Phoronix

Besides Valve pushing out Dota 2 7.00 today, also coming out of Valve as an early Christmas present is a big update to the Steam client...

It's been a year since CentOS Linux 7 last saw a new image released but that's now changed today with putting out CentOS 7 1611 to succeed last year's 1511 images...

LLVM's LLD Linker continues making great strides and with the year coming to an end, developer Rui Ueyama has shared a status update as well as posting some performance benchmarks for the gains made by LLD this year...

Last week I posted some fresh AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 vs. Mesa 13.1-dev + Linux 4.9 Radeon OpenGL driver benchmarks including all of our usual benchmarking suspects. With some fresh requests of some of the other newer Linux games that are interesting but unfortunately don't meet our standards for test automation, here are those tests in that article of Tomb Raider, Shadow of Mordor, and Total War: WARHAMMER when using the Linux 4.9 AMDGPU driver and Mesa 13.1-dev...

Wine has long been working on its Direct3D 11 support, but it's not quite ready for major Windows games with the upcoming Wine 2.0 release. With some work that didn't make the cut for Wine 2.0, Blizzard's Overwatch game appears to be running well...

For the past number of years there's been good Linux support for Roccat devices, mostly various mice/keyboard gaming peripherals. This has done by developer Stefan Achatz working with Roccat and he's done a great job supporting their hardware but now he's stepping back from the project...

AMD/RTG is trying to better compete with NVIDIA in the AI and machine learning space with the introduction of Radeon Instinct...

GNOME developers continue work on the GTK4 tool-kit while GTK3 is still set to receive some improvements...

In addition to the scheduler changes with Turbo Boost Max 3.0 and the EFI changes for Linux 4.10, Ingo Molnar sent in his other pull requests for the code he oversees. Here is a collection of the other highlights...

Following openSUSE/SUSE spinning 64-bit Linux for the Raspberry Pi 3, Arch Linux fans now have a mainline AArch64 kernel for the Raspberry Pi 3...

Jens Axboe has been quick to submit the block changes for the Linux 4.10 kernel and there is a wide range of improvements...

Not only do Linux gamers have a huge Dota 2 update to look forward to today, but Croteam has also released an update to The Talos Principle that includes improvements to its Vulkan renderer that was previously available as beta...

The scheduler area work is another one of Ingo Molnar's interesting pull requests submitted already for Linux 4.10. Exciting us the most about the scheduler changes for this next kernel version is finally having mainline support for Intel Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0...

Ingo Molnar has sent in pull requests for the various areas of the Linux kernel he maintains with various feature updates for the just-opened Linux 4.10 merge window. Of the pull requests so far, one of them worth mentioning is the EFI updates...

Earlier today while waiting for the Linux 4.9 release, I ran some fresh gitstats on the latest Linux kernel Git tree to see the latest numbers on the kernel for those interested in some analytics...

Welcome to the year 198X-- America is in turmoil following a Soviet invasion, there’s Lava People in Mount Saint Helen, a robot protect us from communist robots, and Reagen still won the presidency...

For fans of Valve's Dota 2 online battle arena game, a huge update to the game is slated to ship in a matter of hours...

Con Kolivas has announced the release of the MuQSS CPU scheduler v0.15 with support for the Linux 4.9 kernel. MuQSS is his evolutionary successor to the BFS scheduler...

The Linux 4.9 kernel has been officially released...

A Phoronix reader pointed out to us this weekend there's been another Btrfs file-system data corruption bug discovered that dates back to around 2009...

Now that Wine 2.0 is under a feature freeze with Wine 2.0-rc1 having been released, I spent some time this Sunday looking back at the new features added during the Wine 1.9 development series...

This week Qualcomm announced they are now sampling the first 10nm 48-core ARMv8 SoC based upon their in-house "Falkor" design. With these SoCs branded as the Centriq 2400 series soon to reach partners and potential customers, Qualcomm has published some Falkor V1 patches for the Linux kernel...

Alastair Donaldson at the Imperial College London has been working on testing OpenGL shader compilers across vendors and operating systems with OpenGL shader fuzzing and has been finding some surprising -- and sometimes comical -- results. The results so far are interesting and show how some small code changes can cause big problems for some OpenGL shader compilers...

Thanks in part to last month's GNOME Core Apps Hackfest in Berlin, the GNOME Music application is being revived...

DragonFlyBSD and in particular Francois Tigeot continue to do a good job at continuing to update their Intel "i915" Direct Rendering Manager driver to catch-up with what's offered by the mainline Linux kernel with their official Intel DRM driver...

Earlier this week I published some GCC 5.4 vs. GCC 6.2 vs. GCC 7.0 SVN development benchmarks with a Core i7 6800K Broadwell-E system. For those curious how the LLVM Clang compiler stack is comparing, here are some tests on the same system when running fresh benchmarks of LLVM Clang 3.9 as well as LLVM Clang 4.0 SVN.

Announced alongside the AMD Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition driver debut on Thursday (and the AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 Linux driver) was their GPUOpen initiative introducing OCAT, the Open Capture and Analytics Tool...

With Linux 4.9 expected for release this weekend and the 4.10 merge window to then immediately open, Alex Deucher of AMD sent in an early batch of fixes atop the earlier feature material of AMDGPU/Radeon DRM changes for Linux 4.10...

While Intel's at OpenGL 4.5 compliance in Mesa with their open-source graphics driver, there remain a number of modern extensions that aren't currently mandated by an OpenGL version number, among them is ARB_transform_feedback_overflow_query...

Daniel Stone of Collabora has sent out his latest patches for wiring up atomic mode-setting support in Wayland's Weston...

While LLVM 4.0 isn't coming until its planned release in Feburary, the LLVM 3.9.1 point release is expected this coming week...

It's been a while since last hearing anything of Google's experimental Fuchsia OS but it looks like things are moving along as they are now looking to merge support for it into the GCC compiler...

The first release candidate for Wine 2.0 is now available and marks the start of the code freeze ahead of this next stable Wine release...

With the Linux 4.10 kernel merge window expected to open this weekend, I was digging around to see whether there was anything new on the BUS1 front and whether we might see it for the next kernel cycle...

Jonathan Riddell has announced the KDE Neon User LTS Edition availability. Rather than tracking the bleeding-edge KDE developments as KDE Neon traditionally does, the User LTS Edition tracks Plasma 5.8 LTS...

For those curious how the latest open-source AMDGPU+RadeonSI driver code is comparing to yesterday's AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 release, here are some fresh OpenGL Linux driver benchmarks from a few AMD graphics cards.

Released yesterday was the newest build of vkQuake, the open-source game project developing a Vulkan renderer for the original Quake game based upon the QuakeSpasm code-base...

Waking up this morning I was pleasant surprised to see that OpenBenchmarking.org has now served over 21 million test profile and test suite downloads via the Phoronix Test Suite! As of writing there have been 21,011,121 downloads!..

This week's news of Qualcomm sampling a 10nm 48-core ARMv8 SoC for servers made me wonder where are AMD's ARM SoCs -- and the long-awaited development boards -- and thus been following up with a few sources this week...

There have been some new commits to Google's Chromium code-base this week worth pointing out...

Intel developers are working on "five level paging" to overcome the x86_64 limitation of 256 TiB of virtual address space and 64 TiB of physical address space. While you may not have that much memory in your desktop, that limitation is being hit but can be increased through 5-level paging...

A nine-year-old Mesa bug has now been squashed by Marek Olšák. This Mesa bug ended up affecting the RadeonSI driver and causing stability issues, which has now been addressed and should help open-source AMD Linux gamers run titles like Team Fortress 2 and Batman Arkham: Origins (Wine)...

While AMD developers have been working to improve their "DAL" (now known as "DC") display code for the better part of the past year and this code is needed for new hardware support as well as supporting HDMI/DP audio on existing AMDGPU-enabled hardware plus other features, it's still not going to be accepted to the mainline kernel in its current form...

Google has announced the release of the Chrome 56 beta and it comes with a good amount of changes...

This morning's AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 preview included some 16.40 vs. 16.50 hybrid driver benchmarks, but for those wondering how 16.50 compares to Mesa 13.1-dev for RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan, here are some preliminary tests for the two current Vulkan AAA Linux games...

AMD ran into a snag getting out the updated proprietary hybrid Linux driver stack this morning, but it's now available for download from AMD...

Toward the end of November was a discussion that started about potentially dropping all of the FBDEV Linux kernel drivers that are currently in the staging area, but it doesn't look like that will go through, at least until the relevant hardware has seen basic DRM driver ports...

While it was disappointing that Fedora 25 shipped with Mesa 12.0, the Mesa 13.0 version has now been sent down as a stable release update...

AMD developers sent out a "request for comments" of their Display Core (DC, formerly known as DAL) code-base that they are hoping to merge soon as it's needed for the bring-up of future GPU support. It looks like they will initially merge the code just for the yet-to-be-released GPUs and will then gradually switch it on for currently supported Radeon GPUs...

The embargo has just expired on the Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition release, which had leaked out a few days ago elsewhere. While Crimson ReLive Edition is a big update for AMD Windows users, on the Linux side there's less to talk about but it's still a rather big release. I've been testing the AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 release the past two weeks and overall it's a sizable update for those using this hybrid AMD Linux driver.