Phoronix

There are a number of exciting package updates for the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling-release Linux distribution...

For those not paying attention to the #SteamDevDays tweets from the many developers at the Seattle event, the first day of Valve's 2016 conference appears to have been a huge success and the overall focus was on VR...

The UBI/UBIFS pull request for the Linux 4.9 kernel for those interested in the Unsorted Block Image tech on Linux...

The OpenWrt Summit took place today in Berlin. For those that weren't able to make the event or unaware of it but interested in Linux networking, the slides and videos are now available...

Andrew Morton's pull request for Linux 4.9 has landed some improvements for kernel threads...

Marek Olšák, the prolific longtime contributor to Mesa and AMD developer, published a patch today with a big performance improvement that he says has been discovered by luck...

The work by Nicolai Hähnle on finishing up the GL_ARB_enhanced_layouts extension for Gallium3D is now in Git. This officially marks RadeonSI done with OpenGL 4.4 and is effectively done with OpenGL 4.5 although the new version string is yet to be advertised...

While we found out today Valve is finally expected to show a VR Linux demo likely using the HTC Vive, it turns out Collabora has been working on their own Linux VR effort with a focus on a fully open-source driver for the HTC Vive for the OSVR platform...

Now that the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver is part of mainline Mesa, it's increasingly easy to experiment with this unofficial, open-source Vulkan driver on rolling-release distributions and through third-party package archives/repositories...

For those on rolling-release distributions that tend to wait until the first point release before upgrading your desktop environment, GNOME 3.22.1 is now available as the first update since last month's GNOME 3.22 debut...

The latest Raspberry Pi graphics driver hacking by Eric Anholt of Broadcom has been working to support QPU shaders by this open-source driver stack. QPUs are the shader core of the graphics hardware found in the Raspberry Pi SoC, but come up short of supporting OpenCL or OpenGL compute shaders...

Building off last week's XFS updates for Linux 4.9 is now a specific feature merge for this file-system: shared data extents...

Qt 5.6.2 was released today as the latest point release to the Qt 5.6 Long-Term Support release series...

The HTC Vive was supposed to ship with Linux support but that hadn't materialized... But it looks like it now has. Valve is expected to show off a VR Linux demo during this week's Steam Dev Days event in Seattle...

The Fedora QA team is organizing a Fedora 25 Workstation Wayland Test Day for tomorrow, 13 October. This is to find any last-minute bugs with next month's Fedora 25 Workstation release still set to utilize this next-gen successor to X11 by default...

David Airlie a short time ago submitted the Linux 4.9 DRM subsystem update, including the much sought after open-source Direct Rendering Manager driver improvements. There's a lot of good stuff in here, but sadly the Nouveau changes look like they're going to have to wait until Linux 4.10...

Google has begun sharing early details about the forthcoming Android 7.1 Nougat update...

Back in April I did tests showing how Intel's Clear Linux distribution showed much potential for HD/Iris Graphics performance, something that intrigued many Phoronix readers since Clear Linux would generally be seen as a workstation/cloud/container-optimized Linux distribution and something with not much emphasis on the desktop or gaming. Those earlier tests were with Ubuntu 16.04, bur with Ubuntu 16.10 coming out this week, here are some fresh tests of Clear Linux and Ubuntu Yakkety Yak on an Skylake HD Graphics system.

Chris Mason sent in the Btrfs file-system changes this morning for the Linux 4.9 kernel merge window...

The beta release of the upcoming Fedora 25 is now officially available...

Chad Versace, the former Intel OTC developer now employed by Google on the Chromium team, has published the latest patches for implementing the EGL_ANDROID_native_fence_sync extension within Mesa's Intel driver...

While Fedora 25 isn't even being released until mid-November, with now being past the change completion deadline for F25 and Rawhide continuing to move along, early Fedora 26 features are beginning to be talked about...

The 75 patches for Gallium3D's Nine state tracker improvements (D3D9) have now landed in Mesa Git master ahead of the branching for the next Mesa release at the end of the week...

With GNOME/GTK+ 3.22 having been released at the end of September, developer focus is beginning to shift to GNOME 3.24 or in the case of GTK+ developers it's about GTK+ 4.0 development per the toolkit's new development process...

Iago Toral Quiroga of Igalia has sent out the second version of his massive 103 patches for implementing FP64 support for Intel Haswell hardware within the i965 Mesa driver in order to expose OpenGL 4.0 support...

It's not as important as NVIDIA publishing new signed firmware images, but then again it's not every day we see NVIDIA developers contribute to the open-source Nouveau driver stack. Nevertheless, today a new set of patches were published for the Nouveau DRM driver...

The non-volatile DIMM (NVDIMM) support has been updated for the Linux 4.9 kernel merge window...

The developers at Unigine Corp are making public some screenshots and a brief video from their upcoming Superposition Benchmark that's powered by Unigine Engine 2...

Following the recent delays, FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE is now officially available...

Microsoft today announced the Skype Linux Alpha 1.10 release that brings basic support for video calls...

The ongoing development of a RISC-V back-end for the LLVM compiler stack continues making progress and stepping closer to merging to mainline...

With traditional software package management solutions like APT and Yum showing their age and not adapting well to the embedded world and the slew of new areas for Linux like IoT, a new generation of atomic-based Linux software update solutions continue to be worked on. Matt Porter of the Konsulko Group is presenting at this week's Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2016 with a comparison of these update technologies...

It's been just over two weeks since GNOME 3.22 was released while already a ton of feature work has been landing in Epiphany, GNOME's Web Browser...

Tom Hacohen of Samsung's Open-Source Group is presenting at this week's Embedded Linux Conference about Enlightenment's EFL as a UI toolkit for the embedded world...

While running the fresh NVIDIA vs. AMD Vulkan Linux benchmarks (that also included some OpenGL numbers too), I had also taken the opportunity to run some fresh OpenCL compute benchmarks of the latest NVIDIA 370 proprietary Linux driver against AMDGPU-PRO on different graphics cards...

With catching up on the OpenGL extensions, Marek Olšák of AMD has been spending a fair amount of time on performance optimizations for the AMD's open-source OpenGL driver and some code that benefits Mesa as a whole too. One of his latest patch series is on optimizing Mesa's GLSL compiler performance...

The perf subsystem is seeing some new feature work landing with the Linux 4.9 development cycle...

Ubuntu/Canonical developers have been discussing plans and requirements for Mir Version 1 including stable ABIs and licenses...

Building off the exciting patches published Friday for completing ARB_enhanced_layouts that finish off the RadeonSI OpenGL 4.4~4.5 support, the Nouveau NVC0 support is basically done too with the finishing up of that final extension being done in the Mesa state tracker...

X-Plane, one of the most realistic flight simulators that continues to be cross-platform, will be released "this holiday season" and it offers more flying improvements and much better visuals...

On Thursday the RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver was merged into mainline Mesa and I provided bleeding-edge RADV vs. AMDGPU-PRO benchmark results for these two independent AMD Linux Vulkan driver implementations, plus comparison results to the OpenGL drivers in the same games. For those that have been wondering how the NVIDIA proprietary Vulkan driver compares to AMD's two Vulkan driver options, here are some fresh benchmark results.

KDE Frameworks 5.27 is now available as the latest version of these add-on libraries from the KDE camp to complement Qt5 functionality...

This morning the protection keys syscall interface was submitted for the Linux 4.9 merge window, the last step of adding Protection Keys support to the Linux kernel...

With "Vulkan Next" likely not debuting until 2017, the Vulkan 1.0.x point releases continue with minor fixes to the Vulkan documentation...

There is support for a number of new ARM platforms with the in-development Linux 4.9 kernel...

The MD subsystem updates were sent out earlier this week for the Linux 4.9 kernel merge window with a few improvements/features to note...

GDB 7.12 is now available as the latest feature release of the GNU Debugger...

Back on Wednesday I wrote about how RadeonSI and Nouveau NVC0 completed their OpenGL 4.5 extension changes but were still being held up from exposing OpenGL 4.4 due to the incomplete ARB_enhanced_layouts extension. Well, that is about to change with 13 patches published today that effectively finish it up...

For those sticking to Wine 1.8.x stable releases until Wine 2.0 is released around the end of the year, Wine 1.8.5 is the latest and greatest...

Intel's "ANV" Mesa Vulkan Linux driver now has basic support for HiZ, an important performance feature...