Phoronix

Yesterday I posted some benchmarks showing how the AMDGPU / R9 Fury performance has jumped up in the past few months just since the April release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. For those wondering how the open-source AMD OpenGL performance has evolved over the longer term, I took a Radeon R9 270X graphics card and re-did tests going back to Ubuntu 15.04 for looking at the RadeonSI Gallium3D performance for the past year and a half.

It's off to a good Friday so far in Mesa Git for open-source Radeon users...

Earlier this month David Herrmann sent out two kernel patches to hide "legacy" DRM drivers behind a new Kconfig switch and make these DRI1 drivers depend upon the kernel's "BROKEN" option. Not all are happy about these patches...

The developers within the Sunxi camp working on better Allwinner SoC support under Linux have been reverse-engineering Allwinner's "Cedar" video engine. Their project is being called Cedrus with a goal of "100% libre and open-source" video decode/encode for the relevant Cedar hardware...

David Airlie and Bas Nieuwenhuizen continue making good progress on the open-source, community-driven RADV Vulkan driver for providing Radeon Vulkan support for newer GCN GPUs in the absence of AMD making available their Linux Vulkan driver as open-source...

For those of you using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS in conjunction with the stock AMDGPU driver for open-source driver support on newer graphics cards like the Radeon R9 Fury and R9 285/380, here are some benchmarks showing out the performance you are missing out on by not upgrading your kernel or Mesa after just a few months of development...

Today -- on Linux's 25th birthday -- marks the release of Ubuntu 16.10 Beta 1 for opt-in flavors participating in this "Yakkety Yak" milestone...

Unfortunately Intel Corp hadn't sent over any Broadwell-EP hardware earlier this year when launching these new Xeon E5-2600 V5 server processors nor when it came to the high-end consumer Broadwell-E processors. However, I ended up buying a Xeon E5-2609 v4 Broadwell-EP this week for a new system and will be running a variety of upcoming tests...

Marc Merlin of Google presented at this week's LinuxCon 2016 event in Toronto how the company has -- and continues to -- contribute to open-source software...

OpenSSL 1.1.0 was released today as a major update to this free software cryptography and SSL/TLS toolkit...

Given the underlying work that's been happening in the CPUFreq/scheduler area and the introduce of the new Schedutil CPUFreq governor, I decided to run some fresh performance benchmarks of P-State and CPUFreq with the different governor options when testing from a Linux 4.8 Git kernel atop the current Fedora 25 development packages and using a Core i5 Skylake processor.

Most Phoronix readers know PC-BSD as the BSD operating system derived from FreeBSD that aims to be user-friendly on the desktop side and they've done a fairly good job at that over the years. However, the OS has been in the process of re-branding itself as TrueOS...

Just as a quick notice if you've had problems registering the past few days in the forums, etc...

It looks like some newer Intel laptops will be much happier when S3 suspended with the upcoming Linux 4.8 kernel...

The Qt Company announced the release today of Qt Creator 4.1 as the newest version of its popular, cross-platform IDE...

The second release candidate to the upcoming FreeBSD 11 is now available for testing...

25 years ago to the day Linus Torvalds announced the creation of his kernel that would become Linux...

For those running Intel Haswell processors, hope is not lost in seeing new versions of OpenGL extensions with the Intel Mesa driver. New patches will bring Haswell up to OpenGL ES 3.1...

The first pull request has been submitted of new Radeon and AMDGPU DRM driver updates to be queued in DRM-Next for landing with the Linux 4.9 kernel...

Just months after the NetworkManager 1.2, the next major installment is now available...

For more than the past year I've been very much looking forward to AMD's Opteron ARM-based development boards. Sadly, these boards -- namely the HuskyBoard and LeMaker Cello -- are silently absent...

Up until running the tests for today's article, I can't remember the last time I touched a hard drive... It's been many months ago at least. Nearly all of our tests at Phoronix are from solid state storage, but I decided to pick up a new HDD for running some Linux file-system tests on a conventional hard drive for those not having an SSD.

While the support has been steadily improving, one of the more criticized areas of KDE Plasma 5 has been around the multi-monitor support with various bugs being present. Fortunately, improvements are on the way with KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS...

In time for next month's GNOME 3.22 release, the drawing tablet support for GNOME on Wayland is getting into shape...

Earlier this month Intel submitted their first batch of i915 DRM driver updates to DRM-Next that in turn is now targeting the Linux 4.9 kernel. A second batch of new feature material was submitted today...

For those with a TITAN X or other high-end GPUs that have a configurable light-up "GeForce" LED sign along the edge of the graphics card, a new Nouveau driver allows manipulating those LEDs...

The Aubinator tool has been added to the Mesa tree for helping Intel graphics driver developers debug problems...

Razer keyboards, mice, and other peripherals are very popular with gamers. However, the company has never provided an official control UI / driver for managing their devices under Linux while various open-source projects have filled the void...

While the NVIDIA 370 Linux driver series is currently in beta, the 367 driver series has been updated as the latest long-lived branch release...

Today marks the latest monthly bug-fix release of KDE Plasma 5.7...

Ubuntu developers this week released version 0.24 of the Mir display server...

Linux 4.9 will see SW_SYNC support leaving the staging area...

Today marked the release of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided for Windows gamers and there's signs it might see a native Linux port...

I haven't run any Nouveau driver benchmarks recently for looking at the open-source NVIDIA Linux performance since there hasn't been too much progress, particularly when it comes to re-clocking of the desktop GPUs for delivering better performance. However, with all the testing I've been doing on the Radeon side with Linux 4.8 and Mesa 12.1-dev Git, I decided to do a comparison with a few NVIDIA GeForce GPUs under this latest open-source driver stack.

As we've been covering the past few kernel cycles, a lot of low-level improvements have been happening to CPUFreq with going through a redesign and more plus the introduction of a new CPUFreq governor. If you're behind on this subject matter, here's some slides from this week's LinuxCon event that covers the changes...

Broadcom's Eric Anholt has written another weekly blog post covering improvements he made over the past week to the VC4 open-source graphics driver that's known as being the driver for Raspberry Pi devices...

The first beta of GNOME 3.22 beta is now available for testing ahead of the planned official desktop release around this time next month...

Following developer preview releases through the summer, Google is today beginning to roll out Android 7.0 "Nougat" for their Nexus devices...

Google's annual Summer of Code 2016 (GSoC) is now officially over and we're starting to see the final reports issued by the many student developers involved. One of the reports worth mentioning is the Wayland project around getting Weston to start without any outputs and improved output handling...

Earlier this month Intel released an updated version of their Linux/Windows OpenCL SDK that's binary-only and subject to commercial terms...

With the news from Friday that Fedora 25 will run Wayland by default I loaded up the current Fedora 25 development packages on a test system this weekend and I used that as my primary system for all of my business/production work this weekend. It went well and included are some early gaming benchmarks of Fedora 25 Workstation GNOME on Wayland and X.Org.

Microsoft is delivering a keynote address at this week's LinuxCon event in Toronto. On their blog they also continue talking up Linux and open-source...

For those using the Wine 1.8 stable series until the Wine 2.0 release this fall/winter and not opting to use the bi-weekly Wine 1.9 development releases, Wine 1.8.4 was released today...

We haven't yet seen any official release announcement, but since yesterday a source package and AppImage binary have been out in the wild for KDE's KDevelop 5.0 integrated development environment...

With GNOME 3.19 there were plans for a GTK scenegraph and this GTK Scene Kit (GSK) was then planned for 3.20 and then most recently hoped for 3.22. But it's not happening...

GCC 6.2 is now available as the first stable update to this year's GCC 6/6.1 compiler release...

GNOME Photos 3.21.90 was released this weekend and it finally adds experimental sharing support ahead of next month's GNOME 3.22 release...

Linus Torvalds announced today the third weekly test release of the Linux 4.8 kernel, which is currently codenamed the Psychotic Stoned Sheep...

Continuing off from the fresh open-source AMDGPU test data from yesterday's AMDGPU-PRO vs. open-source Polaris + Fiji comparison, here are more AMD graphics cards tested from the Linux 4.8 development code paired with Mesa 12.1 Git...

A new driver addition coming only now to the Linux 4.8 kernel after the merge window closure is skx_edac...