Phoronix

NVIDIA has been pushing for a new Unix Device Memory Allocator API as an alternative to GBM, which could be used by Wayland compositors instead and would be a superior API that NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver would be willing to support...

While not yet merged into the mainline Linux kernel and so far not seen as favorable by upstream DRM kernel veterans, Samsung developers have been working on a picture processing API for the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM). At this week's LinuxCon Europe, they are presenting their API proposal...

The libvirt Linux virtualization API has been updated to version 2.3 today with some new features and plenty of bug fixes...

Published earlier today was AMDGPU vs. Radeon DRM benchmarks on DRM-Next for GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics cards that have experimental support available via Kconfig switches to enable this alternative open-source DRM driver over the long-standing Radeon driver. Here are some fresh Git benchmarks using the R9 290 "Hawaii" GPU that's been in a regressed state on the default Radeon driver...

Fedora 24 users are advised against currently updating your system using the common dnf update command when running GNOME, KDE, or any other graphical desktop. Due to an awkward bug being explored, it could leave your system in an unhappy state...

The GNOME 3.24 release schedule has been firmed up and is now publicized...

LXQt developers have done a desktop memory consumption comparison to show that Qt programs are not necessarily bloated...

Back in 2013 we heard how X.Org security is worse than it looks and how for a period there were many X.Org security issues. It's been a while since last seeing a number of X.Org security vulnerabilities come about at once, but that's changed with this morning's disclosure...

With the forthcoming Linux 4.9 kernel there is experimental AMDGPU Southern Islands support so that original AMD GCN 1.0 GPUs can optionally work with the newer AMDGPU DRM driver rather than the mature Radeon DRM driver. In this article are tests of some AMD graphics cards from GCN 1.0/1.1 era comparing the performance impact of switching the Radeon/AMDGPU kernel driver with this DRM-Next code for Linux 4.9.

The Khronos Group, the organization behind OpenGL, Vulkan, and other industry standards, is expanding their footprint when it comes to new neural network initiatives...

Version 10 of the Secure Memory Allocation Framework (SMAF) is now available as a large patch-set by Linaro for addressing secure-related memory allocation on Linux...

This morning marks the release of the first Plasma 5 Long-Term Support release, Plasma 5.8...

On top of the RADV Vulkan driver being queued for the next Mesa release, it looks like some improvements to the "Nine" Direct3D 9 Gallium3D state tracker are also en route for the new Mesa version...

While there has been talk about RISC-V architecture support in the GCC compiler and for LLVM too going back months, a developer is reporting that the GCC RISC-V support is being delayed due to UC Berkeley lawyers...

James Morris has submitted the security subsystem updates for the new Linux 4.9 kernel development cycle...

Con Kolivas has rolled out the BFS scheduler v0.512 release for Linux 4.8, which may be his last "BFS" release as he's getting ready to premiere a new scheduler...

It's looking more and more like this month's Mesa 12.1/13.0 release will have the RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver included!..

The latest version of the Mesa DRM library (libdrm) is now available and it's a fairly important release...

Version 16.09 of NixOS is now available, the Linux distribution focused on being a "purely functional distribution" and built atop the Nix package manager...

Ingo Molnar was prompt as usual in submitting his various pull requests for the opening of the Linux 4.9 merge window, including the scheduler changes...

The x86/platform updates for the Linux 4.9 kernel that entered development on Sunday is bringing initial support for the Mellanox systems platform...

In the months ahead the Linux kernel should start receiving the work out of the "make-wifi-fast" initiative for improving WiFi reliability and performance...

NetBeans 8.2 was released today as the newest version of the Java-focused integrated development environment currently developed by Oracle but still pursuing to become an Apache project...

With the forthcoming Linux 4.9 kernel, x86_64 builds will support CONFIG_VMAP_STACK where kernel stacks are allocated with vmalloc_node for greater security...

Version 2.0 of the DNF package manager is now available in release candidate form as a major update to this Yum successor. Meanwhile, DNF-Plugins-Core reached version 1.0 for testing...

The EFI material is one of the early pull requests for the Linux 4.9 kernel and its bringing a new driver via EFI_TEST...

The past few kernel releases there's been a redesign of CPUFreq and P-State code for being able to make use of the kernel's scheduler utilization data by these CPU frequency scaling drivers. That work also led to the introduction of the Schedutil governor. Work along this line has continued for Linux 4.9...

Hot off the release of the official upstream Linux 4.8 kernel, the GNU Linux-libre 4.8-gnu kernel is now available as the deblobbed code that strips out support for loading non-free firmware and other references to non-free kernel support...

The Linux 4.8 kernel is now officially available...

If all goes according to plan, the Linux 4.8 kernel will be officially released this afternoon by Linus Torvalds...

Beginning next year, Mesa developers so far appear favorable to moving towards a date-based versioning concept...

While September was very exciting for Linux users, October is looking to be even more exciting with several open-source/Linux milestones expected before month's end...

We have already covered some of the interesting talks from this year's systemd conference including how to use it for application sandboxing, a new wireless daemon coming to replace wpa_supplicant, and BUS1 is on the way. But saving the best for last in another presentation to watch this weekend for those interested in systemd: Lennart Poettering's state of the union address for systemd and a look ahead to 2017 features...

The start of a new month means the ritual of looking at the latest Steam survey data. September 2016 brought a small increase to the number of Linux gamers...

This week word of Mozilla's "Project Mortar" surfaced, which aims to explore the possibility of bringing the PDFium library and Pepper API based Flash plugin into Firefox. This project is being led by various Mozilla engineers...

Wine 1.9.20 is now available as the latest bi-weekly development release of this cross-platform program to run Windows programs/games on other operating systems...

The past few months we've written a few times about the Dolphin Emulator working on a Vulkan back-end. Dolphin is an open-source project providing cross-platform emulation for Nintendo's GameCube and Wii games. That back-end has now been merged to the mainline code-base...

Another one of the interesting systemd.conf 2016 presentations in Berlin was a talk by Djalal Harouni of EndoCode for using systemd to carry out application sandboxing...

During past Khronos press briefings about OpenGL/Vulkan and in other communications, while Vulkan is the organization's big graphics API focus, it was implied during these conversations that OpenGL would continue to march to its own beat and evolve as needed. While OpenGL continues to be significantly used by cross-platform graphics application/game developers, it turns out there might not be a new official version for a long time - if ever...

Some of the exciting news this week was Unity releasing their Vulkan renderer in preview form and this initial debut did contain Linux support. There are now some unofficial Unity demos built for Linux with the Vulkan renderer enabled...

September was another busy month and here's a look at the most popular articles on Phoronix for the month of my 267 original news items and 17 featured Linux reviews/articles...

In addition to the BUS1 presentation, also exciting from the systemd.conf 2016 conference is a thorough walkthrough of a new wireless daemon for Linux being developed by Intel's Open-Source Technology Center...

BUS1 has been in development as an in-kernel IPC mechanism building off the failed KDBUS project. An "RFC" will soon be sent out to Linux kernel developers about BUS1 and the subject will be discussed at next month's Kernel Summit...

While Linux 4.9 will not officially open for development until next week, the DRM-Next code is ready to roll with all major feature work having been committed by the different open-source Direct Rendering Manager drivers. In this article is some preliminary testing of this DRM-Next code as of 29 September when testing various AMD GPUs with the Radeon and AMDGPU DRM drivers.

Purism, the startup behind the Librem laptops with a focus on free software and user privacy/freedom, still has their minds set on coming up with a GNU/Linux smartphone...

Fedora 25 should have good support for the open-source Vulkan Linux drivers (particularly if it lands the next Mesa release) while Fedora 24 users can now more easily play with the latest Mesa Git RADV and Intel ANV Vulkan drivers via a new repository...

Blender 2.78 is now officially released to end out September for this open-source, cross-platform 3D/animation program...

The final Ubuntu 16.10 Beta for "Yakkety Yak" was released this week and we found its performance doesn't differ much from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (with the exception of the newer graphics stack) while here are some results comparing it to other modern Linux distributions...

Sean Harmer of KDAB is organizing work around some upcoming "major Qt 3D features" for the open-source toolkit...

This week marks three years since Valve publicly announced Steam Machines, SteamOS, and the Steam Controller...