Phoronix

Besides recent Intel graphics hardware making use of firmware binary blobs now for the GuC/HuC functionality, Intel audio hardware continues in making use of firmware binary-only blobs for audio support...

For those looking for some interesting weekend reading, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has provided a lengthy write-up about what happened in Munich with regards to LiMux and the possibility of abandoning their Linux/open-source efforts in favor of going back to Microsoft Windows...

Submitted earlier in the Linux 4.11 merge window were the big ARM SoC and platform changes for this next kernel version while some last-minute ARM changes have just arrived...

Yesterday we posted launch-day Ryzen 7 1800X Linux benchmarks that were particularly appealing for multi-core / heavily-threaded workloads like code compilation. Given all the code compilation done by Linux users in particular, if you were intrigued by the Ryzen 7 1800X performance but find the $499 USD price-tag to be too higher, today I have my initial benchmark figures on the Ryzen 7 1700. The Ryzen 7 1700 is still eight cores and sixteen threads but will only set you back $329 USD as the current low-end Ryzen processor for what's currently available.

Wine 2.3 is out as the latest bi-weekly development snapshot...

Yesterday on top of the main Ryzen 7 1800X Linux benchmarks and the follow-up Linux gaming benchmarks, I also posted some extra Ryzen benchmark results and encouraged Phoronix readers to compare their own system's performance to our data using our open-source, automated benchmarking framework...

Soft/emulated ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 support for GPUs not natively implementing double-precision/FP64 support is getting close in Mesa...

The latest in our AMD Ryzen Linux benchmarking is looking at the impact of compiled binaries when making use of Zen "znver1" compiler optimizations with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) compared to other optimization levels like Bulldozer and K8-SSE3.

Today marks the release of KDE's new Kube 0.1 project, the first tech preview (pre-production) release of this experimental Kontact based on Qt Quick and Akonadi-Next...

Al Viro has called for the new statx system call to be added to the Linux 4.11 kernel...

LLVM 4.0 remains running behind schedule but the third release candidate is now available for testing with hopes of shipping this updated compiler stack in the next week or so...

One week after sending in the main power management and ACPI updates for the Linux 4.11 kernel, Rafael Wysocki has served up a second batch of feature updates for this next kernel version...

Taking things further than the recent landing of the TGSI on-disk shader cache for this Gallium3D IR, Timothy Arceri at Valve has landed his support for a RadeonSI driver on-disk shader cache...

For those craving some Linux gaming benchmarks from the newly-released AMD Ryzen 7 1800X processor, here are some test results. In this initial comparison are benchmarks of the Ryzen 7 1800K to Core i7 7700K when running these processors at stock speeds while using a Radeon R9 Fury graphics card paired with AMDGPU+RadeonSI for the Linux graphics driver stack.

Adam Jackson has announced the release of X.Org Server 1.19.2 and users are encouraged to update to this latest point release...

Back in 2011 was the glorious announcement that AMD would support Coreboot with its future CPUs. Sadly, a lot has changed at AMD over the past half-decade, and there isn't any Coreboot support to find today for Zen/Ryzen...

Assuming you have already checked out this morning's Ryzen 7 1800X Linux benchmarks, here are some more data points while putting the finishing touches on the Ryzen 7 Linux gaming benchmarks being published later today...

Yesterday I wrote about initial Nouveau open-source acceleration for GeForce GTX 1050/1060/1070/1080 GPUs and now the signed firmware images needed for pairing with that code are readily available...

Razer co-founder and CEO Min-Liang Tan has shared plans to improve their Linux support, at least when it comes to their Blade laptops...

The day many of you have been waiting for is finally here: AMD Zen (Ryzen) processors are shipping! Thanks to AMD coming around at the last minute, I received a Ryzen 7 1800X yesterday evening and have been putting it through its paces. Here is my walkthrough of the Linux experience for the AMD Ryzen and new motherboard and a number of the initial Linux benchmarks for this high-end Zen CPU while much more coverage is coming in the hours and days ahead.

GNOME 3.23.91 was released this morning by Matthias Clasen. With this GNOME 3.24 Beta 2 release there is an API/ABI freeze, feature freeze, UI freeze, and string freeze...

DiRT Rally is the latest game from Feral Interactive that has launch-day open-source AMD graphics support, a welcome improvement from the past. Thanks to the ever maturing state of the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and Feral's increased Radeon testing, there is good out-of-the-box Radeon support for this AAA racing game on Linux.

Intel's ANV Vulkan driver in Mesa Git has picked up support for two more extensions of this week's big Vulkan update...

Just weeks after bringing HITMAN to Linux, Feral Interactive this morning has released another high profile game ported from Windows: DiRT Rally. DiRT Rally is now available for Linux gamers interested in a fun racing game. I've been benchmarking their Linux port the past few days and have both Radeon and NVIDIA results to share for launch-day. Here are fourteen NVIDIA GPUs tested with DiRT Rally on Ubuntu Linux.

Adoption of the Linux 4.10 kernel going strong with not only Ubuntu Zesty and Intel's Clear Linux already having pulled it in, among other rolling releases, but openSUSE Tumbleweed is also now too riding off Linux 4.10.1...

If you are interested in embedded Linux development but missed out last week's Linux Foundation event in Portland, the videos are now available online...

Valve has put out their Steam survey results for February 2017 and show another drop in the estimated Linux gaming market-share...

Croteam has pushed yet more Vulkan improvements into The Talos Principle as they prepare to bring Vulkan and Linux support to their other titles this year...

Lennart Poettering has announced the release of systemd 233...

Last week I posted Benchmarks Of Ubuntu 17.04 Beta vs. Antergos, Clear Linux, openSUSE Tumbleweed. Those results were interesting and as usual Clear Linux had led many of the benchmarks due to Intel's investments into highly optimizing this Linux distribution for the maximum out-of-the-box performance. For curiosity sake, I ran some fresh benchmarks of Ubuntu 17.04 daily vs. Clear Linux on another test system and have those results to share...

Collabora developer and longtime X.Org/Wayland contributor Daniel Stone has written a blog post detailing some of the recent and ongoing projects being led by the consulting firm when it comes to open-source graphics...

Emil Velikov has announced the availability today of the Mesa 17.0.1 release candidate...

NVIDIA released their new Vulkan beta driver on Monday to support the new Vulkan 1.0.42 extensions but that ended up breaking the SteamVR Linux support, which relies upon Vulkan. NVIDIA has now corrected this support...

The patches are now out there for having initial accelerated support in the Nouveau DRM driver for the GeForce GTX 1050/1060/1070/1080 series "Pascal" graphics cards. The signed firmware is being released and will allow these consumer graphics cards to now have hardware-accelerated support via the open-source driver...

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) will see new features introduced with the Linux 4.11 kernel...

NVIDIA did their much anticipated unveiling last night at GDC of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card as "the fastest gaming GPU ever."..

February 2017 was rather exciting for Linux enthusiasts with the big Vulkan update ahead of GDC, some fresh Windows 10 vs. Linux benchmarks, AMD Ryzen on the horizon, Intel Kabylake providing lots of testing fun, and other open-source advancements...

The latest and last planned development release of Phoronix Test Suite 7.0-Ringsaker is now available for your cross-platform, open-source benchmarking needs...

Valve developer Andres Rodriguez has posted a set of 22 patches for supporting high priority scheduling within the AMDGPU kernel driver...

The WebAssembly project that's the cross-browser effort for low-level programming for in-browser client-side execution has reached a major milestone today. WASM can allow compiling C/C++ among other languages down into code supported by Firefox, Chrome, WebKit, and Edge...

In preparation for Ryzen tests coming up in the near future, I've been running some fresh benchmarks across a range of Intel and AMD x86_64 Linux systems. For those curious about the current performance of Ubuntu 17.04 daily with the Linux 4.10 kernel, here are benchmarks from 14 of the systems.

Unity Technologies had their keynote this morning at GDC 2017 where they talked about the plans for their game engine this year...

By now you probably know that X.Org's security is in bad shape and routinely new security issues are uncovered and that's the case today...

The open-source Haiku OS inspired by BeOS has made much progress this month on several fronts...

Genode OS 17.02 has been released today as the latest version of this open-source operating system framework...

I've been testing out SteamVR on Linux with the HTC Vive the past few days. From my time spent and trying out various graphics cards with Destinations, Dota 2, and Serious Sam VR: The First Encounter, my impressions is that for this Linux VR beta at least a GeForce GTX 1070 or GTX 1080 is really needed for good performance.

The X.Org Foundation has been once again accepted as a mentoring organization for this year's Google Summer of Code. Yes, the X.Org involvement in GSoC isn't limited to just the xorg-server but also covers Mesa, Wayland, and other involvements...

It's going on five years since there was the call for deprecating FBDEV within the mainline Linux kernel and various ongoing efforts to get more drivers to making use of the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) rather than FBDEV. But with Linux 4.11, FBDEV still remains in place...

David Airlie sent in another pull request of DRM material for Linux 4.11, which follows last week's main DRM feature update for Linux 4.11...

In celebrating their five-year milestone, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced their latest product: the Raspberry Pi Zero W...