It was just two weeks ago that Intel's Mesa driver finally crossed the threshold with Haswell for supporting OpenGL 4.0 and then last week OpenGL 4.2 was crossed for this older generation of Intel graphics hardware. Now, it looks like OpenGL 4.5 will be enabled for Haswell with the i965 Mesa driver...
Wine-Staging 2.0-RC5 was released on Sunday as the newest version of this experimental/testing Wine build. This time around there are some exciting new patches...
GIMP contributor Alexandre Prokoudine published a lengthy blog post today looking back at what were the accomplishments for this open-source image manipulation program in 2016 and some of what's ahead for the program this year...
Landing this week in Mesa 17.0-devel Git was OpenGL 4.3 for NVC0 Maxwell and a big performance boost as well for these GeForce GTX 750 / 900 series NVIDIA "Maxwell" graphics processors. Here are some before/after benchmarks of the performance improvements, which the patch cited as "1.5~3.5x better", when testing a GeForce GTX 750 Ti and GTX 980.
There's a patch pending for the Intel DRM driver that in extreme select cases can boost the graphics performance by up to 60% but for most OpenGL workloads the gains will be much smaller...
When firing up Intel's Beignet OpenCL implementation on Clear Linux this weekend, I was surprised to see it was happily chugging along with many of our different CL benchmarks...
I'm still running more benchmarks in investigating the Core i5 7600K Linux performance and with even its graphics performance being slower than Skylake. I fired up Clear Linux on this Kaby Lake system this weekend and it's indeed faster than Ubuntu, though there still is some sort of fundamental issue at play with these new CPUs on Linux. But what is clear is that there are cases where the P-State CPU frequency scaling driver does perform very poorly over the mature, generic CPUFreq scaling driver...
For many months now there's been work on an AMD HSA IL front-end for GCC with supporting the BRIG binary form of the Heterogeneous System Architecture Intermediate Language (HSA IL). It's getting late into GCC 7 development and onwards to its final development stage while this new front-end has yet to be merged...
Andres Rodriguez, a former AMD engineer who joined Valve back in November to begin working on their Linux efforts, has begun landing commits into Mesa Git for the RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver...
One would think the graphics of a Core i5 7600K "Kaby Lake" processor would be faster than the Core i5 6600K "Skylake" or even a Core i5 6500, but that's not always the case with the current state of the Linux driver support for the newest-generation Intel hardware.
Yesterday I spent a fair amount of time updated some existing test profiles as well as pushing out some new test profiles onto OpenBenchmarking.org for use by those doing their open-source, cross-platform benchmarking with the Phoronix Test Suite...
For those following the progress of the RISC-V open-source and royalty-free processor ISA, a new port of the GNU Compiler Collection for this architecture is now available...
It looks like Valve may be moving closer to debut their Linux VR support, which they demonstrated at the 2016 Dev Days and we've known they've been working on further -- including improvements to AMDGPU/RadeonSI/RADV...
With the Etnaviv driver bringing the Gallium3D "renderonly" library to Mesa Git, Alexandre Courbot of NVIDIA has sent out an updated patch for adding renderonly support to Tegra/Nouveau...
Some more exciting last minute work landing in Mesa Git before this weekend's Mesa 17.0 branching are the potentially performance-improving HiZ work within the Intel Vulkan driver...
For those using Laptop-Mode-Tools to conserve power consumption when running on battery or using it to be more power efficient on your desktop or server, a new version is now available...
In time for this weekend's feature freeze of Mesa 17.0, the Etnaviv Gallium3D driver has landed in Mesa Git after years of work on this reverse-engineered, open-source driver stack...
Many free software advocates have been concerned by Intel's binary-only Management Engine (ME) built into the motherboards on newer generations of Intel motherboards. The good news is there is now a working, third-party approach for disabling the ME and reducing the risk of its binary blobs...
GStreamer 1.11.1 is now available as the first unstable release of this multimedia framework for their 1.11 development series, which will culminate with GStreamer 1.12...
It should be a busy end of week for Mesa with the Mesa 17.0 feature freeze being this weekend. In addition to Haswell hitting OpenGL 4.2, Nouveau's NVC0 Gallium3D driver has enabled OpenGL 4.3 support for newer Maxwell and Pascal hardware...
Yesterday we noted the new open-source AMD GPU debugging tool being developed by a Valve engineer as part of their work on the open-source RADV/RadeonSI/AMDGPU code. It turns out AMD has officially been working on a GPU debugging tool too...
At the end of December I posted a number of Linux workstation/server distribution benchmarks while this article has the results from the more desktop-focused (non-graphics) Linux distribution benchmarks. Up for benchmarking off a Skylake NUC in this article was Antergos, Fedora 25, Ubuntu 16.10, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Debian 9 Testing, and Intel's Clear Linux.
Days ago we mentioned the patches were lining up to get Intel's Haswell to OpenGL 4.2 and this morning those patches have landed in Mesa Git ahead of the branching for the Mesa 17.0 release...
More than two months after RHEL 7.3 was released and a month past the updated CentOS, the Scientific Linux folks are working to release their updated Enterprise Linux distribution later this month...
Another Valve developer has begun contributing to the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack. Besides posting some RADV Vulkan patches last week, today he's announced a new GPU debugging tool he's been working on for AMD's driver/hardware...