Phoronix

RISCVEMU is a RISC-V system emulator designed by the talented developer Fabrice Bellard. This RISC-V emulator supports RISC-V to the extent it can boot the Fedora spin for this architecture...

While Chromebook / ChromeOS fans have been looking forward to the Kabylake-based "Eve" device, it looks like another device is possibly forthcoming making use of these latest-generation Intel CPUs...

It's not as exciting as seeing a massive patch series arrive for like the OpenGL shader cache or other key features, but Collabora's Timothy Arceri sent out a set of 70 patches today providing some clean-ups and bug fixes for Mesa...

Reproducible builds have been a big theme in particularly the last year or two with being able to verify the binaries offered by open-source projects are bit-for-bit the same against the same set of sources. With the latest Coreboot work, all of their generated images are now reproducible from source...

There's an AMDGPU Linux branch in development for supporting HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection) security and the PSP (Platform Security Processor)...

A wonderful Christmas present this year for Fedora users is the release of DNF 2.0 and it's joined by the DNF-PLUGINS-CORE 1.0 release...

There's a new version of The Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux before closing out 2016...

It's not as exciting as seeing a brand new Linux game port released before the holidays, but for those hoping to do some Linux gaming over Christmas, the Realm of the Wood Elves DLC is now available...

The open-source VC4 driver stack with DRM/KMS driver and Gallium3D driver for the Raspberry Pi hardware continues stepping closer to feature parity with the original binary blob graphics driver, particularly when it comes to mode-setting related functionality...

Following last week's Btrfs / EXT4 / XFS / F2FS benchmarks using the Linux 4.6 through 4.9 kernels, some requests came in for doing some fresh Btrfs mount option comparison benchmarks. Thus for your viewing pleasure ahead of the holidays are some Btrfs mount option tests with the Linux 4.9 kernel.

Google developers today pushed a bunch of their Chrome on iOS code into the upstream Chromium Git repository...

An Intel developer has sent out the latest version of his patches for implementing the Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) protocol support for the Linux kernel...

Patches were published today for supporting "Polaris 12" graphics cards within the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver on Linux...

Since Nintendo's Switch game console launch powered by the NVIDIA Tegra we have suspected they were making use of Vulkan as the graphics API, particularly with Nintendo joining The Khronos Group, now it's been pretty much firmed up...

This past weekend I published a number of year-end 2016 AMD Linux benchmarks on a wide-range of AMD GPUs going back many generations while using the Linux 4.9 kernel on Ubuntu along with the Mesa 13.1-development code for having the newest open-source Gallium3D drivers. Those results were very interesting and go check them out now if you haven't done so already. For this article is a sub-set of those tests carried out again while monitoring the AC power consumption, GPU temperature, and CPU utilization while also automatically calculating the performance-per-Watt.

The Radeon Open Compute platform has been updated and quietly released prior to the weekend. The ROCm 1.4 release comes with preliminary OpenCL support...

For users of libav, the latest development code now supports hardware-accelerated HEVC/H.265 video decoding with the Video Acceleration API (VA-API)...

While Matthias Clasen is usually busy working on GTK+, improving GNOME Wayland support, and other core engineering tasks, recently he's been working on a new GNOME application: GNOME Recipes...

Peter Hutterer has an early Christmas present for users of libinput on mobile devices with touchpads: much-improved touchpad acceleration...

I now have my first dead NVM Express SSD and it only lasted one week... It's already time to RMA the Samsung 960 EVO and unfortunately lost a number of benchmarks that I was working on this weekend...

While the CryENGINE 5.x game engine is supported on Linux, to date their sandbox editor isn't compatible with Linux but it looks like eventually there could be said support...

A few days ago I wrote about HID improvements for Microsoft's Surface 3/4 tablets coming with Linux 4.10 while now there is additional driver work landing to benefit the Microsoft Surface 3 2-in-1 computer...

In addition to big end-of-year AMD Radeon Linux benchmarks and the forthcoming NVIDIA data points among other interesting EOY comparisons, there is also ongoing fresh Intel Linux benchmarks as we end out 2016. For your viewing pleasure today are the latest Intel OpenGL vs. Vulkan Linux benchmark results using last week's Dota 2 7.00 game release...

During last month's SuperComputing 2016 conference in Salt Lake City was the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure in HPC workshop being hosted for its third year. The slides from that event were recently made available and one of the talks interesting me the most was about the state of Clang OpenMP offloading, including for GPUs...

There is an early GNU Christmas with the release of GNU Hurd 0.9 joined by GNU Mach 1.8. Yep, another rare released update to Hurd...

There are two noteworthy pieces of KDE news as the weekend comes to an end...

Bas Nieuwenhuizen has reached another big milestone in the RADV project that's the unofficial open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux. As of this weekend, Bas has compute queues working with this Vulkan driver...

It's sad that DOOM hasn't seen a native Linux port with id Software having a falling out with Linux in recent years, particularly after they were acquired by ZeniMax. But fortunately there is now a patch for being able to run DOOM with Wine...

With 2016 soon drawing to an end, it's time for all of my year-end recaps now of Linux drivers that I have been doing for the past 12 years. Today are benchmarks of a wide assortment of AMD graphics cards on both R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers when using Mesa 13.1-dev + LLVM 4.0 SVN and the Linux 4.9 kernel for providing a bleeding-edge look at the open-source AMD Linux graphics performance across hardware going from the Radeon HD 4890 series all the way up through the RX 480 and R9 Fury hardware. Here's a fun look at the OpenGL driver performance across this range of GPUs.

The subject of remote Wayland displays with hardware-acceleration is again back to being talked about, this time initiated by the developer of VirtualGL...

In recent days there have been a few Phoronix readers inquiring why I am not testing with my Radeon R9 290 graphics card in all our frequent comparisons and driver benchmarks. The short story is that the regression since Linux 4.7 remains and for my Radeon R9 290 and others with select Hawaii graphics cards, there still is a performance regression. Though over Christmas I hope to finally find the time to bisect it...

Well this weekend is exciting for AMDGPU users and open-source AMD fans. Yesterday was the news we published about Valve looking to improve AMDGPU/RADV for their Vulkan-based VR experience while the latest is work from AMD that implements GPU virtualization support within the AMDGPU driver...

Takashi Iwai submitted all of the sound driver updates on Wednesday for the Linux 4.10 kernel. Intel Skylake audio continues to be refined but there is also a lot of other hardware driver work...

The PCI subsystem updates for the Linux 4.10 merge window were sent in a few days ago...

The promising VK9 project for implementing the Direct3D 9 API over Vulkan continues progressing and has hit its sixth milestone just ahead of Christmas...

Earlier in the week the KVM and Xen updates were sent in for the Linux 4.10 kernel to add to the list of changes so far for Linux 4.10...

For those curious how various Linux file-systems have evolved since Linux 4.6, here are some fresh benchmarks of the Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS file-systems being tested on Linux 4.6 vs. 4.7 vs. 4.8 vs. 4.9 with a solid-state drive for looking at any performance changes.

Warsow had been an open-source, cross-platform first-person shooter video game in development since 2005, but unfortunately it appears work on it has ended...

This week I posted many Dota 2 7.00 benchmarks with different AMD graphics cards while testing Mesa 13.1-dev + Linux 4.9 with both the RADV Vulkan driver and RadeonSI OpenGL driver. Here are some tests of the latest The Talos Principle build while comparing those OpenGL and Vulkan numbers...

NetworkManager 1.5.3 was released this week as the new development release with a lot of feature work in stepping towards NetworkManager 1.6 in 2017...

The BeOS-compatible Haiku operating system continues working on a big feature not present during the original BeOS days: UEFI...

The input driver updates for Linux 4.10 are most exciting for those with laptops having newer Synaptics technology...

A developer at Valve has issued a request for comments on a proposal to implement high priority scheduling in the AMDGPU kernel driver in order to benefit their Linux VR efforts...

In case you didn't hear, last week a nine year old Mesa bug was fixed that ended up causing stability issues for RadeonSI and was one of the reasons Valve's Team Fortress 2 game wasn't running stable on the open-source AMD driver in quite a while. With Mesa Git now running Team Fortress 2 on RadeonSI without any stability problems, here are fresh benchmarks of that game when using Mesa 13.1-dev and Linux 4.9...

One week after going into a code freeze and releasing Wine 2.0-rc1, the second release candidate is now available...

Adding to the list of changes so far for Linux 4.10 are the Btrfs file-system updates...

While rumors have recently come back up about the financial health of Crytek, at least this week they managed to deliver on their CryENGINE 5.3 release but it's coming about one month later than initially anticipated...

Here is a look at the new features so far of the Linux 4.10 kernel, less than one week into the two-week merge window process. There is a lot of great improvements and additions to Linux 4.10, but we'll see if it ends up being a bigger release than Linux 4.9...

While it took a long time for Intel's Mesa driver to begin supporting the ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 extension for double-precision floating-point data types in shaders, fortunately it looks like Intel should soon land the Float64 support in their Vulkan driver soon...

With the big Dota 2 7.00 update having been released at the start of the week bringing some performance changes, I have carried out a number of fresh benchmarks of Mesa 13.1-dev with AMD Radeon graphics when testing the OpenGL renderer using RadeonSI and the Vulkan renderer with RADV paired with Linux 4.9 AMDGPU. Tests on several different Radeon graphics cards.