Phoronix

AMD ran into a snag getting out the updated proprietary hybrid Linux driver stack this morning, but it's now available for download from AMD...

Toward the end of November was a discussion that started about potentially dropping all of the FBDEV Linux kernel drivers that are currently in the staging area, but it doesn't look like that will go through, at least until the relevant hardware has seen basic DRM driver ports...

While it was disappointing that Fedora 25 shipped with Mesa 12.0, the Mesa 13.0 version has now been sent down as a stable release update...

AMD developers sent out a "request for comments" of their Display Core (DC, formerly known as DAL) code-base that they are hoping to merge soon as it's needed for the bring-up of future GPU support. It looks like they will initially merge the code just for the yet-to-be-released GPUs and will then gradually switch it on for currently supported Radeon GPUs...

The embargo has just expired on the Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition release, which had leaked out a few days ago elsewhere. While Crimson ReLive Edition is a big update for AMD Windows users, on the Linux side there's less to talk about but it's still a rather big release. I've been testing the AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 release the past two weeks and overall it's a sizable update for those using this hybrid AMD Linux driver.

There is a new DRM driver merged into DRM-Next for the Linux 4.10 merge window...

David Airlie is prepping the latest round of work to the open-source RADV Radeon Vulkan driver...

Bruno Friedmann has announced the end to AMD proprietary driver fglrx support in openSUSE while also announcing they don't plan to support the hybrid proprietary AMDGPU-PRO stack either...

Prolific Gallium Nine developer Axel Davy has published a massive patch-set today implementing support for internal multi-threading in this Direct3D 9 state tracker...

The Xen Project Hypervisor 4.8 release was announced today as their first to be done off a six-month release cycle. There is a lot of ARM work in Xen 4.8 but also a lot of other enhancements...

The Bluetooth SIG today announced the core specification release for Bluetooth 5...

While Chrome 55 has JavaScript async/await support, the Firefox support isn't coming until the Firefox 52.0 stable release in March while currently it's available in the latest Firefox Developer Edition and early alpha builds...

SIGGRAPH Asia 2016 is happening this week in Macau and it's from that event where yesterday they announced their new VR initiative. The Khronos slides from their presentation are now available plus another VR company has already become a member of The Khronos Group for helping to push this new, open, cross-vendor VR standard...

With now having netperf in the Phoronix Test Suite as well as iperf3 for the latest open-source benchmarks in our automated cross-platform benchmarking framework, I couldn't help but to run some networking benchmarks on a system when trying out a few different Linux distributions and BSDs to see how the performance compares. The operating systems ran with these networking benchmarks included Debian 8.6, Ubuntu 16.10, Clear Linux 12020, CentOS 7, and Fedora 25. The BSDs tested for this comparison were FreeBSD 11.0 and DragonFlyBSD 4.6.1.

Qualcomm announced this morning they have begun sampling the world’s first 10nm server processor...

With more laptops abandoning DVD drives, USB-based flash drive installers being well supported and widely-used, and CD/DVDs just being far less popular these days, Fedora developers are discussing the future of the official status for optical images in future Fedora releases...

The rumor is back that Intel and AMD have reached a deal for future Intel CPUs to be paired with integrated AMD Radeon graphics...

With the Linux 4.9 kernel expected for release this coming weekend, here is a recap of some of the most interesting changes for this next big kernel release...

Intel's Mesa driver has wired in support for two more OpenGL extensions not part of an official OpenGL specification release. These two new extensions are supported for Skylake and newer...

It is arriving a few weeks late, but the latest over-the-air update to Ubuntu Touch is now available for the select Ubuntu phones and tablets this holiday season...

Mesa developers are discussing the idea of removing the Intel "ILO" Gallium3D driver from Mesa since it hasn't been maintained in a while and provides only limited functionality...

There is yet another new Linux kernel vulnerability being disclosed today that allows for unprivileged processes to gain kernel code execution abilities...

NVIDIA has released a major new version of their Linux Graphics Debugger for helping game developers and others wishing to optimize OpenGL 4.x workloads on a variety of Linux distributions...

The latest patches for the AMDGPU DRM driver's DC code -- what was previously known as DAL -- have been published and they reduce the size of the code-base some more...

It's been a while since publishing any fresh Intel Core i7 5775C benchmarks, the socketed Broadwell CPU with Iris Pro 6200 graphics, since normally it's busy in the daily benchmarking churn of the server room for Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org / LinuxBenchmarking.com efforts. But with having been doing some maintenance on that system this week and loading a clean install of Ubuntu 16.10, I did some fresh benchmarks of the Iris Pro 6200 graphics using Mesa 13.1-dev and Linux 4.9, including a look at the OpenGL vs. Vulkan performance for the Iris Pro graphics.

For those looking toward the next maintenance release of GCC 6, the GNU Compiler Collection 6.3 is aiming to be out by Christmas...

The Khronos Group is going public this morning with a call for participation of companies that are not yet Khronos members but looking to join a new initiative: developing a new, cross-vendor VR standard to allow for better virtual reality interoperability of hardware devices, game engines, and more...

For those following the development of the Raspberry Pi VC4 open-source graphics driver stack, more progress continues on bringing up various features...

Overall the Nouveau DRM updates for Linux 4.10 are significant after they missed out on any feature changes for Linux 4.9. Given all the churn, there's been a last minute pull into DRM-Next of some more fixes and other minor activity...

There have been some rare updates today to the xf86-video-intel X.Org driver, including the addition of the PCI IDs for supporting next year's Geminilake hardware...

The latest change request coming in for Fedora 26 is to update the default C/C++ compiler flags...

Phoronix Test Suite 6.8.0 is now available as the latest version of our open-source, fully-automated, reproducible benchmarking software for Linux, BSD, Solaris, macOS, Windows, and other operating systems...

Version 0.98 of the GNOME-aligned GStreamer-powered Pitivi non-linear video editor was tagged today as the newest development milestone...

NVIDIA has confirmed that their next proprietary driver update for Linux will introduce support for Vulkan rendering outside of the X.Org Server...

Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller has offered some statistics about the Fedora 25 launch to date and is proposing some possible changes to release scheduling for the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution, including the possibility of moving to doing one major release per calendar year...

Just as a quick follow-up to adding Netperf to the Phoronix Test Suite, the iperf3 client is now available as an additional networking benchmark via PTS...

Hans Wennborg has laid out plans to release the LLVM 4.0 (and Clang 4.0, along with other LLVM sub-projects) toward the end of February...

Mesa release manager Emil Velikov announced the availability today of Mesa 12.0.5, just another point release and what he expects will be the last of the Mesa 12.0.x releases...

With the GCC 7 compiler having entered its stage three, feature development is basically over so it's a great time to begin running more benchmarks of this big compiler update that will be officially released as GCC 7.1.0 in early 2017. Up today are benchmarks of the latest GCC 7.0 development snapshot compared to GCC 6.2 and GCC 5.4 on an Intel Core i7 6800K Broadwell-E system running Ubuntu 16.10.

This week I provided a look at some of the interesting Vulkan engines/renderers on GitHub created by the community in the months since the Vulkan unveil. After that article forum goers and those on Twitter shared some other promising Vulkan projects worth looking at too if you are just looking for some Vulkan demos to watch, learn more about the Vulkan API yourself, etc...

In addition to Red Hat's Benjamin Otte working on a Vulkan renderer for GTK4's GSK, he's also been working on a big refactoring of the OpenGL code that's now been merged to master...

Following SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as being available in a 64-bit edition catered to the Raspberry Pi 3, openSUSE developers have now released a 64-bit image of Leap 42.2 for the RPi3...

A Vulkan back-end is in development for GNOME's GTK's tool-kit new GTK Scene Kit (GSK) code...

As pointed out by this week's LLVM Weekly, the LLVM Linker (LLD) received a rather nice performance optimization this past week...

It's been quite a while since last having anything to report on the KDE Calligra open-source graphics/office suite while surprisingly this morning it was pleasant to see Calligra 3.0 tagged for release...

For fans of Netperf or just looking for another networking benchmark to add to your arsenal, the netperf client can now be automated and run via the Phoronix Test Suite...

There was too much churn in the mainline Linux kernel Git tree that Linus Torvalds today released 4.9-rc8 rather than declaring Linux 4.9 as ready to ship...

Last week I shared some 2016 Holiday Gift Ideas For Linux Enthusiasts, Gamers. Since then more ideas came to mind with other interesting tech gift ideas, particularly for Linux/open-source enthusiasts, as well as other favorite gadgets and interesting devices I've come across in the past year. So here are some more ideas of stocking stuffers and other fun purchases for the holidays...

The iRulu BL20 is a low-cost projector 1080p/HD projector that supports a projection distance up to six meters, dual built-in speakers, and a screen size up to 200 inches. Retailing for about $165 USD, this isn't a high-end projector but is rather decent for the price. Here's a quick write-up about my experience with this budget projector.

There have been many small GitHub projects the past several months aspiring to be a good, open-source Vulkan game engine, but many of them don't tend to see commits too often or don't come close to realizing their dream. In my usual weekend "fun" of digging through GitHub looking for fascinating Vulkan projects of interest, I decided to provide a quick overview on some of the more promising Vulkan open-source engine projects...