Developers at Canonical working on the Mir Display Server for Ubuntu Linux have publicly confirmed for the first time they're starting to look at the Vulkan graphics API...
Earlier this year pixar released a free, non-commercial version of Renderman, their photo-realistic 3D rendering software used within the company's animated movies. Coming out now thanks to work by Pixar and the community is a Blender-to-Renderman exporter plug-in...
The in-development X.Org Server 1.18 once again breaks the video driver ABI. Rebuilding the driver for compatibility isn't much of an issue for the open-source DDX drivers or the frequently-updated NVIDIA proprietary driver, but it could spell out months of waiting for those depending on the AMD Catalyst driver and wanting to use xorg-server 1.18...
Skylake is around the corner and now after an Intel engineer added Skylake SoC support to Coreboot, that work has been extended by adding support for the first Skylake motherboards in Coreboot...
This week has been fun testing out the Braswell-powered NUC5CPYH. This NUC features the Celeron N3050 SoC and in this article are some of the first benchmarks of this new Intel design when testing under Linux.
Recently there was the news about Jolla splitting up and focusing on Sailfish OS licensing. Yesterday it's been announced that they've landed a device partner in India for expanding their presence in that booming region for mobile users...
A new release candidate came out yesterday for QEMU 2.4, the next release of this important piece to open-source Linux virtualization. With QEMU 2.4 comes several new features...
Last month I wrote about the latest Linux kernel yielding better performance for Intel Bay Trail hardware. Those gains also carry over to Intel's newest Braswell SoCs. Here are some tests with the newest Linux kernel and Mesa Git code when using the new Intel Braswell NUC with Celeron N3050.
Software in the Public Interest (SPI), the organization that represents the finances for Arch Linux, Debian, FreeDesktop.org, and other countless other free software projects, has published their annual report that offers a glimpse into the financials of these open projects...
Version 0.6 of the GStreamer VA-API plug-ins is now available. These GStreamer plug-ins expose video encode/decode for GStreamer that's backed by VA-API on supported graphics hardware/drivers...
The Intel Iris Pro Graphics 6200 (GT3e) as the fastest Broadwell GPU boasting an eDRAM cache and 48 execution units is a dream for open-source fans. Backed by a fully open-source Linux graphics driver, the Iris Pro Graphics 6200 found on the socketed Core i7 5775C is a dream come true that can compete with mid-range Radeon graphics cards on their open-source driver.
With the EXT4 file-system having been stable for years as an evolutionary upgrade to EXT3, the EXT4 module supporting mounting EXT3 file-systems, and most (all?) Linux distributions having switched to EXT4 by default, there's now patches for removing the EXT3 file-system driver from the Linux kernel...
This week I started testing Intel's new NUC5CPYH NUC as the first device with a Braswell SoC (not to be confused with Broadwell). The tests are progressing but the out-of-the-box experience hasn't been one of the best for Intel...
Over the last week security researchers have been combing through the 400-gigabyte treasure trove of documents from The Hacking Team's hacked servers. The Hacking Team is an Italian based company that specializes in de-anonymization, decryption, and other subversive technologies such as sanctioned spyware that they sell to nation states world-wide...
If you've noticed your 802.11 WiFi adapters on Linux tending to more often connect to 2.4GHz networks than 5GHz, you're not alone, but improvements for 5GHz WiFi on Linux are forthcoming...
While a lot of results are produced on LinuxBenchmarking.com of daily automated open-source/Linux tests and separately on Phoronix.com, these results do not come free but require a great deal of resources to keep going...
While there's been some stability issues / kernel panics with the high-end Core i7 5775C "Broadwell" processor on Linux, I've found out that Fedora 22 yields a much better experience than Ubuntu 15.04/15.10...
An anonymous Phoronix reader tipped us off this morning that Imagination Technologies has listed a new job opening for a Linux graphics driver developer that would also include working on portions of their yet-to-be-public open-source driver...
With the big Catalyst 15.7 Linux driver update released last week and the continued evolution of the open-source AMD Linux driver in the Linux kernel and Mesa Gallium3D, here are fresh benchmarks of six different AMD Radeon graphics cards when being tested on both the open and closed-source drivers to represent the AMD Linux gaming experience this summer.
In part due to the recent news item about an NSA researcher looking at KDBUS and then having written a mailing list parser for finding how many Intel developers work on their open-source driver, for curiosity sake, here's a look at the companies most active on the systemd mailing list...
While I'm still working on my full Intel Core i7 5775C Linux review of this socketed Broadwell processor with Iris Pro Graphics 6200, and still working through some strange issues, I do have some Steam Linux gaming figures to share tonight for those interested in how Intel's latest-generation Iris Graphics are performing with the open-source Mesa driver stack...
With Linux 4.2 there is UEFI ESRT support as a necessary prerequisite for supporting UEFI firmware upgrades / capsule upgrades. That kernel System Resource Table support is in the process of being back-ported for riding on Ubuntu 15.04's kernel...
It's been over a week now playing with the Intel Core i7 5775C on Linux and unfortunately problems persist even after buying another Intel Z97 motherboard...
The Linux 4.2 kernel that's currently under development ships many new features, but as I've been writing about for a while and tweeting, the 4.2 Git code hasn't been booting on many systems in my test lab for over one week. Various Phoronix readers have also been able to reproduce these different kernel panics that happen almost immediately into the boot process. Here's the root problem affecting Linux 4.2 on my daily Linux benchmarking systems...
If you are in the market for a new solid-state drive but aren't too concerned about speed or storage capacity but just need something very affordable to get the job done, the ADATA SP600 is available in a 64GB model for less than $40 USD.
NVIDIA is announcing today the release of a new OpenACC Toolkit for enhancing GPU computing, but sadly it's only free in the long-run for academia developers and researchers...