Phoronix

In the early hours of today AMD posted a set of 23 AMDGPU patches as "prep patches for new ASICs", which given the timing, is presumably prepping for the Radeon RX VEGA...

Samba 4.6.0 is now available as the project's latest stable release for SMB/CIFS support on Linux systems...

Peter Hutterer has released minor updates to libinput as well as the X.Org xf86-input-libinput components...

With Firefox 52 having sailed earlier this week, Mozilla has pushed Firefox 53.0 into beta...

The LLVM compiler infrastructure stack and Clang C/C++ compiler front-end will see their version 4.0 release within the next few days...

With Mesa recently landing their RadeonSI GLSL on-disk shader cache and enabling it by default plus other recent optimizations, plus in kernel-space there now being Linux 4.11-rc1 and that showing potential improvements, here are some fresh benchmarks of AMD Radeon vs. NVIDIA on Ubuntu Linux.

Imagination Technologies has announced their new PowerVR "Furian" GPU architecture for next-gen graphics and compute performance...

The developers behind the Wine-Staging tree that carries various experimental patches atop the latest upstream Wine repository for running Windows programs on Linux/macOS have announced their newest bi-weekly build...

Yesterday I had a call with The Khronos Group president Neil Trevett to discuss some of their latest initiatives and the ongoing advancements to the Vulkan API, WebGL, SPIR-V, and more. Here were some of the highlights...

Our latest AMD Ryzen Linux benchmarking is looking at the performance of the GCC and LLVM Clang compiler performance with a Ryzen 7 1700 on Ubuntu Linux.

AMD developer Christian König has worked the 10-bit HEVC GPU-accelerated decoding into shape for the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

Ben Skeggs has sent in his initial Nouveau feature update abnormally early to DRM-Next for in turn landing in the Linux 4.12 kernel...

NVIDIA has made the surprise announcement of the Jetson TX2 and it's powered by dual custom-designed 64-bit Denver 2 CPUs plus quad Cortex-A57 cores while boasting Pascal graphics with 256 CUDA cores.

For those using the xf86-video-nouveau X.Org driver rather than xf86-video-modesetting, the Nouveau DDX v1.0.14 release took place today...

Kevin Brace, the sole remaining main contributor to the OpenChrome project, has announced version 0.6 of the xf86-video-openchrome driver...

A Phoronix reader has written in about his independent work to make it easier trying out the latest AMDGPU DC/DAL code on Ubuntu...

Recently I ran out of spare SSDs and needed one for one of my test systems where the I/O storage capacity or performance wasn't important, so I decided to try out the Patriot Torch 60GB SSD that can be had for about $33 USD...

Mozilla has rolled out Firefox 52.0 as the latest version of their open-source, cross-platform web browser...

Ubuntu dropped their official alpha/betas long ago, Fedora 27 is dropping their alphas, and openSUSE is also shifting their development approach and will get rid of alpha and beta releases. OpenSUSE Leap 42.3 will be developed in a "rolling" manner although the release will not be a rolling-release post-release, unlike openSUSE Tumbleweed...

With the Linux 4.11 merge window now closed and the RadeonSI shader cache having landed and even turned on by default, it's a great time to run some fresh benchmarks of the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack. Here are some benchmark results with the latest Mesa Git code for RadeonSI Gallium3D and RADV as well as the Linux 4.11-rc1 kernel compared to Linux 4.10.

Intel is off to the races in preparing their new feature material work they plan to have introduced for the Linux 4.12 kernel, even though Linux 4.11-rc1 was just introduced on Monday and thus still nearly two months until the 4.12 merge window...

KDE developer Kai Uwe has provided a look at some of the new features coming for Plasma 5.10, including some screenshots...

One month ago AMD developer Marek Olsak sent out threaded OpenGL dispatch code for Mesa, which can be a big win for some games but unfortunately Marek is now too busy to handle the code. Fortunately, Collabora-turned-Valve developer Timothy Arceri has taken to getting this code vetted...

Two popular Linux distributions based upon Arch have released updated versions of their operating systems...

The Phoronix Test Suite 7.0-Ringsaker update is now available as the latest version of our cross-platform, open-source benchmarking software particularly for Linux, macOS, and BSD systems. Phoronix Test Suite 7.0 has many user-facing updates over Phoronix Test Suite 6.8 and all users are encouraged to upgrade to this latest release of our GPL benchmarking software.

Earlier today I posted some Linux game CPU scaling benchmarks using a Core i7 6800K Broadwell-E For showing how current Linux games make use of (or not) multiple CPU cores, which originated from discussions by Linux gamers following the AMD Ryzen CPU launch with how many cores are really needed. While going through the process of running those Linux game CPU scaling benchmarks, I also ran some other workloads for those curious...

Mageia 6 is running months behind schedule while today the project was able to announce their second stabilization snapshot...

Our latest Ryzen Linux benchmarks are looking at the impact of the CPUFreq scaling driver's governors have on the performance of the Ryzen 7 1800X, including a look at the power consumption and performance-per-Watt when changing the governors.

The Free Software Foundation has announced three more devices that are certified for "respects your freedom" (RYF), including a laptop, motherboard, and USB sound adapter. But don't get too excited quite yet...

Binutils 2.28 is out today as the latest version of this important GNU package...

With all the discussions about AMD's Ryzen 7 processors that boast eight cores plus SMT, there has been much discussion in our forums and elsewhere the past few days about how many cores most modern Linux games actually utilize... That plus with looking at how well Ryzen's CPU cores scale, I have carried out some fresh Linux CPU core scaling benchmarks with an Intel Core i7 6800K Broadwell-E to see if most Linux games can end up using 4+ cores right now.

Reports out over the weekend indicate that C++17 is "done" as the next version of the C++ ISO standard...

Several times in the past we have covered Zapcc as an LLVM Clang based compiler focused on very fast compilation speeds. Zapcc 1.0 has been released today...

Google and the X.Org Foundation have firmed up the dates for the annual X.Org Developers' Conference...

Intel's Daniel Vetter has updated their drm-intel-testing tree with early code to begin testing that should end up being queued for the Linux 4.12 kernel...

Many Phoronix readers appear rather intrigued by the AMD Ryzen 7 1700 on Linux as it offers good multi-threaded performance with eight cores / 16 threads and retails for just $329 USD. Making the Ryzen 7 1700 even more appealing to enthusiasts is that it overclocks well. For those curious, here are benchmarks of the Ryzen 7 1700 on Ubuntu Linux running at 4.0GHz.

With the recent roll-out of Mesa's on-disk shader cache, an initial limitation was that the entire cache would be erased if a user switched between 32-bit and 64-bit applications. That's now been fixed. And now the OpenGL GLSL shader cache is enabled by default...

Linus Torvalds has announced the first test release of the upcoming Linux 4.11 kernel...

If all goes according to plan, Linus Torvalds will have announced the first release candidate of the upcoming Linux 4.11 kernel before the day is through. The Linux 4.11-rc1 release also marks the end of the feature merge window for this kernel cycle. So with that said, here is a look at the new features of the Linux 4.11 kernel that I have been covering through closely watching the Git repository and mailing list over the past two weeks.

Intel's "SWR" software rasterizer living within Mesa now has support for OpenGL geometry shaders...

For fans of the Ada programming language, id Tech 4 / Doom 3 is being rewritten by an open-source enthusiast in this structured, statically-typed language...

Linux 4.11 is worthwhile in that it's bringing ALC1220 audio support, the codec used by many Ryzen (and Intel Kabylake) motherboards, but this next kernel version doesn't appear to change Ryzen's performance...

The WebAssembly efforts so far have been centered around making use of the LLVM compiler infrastructure, but now there are patches for providing partial WASM support atop the GNU toolchain...

With the rest of the RadeonSI shader cache support landing in Mesa, I have carried out some benchmarks to measure the impact of this on-disk GLSL shader cache not only for the performance of games but also the reduced load-times.

Alan Griffiths of Canonical has announced the release of MirAL 1.3, Mir's abstraction layer to ease bringing up new environments under Mir while providing a stable ABI...

Curious how Ryzen scales across its CPU cores and SMT? Here are some Ubuntu Linux benchmarks testing a Ryzen 7 1700 with different core/thread counts.

Emil Velikov has announced the first point release to last month's big Mesa 17.0 release...

Version 3.2 of the Postfix mail transfer agent is now available...

Chris Mason has sent in a secondary pull request of Btrfs material for the Linux 4.11 merge window...

Intel's set to enable atomic mode-setting by default with code slated to land for the Linux 4.12 kernel...