Phoronix

For more than the past year I've been very much looking forward to AMD's Opteron ARM-based development boards. Sadly, these boards -- namely the HuskyBoard and LeMaker Cello -- are silently absent...

Up until running the tests for today's article, I can't remember the last time I touched a hard drive... It's been many months ago at least. Nearly all of our tests at Phoronix are from solid state storage, but I decided to pick up a new HDD for running some Linux file-system tests on a conventional hard drive for those not having an SSD.

While the support has been steadily improving, one of the more criticized areas of KDE Plasma 5 has been around the multi-monitor support with various bugs being present. Fortunately, improvements are on the way with KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS...

In time for next month's GNOME 3.22 release, the drawing tablet support for GNOME on Wayland is getting into shape...

Earlier this month Intel submitted their first batch of i915 DRM driver updates to DRM-Next that in turn is now targeting the Linux 4.9 kernel. A second batch of new feature material was submitted today...

For those with a TITAN X or other high-end GPUs that have a configurable light-up "GeForce" LED sign along the edge of the graphics card, a new Nouveau driver allows manipulating those LEDs...

The Aubinator tool has been added to the Mesa tree for helping Intel graphics driver developers debug problems...

Razer keyboards, mice, and other peripherals are very popular with gamers. However, the company has never provided an official control UI / driver for managing their devices under Linux while various open-source projects have filled the void...

While the NVIDIA 370 Linux driver series is currently in beta, the 367 driver series has been updated as the latest long-lived branch release...

Today marks the latest monthly bug-fix release of KDE Plasma 5.7...

Ubuntu developers this week released version 0.24 of the Mir display server...

Linux 4.9 will see SW_SYNC support leaving the staging area...

Today marked the release of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided for Windows gamers and there's signs it might see a native Linux port...

I haven't run any Nouveau driver benchmarks recently for looking at the open-source NVIDIA Linux performance since there hasn't been too much progress, particularly when it comes to re-clocking of the desktop GPUs for delivering better performance. However, with all the testing I've been doing on the Radeon side with Linux 4.8 and Mesa 12.1-dev Git, I decided to do a comparison with a few NVIDIA GeForce GPUs under this latest open-source driver stack.

As we've been covering the past few kernel cycles, a lot of low-level improvements have been happening to CPUFreq with going through a redesign and more plus the introduction of a new CPUFreq governor. If you're behind on this subject matter, here's some slides from this week's LinuxCon event that covers the changes...

Broadcom's Eric Anholt has written another weekly blog post covering improvements he made over the past week to the VC4 open-source graphics driver that's known as being the driver for Raspberry Pi devices...

The first beta of GNOME 3.22 beta is now available for testing ahead of the planned official desktop release around this time next month...

Following developer preview releases through the summer, Google is today beginning to roll out Android 7.0 "Nougat" for their Nexus devices...

Google's annual Summer of Code 2016 (GSoC) is now officially over and we're starting to see the final reports issued by the many student developers involved. One of the reports worth mentioning is the Wayland project around getting Weston to start without any outputs and improved output handling...

Earlier this month Intel released an updated version of their Linux/Windows OpenCL SDK that's binary-only and subject to commercial terms...

With the news from Friday that Fedora 25 will run Wayland by default I loaded up the current Fedora 25 development packages on a test system this weekend and I used that as my primary system for all of my business/production work this weekend. It went well and included are some early gaming benchmarks of Fedora 25 Workstation GNOME on Wayland and X.Org.

Microsoft is delivering a keynote address at this week's LinuxCon event in Toronto. On their blog they also continue talking up Linux and open-source...

For those using the Wine 1.8 stable series until the Wine 2.0 release this fall/winter and not opting to use the bi-weekly Wine 1.9 development releases, Wine 1.8.4 was released today...

We haven't yet seen any official release announcement, but since yesterday a source package and AppImage binary have been out in the wild for KDE's KDevelop 5.0 integrated development environment...

With GNOME 3.19 there were plans for a GTK scenegraph and this GTK Scene Kit (GSK) was then planned for 3.20 and then most recently hoped for 3.22. But it's not happening...

GCC 6.2 is now available as the first stable update to this year's GCC 6/6.1 compiler release...

GNOME Photos 3.21.90 was released this weekend and it finally adds experimental sharing support ahead of next month's GNOME 3.22 release...

Linus Torvalds announced today the third weekly test release of the Linux 4.8 kernel, which is currently codenamed the Psychotic Stoned Sheep...

Continuing off from the fresh open-source AMDGPU test data from yesterday's AMDGPU-PRO vs. open-source Polaris + Fiji comparison, here are more AMD graphics cards tested from the Linux 4.8 development code paired with Mesa 12.1 Git...

A new driver addition coming only now to the Linux 4.8 kernel after the merge window closure is skx_edac...

OpenMandriva Lx 3.0 was released last week and since then many Phoronix readers have inquired about benchmarks of it since it's the first major GNU/Linux distribution using the LLVM Clang compiler by default over GCC...

Just over half-way through August, it's been a particularly exciting month for Linux and open-source fans. From Microsoft bringing PowerShell to Linux, Google working on a new operating system, AMD making open-source driver progress, Fedora 25 going ahead with Wayland by default, and more, there's been excitement for almost everyone this month...

While Intel Skylake hardware has been available for one year now, various issues persist for Linux desktop users wishing to make use of Skylake graphics on Intel's open-source Linux driver...

Happening next month in Portland, Oregon is GNOME's first US-based conference...

For those wondering how AMD's hybrid "AMDGPU-PRO" Linux driver stack compares to the latest pure open-source driver stack of the AMDGPU kernel driver and RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, here are side-by-side results for the Radeon RX 460, RX 470, and RX 480 Polaris hardware as well as the R9 Fury (Fiji) graphics card.

Systemd-mount is the newest tool added to systemd by Lennart Poettering...

DragonFlyBSD developers have decided to remove PulseAudio from their dports packaging system and patch their desktop software to not depend upon this open-source sound server...

LLVM release manager Hans Wennborg tagged LLVM 3.9.0-rc2 on Thursday and it's still looking like LLVM/Clang 3.9 could ship on schedule next week...

While upstream Qt developers continue focused on supporting Qt WebEngine as their Chromium-based browser engine environment, others meanwhile have been working on reviving Qt WebKit...

Version 0.4.2 of ReactOS, the open-source Windows re-implementation, is now officially available...

The GNOME 3.21.90 packages were released this week in preparation for next month's GNOME 3.22 desktop release...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has decided that Fedora 25 will indeed ship the Wayland display server by default in place of the X.Org Server...

After running many OpenGL and Vulkan NVIDIA vs. AMD Linux benchmarks earlier this week, here is a 16-way graphics card comparison when testing the AMD Radeon "Polaris" and NVIDIA GeForce "Pascal" GPUs, among others, on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and looking squarely at the OpenCL compute performance. Many OpenCL tests plus performance-per-Watt metrics too when using the latest NVIDIA proprietary Linux driver and AMDGPU-PRO.

Wine 1.9.17 is the latest bi-weekly release of this open-source software for running Windows programs/games on Linux and other operating systems...

Earlier this week NVIDIA rolled out the 370.23 beta Linux driver and alongside the Pascal over/under-clocking support and other improvements for the GeForce GTX 1000 series, there is also experimental PRIME synchronization support...

One of the features missing from Linux 4.8 is any Southern Islands / GCN 1.0 support in the new AMDGPU kernel DRM driver. However, it looks like this support ported over from the mature Radeon DRM driver will happen for Linux 4.9...

The middle of October is when Crytek should be publicly rolling out their Vulkan API support in the CryENGINE...

Earlier this year I heard from an Intel PR representative they had no plans for a Turbo Boost Max 3.0 Linux driver and immediately heard after that from a developer it was bollocks from the media department as usual. Today patches have emerged for supporting Turbo Boost Max 3.0 in the Linux kernel...

Last month when I was trying Intel's open-source Vulkan driver with Dota 2 and The Talos Principle the Linux gaming experience didn't go well, it didn't even really work even when experimenting with Mesa Git and toggling items like the Steam Overlay. With my fresh Git testing today, it went a bit better...

The Libreboot project has done their first official release of this Coreboot binary-free downstream now being under the GNU project label...