Phoronix

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...

This past week marked the availability of the first alpha release of Trisequel 8.0 "Flidas", the latest installment of the Free Software Foundation endorsed GNU/Linux distribution...

GCC developers have been working to support the compiler-side changes for dealing with ARMv8-M Security Extensions...

A few days back I wrote about a Vulkan renderer for a PlayStation emulator being worked on and now the code to that Vulkan renderer is publicly available...

While there are many open-source game engines these days, many of which were formerly closed-source/commercial engines, one of the big bottlenecks for community-driven game projects continue to be on the art assets/models and/or their reliance upon the commercial game assets for game engines that were later opened up. ET: Legacy continues making progress on free, modernized assets inspired off the original Wolfenstein Enemy Territory game...

A few days ago I wrote about how Apple's 2016 MacBook Pro and Linux Don't Mix, but prior to returning it to the sponsor, I did run a few more benchmarks under macOS beyond what was found in the original article...

Etnaviv is the latest DRM driver having its code ready for DRM-Next to in turn land for Linux 4.10...

Ubuntu is preparing Mesa 12.0.4 for Ubuntu Xenial and Yakkety users. It's not as great as Mesa 13, but at least there are some important fixes back-ported...

With Wine having moved to annual, time-based releases, the code freeze is indeed imminent for the next stable release, Wine 2.0...

When benchmarking Intel's Clear Linux distribution earlier this year we found its Intel graphics performance to be quite good and slightly faster than other Linux distributions even when Clear was using an older version of Mesa. Now with Clear Linux having switched to Mesa 13, I decided to run some fresh Intel OpenGL benchmarks on it compared to other distributions.

With today's PHP 7.1 release, performance isn't highlighted as much as language improvements to this first major update to PHP7, but I decided to run some PHP 7.1, PHP 7.0, PHP 5.6, PHP 5.5, and HHVM benchmarks of our open-source Phoronix Test Suite code-base...

A new version of MirAL is now available, the Ubuntu project for making it easier to develop new Mir servers by offering a stable ABI and other shared/common components...

Jolla engineers have spent the past few weeks porting Sailfish OS to an Android smartwatch as they feel their Linux-based OS is particularly suited for small screens...

Earlier this week I wrote about a release schedule coming out for Mesa 13.1 that culminates with this next big Mesa update being out in February. Some Mesa developers have now shared the work they still hope to see in this next release...

Rob Clark has landed his code for supporting EGL_ANDROID_native_fence_sync in Mesa and his Freedreno Gallium3D driver is the first in-tree Mesa/Gallium3D driver to support the native fence FD support, even beating out the Intel driver...

Mark Shuttleworth has written a new blog post where he's outlining a dispute Canonical is having with a European cloud provider over a breach of contract and "publishing insecure, broken images of Ubuntu" for its cloud customers...

A set of 27 patches published this week for GBM and the Intel Mesa driver provide for significant bandwidth savings...

PHP 7.1 is now officially available...

With the start of the new month comes updated statistics from Valve with their Steam Survey...

Gtkmm, the project providing the de facto C++ interface for GTK+, is preparing for the GTK+ 4.0 era...

AMD's big display abstraction layer (DAL) code-base that's used by AMDGPU-PRO but not yet mainlined in the Linux kernel for providing HDMI 2.0, future FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync, HDMI/DP audio, and other modern display features is DAL no more...

Last month I shared that Linux tests of the 2016 MacBook Pro would be coming and now I've finally managed to complete a few, but I highly encourage you not to get the new MacBook Pro if you plan on using anything other than macOS as the experience is a wreck. This is one laptop I don't mind seeing returned!

Oracle might be pulling the plug on the Solaris operating system, at least according to some new rumors...

Google today is rolling out a public beta of OSS-Fuzz, their new program to provide continuous fuzzing of core open-source software code-bases...

Razer is the latest company looking to promote open, cross-platform industry standards by joining The Khronos Group...

Just a few notes to get December kicked off on Phoronix, including good news for Phoronix Forums participants...

A new release of Ardour is available, the widely-praised, open-source digital audio workstation software...

The Haiku OS developer community have issued their latest activity report to cover what's going on with this open-source BeOS-compatible operating system...

A new DRM driver is being baked for supporting the video processing unit for Amlogic Meson SoCs...

Intel developers are proposing the introduction of a new pseudo file-system intended as a better fit for Direct Rendering Manager drivers rather than the mix of sysfs/debugfs usage currently used...

Mesa release manager Emil Velikov has laid out his draft of a release schedule for the next major Mesa release...

Unity 5.5 is now available and one of its big features is something that won't be too interesting to Linux folks: Microsoft HoloLens is now officially support...

Amazon Web Services today revealed more information about their EC2 Elastic GPUs support they are working to implement in the cloud...

The latest installment of the ten-year-old Genode open-source operating system framework is now available with low-level improvements, support for smart cards, and kernel improvements to the NOVA hypervisor...

Two days ago we brought up Devuan, the systemd-free fork of Debian turned two years old, and now it seems they are celebrating the anniversary by the release of the second beta...

Fresh from the libdrm 2.4.74 release that had some Etnaviv API changes, the Etnaviv Gallium3D driver has been proposed for mainline Mesa as the open-source, reverse-engineered 3D effort for Vivante graphics cores...

The Qt Company today issued the first release candidate for the Qt Creator 4.2 integrated development environment release...

With having published some Darktable OpenCL benchmarks at the beginning of the week with 20 different GPUs (plus more follow-up benchmarks), it didn't take long before requests came in to see some fresh OpenCL Blender benchmarks.

Collabora's latest patch series for Wayland/Weston is implementing support for initial XWayland window positioning with the Weston compositor...

On Tuesday was the MSM-Next submission by Red Hat developer Rob Clark of these Freedreno MSM changes to be sent to mainline for the Linux 4.10 kernel...

Mesa DRM library updates aren't usually too notable, but that's different with this evening's libdrm 2.4.74 release...

Ubuntu's kernel team will likely be targeting the Linux 4.10 kernel for April's release of Ubuntu 17.04...

Git 2.11 has been released as the newest version of this most widely used open-source version control system by free software projects...

Earlier this year the LibRetro crew unveiled their work on a Vulkan renderer for their Nintendo 64 emulator while now they have been working on a Vulkan renderer for a PlayStation One emulator, and it's already working...

Earlier this month ARM announced an updated Mali Graphics Debugger that includes Vulkan 1.0 tracing support on Linux...

A growing number of GNOME projects have been exploring Meson as a next-gen build system with one of the benefits being much faster build times. Now Daniel Stone at Collabora is exploring using Meson for Wayland and its Weston Weston compositor...

Last week marked the release of libSoftFloat 1.0, the library working to implement double-precision operations in pure GLSL 1.30 via bit twiddling operations and integer math. This is the most hopeful effort yet for getting OpenGL FP64 support exposed for older GPUs that lack native support...

The latest target of our Linux benchmarking at Phoronix are running various performance benchmarks under different Docker operating system images. The images used for benchmarking were the latest of Ubuntu, Clear Linux, CentOS, Debian, and Alpine while comparing the benchmark results to running on the bare metal host.

Eric Anholt at Broadcom has been focusing his latest VC4 driver efforts on performance tuning...

In addition to the big Mesa shader cache patch series hitting the mailing list over night, Ian Romanick at Intel sent out another big patch series: his revised work on ARB_gpu_shader_int64 support...