Phoronix

After it took NVIDIA until earlier this year to release the signed firmware for the GeForce GTX 900 "Maxwell" GPUs, I expected -- and based upon what I heard -- that it could be months before seeing the firmware for GeForce GTX 1000 "Pascal" GPUs in order to enable hardware acceleration with these latest-generation GPUs. Thus it's a huge surprise today to see NVIDIA already making public their Pascal GP100 firmware images!..

Here is a look at the performance of the Blender 3D modeling/creation software with its Cycles Engine when making use of NVIDIA's CUDA API for GPU acceleration. Tests for this initial comparison include NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1000 "Pascal" and GTX 900 "Maxwell" graphics cards.

Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 821 SoC this morning as its fastest processor to date and comes out slightly ahead of the Snapdragon 820...

KDE Plasma 5.7 was advertised as having better multi-screen support, but it turns out there's still more work to do as various problems in the open-source Linux desktop stack are leading to a less than ideal experience...

Linux input expert Peter Hutterer at Red Hat has shared an upcoming feature of libinput 1.4: mode switching support for graphics tablet (e.g. Wacom tablets) for switching through different behavior depending upon button presses...

Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 4.7-rc7 as the seventh weekly test release to Linux 4.7...

After finishing up this weekend's AMDGPU R9 Fury + RX 480 benchmarks of DRM-Next for material that will land with Linux 4.8 along with RX 480 overclocking support, tables turned to run some fresh benchmarks of the Intel DRM-Next code that will premiere in Linux 4.8...

The promising Unvanquished open-source first person shooter game has been in development for years, is powered by the Daemon Engine as a distant derivative of id Tech 3, and has shown much potential from the engine to artwork. However, the past few months have been eerily quiet...

With the Linux 4.8 kernel coming later this year one of the main end-user additions to the AMDGPU kernel driver is GPU overclocking support via OverDrive. This is the first time AMD GPU overclocking is being offered via their open-source Linux driver and so I decided to try it out with the AMD Radeon RX 480 using this experimental DRM-Next code.

Veteran X.Org/X developer Keith Packard along with well known open-source advocate Bdale Garbee have been working on an "inexpensive yet robust" USB-based hardware random number generator...

Being half-way through the year now and also given the recent Mesa 12.0 release I decided to run some Git statistics on Mesa to see how this year is panning out for its development...

It's possible to run the Unity desktop with Compiz window manager atop Windows 10...

KDE Frameworks 5.24.0 was released today as the newest version of these KDE libraries to go along with the recent release of Plasma 5.7...

With the main batch of Radeon/AMDGPU driver changes ready for DRM-Next that will in turn land for the Linux 4.8 kernel, I've begun testing this new code with various AMD GPUs. Here are my AMDGPU results when comparing Linux 4.7 Git to this code that's coming for Linux 4.8 with a Radeon R9 Fury and RX 480...

Started a few years back was Debian's Long-Term Support (LTS) project whereby releases were given five years of security support and this would also allow users to skip a release. This project, which is financed by sponsors, continues to make progress and provide for a more secure and longer-supported Debian...

BSD fans looking to do some testing this weekend can try out the beta of the upcoming FreeBSD 11.0...

While there isn't yet any 3D/hardware acceleration support, the first milestone of open-source bring-up for the latest-generation NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1000 "Pascal" graphics processors is now available for Nouveau...

Sadly, another blow to report on with regard to Intel's open-source efforts... Just days after reporting on Intel losing its chief Linux/open-source technologist, Dirk Hohndel, there's another high profile departure in the open-source world. Today marks the last day at Intel for Wayland founder Kristian Høgsberg...

Here is the latest look at the performance of Debian GNU/Linux 8.5 vs. Debian Testing on the same system for showing how the performance is looking for Debian 9 "Stretch" ahead of its release next year...

It's been a while since Microsoft-owned Skype last did a serious update to their Linux client, but it looks like that could be changing.....

Wine 1.9.14 was released today as the newest bi-weekly Wine development release for running your favorite Windows games/applications on Linux and other operating systems...

While it's coming late, the huge Mesa 12.0 release is now official! Mesa 12.0 is easily one of the biggest updates to this important open-source user-space OpenGL driver stack in quite some time and will offer much better support and features especially for Intel, Radeon, and NVIDIA open-source Linux desktop users/gamers.

Alex Deucher has submitted the main feature pull request for DRM-Next of the Radeon and AMDGPU DRM driver changes for the next kernel cycle, Linux 4.8...

DebConf 16 is wrapping up as Debian's annual conference, which this year is being held in Cape Town. For those not in South Africa, most of the session videos have been uploaded...

Java Training Wheels has become the newest GNU package...

Oracle has released the first RC development release of the upcoming VirtualBox 5.1...

It's not often we get to talk about NVIDIA developers making open-source contributions to Mesa... After all, their contributions to the Nouveau driver tend to be limited just to the Nouveau DRM/KMS kernel driver and even there seeing patches from the green giant tend to be very infrequent. The latest Mesa patches from NVIDIA aren't even tied to Nouveau but just for wiring up an EGL extension...

Version 1.10 of the Rust programming language is now available...

The nearly finished Fedora Media Writer is looking to take on a greater role with Fedora 25 in making it easier to write Fedora images out to USB sticks...

One week after the launch of the Radeon RX 480, NVIDIA is lifting the lid this morning on the GeForce GTX 1060 Pascal graphics card with pricing at $249+ USD while delivering GeForce GTX 980 class performance. I already have been testing the GeForce GTX 1060 under Ubuntu Linux, but unfortunately that embargo doesn't expire today... But here's the run-down on all of the technical details on the GTX 1060.

Timothy Arceri sent out the latest version of his Intel Mesa patches for the ARB_enhanced_layouts OpenGL extension. These patches finish up this last GL extension that's needed by this open-source Intel Linux driver before it can claim OpenGL 4.4 and then 4.5 compliance...

While we're already one week into July, Mesa 12.0 has been quietly riding well past its June release schedule...

Hans de Goede of Red Hat has been tasked with making improvements to Linux's switchable graphics support, namely for laptops with integrated and discrete GPUs...

Apple has open-sourced LZFSE, a lossless compression algorithm used by iOS 9 and newer and being added with OS X 10.11...

Another batch of AMDGPU DRM driver fixes has been sent in for landing in Linux 4.7...

Canonical developers have been working on new Snap desktop launchers for improving integration of Snap GUI packages with the converged Ubuntu desktop...

If Mozilla didn't already have their hands full with enough projects, the latest they are looking to engage in is a recommendation system to potentially upset the likes of Facebook and Google when it comes to looking for similar sites/resources...

At the end of last year was the untimely passing of Ian Murdock, the founder of Debian who went on to work for Sun Microsystems during the Project Indiana days and then was employed by Docker. Details of Ian's passing have remained quite scarce besides it being reported as a suicide following a sporadic Twitter rant just before his death. New details have now come to light...

Valve will soon be releasing a big update to their Team Fortress 2 game...

For those still leveraging VIA x86 hardware on Linux, the DRM/KMS driver hasn't been restored yet but there is a new xf86-video-openchrome DDX feature release now available...

By now you may have heard that there is the potential for the Radeon RX 480 to draw more power from the PCI-E bus than it's rated to provide. In rare situations, this could potentially cause problems for the system. AMD/RTG is preparing to release a Windows driver fix while I checked in with AMD about addressing this situation under Linux...

Well this somehow slipped under our radar last week and comes as a big surprise... Dirk Hohndel has left Intel Corp after being their chief Linux and open-source technologist the past number of years...

Debian developer Michael Biebl has presented a status update on systemd in Debian at this week's DebConf 16 event in Cape Town, South Africa...

The first milestone release of Phoronix Test Suite 6.6 "Loppa" is now available for your open-source, cross-platform benchmarking needs,..

The first beta release is now available of Qt Creator 4.1, the latest version of this Qt-focused integrated development environment...

GStreamer core, gst-plugins-base, gst-plugins-good, gst-plugins-ugly, gst-plugins-bad, gst-libav, gst-rtsp-server, gst-python, gst-editing-services, gst-validate, gstreamer-vaapi, and gst-omx now have out their first 1.9 unstable series releases...

There is a new release available of cf4ocl, the C Framework for OpenCL. This open-source project provides an object-oriented interface to the OpenCL API and offers various other features...

After two years of development, DigiKam 5.0 has been released as the digital photography management software from the KDE camp that's now been ported to Qt5...

The past few weeks I have been testing out the ASUS MG28UQ 4K display as the monitor on my main daily workstation. This ~$500 monitor has been working out well and also supports extra features like Adaptive-Sync once the open-source Linux graphics drivers catch up.

There's a new blog post concerning the state of Flatpak (formerly XDG-App) integration in the GNOME Software app/software store/center...