Phoronix

Whew, tons of Linux graphics benchmarks this weekend, in large part for getting more eyes looking at the new OpenBenchmarking.org web interface that's now in beta so feedback can be received and get it all tuned up for the official release in February. The latest of these benchmarks this weekend is comparing the out-of-the-box Ubuntu 15.10 performance against the speed when upgrading the Linux kernel and Mesa for the AMD R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers...

The Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D driver is very close to OpenGL 4.2 compliance as I wrote about this weekend and there's been other Gallium/NVC0 GL4 extension progress this weekend. The weekend is not over yet and Ilia Mirkin has already published another patch series.....

Two weeks back I wrote about Brainstorming Further Cooling Improvements To The Linux Benchmarking Room with the idea of replacing the vinyl floor tiles and underlayment and using porcelain tiles directly on the concrete slab for helping to absorb some of the heat during the coming summer months. That project is moving forward...

The port of the digiKam digital camera software to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5 is nearing its stable release...

A few days back I showed the Radeon vs. AMDGPU vs. Catalyst kernel driver potential when testing on the R9 290 "Hawaii" graphics card that has experimental and disabled-by-default support for the new AMDGPU kernel driver primarily designed for AMD GCN 1.2 GPUs and newer. Those results were interesting and showed some areas where AMDGPU came out faster than Radeon, so I decided to run experimental tests on another GCN 1.1 Sea Islands GPU that can be made to work with this kernel driver...

Jason Ekstrand of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center had a main track presentation on Saturday at FOSDEM about Vulkan...

The latest batch of open-source Linux benchmarks to share this weekend are doing some P-State and CPUFreq scaling driver benchmarks and also trying each driver's different CPU scaling governor options when using the AMD Radeon R9 285 graphics card on the AMDGPU kernel driver of Linux 4.5...

Prolific Mesa contributor Ilia Mirkin has published a set of patches for hooking in shader image support within the Mesa state tracker, an important step particularly for OpenCL use-cases...

One year ago was a status update on GNU Hurd where it was mentioned that GNU Hurd lacks 64-bit, audio, and USB support among other features for this micro-kernel free software project alternative to the Linux kernel. Sound support for Hurd is now in the works, but other features remain missing...

While the Nouveau NVC0 and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers were tied for a while in terms of their OpenGL 4 extension coverage, the NVC0 driver for NVIDIA Fermi GPUs and newer has advanced further with two more extensions -- one for OpenGL 4.2 and the other for OpenGL 4.3 -- now being supported by this open-source, reverse-engineered driver...

When it comes to OpenGL 4 support on the AMD R600 Gallium3D driver for pre-GCN graphics cards, currently the only R600g-supported cards advertising OpenGL 4.1 right now are the Radeon HD 5800 "Cypress" and Radeon HD 6900 "Cayman" series. Here are some tests done with OpenGL 4.1 on a Radeon HD 5830 compared to Cayman and various GPUs with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

With ZFS file-system support continuing to spread via OpenZFS, you may be one of the many out there still wondering about the benefits of ZFS...

This morning was news about Libreboot supporting another AMD server motherboard. Another motherboard -- this time an Intel board -- was added today since then to this Coreboot downstream that initializes the hardware without any proprietary firmware/microcode...

Hans de Goede of Red Hat and Pierre Moreau, an independent Nouveau contributor, are speaking at FOSDEM's graphics development room tomorrow about compute support for Nouveau...

Here are some thermal test results when switching from some Intel and AMD water coolers over to $20 Arctic Cooling heatsinks in the test lab...

This week I've already delivered a number of AMDGPU/Radeon benchmarks from the in-development Linux 4.5 kernel now that there's AMDGPU PowerPlay and other improvements. With the week not being over, here are some more AMD Radeon graphics card benchmarks from Linux 4.5 while also using Mesa 11.2-devel Git with LLVM SVN...

Debian is still working to add a ZFS kernel module to the Debian GNU/Linux repository...

Following the news yesterday that KDE is incubating a new "KDE Neon" project, it's now been launched from FOSDEM this weekend in Brussels, Belgium...

Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has been working on speeding up color transformations for color management on Intel Linux systems using their Beignet OpenCL implementation for Iris/HD Graphics...

Assuming you are now reaching the new server, the beta of the new OpenBenchmarking.org should be publicly accessible...

Landing as a fix this week inside the Linux kernel appears to be an indication that NVIDIA's Linux engineers are already working on their next-generation hardware support...

Libreboot, the version of Coreboot that is 100% free software without relying upon any proprietary blobs, has added support for another AMD motherboard...

The Arch Linux crew has announced the release of their Pacman 5.0 package manager...

Building off Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 that was released back in November, coming next week will finally be the Scientific Linux 7.2 release...

This weekend OpenBenchmarking.org is being moved off to some new server infrastructure for preparing for the new OpenBenchmarking.org, delivering HTTPS by default, and yielding quicker load times for both it and Phoronix.com...

The Qt 5.7 release is running slightly behind schedule due to the recent licensing changes with open-sourcing some new components and other reasons, but upstream Qt developers are now planning for the feature freeze to happen next week...

While earlier this week it was looking like Ubuntu 16.04 Alpha 2 might not happen for the opt-in flavors, it ended up getting released today...

While the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver right now exposes support for AMD GCN 1.2 GPUs and newer, like Carrizo, Fiji, and Tonga, it is possible to get GCN 1.1 Sea Islands hardware working with this driver if jumping through a few hoops. In this article are some tests of a Radeon R9 290 "Hawaii" when using the proprietary Catalyst driver, Radeon DRM driver as is the default for this card on open-source, and then using the experimental AMDGPU DRM open-source support.

Jonathan Riddell, the former Kubuntu release manager that was ousted from the project, will be announcing a "KDE Neon" incubator project this weekend at FOSDEM...

Dutch software firm StreamComputing has launched an educational project aiming to get more developers using OpenCL and as part of this initiative they will try to port as many GEGL operations to OpenCL as possible...

If you have ever wanted a thermal imager to get an idea for the hottest areas of your PC, look how to improve the thermal efficiency of your server room or house, or other purposes, you've likely noticed how thermal imagers are generally quite expensive. A lower-cost solution that's also very versatile is the Seek Compact Thermal, which can attach to your Android smartphone or tablet and turn it into a thermal imaging solution paired with the ease of use of being able to save the captured video or still images to your device.

GLAMOR, the X.Org means of doing 2D acceleration over OpenGL, is going through a period of more clean-ups as Broadcom's Eric Anholt looks to further boost its performance on the Raspberry Pi VC4 driver...

Kodi 16.0 "Jarvis" is quite close to being released with today marking the availability of their second release candidate...

It was just one week ago writing about Steam on Linux having 1,800 native games available and today the 1,900 threshold was crossed! As of writing this article there's been 1,913 native Linux games available...

The OpenMandriva Lx camp has released their 2015 Beta release in time for this weekend's FOSDEM conference happening this weekend in Brussels...

A NVIDIA engineer has posted a blog post today concerning shader resource binding with the Vulkan API...

SNOW is now available for Linux, a game that's currently in Steam early access and is a free-to-play winter game...

With the new OpenBenchmarking.org that's coming soon, besides the UI refresh, restored search functionality, and other improvements, the statistics access has also been re-enabled...

OPNsense, the open-source firewall project powered by FreeBSD that began as a fork of pfSense, is out with a new release...

Jolla published a blog post today entitled "Jolla Tablet: Aiming for Closure" and it doesn't deliver much in the way of good news...

Debuting in 2006, Medieval II: Total War, and its Kingdoms expansion, were the final Total War game to use the second version of the Total War Engine. It is also, arguably, the last game in a generation for the series. The follow-up to this game was Empire: Total War (also available on Linux), which changed the game engine, user-interface, as well as several of the gameplay mechanics-- such as adding naval battles.

For KDE Ubuntu users wanting to run the latest upstream KDE software components without switching over to the 16.04 "Xenial Xerus" development repository, backports of the new packages have taken place for Kubuntu 15.10...

Our latest Intel Skylake processor to benchmark is a Xeon E3-1270 v5 processor that boasts a boost speed of 4.0GHz...

Last week I had plans to run some fresh FreeBSD vs. Linux gaming benchmarks using the FreeBSD's Linux software binary compatibility layer...

With yesterday's Linux 4.5 AMDGPU/Radeon vs. Catalyst OpenGL Performance testing, the loser was the R9 Fury "Fiji" graphics card on the AMDGPU open-source driver with the performance still being miserable. Even with PowerPlay enabled on Linux 4.5, the performance was still poor. But if forcing to a high performance state via sysfs, is the performance any better?..

The libinput 1.2 release candidate was released this morning as the newest development version of this input handling library used primarily by Wayland systems and now as well with Ubuntu's Mir and then X.Org when using the xf86-input-libinput driver...

The first release candidate is now available for the Go 1.6 programming language...

The Black Mesa third-party remake of Half-Life is confirmed for being ported to Linux...

We are just over one month away until GDC 2016 kicks off in San Francisco where there will be many Vulkan API talks by different Khronos members...

For anyone still relying upon Java web-plugins in their browser, they are going to be deprecated with the upcoming Java 9...