Linux 4.7 kernel merge window...

We've already covered at length the many AMDGPU/Radeon changes, the usual Intel DRM churn, and the multiple new DRM drivers coming for Linux 4.7. Missing from our coverage has been the Nouveau driver, but that work is finally getting queued up for this next kernel version...

It's been a year since the last LM-Sensors release and the project isn't as vibrant or active as it once was while the project site has been down for a while now and it doesn't appear to be coming back...

It's possible to get XWayland running on DragonFlyBSD if you want to experience Wayland/Weston outside of Linux...

Following all of the Intel 3D graphics tests this week for DRM-Next code for Linux 4.7, Mesa 11.3-devel, and more, there's been a few readers requesting a fresh xf86-video-intel vs. xf86-video-modesetting comparison...

Up to now Mir servers (basically compositors / shells) have only supported OpenGL ES but now with the latest Mir work they are able to support full OpenGL...

The newest module added to the Phoronix Test Suite is the start of a watchdog implementation with initially being focused on watching the system's thermal state to trip the benchmarking process if any of the selected sensors cross a defined threshold...

For those curious whether Mesa 11.3 improves the performance at all for users bound to an old AMD Radeon graphics card using the R600 Gallium3D driver, I have some tests of that to share this morning...

There is finally a public TODO list for Intel's Vulkan Linux driver living within Mesa...

Libreboot, the downstream of Coreboot that doesn't permit any closed-source microcode/firmware blobs as part of the hardware initialization process for this alternative to proprietary BIOS/UEFI, has become an official GNU project...

Virgil 3D (also sometimes marked as VirGL 3D) is now part of all the key mainline components for supporting 3D acceleration on guest VMs that's then passed onto the host using a pure open-source software stack by creating a virtual 3D GPU inside QEMU. Here are some benchmark numbers...

Adding to the list of Linux 4.7 features/changes so far are device driver improvements in the audio realm...

The NVIDIA 367.18 beta Linux graphics driver was released this afternoon...

There were a lot of exciting Google announcements yesterday in kicking off the company's annual I/O conference while today there's a big piece of news: the Google Play store is coming to Chrome OS. Yes, all Android apps...

While "Light Ridge" was the first copper Thunderbolt controller and released back in 2010, only now in 2016 is the first-generation controller seeing mainline Linux support...

OpenGL tests I published yesterday show that Intel Broadwell graphics are much faster with Mesa 11.3 -- and that's on top of the newly-minted OpenGL 4.2 support -- but the same can't be said for Haswell...

We are just a few days into the two-week merge window for the Linux 4.7 merge window. But given all of the pull requests already sent in so far, here's a quick recap of what's been submitted for this next major version of the Linux kernel...

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) code for Linux 4.7 is adding x86 AVIC support for further optimizing virtualization performance. AVIC is of relevance to AMD's Carrizo hardware and newer...

Alex Deucher sent in some early fixes for the AMDGPU kernel driver for the Linux 4.7 merge window...

James Morris has made known the security subsystem updates intended for the Linux 4.7 kernel and it includes one addition worth mentioning...

There is OpenMW as a re-implementation of Morrowind, OpenRA as a re-implementation of Command and Conquer, and many other open-source game projects out there seeking to be free engine re-implementation of popular classic games. The latest of these projects is OpenRW, a re-implementation of Grand Theft Auto III...

It has taken longer than anticipated, but it looks like Valve will be releasing Dota 2 with Vulkan API renderer support within the next week...

While there's still a shortage of Vulkan-powered games, the Steam client continues to make improvements for this next-gen graphics API...

For kicking off the Google I/O conference today, Google announced the third developer preview of the upcoming Android N...

Last week I published a 16-way NVIDIA GeForce performance comparison on Linux looking at the OpenGL performance evolution from the GeForce 9800GTX to the GeForce GTX 980 Ti / TITAN X, in getting ready to compare the long-term NVIDIA Linux performance to Pascal. This week I've done similar tests on the AMD Radeon side and compared these OpenGL performance and power consumption / performance-per-Watt numbers to NVIDIA.

There's a new release of GNU/Hurd available today...

With the GTX 1080 media embargo lifted yesterday, NVIDIA is spending today getting out more details on the GTX 1070 that will begin shipping in early June...

Wine-Staging 1.9.10 is out today with more experimental patches atop this week's Wine 1.9.10 snapshot...

For those having some extra time today to help test out some new Mesa patches or just curious about what's on the horizon, Nicolai Hähnle of AMD has posted some Mesa state tracker patches for benefiting several modern Linux games...

ARM today made public they've validated their first multi-core 64-bit ARMv8-A test chip based on TSMC's 10nm FinFET process...

Not only is there now OpenGL 4.2 support for Intel's Mesa driver but also as part of the massive Mesa 11.3 release in development there are OpenGL performance improvements too, at least for newer Broadwell hardware.

SQLite 3.13 was released today as the newest version of this widely-used and relied upon embedded SQL database library...

Per the Wayland 1.11 schedule, Wayland and its reference Weston compositor saw their v1.11 beta releases during the night. Wayland 1.11 remains on target for release at the end of May...

Krita, KDE's incredible digital painting and illustration program, is getting very close to their major 3.0 milestone with today's availability of their release candidate...

Seven ARM pull requests were submitted on Tuesday for the Linux 4.7 merge window...

With today marking the milestone of Intel's Mesa driver jumping ahead to OpenGL 4.2 compliance after just yesterday hitting OpenGL 4.0, I decided to try out the Mesa Git code of the i965 driver on an Ubuntu 16.04 system...

Jiri Kosina sent in the pull requests today for the subsystems he is responsible for, including the HID area. Here are the changes from that stack coming to Linux 4.7...

Another day, another round of more open-source driver work out of the AMD folks. The latest are some minor Polaris updates for the AMDGPU DRM driver...

David Miller sent in his big networking subsystem pull request today full of new features for the Linux 4.7 merge window...

As anticipated, Frozenbyte released their newest game today, Shadwen, and there's day-one Linux support...

Jens Axboe at Facebook sent in this morning the block I/O changes for the Linux 4.7 kernel merge window...

Last week AMD published initial open-source OverDrive GPU overclocking support for their AMDGPU kernel driver, eight years after Catalyst on Linux got OverDrive support. This feature won't be mainlined until the Linux 4.8 kernel but allows for basic overclocking of the GPU core on Tonga / Fiji / Polaris hardware...

For those that have been requesting some fresh benchmarks looking at the system power consumption / efficiency of modern Linux distributions/kernels and how they're working out for laptops/ultrabooks, here are some fresh benchmarks on two Intel devices when comparing Fedora 23 to Fedora 24 Beta and also testing out the power performance with the Linux 4.6 kernel.

Today marks the embargo lift for publications putting out performance figures and initial findings on the GeForce GTX 1080 "Pascal" graphics card. At least under Windows, the results are looking pretty great...

The ARM64 architecture updates were sent in on Monday for the Linux 4.7 kernel and do contain some notable changes...

KDE Frameworks 5.22 was released this week and with this frameworks update comes the addition of KWayland...

Happy 17th of May to our Norwegian readers, but if you're not busy today or not one of them, you may want to fire up ReactOS 0.4.1 as the latest version of this open-source project re-implementing Windows...

It was just yesterday that Intel's Mesa driver crossed the OpenGL 4.0 threshold while today it's jumped ahead to OpenGL 4.2...

The latest fun stuff worth mentioning for the Linux 4.7 kernel merge window are the ACPI and power management updates...