Beginning with Skylake and Broxton hardware, Intel began requiring firmware blobs as part of their open-source graphics driver stack. This binary firmware is continuing forward with the next-generation Kabylake processors...
With having pushed out an interesting 27-way NVIDIA Linux graphics card comparison that follows off the recent large AMD Linux graphics comparison, I decided it time to run another premium special if you'd like to show your support and help allow for future, in-depth comparisons and other Linux hardware tests...
While there's been various weird Ubuntu Tablet initiatives, it looks like next month will be the first official Ubuntu Tablet announcement that will usher in the long talked about convergence support...
While today's 0-day local privilege escalation bug is making the news rounds on the Internet, there were many other security vulnerabilities discovered within the Linux kernel last year -- many of which didn't receive as much attention and some of them are even yet to be resolved...
Sixty-three patches were published on the Mesa mailing list this morning for wiring up the ARB_internalformat_query2 extension as needed by OpenGL 4.3...
Curious how the raw OpenGL performance and power efficiency has improved going back a decade to the GeForce 8 days? In this article is a 27-way graphics card comparison testing graphics cards from each generation going from the GeForce 8 series through the GeForce GTX 900 series and ending with the $999 GeForce GTX TITAN X. If you are interested in how graphics card performance has evolved, this is a fun must-read article.
CVE-2016-0728 is being made public today: a 0-day local privilege escalation vulnerability in the Linux kernel that's been present now for over three years...
Since last month Intel has offered compute shader support via their open-source Linux graphics driver. The ARB_compute_shader support is needed for OpenGL 4.3 but so far Intel is the only Mesa/Gallium3D driver having support for this important extension...
Darkest Dungeon is a roguelike, dungeon crawler game that's been in early access for the better part of a year while its full release is set for today...
Whenever posting news items about the X.Org Foundation, it's common to routinely see a few comments about "let X.org die already!", "Wayland is the future!", and other similar remarks...
David Airlie's latest interesting Linux graphics patch series is about GLAMOR, the means of providing 2D acceleration in a hardware-independent manner over OpenGL...
AMD's Nicolai Hähnle has taken over where KDE developer Fredrik Höglund left off in working on accelerated texture uploads from Pixel Buffer Objects for Gallium3D drivers. This is a change just not for the Radeon Gallium3D drivers but for all of the drivers using the Mesa state tracker...
A request recently came in (yes, from a premium user) for doing some fresh benchmarks atop the brand new Linux 4.4 kernel while comparing the P-State and CPUFreq CPU scaling drivers and their different scaling governor options...
While Google's annual Summer of Code has been done for several months now, the KDE project published this weekend their final overview of all the progress that was made this past summer by these promising student developers...
The Pitivi open-source non-linear video editor designed around GNOME components and making use of GStreamer just landed a big feature that also relieves another blocker in nearing the Pitivi 1.0 milestone...
For providing network tracking protection and out of privacy concerns, NetworkManager 1.2 has added a feature that was first found in Apple's iOS 8 and has since been found in Windows 10 too...
NVIDIA has released new patches today for helping the open-source Nouveau driver step towards properly supporting the GeForce GTX 900 "Maxwell" graphics cards as well as better supporting Tegra...
Zlib is likely the most widely-used data compression library on open-source systems, but it's now at great risk of becoming obsoleted by more modern codecs for data compression...
Version 4.12 of Xen Orchestra is now available, the open-source project built around XenServer. The Xen Orchestra 4.12 release brings new features and is one of the few remaining before focusing on Xen Orchestra 5...
When it comes to open-source C/C++ compilers, most of the coverage these days is about new features and functionality for GCC and LLVM Clang. However, the Portable C Compiler with its history originally dating back to the 1970s continues to be in-development...
The controversial, crowd-funded Librem laptop that aimed to be fully open down to the firmware but ended up shipping with an AMI UEFI firmware for the initial release has now been ported to Coreboot for the Librem 13 model. The Coreboot support wasn't done by Purism, the company behind the Librem, but rather a Coreboot developer at Google...
For those not following me on Twitter, the past week I've been busy running a huge OpenGL performance comparison (with performance-per-Watt metrics) on basically every NVIDIA GeForce GPU I have available going back to the GeForce 6 days up through the GeForce GTX 900 series and GTX TITAN X...
We are only half-way through January yet there's been so much exciting news already for open-source and Linux enthusiasts as well as when it comes to interesting computer hardware...
We are one week into the two week merge window for the Linux 4.5 kernel. There have been multiple Phoronix articles daily about changes and new features of Linux 4.5. If you're looking at catching up on your reading this weekend, here is a look at the interesting changes that landed this week...
Come April it will be five years since the release of GNOME 3.0. The GNOME desktop has certainly evolved a lot since going back to GNOME 3.0, but what do you think of it?..
With yesterday's news about AMD planning GLVND support for their Linux driver -- which follows the NVIDIA 361 driver being the first to ship GLVND, years after NVIDIA began working on this OpenGL Vendor-Neutral Dispatch Library -- many have been wondering how Mesa fits into the equation...
Two years ago at this time all of the excitement was building up around Valve's VOGL OpenGL debugger. While the VOGL source code hasn't even been public for two years yet, there hasn't been any new public activity to report on with the debugger in over a half-year...
The other follow-up question I received an answer to on Friday from AMD's media liaison was whether the company is looking at supporting the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library (GLVND) to make it easier to install and maintain their user-space GL driver on Linux systems...
While the modifications I did to the big basement Linux server room back in December have been yielding excessive "free heat" and the heating bills this winter have been at a minimum, I've already begun thinking of ways to improve the cooling of our benchmarking basement by the time summer rolls around...
Eric Griffith, our former summer intern, is back this weekend writing about his experiences with enjoying Wasteland 2: Director's Cut on Linux. He's been gaming on the open-source drivers with Fedora 23. While he enjoys the game, some problems were encountered on Linux that he found it worthwhile writing about even though this title is already a few months old.
One month after releasing ReactOS 0.4.0 RC1, the second release candidate is now available of this next ReactOS update that continues marching towards a Windows ABI compatible operating system for applications and drivers...
Earlier today I wrote about how AMD will only be supporting Vulkan with the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver and not the more common Radeon DRM kernel driver. Here's a few more points to clarify the situation...