Phoronix

The soft freeze is now upon us for Debian 9.0 "Stretch" while the full freeze will happen in February...

For those interested in the BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system, they have issued their latest monthly progress report to end out 2016...

With Marek's latest set of RadeonSI Gallium3D patches, which are said to improve the Deus Ex: Mankind Divided performance by around 70%, having landed in Mesa Git, here are some fresh benchmarks with a Radeon RX 480 and R9 Fury...

It's been a good week for users of older Intel Haswell graphics on Linux: beyond landing FP64 support and then exposing OpenGL 4.0 support, this older generation of Intel graphics now has a couple more OpenGL ES 3.2 extensions...

This week Intel launched the desktop/socketed Kaby Lake CPUs. Over the next week will be many Linux CPU benchmarks on Phoronix so here is your last opportunity to put in any special benchmark requests...

The fourth release candidate is now available for Wine 2.0 while the official stable release remains on track for debut later this month...

As mentioned earlier when posting some fresh AMD Kaveri vs. Intel Linux graphics benchmarks, I have some fresh AMD A10-7850K "Kaveri" APU numbers with running the latest Ubuntu 16.10 + Linux 4.10 + Mesa 13.1-dev stack on many of my benchmarking systems in the basement server room. With having an A10-7850K Kaveri system running with the latest Linux open-source driver code, I figured I'd compare it to some of my older Kaveri results.

Jerome Glisse of Red Hat has published his first set of Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) revisions for 2017...

According to one popular NSFW web-site, the 53rd most popular web-site in the world ranked by Alexa, their Linux traffic went up 14% in 2016...

Qiang Yu of AMD has been baking a new feature for the xf86-video-modesetting DDX: MS_ALL_IN_ONE...

I'm in the process of testing a lot of my different CPUs/APUs in preparation for some Kaby Lake Linux benchmarks next week with the Core i5 7600K and Core i7 7700K. Along the way with the different CPU benchmarks I've also been running some fresh integrated Linux graphics tests on the newer and interesting hardware...

For those that have been looking forward to running Deus Ex: Mankind Divided on Linux with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, you'll want to fire up Mesa Git...

The work to run Linux on the PlayStation 4 continues to advance and previously we reported on those behind it managing to exploit the Radeon graphics found on the AMD APU powering the PS4. The latest milestone is they now have Vulkan running on the PS4...

Most often when running any regular NVIDIA Linux benchmarks with Vulkan/OpenGL, it's usually just with the newest Pascal GPUs and then the older Maxwell GPUs for reference. But if you are curious about the OpenGL vs. Vulkan performance for GTX 600/700 "Kepler" graphics processors, I have some fresh results today...

Valve pushed out an updated Steam Linux client beta today that includes some useful changes for Linux gamers...

After the Nouveau DRM driver updates didn't make it for the Linux 4.9 merge window, this open-source NVIDIA graphics kernel driver saw significant updates for Linux 4.10. Nouveau in Linux 4.10 has atomic mode-setting, DP MST support, a LED driver for controlling the cards that have the illuminated "GeForce" logo, NvBoost support for hitting the higher boost frequencies on supported cards, and many other changes. Here are some fresh benchmarks of Nouveau with the Linux 4.10 kernel.

The drama over Libreboot, a downstream of Coreboot, wanting to leave the GNU has come to an end...

Emil Velikov of Collabora has announced the first stable Mesa release of 2017...

For those that shared your hopes for Ubuntu Phones in 2017, some of you were right: those that guessed nothing or very little. There isn't going to be any new Ubuntu Phone releases or major OTA updates until there is a Snap-based image down the road...

Fresh off their work on landing the long-awaited Haswell FP64 support followed by today enabling OpenGL 4.0 for Haswell (along with revised Float64 patches for Intel's Vulkan driver), there is now the FP64 patches for Ivy Bridge with the patches that ultimately enable OpenGL 4.0 on this generation-older hardware...

AMD isn't using CES 2017 to launch their Ryzen (Zen) processors or Vega graphics cards, but at least they have opened up more Vega architecture details for this busy week in Las Vegas...

Now that Igalia developers have landed their Haswell FP64 support and thereby hitting OpenGL 4.0 for these older generation Intel graphics processors, the latest Float64 patches have been sent out for the Intel Vulkan "ANV" driver...

With Linux 4.10 going through its stabilization process, I've begun testing it on more and more systems. For your viewing pleasure today are some OpenGL and Vulkan results when testing Skylake HD Graphics 530 hardware with Linux 4.10 and Mesa 13.1-dev Git...

With FP64 for Haswell having landed in Mesa Git, the remaining patches have now been placed into Mesa Git as well for finally turning on OpenGL 4.0 for older Intel Haswell HD Graphics 4000 era hardware...

There's a new release available of the HarfBuzz text shaping library used by projects like Qt, Pango, GTK, LibreOffice, Firefox, and many other software projects. HarfBuzz 1.4 is a significant release...

The release candidate is out for the upcoming Samba 4.6 version of this open-source SMB/CIFS implementation...

Jen-Hsun Huang's keynote presentation for NVIDIA is going on tonight at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2017)...

As part of the ongoing battle with bufferbloat are some improvements to the ath9k WiFi driver with the Linux 4.10 kernel...

The latest development patches up for testing on Intel's DRM kernel driver is for supporting render decompression on the display engine of Skylake hardware and newer...

The librsvg library for SVG rendering is up to version 2.41.0 and with this milestone it's their first release to port some code to Rust while maintaining the same public API...

The HDMI Forum announced from CES today the upcoming release of the HDMI 2.1 specification...

Google's open-source team today announced Grumpy, a Python runtime written in the Go programming language...

The discussion has come up before about supporting Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers in user-space rather than having to be tied within the Linux kernel while that outlook was reignited today with a new patch series wiring in said support...

For those making use of GNU's Stream Editor, Sed, for non-interactive command-line text editing there is a new release available...

The GTK toolkit's Vulkan renderer continues making quick progress...

Fitting nicely into the related discussion of Should Tarballs Be On Their Way Out The Door In 2017?, Intel developer Arjan Van De Ven of the Clear Linux project has compared various data compression options...

Being announced today on the kernel mailing list is the KSM hypervisor, what's self-described as "a hackable x86-64 hypervisor."..

LLVM's LLD linker has been making a lot of progress over the past year and now it's hit the milestone of being able to link the entire FreeBSD/amd64 base system...

It's been about one year since the last Inkscape release while now available is version 0.92 as a relatively big update to this open-source vector drawing program...

Just days after writing about how Valve's Steam Linux project was the hardest one veteran game developer had ever worked on, Rich Geldreich has begun blogging some more of the back-stories to the Linux project at Valve...

With the Linux 4.10 kernel there remains experimental Kconfig switches for being able to build the Linux kernel with GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" and GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" support in the newer AMDGPU DRM driver rather than the mature Radeon DRM driver. For your viewing pleasure today are benchmarks of a few GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs when testing the Linux 4.10 Git kernel with Radeon DRM and then the experimental AMDGPU DRM driver while both kernel drivers were tested in conjunction with the same Mesa 13.1-dev snapshot as of this week.

Often times whenever mentioning a new security vulnerability in any piece of open-source/Linux software, it generally gets brought up in our forums "they should write that software in Rust" or similar comments about how XYZ project should see a rewrite in Rust for its memory-safety features. But is it really worthwhile porting your codebase to Rust?..

A new release of Lumina is now available to ring in 2017, the BSD-first Qt-powered open-source desktop environment...

In addition to working on sharply improving the performance of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided when using the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, Marek Olšák has published some patches for improving The Witcher 2 with the open-source AMD driver stack...

A new version of the musl libc standard library is available for those interested in this lightweight alternative to glibc and others...

Today Intel officially unveiled their 7th Generation "Kaby Lake" desktop CPU line-up at CES...

It was only last month that FreeSync support came to Linux via the hybrid AMDGPU-PRO driver while the open-source FreeSync support for AMDGPU atop DAL/DC has yet to be published. But today the Radeon Technologies Group is already rolling out FreeSync 2...

Broadcom developer Eric Anholt has issued his first weekly progress report of the new year for the VC4 open-source graphics driver supported by the Raspberry Pi...

On a CVE basis for the number of distinct vulnerabilities, Android is ranked as having the most vulnerability of any piece of software for 2016 followed by Debian and Ubuntu Linux while coming in behind them is the Adobe Flash Player...

Those making use of Intel Haswell graphics on Linux can rejoice this morning as the massive Igalia patch-set for wiring in ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 support has finally landed in Mesa Git...