Phoronix

AMD developers continue working on improving the performance of the open-source Linux graphics driver stack. The latest is a small patch to fix the performance when under video memory pressure...

With DragonFlyBSD 4.8 making its debut yesterday, I was excited to give this updated BSD operating system a try now that it has UEFI support and some performance improvements. Here are some early benchmark results of DragonFlyBSD 4.8 compared to 4.6 and Intel's Clear Linux for some additional reference points.

The first and only planned point release to Phoronix Test Suite 7.0-Ringsaker is now available as a minor update to this cross-platform, open-source benchmarking software...

Ubuntu 12.04/14.04/16.04/16.10 is affected by a new medium priority CVE this morning that could allow a local attacker to execute code as root...

The latest DRM driver going atomic is VMware's vmwgfx driver used by VMware virtualized guests...

Last week I wrote about Intel's Rafael Wysocki working on P-State improvements for Linux 4.12 and today he has published yet more clean-up and optimization patches for this Intel CPU frequency scaling driver alternative to ACPI CPUfreq...

AMD's Nicolai Hähnle has published his revised set of 25 patches for implementing OpenGL sparse buffer support within the RadeonSI driver...

There's a new Linux-friendly game launching today that's powered by the demanding Unigine Game Engine...

Longtime X.Org developer Eric Anholt who previously worked for Intel and is now working for Broadcom on the open-source VC4 driver stack is working to add the Meson build system support for the xorg-server...

Valve issued a new Steam client beta this afternoon where the sole listed change are the internal changes for supporting SteamVR 360 video playback...

Last week AMD began publishing the open-source driver enablement patches for the upcoming Vega graphics hardware. Today the libdrm support began to land...

For those curious about the impact of GCC compiler optimization levels, a variety of benchmarks were carried out using GCC 6.3 on Intel's Clear Linux platform.

The Sapphire Pure Platinum H61 is the latest motherboard to be supported by mainline Coreboot for replacing the board's proprietary BIOS...

Today marks the release of the newest version of the BSD-based DragonFly operating system...

For months there have been Intel developers working on 5-level paging to increase Linux's virtual/physical address space limitations and with Linux 4.12 it looks like that will be supported...

The Khronos Group has uploaded the remainder of the Vulkan and related graphics tech presentation slides from the Game Developers Conference (GDC17) that ended a few weeks ago...

Tom Stellard, who recently left AMD for Red Hat, is stepping up once again to maintain LLVM point releases. Tom has laid out plans for LLVM 4.0.1 and he's also looking to enhance the overall stable release process...

Matthew Dillon has implemented HAMMER version 7 support in DragonFlyBSD as well as work on the still-experimental HAMMER2 file-system...

A new subsystem has been proposed for staging in the Linux 4.12 kernel...

Prolific Mesa developer Marek Olšák is looking to tackle what he thinks is the "biggest performance bottleneck at the moment" for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

Linus Torvalds has announced the Linux 4.11-rc4 kernel this evening...

The desktop-focused, performance-oriented Solus Linux distribution has pulled in another component from Clear Linux: clr-boot-manager. The clr-boot-manager is responsible for solid kernel and boot-loader management...

While Ubuntu 17.04 is set to ship next month with Linux 4.10 and Mesa 17.0 as a big upgrade over the open-source graphics stack found in Ubuntu 16.10, if you switch over to using Mesa 17.1 and Linux 4.11 is the potential for even better performance. Here are some Radeon RX 470 tests in different combinations on Ubuntu 17.04...

There is a new feature to talk about for Etnaviv Gallium3D, the open-source reverse-engineered driver designed for Vivante graphics cores...

Every year or so it comes up how some users believe that at Phoronix we should be benchmarking with Antergos/Arch, Debian, or [insert here any other distribution] instead of mostly using Ubuntu for our Linux benchmarking. That discussion has come back up in recent days...

With the first quarter of 2017 drawing to a close next week, here's a look back at the most popular news stories and articles so far this year on Phoronix. Year to date on Phoronix there have already been 842 original news articles and 91 featured articles and Linux hardware reviews...

Google's Chrome / Chromium web-browser has added a native glTF 1.0 parser. The GL Transmission Format, of course, being Khronos' "3D asset delivery format" for dealing with compressed scenes and assets by WebGL, OpenGL ES, and other APIs...

Just as a quick notice for those curious, while Mesa 17.0 has worked its way recently into Ubuntu 17.04 "Zesty Zapus", the Vulkan support isn't enabled by default..

Google is working on Android Studio support atop Chrome OS. With this official Android integrated development environment on Chrome OS, could it make Chromebooks/Chromeboxes a great platform for Android development?..

With Broadwell "Gen 8" graphics and newer, there is better engine reset support in case of problems or hangs. The Intel DRM driver is still being wired up to take advantage of this better support under Linux...

Version 1.0.45 is now the latest version of the Vulkan 1.0 specification...

Red Hat developer Lyude Paul is working on OpenGL NV_fill_rectangle support for Gallium3D and the Nouveau driver...

While the Ubuntu 17.04 final release is expected to happen in just over two weeks and the final freeze is quickly approaching, X.Org Server 1.19 has yet to land as anticipated into the Zesty Zapus...

We heard earlier this month that C++17 is "done" and looked at the new features while now more details have been shared...

Yesterday I published some initial RADV Vulkan benchmarks for Serious Sam 2017, their "fusion" update to Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter. In this article are some comparison NVIDIA Linux Vulkan benchmark figures.

The OpenSSL project is planning to change its software license...

Less than one week after AMDGPU DRM Vega support was published along with the other Vega enablement patches for the Linux driver stack, more Direct Rendering Manager patches are being shot out today...

It may not be as exciting as hearing Dell looking at Coreboot, but another Intel-powered Chromebook is now supported by mainline Coreboot...

ELKDAT is a new Linux kernel project to provide an easy kernel development and testing tool...

Gtef is short for the GTK+ Text Editor Framework and makes it easier to develop text editors and IDEs with GNOME's toolkit...

If you are looking for a new Linux-native game title to pick up this weekend and are into WW2 FPS games, Day of Infamy is now available...

The final beta releases for Ubuntu 17.04 "Zesty Zapus" has just occurred...

While waiting for AMD to open-source their Vulkan Linux driver, we have a new AMD open-source Vulkan project to look at: Anvil...

Given there is just one month to go until the official Ubuntu 17.04 "Zesty Zapus" release and past the ordinary freezes and nearly at the final development milestones, I decided to take a test drive this morning of Unity 8 with Mir atop the latest daily Zesty packages.

CodeWeavers has announced CrossOver 16.2 as the newest release of their Wine-based software for running Windows programs on Linux and macOS...

Fedora 26 was set back by a delay last week and today it's been delayed again for another week...

Tuning the P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for the Linux kernel feels like a never-ending process. While it's been around for years and continues to be refined, for some Intel CPUs on some workloads, the CPUFreq scaling driver leads to be better performance and even Intel's own Clear Linux distribution is using CPUFreq by default. With Linux 4.12, more intel_pstate revisions are taking place...

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver is prepping support for the experimental VK_KHX_multiview extension...

This week marked the roll out of Serious Sam Fusion 2017 into public beta first up with Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter and soon to be followed-up by The Second Encounter and Serious Sam: BFE. The Fusion 2017 update is interesting as it brings these classics Vulkan support, 64-bit only, and other engine improvements.

The first Qt 5.9 tool-kit beta snapshot is now available for testing as the next feature release for this widely-used, cross-platform toolkit...