Phoronix

The proliferation of Vulkan abstraction libraries continues...

X.Org Server 1.19.1 was released today with a couple regression fixes...

After ordering a Core i5 7600K Kaby Lake CPU last week, I've been spending the past few days trying it out under Ubuntu Linux. If you happened to pick up an early Kaby Lake CPU and seeing low performance, I wanted to pass along a little PSA while I am still working on additional tests.

With word of Fedora switching away from using the Intel X.Org driver in favor of the generic xf86-video-modesetting driver, following in the steps laid by Debian/Ubuntu, there is fresh discussions over features and any performance impact of xf86-video-modesetting vs. xf86-video-intel DDX drivers. As such, here are some fresh 2D and 3D benchmarks.

While a lot of OpenGL improvements, Vulkan driver advancements, and performance optimizations can be found in Mesa Git for the forthcoming release as Mesa 17.0, one big feature that's still missing as of today is the OpenGL on-disk shader cache...

Fedora 26 will likely be using GCC 7 as its default compiler...

Three weeks from today should mark a new release of the GNU C Library, glibc 2.25, and it's coming with many feature additions...

Matthew Dillon's latest work on the DragonFlyBSD kernel includes steps towards supporting NUMA-awareness, locking, and other memory allocation related changes...

The MIPI Alliance this week announced the release of the I3C Sensor Interface specification, the Improved Inter-Integrated Circuit, and successor to the long-standing I2C...

In addition to Mesa's "ANV" Intel Vulkan driver getting Float64 shader support this week, another important addition has made it into the latest Mesa Git code...

The first release candidate of Google's Go 1.8 programming language is now available ahead of the official launch expected next month...

The latest code being opened up by NVIDIA for Vulkan is a new framework: VkHLF...

Chris Lattner who is known most recently for starting the Swift programming language while most profoundly he is the original creator of LLVM/Clang, is leaving his job at Apple...

We previously talked of the open-source Banshee 3D engine working on Vulkan support while now it's official, but the Linux client remains a work in progress...

A big update to Synfig is now available, an open-source 2D animation software package for Linux / Windows / macOS...

For those curious about the performance difference if upgrading to third-party PPAs from Ubuntu 16.10 when using a modern AMD Radeon graphics card with the open-source driver stack, here are some fresh numbers.

Fedora is the latest Linux distribution abandoning the xf86-video-intel driver in favor of the generic xf86-video-modesetting DDX driver...

The latest LLVM and Clang compiler code as of this morning now has support for Zen (AMD Ryzen) processors...

Radeon developers have issued updated patches for their AMD GPU virtualization support...

Version 4.0 of mdadm is out, the tool for managing MD "Soft RAID" on Linux...

Peter Hutterer announced the first release candidate for the upcoming libinput 1.6 release, the input handling library supported on X.Org / Wayland / Mir systems...

For those of you running Wine-Staging for its extra patches like the ability to run DOOM, Direct3D Command-Stream Multi-Threading, or other work that hasn't yet found its way into mainline Wine, the Wine-Staging 2.0-RC4 update is now available...

Skylake and newer hardware is set to have frame-buffer compression (FBC) enabled by default when the Linux 4.11 kernel rolls around in a few months. This feature can reduce power consumption while reducing memory bandwidth needed for screen refreshes...

Skylake and newer hardware is set to have frame-buffer compression (FBC) enabled by default when the Linux 4.11 kernel rolls around in a few months. This feature can reduce power consumption while reducing memory bandwidth needed for screen refreshes...

Mozilla's experimental layout engine, Servo, is working on figuring out their goals for 2017...

After Aspyr Media left a lot of uncertainty in 2016 about the viability of bringing Sid Meier's Civilization VI game to Linux, they officially confirmed today that they are bringing this latest Civilization title to Linux...

Valve appears to be ramping up their open-source AMD Linux graphics driver work, but they are looking for more Linux games that currently don't work atop the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

There was talk last year of Mesa moving to a date-based version scheme and that's now official with Mesa in Git being 17.0-devel rather than 13.1-devel...

Igalia developers have been doing a lot of work this past week from seeing their FP64 Haswell patches merged, issuing new Ivy Bridge FP64 patches for testing, Float64 support for the Intel Vulkan driver, and related work. The newest from Juan Suarez Romero on behalf of Igalian developers are the 11 patches needed for taking Intel's Mesa driver for Haswell to the OpenGL 4.2 milestone...

Jonathan Riddell has released a new KDE Plasma Wayland ISO for those wishing to try the latest KDE development packages atop Wayland rather than the X.Org Server...

With the Talos Secure Workstation not set to hit its goal, I was curious this morning about how the MJ Technology's openSUSE-powered "First True Linux x86 and x64 Tablet" was doing, but that too has failed to materialize...

It doesn't look like the Talos Secure Workstation will see the light of day with it's crowdfunding campaign ending this week and it's coming up more than three million dollars short of its financing goal. Now there's another effort to offer a libre system but using off-the-shelf x86 hardware...

Continuing on from this weekend's open-source Nouveau vs. closed-source NVIDIA Linux driver performance are results now added in with showing AMD's open-source vs. closed-source driver performance with the same tests.

Jakub Jelinek of Red Hat has provided the latest status report concerning the state of the GNU Compiler Collection 7 code compiler...

The ARMv8.3 specification is adding support for nested virtualization and already kernel developers have been working to take use of this feature on future ARM CPUs within the Linux kernel...

The work on supporting shaderFloat64 within Intel's "ANV" Mesa driver is now complete and merged into Mesa Git...

A new release is now available of the Jailhouse 0.6 partitioning hypervisor that remains an out-of-tree option for Linux server admins...

The first release candidate of the upcoming NetBSD 7.1 is now available for testing...

Linux 4.10-rc3 is now available as the latest weekly update to the Linux 4.10 kernel...

The Intel developer working on UMIP (User-Mode Instruction Prevention) support for the Linux kernel has been collaborating with Wine developers about this security-minded feature to be introduced with future Intel CPUs...

In preparation for Intel Kaby Lake socketed CPU benchmark results soon on Phoronix, the past number of days I have been re-tested many of the systems in our benchmark server room for comparing to the performance of the new Kaby Lake hardware. For those wanting to see how existing Intel and AMD systems compare when using Ubuntu 16.10 x86_64 and the latest Linux 4.10 Git kernel, here are those benchmarks ahead of our Kaby Lake Linux CPU reviews.

On Saturday I published Intel IvyBridge / Haswell /Broadwell / Skylake OpenGL and Vulkan Benchmarks On Linux 4.10 + Mesa 13.1 using various Core CPUs. But for some fun benchmarks this Sunday morning are GL/VLK results when using a Xeon E3 v5 Skylake CPU with HD Graphics P530...

Jason Donenfeld who has been working on the WireGuard secure network tunnel for Linux has also been working on another security enhancement: adding the SipHash PRF to the Linux kernel...

Just in case any of you now are thinking about building a Xeon E3 v5 "Skylake" workstation-ish system now that the prices are getting lower, I just wanted to pass along that the MSI C236A WORKSTATION motherboard is still serving me very reliably and ended up picking up another one of these boards when a Supermicro Skylake board stopped working...

For those in need of a professional-grade Linux video editor, the Lightworks 14 release is near as the latest feature-update that is more than powerful enough if needing to do any simple home video editing or of holiday videos...

Earlier this week I posted some benchmarks showing the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver performance on Linux 4.10 with the new NvBoost capability for finally being able to hit the "boost" clock frequencies with Kepler graphics cards when using this reverse-engineered driver. While the manual re-clocking and enabling NvBoost is able to increase the Nouveau driver's performance, how do these results compare to using the closed-source NVIDIA Linux driver? These benchmarks answer that question.

With running fresh benchmarks on all of my Intel systems for comparison with my upcoming Kaby Lake desktop CPU Linux reviews, this weekend I have some fresh results of the past few generations of Intel hardware when looking at their HD/Iris Graphics performance when using the latest Linux driver code as of Linux 4.10 Git and Mesa 13.1-devel Git from this week.

With Marek's optimizations having landed in Mesa Git that targeted Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, I ran benchmarks and found Deus Ex: MD is generally much faster and can be 2~3x faster, much more than the 70% originally thought by Marek. Now that more time has passed, I have carried out some more Linux gaming tests...

AMD is looking to land initial support for upcoming "Polaris 12" graphics processors into the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel...

It appears Valve Linux developers are doing a bit more tinkering with the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver...