Phoronix

In addition to being the organizer of XDC2016, Martin Peres also participated in several presentations at this week's conference in Helsinki. One of these pesentations by Martin was concerning 2D X.Org acceleration...

Besides Nouveau developers being frustrated by NVIDIA's signed firmware blobs, at XDC2016 they also made other remarks about their focus on OpenGL and performance while Vulkan support isn't expected anytime soon...

Harry Wentland of AMD just presented at the XDC2016 conference about DAL, the big Display Abstraction Layer code-base, which many AMD Linux users have been waiting to see merged in order to have Polaris audio support and this is one of the stepping stones for seeing FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync and other modern display capabilities...

Feral Interactive will be releasing three new Linux games next week...

Earlier this month LunarG published up-to-date Vulkan Sample Tutorials for those wanting to learn more about using this high-performance Khronos graphics API...

The AMDGPU DRM code for Linux 4.9 is already queued in DRM-Next with virtual display support and other features as well as experimental GCN Southern Islands support while today another feature pull request was submitted to DRM-Next with more Radeon/AMDGPU changes...

Intel Open-Source Technology Center developer Jason Ekstrand presented earlier today at XDC2016 with a presentation entitled "The Anatomy of a Vulkan Driver" where he covers how he and fellow Intel developers brought up the first open-source Vulkan driver and had it ready for launch-day when Khronos formally unveiled the specification earlier this year...

Last week marked the ratification of the first cross-vendor SPIR-V extension, the Khronos intermediate representation used by Vulkan and OpenCL 2.1+...

The latest stable release of the Nouveau X.Org driver is now available for users of this open-source NVIDIA DDX component in conjunction with the Nouveau DRM kernel driver...

While still in its early stages, there's a port in the works of the GNU Compiler Collection for AMD's GCN (Graphics Core Next) instruction set architecture...

The X.Org Foundation Board of Directors held their annual in-face meeting today at XDC2016 in Helsinki, Finland. At this meeting they have decided to accept Google's invitation to host XDC2017 at the Googleplex...

Intel Open-Source Technology Center developer Kevin Rogovin just finished presenting at this year's XDC2016 conference in Helsinki. Rogovin presented on the promising 01.org project FastUIDraw...

The second beta of the upcoming openSUSE 42.2 Linux distribution is now available. One notable change is that 42.2 has switched to the KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS beta...

At the GNU Tools Cauldron that took place earlier this month in Hebden Bridge, UK was the annual status update of the GDB debugger...

The Lenovo N21 Chromebook is now supported by mainline Coreboot. But then again that's not a huge surprise considering Google's focus on Chromebook/Chromebox support in Coreboot...

Yesterday saw some infrequent updates to the SDL2 library's Mir back-end for Ubuntu users...

Nouveau developers Samuel Pitoiset, Karol Herbst, Pierre Moreau, and Martin Peres presented their status update on this open-source, reverse-engineered NVIDIA Linux graphics driver during the second day of the XDC2016 conference. Nouveau developers had a few words for the NVIDIA developers in the room...

Covered so far today on Phoronix, the first day of XDC2016 Helsinki, were NVIDIA's work on Linux HDR support, how Google's Android Runtime on Chrome uses Wayland, and the NVIDIA surface allocation API debate continued as a prerequisite to seeing mainline NVIDIA Wayland support in the compositors. There were also other notable presentations today...

Intel's Mesa driver has supported all of the extensions required by the OpenGL ES 3.2 specification, but only today is the support being officially advertised...

The highly-anticipated GNOME 3.22 desktop release is now available...

While I've tested out various indoor WiFi-based security cameras over the past decade on Phoronix, outdoor WiFi cameras have been a different story. Either through my contacts from Phoronix or through my own personal searching, I've never found an outdoor WiFi security camera that I've liked either due to poor build quality, poor video quality / viewing angles, or other issues but most of the time has revolved around not being well-engineered. That has changed with the Nest Cam Outdoor that was announced earlier this year by the Google/Alphabet-owned company while this week it's finally begun shipping to consumers. I certainly like the Nest Cam Outdoor from a hardware perspective, but the software could still use some improvements.

James Jones of NVIDIA just finished taking the stage at XDC2016 where he was talking about Unix device memory allocation, which comes down to the big EGLStreams vs. GBM debate... A.k.a. NVIDIA pushing a different approach for their Wayland support from the Wayland compositors currently focusing around GBM for buffers. This debate is leading towards the development of a new API...

Google developer David Reveman presented at this morning's XDC2016 conference in Finland about the Android Runtime for Chrome making use of Wayland (ARC++) and how the rest of its graphics stack looks for running Android programs on Chrome OS...

NVIDIA supports HDR displays on Windows and Android, but not currently under Linux for the infrastructure not being in place to support High Dynamic Range displays from the Linux desktop. NVIDIA though is looking at working towards ultimately supporting HDR displays on Linux...

For those craving some fresh Mesa Git benchmarks, here are a few OpenGL tests I carried out with some AMD Radeon GPUs when comparing the out-of-the-box Ubuntu 16.04 LTS performance to what's offered currently by Linux 4.8 and Mesa 12.1-dev Git...

Lately I've heard a few reports of some newer PCs being less than friendly with Linux, namely a number of Lenovo devices who have issues with installing Linux. Based upon new information that's come to light from a Phoronix reader, it appears that PCs receiving Microsoft's "Signature Edition" tag are being locked-out from running non-Windows platforms...

APT 1.3 is now available as the newest version of this Debian command-line package manager...

Version 1.5.1 of the libjpeg-turbo library is now available. For those that have somehow managed to never hear of it, libjpeg-turbo is a BSD-licensed, faster JPEG image codec than libjpeg and has various other feature differences...

While it's coming a few days later than anticipated, Wayland 1.12 along with the adjoining Weston 1.12 compositor update is now officially available...

For users of Apache's CouchDB document-oriented NoSQL database system, version 2.0 was announced today...

If all goes well, GNOME 3.22 will be officially released tomorrow, 21 September. Here is a recap of some of the new features and improvements made over this past six month development cycle plus some screenshots of the near-final desktop that will power the upcoming Fedora 25 Workstation.

Those wishing to use Coreboot on a modern Intel system (albeit with the closed-source FSP) will soon have another option to consider with an open-source, physically secure computer powered by a Skylake-Y SoC moving ahead with a port to Coreboot...

The various components of the GNOME2 desktop forked MATE code were checked in as version 1.16 today in preparation for announcing this next release...

XDC2016 begins tomorrow in Helsinki, Finland as the annual X.Org / Wayland / Mesa conference. For those not able to enjoy the event in person, a livestream is planned...

Besides Mozilla Firefox 49 being available, so is the latest stable update to the Opera browser powered by Chromium's Blink engine...

Following the Unigine 2.3.1 engine update I was able to get confirmation from Unigine Corp they do have a new technology demo / benchmark coming out!..

While being delayed one week due to last-minute bugs, Firefox 49.0 is now available this morning...

It's been a while since last having anything to talk about with regard to Bcachefs as a file-system aiming for speed while having ZFS/Btrfs-like capabilities and being spun out of the Bcache caching code. This file-system now has tentative patches for complete encryption support...

Android developers announced the release today of the Android Studio 2.2 integrated development environment with many changes...

Version 1.0 of GNOME's GUPnP has been released after about a decade in development along with the associated GSSDP project...

Unigine Engine developers have announced the latest version of their advanced multi-platform game engine and virtual reality system...

The first release candidate of the X.Org Server 1.19 is now available along with some last-minute API/ABI breaks...

The past few weeks I've been testing out the MSI X99A Workstation motherboard courtesy of MSI Computer and it's been working out very well across a spectrum of open-source Linux (as well as BSD) use-cases for those in need of a LGA-2011 v3 motherboard.

Wine-Staging 1.9.19 was released this weekend as the latest experimental patch-set atop of the newest bi-weekly Wine release...

Eric Anholt has been working at Broadcom for more than two years to develop the "VC4" open-source Linux graphics driver stack consisting of the DRM/KMS kernel driver and VC4 Gallium3D driver in user-space. While there's been 2+ years of work and tons of progress made, it's still not feature-complete compared to the older proprietary driver and as an interim solution Eric has hacked up a firmware-based KMS path...

Coreboot has mainlined a months-old patch to make the Ada programming language "a first class citizen" in this low-level open-source project...

It's been a while since last talking about the discussions among LLVM developers about re-licensing the project. The re-licensing is moving forward and they are settling on the Apache 2.0 license plus explicitly stating compatibility with GPLv2...

Qt developer Laszlo Agocs has written a thorough walkthrough for the official Qt blog about the different Qt graphics options with multiple displays on embedded Linux...

Ubuntu OTA-13 has been released this Monday morning for Ubuntu phone/tablet users...

For Linux 4.9 we already saw some Intel DRM changes in early August, a second batch of feature changes in late August for DRM-Next, and out this morning is another batch of i915 DRM driver changes being queued for the upcoming Linux 4.9 kernel merge window...