Phoronix

Here are some of my earliest Linux 4.6 kernel benchmarks out there from a few different subsystems with the tests happening from a Xeon E5 Haswell system with AMD Radeon graphics...

With Q1'16 quickly coming to a close, I ran some Git statistics on the Mesa repository this morning to see how things are ticking so far in 2016...

Last month Google engineers posted patches to LLVM for "Lanai", an in-house (apparently network/communications oriented) processor as they were looking to upstream the code. This raised some concerns over Google looking to upstream the code when those outside of the search giant can't even benefit from the code due to the hardware not being public and other concerns, but nevertheless, the code was merged today...

With the in-development Linux 4.6 kernel there is the long-awaited NVIDIA GeForce GTX 900 series accelerated support atop the open-source Nouveau driver. While it requires using NVIDIA's signed binary blobs for the firmware, the support is now working. Here are some benchmarks on several different GTX 900 Maxwell graphics cards comparing the open-source driver performance to what's offered by NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver.

Gzip 1.7 was released this morning with two new features...

A new working group is being formed that's focused on making Fedora more modular and to define a base module from which new derivatives of Fedora can be constructed...

While exploring the community game engines/projects making use of Vulkan over Easter, I also encountered another fun project: Vulkano...

Here are some tests of Fedora 23, Fedora 23 with all available stable release updates that currently takes it to Linux 4.4 and Mesa 11.1, along with enabling the Fedora Rawhide Nodebug repository where an early Git snapshot of Linux 4.6 is present...

SystemTap, a DTrace-like means of dynamically profiling Linux with a scripting language and tool, is out with version 3.0...

One month after announcing the Bq Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Tablet, the device is now available for pre-ordering...

Here's the first Skylake motherboard to have failed on me after just four months of daily benchmarking...

Recently when writing about the tiling work and other changes being done in the "basement server room", a Phoronix reader asked how I do so without being concerned of the basement flooding and destroying the 60+ computers...

For anyone running applications or games still relying upon the GL_ATI_fragment_shader extension, this old OpenGL extension is now supported by all Gallium3D drivers...

While Vulkan is still very young, many developers have already taken a stab at starting their own, community-based game engines using a Vulkan renderer...

It's looking incredibly likely that ownCloud, the popular open-source project for easily setting up your own private cloud for file storage, will not be available as Debian packages with next year's 9.0 Stretch release...

ReactOS, the open-source operating system aiming for binary compatibility with Windows drivers and programs, is adding ReiserFS support...

With GNOME 3.20 having been released this week, developers working on the desktop stack have already firmed up their release schedule for the next six-month update, GNOME 3.22...

Mesa's Gallium3D drivers are stepping closer to supporting the NIR intermediate representation as a tier-one IR...

Linus Torvalds ended up tagging the Linux 4.6-rc1 kernel on Saturday night rather than opting for Sunday. While we tend to get excited about every major update to the Linux kernel, Linux 4.6 is coming in particularly heavy with new functionality and notable improvements to existing features. Linux 4.6 is arguably looking like the most exciting release in a few kernel cycles.

Linus Torvalds announced an early release of the Linux 4.6 kernel ahead of Easter...

A new file-system has been merged for the Linux 4.6 kernel...

It's been a while since last having anything to report on the Mandrake/Mandriva-derived Mageia Linux distribution while this weekend they finally managed to put together their first development release of Mageia 6...

As an alternative to the Raspberry Pi 3 for a low-cost 64-bit ARM (AArch64) development board is the PINE 64, which was successfully Kickstarted as a "$15 64-bit single board super computer" that generated more than 1.7 million dollars. The PINE 64 is still shipping out in limited quantities for now, but the folks behind this project were kind enough to send over a sample of their PINE 64 1GB SBC for some benchmarking.

Patches are out for yet another OpenGL 4 extension that may soon be supported by the Gallium3D drivers as another item to mark off the list for OpenGL 4.3...

With KDBUS having faced a large uphill battle in its attempt to be mainlined in the Linux kernel, systemd developers continue working on the new BUS1 project as a new, in-kernel IPC mechanism for Linux...

Mesa 11.2 was supposed to be released in early March but that milestone has yet to be reached...

Earlier this month was the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. While there were the Khronos session recordings available shortly thereafter -- including the Vulkan talks -- they were of low quality. Fortunately, the higher-quality recordings are now available...

OpenSWR, the new high performance software rasterizer developed by Intel and leveraging LLVM within Mesa, saw a slew of commits today...

At the end of February I posted my initial hands-on with the passively-cooled Airtop PC that's been exciting many readers over its unique design and being Linux-friendly. As I hadn't written anymore about it in the past few weeks, some Phoronix readers had emailed me and tweeted, curious what the deal was and if it wasn't living up to expectations. That's not the case at all and the Airtop PC continues to exhibit great potential and is yet another solid offering from CompuLab.

While AMD just open-sourced their next-gen Polaris graphics driver code this week, changes have already landed in LLVM and this morning the Mesa/Gallium3D modifications necessary have landed in mainline Mesa...

Last week was the big ACPI and power management updates for Linux 4.6 that included a redesign of CPUFreq and P-State to support callbacks invoked by the kernel's scheduler. A few more feature changes have now been queued up for pulling of the ACPI+PM work for Linux 4.6...

At the start of the merge window there was a proposal to land an in-kernel debugger with full x86/x86_64 disassembler support even though KDB/KGDB exists already. We're nearing the end of the merge window and Linus Torvalds so far has decided not to pull this MDB debugger as other kernel developers are also objecting...

While we continue to wait on the release of VLC 3, some improvements for the media player's support of Google's Chromecast devices have landed...

Con Kolivas has released his new version of the BFS scheduler for the Linux kernel...

The final beta was pushed out this morning for the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS "Xenial Xerus" release...

While the Linux 4.6 kernel is enabling FBC and PSR by default in the Intel graphics driver, it's only for select generations of Intel hardware for these power-saving Frame-Buffer Compression and Panel Self Refresh features. With Intel Skylake, FBC support remains a work in progress...

The DragonFlyBSD operating system with its AMD Radeon graphics driver ported from the Linux DRM/KMS code is up to a state equivalent to where it was in the Linux 3.18 kernel...

Following this week's AMD vs. NVIDIA Linux OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks, you may be wondering about the performance of OpenCL GPGPU performance particularly around AMD's new hybrid Linux driver stack. So for your viewing pleasure today are some OpenCL benchmarks on AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce hardware using the newest drivers.

While it comes down to a mundane commit, the AMD Polaris next-generation graphics processor support was already added to LLVM for the Radeon driver's back-end...

The thermal updates were submitted today for the Linux 4.6 kernel merge window and there's a very important fix for at least some newer Lenovo laptops. The fix should end up getting backported to current stable series, but if you have a Lenovo laptop and have been seeing slower performance on recent Linux kernel versions, you'll want to upgrade...

Along with open-sourcing the next-gen Polaris GPU driver code yesterday, Alex Deucher of AMD laid out their plans for aiming to get the DAL display code into the Linux 4.7 kernel...

Timed for this week's GNOME 3.20 release, GStreamer 1.8 was officially released this morning...

With companies like Google and Facebook having developed keystroke fingerprinting technology to identify users based upon how long they press keys on the keyboard and the time between key presses, this poses new challenges for those wanting to stay completely anonymous on the Internet. A developer is trying to come up with a solution down to the display server or kernel level...

Red Hat's Adam Jackson has taken to working on X.Org Server patches for supporting GLVND within a GLX world (rather than just EGL) via the GLX_EXT_libglvnd extension. GLVND, of course, is NVIDIA's OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library...

The KDE community today released KDE Applications 16.04 Beta with this next spin of the KDE application set now under a feature freeze ahead of next month's release...

It took a year, but the Fedora Project has announced that it has now found a Diversity Advisor to sit on the Fedora Council...

There are already many new features for the Linux 4.6 kernel but with the two week merge window not being over yet, new pull requests are still trickling in. The latest pull is the x86 platform driver updates that offer improvements to various Intel-powered laptops...

Now that everything has been mainlined concerning the GeForce GTX 900 "Maxwell" support in the open-source Nouveau driver, it's relatively easy getting the hardware acceleration with OpenGL support running on this community-based, reverse-engineered Linux graphics driver...

ZFS On Linux 0.6.5.6 has been released as the newest version of this open-source file-system support for the Linux kernel...

One week after the surprise of delivering a beta of their new hybrid "PRO" driver stack, here's another big surprise: AMD has just published the initial open-source code for driver support with their upcoming "Polaris" graphics processors!..