Phoronix

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...

With Microsoft having begun to mandate TPM2 (Trusted Platform Module 2) support be present in all platforms for newer versions of Windows, these chips are going to become a lot more common to laptops and desktops. Thus veteran kernel developer James Bottomley is looking closely at the current and future support for TPM2 on Linux...

For those using KDevelop as the KDE-aligned integrated development environment, version 5.1 Beta 1 is now available for testing...

Marek Olšák is off to a good start with performance optimizations of the RadeonSI Gallium3D open-source driver stack in 2017...

With the post Christmas ad rate slowdown I finally found the time to run some fresh tests on my Radeon R9 290 that since around Linux 4.7 has been performing abnormally slow but has been working fine with AMDGPU-PRO. I carried out some tests with Linux 4.10 and also ensured linux-firmware.git was the latest, but still it's somewhat of a mystery...

The DawnCC project is out of the UFMG University and aims to provide automatic parallelization of code for mobile devices and other supported software/hardware of OpenACC and OpenMP...

Kirigami is KDE's set of UI components and philosophy / patterns announced last year for developing "intuitive and consistent apps that provide a great user experience" and do have convergence applications in mind. Now ringing in 2017, the first beta of Kirigami 2.0 is now available...

While we've already shared the most popular news and reviews on Phoronix for 2016, here's our usual monthly recap for those wondering what dominated the headlines in December. Of the 3,336 news articles on Phoronix in 2016, December yielded 323 original news articles and 32 featured articles/reviews for Linux enthusiasts...

A developer has published a set of 14 patches providing copy propagation optimizations for Mesa's GLSL/Nir code...

Prolific GNOME developer Matthias Clasen has written a blog post about recent and ongoing work for GTK4 at the start of 2017...

The .tar archive file format has been around for decades, but GNOME / free software developer Jussi Pakkanen suggests that it's time for a modern solution...

SQLite 3.16.0 was released today and it's quite a feature-packed release for being the first update of 2017...

In addition to Valve publishing the top-grossing games on Steam for 2016, they have also published their Steam Survey statistics for December 2016...

Linus Torvalds has issued the second test release of the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel. Linux 4.10-rc2 marks the first kernel release of 2017...

Valve has published a list of the top-grossing games by revenue on Steam for the 2016 calendar year...

Going from the Linux 4.5 kernel merge window that was open in last January to the Linux 4.10 merge window that closed this past Christmas, here is a look back at the prominent features added to the kernel in 2016...

Zlib 1.2.9 was released this weekend as the first update to this data compression library in more than three years...

Back in June we reported on WireGuard as a next-generation secure network tunnel for the Linux kernel. We haven't heard much on WireGuard in recent months, but this New Year's morning we received a message from their lead developer with a status update...

Last year I had written about the The Open-Source Linux Letdowns of 2015 and then Other Letdowns For Linux / Open-Source Users From 2015, which ended up being among the most viewed articles of 2016. So I figured I'd once again share a list of what personally was disappointing not to see happen in 2016 within the Linux/open-source space...

Yesterday I published Skylake Iris Pro Graphics benchmarks on Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Antergos, and Clear Linux using a Skull Canyon NUC. That was fun but then I decided to ring in the new year by running even more benchmarks, so if you're curious how the Debian 9 "testing" performance fits among these other distributions, here are those results...

The Xiph.Org crew rung in 2017 by releasing FLAC 1.3.2 as the newest version of this free lossless audio codec...

The twelfth year is now in the books at Phoronix. In 2016 on Phoronix there were 3,336 original news articles and 248 featured multi-page articles and Linux hardware reviews. That puts our total now at more than 21.3k news articles and 3.3k Linux hardware reviews and other featured articles. Happy New Year to all and 2017 will hopefully be even better.

Getting games on Linux and improving OpenGL drivers was the hardest challenge one veteran game developer has come across...

This New Year's Eve I finished up some benchmarks of the Linux 4.5 through Linux 4.10 Git kernels on a powerful Core i7 6800K "Broadwell-E" system. I found some improvements with 4.10 Git, but there are also some evident regressions...

It's been a long time since I last heard of StreamTuner2 as an open-source Internet radio station and video browser, but a major update was released today...

For those planning to do Linux gaming with Intel graphics hardware, you might soon have a new choice with the performance-oriented Clear Linux distribution out of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center...

Redox OS started development mid-way through last year while this year things really took off for this Rust-written operating system from scratch. The project has provided a recap of all of their OS accomplishments for 2016...

Unless Marek delivers another one of his big patch-sets to provide some new feature/improvement to RadeonSI, the OpenGL shader cache magically lands, or some other big surprise to end out the year, here are some final statistics about Mesa's impressive developments in 2017...

The firm behind Calculate Linux is celebrating the end of the year by releasing a new version of Calculate Linux, a Gentoo derived distribution...

For those craving some more end-of-year Linux distribution benchmarks, this morning I finished carrying out a fresh Linux distro comparison focusing upon the Intel OpenGL performance when making use of "Skylake" Iris Pro hardware. For this New Year's Eve benchmarking fun was Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Antergos, and Clear Linux...

One month from today, KDE Plasma 5.9 will officially meet the world...

Open-source game engine Godot has been working on a multi-month project to vastly improve (and largely rewrite) its 3D renderer to make it as great as its 2D renderer. This work is being done for the Godot 3.0 engine and so far this 3D renderer is seeing a lot of movement...

If the recent releases of Kdenlive, OpenShot, Pitivi, and others haven't satisfied your needs, perhaps you may want to try out the latest build of Avidemux...

For those that don't recall, VDENC is a low-power, high-performance video encode engine added originally to Intel Skylake hardware. That aforelinked article covers the big benefits of using VDENC and the patches published earlier this year for enabling this Intel video encode engine on Linux...

At the end of last year was an update on MARS Replication System Still Being Worked On For Upstream Linux Kernel and like clock work, the German web hosting provider has issued another update on the in-development MARS replication system and is still hoping to mainline it, maybe next year...

Alexandre Julliard had been issuing weekly release candidates of Wine 2.0 but given the holidays, he's skipping this week but has provided a status update...

With systemd having the most commits ever in 2015 for this project, I was curious to see how the statistics for 2016 compared... To some surprise, the number of commits to systemd fell sharply and the code churn is also down to a point not seen in a few years...

With having out a Core i7 "Broadwell" ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptop for the MoCA 2.0 network tests, I decided to run some end-of-year graphics tests on this Core i7 5600U system with OpenGL and Vulkan...

There are just a few more interesting recaps to share before 2016 draws to an end. I figured some of you may be curious about the most-viewed kernel news stories on Phoronix this calendar year...

Intel's open-source Beignet OpenCL project for implementing CL/GPGPU support for Intel graphics hardware is on the edge of a big milestone...

With the Linux 4.10 merge window comfortably over now, Daniel Vetter has sent in the first pull requests to DRM-Next of new material slated for Linux 4.11...

The MoCA 2.0 specification is six years but there still aren't many consumer devices making use of this "Multimedia over Coax Alliance" standard nor the newer MoCA 2.5 standard. But in looking for alternatives to Ethernet over powerline when expanding my network, I ended up setting up a MoCA 2.0 system while running some Linux performance benchmarks along the way.

Broadcom developer Eric Anholt pushed a few VC4 Gallium3D commits into mainline Mesa tonight, likely marking the end of work on this open-source Raspberry Pi 3D driver for 2016...

Given all the changes with the Linux 4.10 kernel, including a fair amount of work on file-systems and block / I/O code, here are some fresh benchmarks of the EXT4, F2FS, Btrfs, and XFS file-systems atop a solid-state drive when comparing the early post-RC1 Linux 4.10 kernel benchmarks to that of the 4.6/4.7/4.8/4.9 stable kernels.

KDE developer Adriaan de Groot has provided an update concerning the state of running the modern KDE software stack with Plasma 5 and KDE Applications atop FreeBSD...

Continuing with our various year-end recaps, here's a comparison of the top NVIDIA and AMD/Radeon Linux enthusiast/oriented gamer news for 2016 on Phoronix...

The Linux Foundation's "Automotive Grade Linux" infotainment platform is out with an update to its Unified Code Base (UCB) as the basis of various IVI systems from different automobile vendors...

Libpng 1.6.27, 1.5.28, 1.4.20, 1.2.57, and 1.0.67 were all released today to fix a pointer null dereference bug dating back to 1995...

With running a ton of end of year benchmarks for showing the latest Linux graphics driver performance at the end of 2016, it's mostly focused upon OpenGL and Vulkan, but for those desiring some fresh NVIDIA CUDA numbers, here they are for your viewing pleasure.

Continuing our end-of-year recaps for the most popular stories on Phoronix, when we're not busy covering Linux, the BSD operating systems get their share of interest on Phoronix. Here is a look at the exciting BSD advancements made in 2016...