Phoronix

With Qt 5.8 that's due to be released next week there is the new Qt Speech as a "tech preview" of text-to-speech for this tool-kit...

Peter Hutterer has announced the latest stable version of libinput, the input handling library commonly used across modern X.Org / Wayland / Mir systems...

At the beginning of 2017 Valve released a Steam client beta with noteworthy Linux improvements. With today's Steam stable client update, all of those changes are included...

Librecore is a new project aiming to be a new Coreboot downstream with a focus remaining on providing fully-free system firmware. Separately, Minifree/Libreboot has been accused (and admitted by Leah Rowe) to not paying a vendor for a completed contract...

Our friends and Linux-friendly PC vendor, CompuLab, have announced a new "IPC" line-up of their small form factor computers now with Intel Kabylake processors...

Earlier this week I posted some benchmarks of GPUOpen's new Radeon Open Compute ROCm OpenCL stack that premiered last month and they are working to make completely open-source. In those initial benchmarks I compared the ROCm 1.4 OpenCL performance to the existing AMDGPU-PRO OpenCL implementation on Linux. For those wondering how these two Radeon OpenCL stacks compare to NVIDIA, here are some fresh benchmarks.

It was widely expected that Linux 4.9 would be a "LTS" (Long Term Support) kernel release while now it's been made official...

The first release candidate of Mesa 17.0 (formerly known as Mesa 13.1) is now available for testing...

With it looking certain now that Oracle is ending Solaris feature development with the cancelling of Solaris 12, here's a look back at the most popular Solaris news and milestones for the project over the years on Phoronix...

With the forthcoming Linux 4.10 kernel there is finally support for Turbo Boost Max 3.0 as featured in some newer Intel CPUs. But, unfortunately, the code in Linux 4.10 doesn't work for all TBM3-capable systems out there, but a new kernel patch is being worked on for Linux 4.11 or later to make it work with more hardware...

Pekka Paalanen of Collabora has merged his patch-set into Weston for supporting initially positioned windows with XWayland, a feature that some X11 apps rely upon for correct functionality...

Coincidentally, yesterday Stereoscopic 3D patches emerged not only for the Nouveau driver but also the AMDGPU driver too...

With AMD having not yet opened up their Catalyst Control Center / Radeon Software Center for AMDGPU Linux, using RadeonTop is one of the third-party ways to see your GPU utilization...

After a very exciting development cycle, Mesa 17.0 was branched yesterday, officially marking the end of feature development for this next Mesa release due out in February...

Well, that happened sooner than anticipated...

Adding to the list of Mesa 17.0 features is enough functionality in the reverse-engineered Etnaviv Gallium3D driver for running OpenGL 2.0 games...

With this week Clear Linux now being able to run Steam, I was excited to see how this performance-minded Linux distribution out of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center would compare to other more popular Linux distributions when it comes to Intel Linux gaming performance. Here are some benchmarks of this traditionally workstation/server-oriented Intel Linux distribution running some Steam Linux games.

As reported a few hours ago, it's the day for a new NVIDIA Linux driver beta series. Meet the NVIDIA 378.09 driver release and it's pretty darn exciting for both OpenGL and Vulkan...

At the beginning of December there were rumors of Oracle canning Solaris and now that's finally been confirmed by Oracle more or less as they will not be delivering Solaris 12...

NVIDIA today is releasing their first Linux 378.xx driver series beta and alongside that new beta driver they are publishing their EGL External Platform interface and Wayland library...

The GCC Steering Committee has approved of the RISC-V port being included in GCC...

Hans Wennborg of Google, serving as the LLVM release manager, has announced the tagging of the first release candidate of the forthcoming LLVM 4.0...

It's been a half year since the debut of PulseAudio 9.0 while the release of PulseAudio 10 is coming soon...

Nouveau continues advancing on the display front: beyond getting DP MST and atomic mode-setting support in the Linux 4.10 kernel, there are now patches available for wiring this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver up to supporting stereoscopic 3D output via HDMI...

With the Linux 4.10 kernel having initial but limited Intel Graphics Virtualization Tech support, you can begin playing with the experimental virtual GPU support using the upstream kernel and libvirt...

The Khronos Group has published their booth information and sessions that will happen at this year's Game Developers Conference (GDC 17) at the start of March in San Francisco...

The Genode Operating System Framework has announced their planned roadmap for this year as the involved developers continue working on this original OS initiative...

While GNOME / Red Hat developers have been leading the Flatpak app sandboxing initiative, KDE developers are making progress too with embracing Flatpak as a more convenient and secure way of securely packaging Linux desktop apps...

X.Org Server 1.19 was released last November while today there was finally an X.Org developer giving some love to the older DDX drivers for those still with vintage GPUs and wanting to run the modern xorg-server...

Gabe Newell of Valve wrapped up his latest Reddit "Ask Me Anything" where he faced a variety of questions. There were a number of users asking various SteamOS / Linux questions, but not much in the way of answers...

Google developers are proposing the addition of a Gaming Input Protocol to Wayland...

Last month with AMD/GPUOpen's ROCm 1.4 release they delivered on OpenCL support, albeit for this initial release all of the code is not yet open-source. I tried out ROCm 1.4 with the currently supported GPUs to see how the OpenCL performance compares to just using the AMDGPU-PRO OpenCL implementation.

For more than the past decade, the Free Software Foundation has been maintaining a list of high priority projects. Today they have a brand new list...

A few weeks back we learned of Intel's Clear Linux distribution working towards Steam support. While Clear Linux is a performance-oriented workstation/server/cloud distribution, repeatedly in our tests it performs among the top Linux distributions even when it comes to Intel OpenGL Linux gaming, so being able to game with it isn't a far stretch with Steam support -- there is also Vulkan support now too...

Mesa 17.0 (formerly known as Mesa 13.1) was supposed to enter its feature freeze last weekend, but that milestone and branching of the code-base didn't happen due to last minute feature work...

Alan Griffiths of Canonical today posted a year-in-review for Mir during 2016 and a look ahead to this year...

While Kodi 17 "Krypton" hasn't even shipped yet, feature work is building already for Kodi 18 "Leia" and it sure should excite those wanting to play games from their HTPC...

Fedora Linux has been pursuing a path of modularity whereby modules provide different software purpose/functionality and are integrated/tested at the module level and a unit of delivery itself. With the Fedora 26 release they are hoping to provide a Fedora Modular Server preview build...

GNOME developer Georges Stavracas has shared his thoughts on the state of the GTK4 tool-kit with the recent work involving a Vulkan renderer, including which also now works on Wayland...

Yesterday I published a number of OpenGL/Vulkan benchmarks from Mesa Git in Mesa Git Delivering Faster Intel Vulkan Performance, Closer To OpenGL Driver Speed. Those tests were with Skylake desktop graphics so for some follow-up reference tests I also fired up Mesa Git on an Intel Broadwell ultrabook...

For those running older Intel "Ivy Bridge" hardware on Linux, OpenGL 4.0 support soon should arrive...

It's been a while since last hearing much excitement around Google's Dart programming language that's an alternative to JavaScript. This ECMA-approved language is now being used with IoT devices, can still be source-to-source compiled for JavaScript, and the latest is that the Google developers have been experimenting with wiring it into LLVM...

With the Linux 4.10 kernel there is initial mainline support for Intel GVT-G (Graphics Virtualization Technology) while it will become more usable in future updates...

Open-source driver developer Bas Nieuwenhuizen has posted a patch for allowing the open-source Radeon Mesa Vulkan driver (RADV) to support multiple devices...

As a quick update from this morning's article about Intel's Mesa driver getting ready for OpenGL 4.5 on Haswell, that code has now landed...

In addition to Nouveau Gallium3D seeing a performance boost last week, last week Intel's Vulkan driver also seen some interesting work around HiZ. Here are some fresh benchmarks showing recent performance improvements to the Intel "ANV" Mesa Vulkan driver plus some fresh OpenGL benchmarks too.

While RadeonSI in Mesa Git exposes OpenGL 4.5, it hasn't yet formally passed the OpenGL 4.5 Conformance Test Suite (CTS) for certifying the OpenGL driver. But now it looks like this open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver has about all OpenGL CTS failures addressed...

With the recent news over the Nouveau Maxwell performance improvements and reaching OpenGL 4.3, among other milestones for this community-driven, open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver, you may be wondering what else is on the road-map for this driver...

The MSI X99A RAIDER is a sub-$200 LGA-2011 v3 motherboard. I've been using it for almost two months now on one of the daily Linux benchmarking systems and it's been running great.

A new spin/flavor has been proposed for Fedora 26, one integrating the LXQt desktop environment...