Phoronix

With Ubuntu 16.10 being right around the corner you may be wondering about its support for Vulkan. Here's my experience when trying out today's Ubuntu 16.10 "beta 2" release and looking for Vulkan support...

For those curious how NVIDIA's DRIVE PX 2 system is working and how their self-driving car efforts are progressing, they've published a new video today showing their self-driving car that's taught by deep learning with analyzing human driving patterns...

Apple released macOS 10.12 "Sierra" last week as the successor to OS X El Capitan. Given this annual update to macOS / OS X, here are benchmarks of macOS Sierra compared to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on a MacBook Air and Mac Mini computers.

LibreSSL 2.5.0 is available today as the newest version of this growing fork of OpenSSL led by the OpenBSD project...

NVIDIA announced at GTC Europe today their forthcoming Xavier SoC that will succeed Parker. At least for now, Xavier is super exciting and is aimed to be a "AI supercomputer" SoC...

While it has been available in early form for a few months, today NVIDIA announced the general availability of CUDA 8...

David Airlie has pulled the remaining DRM driver feature pull requests into DRM-Next, in preparation for the Linux 4.9 merge window opening next week...

Landing over night in systemd Git were several new tunables for offering better system security/protection. The systemd-udevd.service is also now run in a Seccomp-based sandbox to prohibit any network access...

The plugable validation layers concept is one of many great improvements with Vulkan over OpenGL. If you are new to Vulkan development or just haven't explored the validation layers yet, The Khronos Group and LunarG hosted a webinar this week concerning this area of the new high-performance graphics API...

With the recent Beignet 1.2 release some Phoronix readers expressed disappointment that this Intel OpenCL implementation for Iris/HD Graphics hadn't supported the recently-released LLVM 3.9. Well, now it does...

It feels like so soon - we are just two weeks out from seeing the official Ubuntu 16.10 "Yakkety Yak" release. Today the final beta is available...

Just a few days ago was the fifth version of the proposed Mesa on-disk shader cache and it's looking like it may finally be ready for merging with some of the prep infrastructure work having landed today in mainline Mesa...

It has been over one year since last testing the mainline Linux kernel's BCache support for this block cache that allows solid-state drives to act as a cache for slower hard disk drives. Here are some fresh benchmarks of a SATA 3.0 SSD+HDD with BCache from the Linux 4.8 Git kernel.

There are about 2,000 Steam Linux games that are published and working (1,999 as of right now), granted a majority of them are indie games and only about a fifth of the games available for Steam on Windows or less than half of the number of games available for OS X...

At the end of 2015 Mozilla effectively put an end to Firefox OS / Boot 2 Gecko by concluding things weren't working out for Mozilla Corp and their commercial partners to ship Firefox OS smartphones. All commercial development around it has since stopped and they are now preparing to strip B2G from the mozilla-central code-base...

One month after Kirigami's first public release, KDE Kirigami 1.1 is now available as the newest stable of this user-interface framework designed for mobile and convergent applications in Qt...

Today is a big day along the Fedora 25 schedule and stepping towards its official debut in November...

A revised set of 11 patches were published this week for implementing basic HiZ (Hierarchical Z) support within Intel's open-source Vulkan "ANV" Mesa driver...

With all of the RADV Radeon Vulkan activity in the past few weeks, The Talos Principle now renders correctly when using this community-driven Vulkan graphics API driver!..

While GLAMOR has already been around for a number of years as a means of providing generic X11 2D acceleration over OpenGL for the X.Org Server, it's a seemingly never-ending process to optimize its code-paths for best performance. More improvements are en route for making GLAMOR 2D faster, which should especially be helpful for Raspberry Pi users making use of the VC4 driver stack on this very slow-speed hardware...

With AMD's forthcoming Zen processors is support for some new memory encryption technologies that are of particular benefit for virtualized environments...

A KDE Advisory Board has been formed by KDE e.V. to provide greater insight and cooperation around this free software desktop environment...

While the Core i7 6800K has been available for a few months now, there hadn't been any review on it since Intel hadn't sent out any Broadwell-E samples for Linux testing this time around. However, I did end up finally buying a Core i7 6800K now that the Turbo Boost Max 3.0 support is finally coming together (at first, Intel PR said it wouldn't even be supported on Linux) so that I can run some benchmarks there plus some other interesting items on the horizon for benchmarking. Here are some benchmarks of the i7-6800K from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with the Linux 4.8 kernel.

Edward Shishkin, one of the last remaining Reiser4 developers and the one who has been leading this out-of-tree file-system the past few years, has implemented logical volumes support with support for mirrors (in effect, RAID 0) and failover support at the file-system level...

The inaugural LLVM Cauldron conference happened earlier this month ahead of the GNU Tools Cauldron in Hebden Bridge, UK. All of the slides and videos from this latest LLVM conference are now available...

OpenMW 0.40 is now available as the well known open-source reimplementation of the Elderscrolls III: Morrowind game...

Coming up in two weeks marks the return of Steam Dev Days. Linux and SteamOS gaming will be talked about there, but so far no indications of Steam Machines...

Using the LLVM JIT with PostgreSQL can vastly speed up the query execution performance and shows off much potential but it hasn't been mainlined yet...

Linus Torvalds issued on Sunday night the eighth weekly test version of the Linux 4.8 kernel with the expectation of officially releasing this new kernel next weekend...

It has been about two weeks since last reporting on "RADV" Radeon Vulkan activities, but development hasn't let up and there has been several feature commits since then on this open-source Vulkan Linux driver for Radeon AMDGPU-interfacing hardware...

Fedora has been making a lot of RISC-V build/packaging progress over the past few months while this weekend the milestone was announced that they are hosting clean, RPM-built, bootable disk images for this open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture...

Here are some fresh benchmarks of various solid-state drives (SATA 3.0 SSDs plus two NVMe M.2 SSDs) as well as two HDDs for getting a fresh look at how they are performing using the Linux 4.8 Git kernel...

PostgreSQL 9.6 is being prepared for release on 29 September as the database system's latest major update...

SuperTux v0.5 is now available as the newest version of this open-source Tux-themed game inspired by Super Mario Bros...

Independent developer Kevin Brace took over maintaining the OpenChrome DDX driver earlier this year to improve the open-source VIA Linux graphics support while over the summer he's slowly been getting up to speed on development of the OpenChrome DRM driver...

The 2016 X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC2016) wrapped up Friday in Helsinki, Finland. Here is a summary of the major happenings for those that may have missed it or didn't yet watch the video streams.

Following this week's Wayland/Weston 1.12 release, Wayland 1.13 and the reference Weston 1.13 compositor are now open for development...

In addition to the Nouveau status update talk at XDC2016, Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst had carried out an additional presentation on Friday dedicated to this open-source NVIDIA driver's work on power management and re-clocking...

It's been one week since the Libreboot downstream of Coreboot announced it would leave the GNU and denounced the FSF over supposedly a transgendered individual having been fired by the this free software group. Both Richard Stallman and the FSF denounced these claims made by Libreboot maintainer Leah Rowe. Since then, no actual proof has been presented to back up these claims by the Libreboot maintainer but the drama around it has seemingly continued...

At the GNU Tools Cauldron earlier this month in the UK there was a presentation on forthcoming improvements to the GNU Tools, presented by Nick Clifton as part of the Red Hat Tools Team...

This summer the student developer Elie Tournier participated in Google Summer of Code to develop a "soft" double-precision floating-point library for Mesa. While GSoC is past, it appears he is committed to seeing this library through and getting into Mesa. With potential soft/emulated ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 support, this could be good news for those GPUs lacking real double precision support...

Timothy Arceri of Collabora has revised his massive patch-set that implements an on-disk shader cache for the Intel open-source driver...

It has been nearly one year since the LXQt 0.10 release while today it was succeeded by LXQt v0.11, the newest version of this lightweight, Qt-powered desktop environment...

Landing in the mainline GCC compiler stack for next year's GCC 7.1 release is initial enablement on ARMv8.2-A support...

If you are using openSUSE's Tumbleweed rolling-release Linux distribution, you now have access to the upstream GNOME 3.22 packages...

On the first day of the XDC2016 conference this week in Finland NVIDIA presented over their GBM vs. EGLStreams debate that's been ongoing for months with NVIDIA's lack of GBM API support by their driver being what's preventing the binary blob from working with current-generation Wayland compositors. In that session they called for a new community-driven API to suit the needs of device memory / surface allocation and could succeed the Generic Buffer Manager. By the end of XDC2016, some progress has already been made...

The OpenSolaris-derived Illumos project is rolling out its new bootloader project to use on new systems in place of its old GRUB (v0.97) legacy bootloader...

Last month Intel introduced the 600P Series solid-state drives as the most competitively-priced NVMe SSDs launched to date. Here are a few Linux comparison benchmarks from my initial testing of the SSDPEKKW256G7X1 M.2 SSD on Linux.

The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) now has support for atomic mode-setting and nuclear page-flipping!..

It's been one year since Frictional Games launched SOMA as their latest science fiction survival horror game. The game is supported on Windows, OS X, Linux, and PlayStation 4. This game saw close to half a million sales, but just over 1% of them were from Linux gamers...