Phoronix

The AMDGPU DRM driver support for Iceland (Topaz) graphics processors is now considered stable with the experimental flag set to be removed...

A Google Chromium engineer has interestingly provided patches for Qualcomm Adreno 430 display support within Freedreno's MSM DRM driver...

Landing last month in the LLVM SVN/Git code-base was the SI machine scheduler for the AMDGPU LLVM back-end. This scheduler has the potential to improve the performance for some hardware/workloads, but not by the wide margins originally reported by some early testers...

The OpenChrome driver for open-source VIA graphics on Linux isn't quite dead yet... There's a new developer wanting to step up and take over maintainership of the X.Org driver...

Following this morning's article about Russian Super-Computing Users Get Tired Of Catalyst, Start Looking At Open-Source AMD, I decided to run some fresh Radeon open-source OpenCL benchmarks on my own using the Gallium3D Clover state tracker with the HPC researchers also being curious how this very latest open-source AMD graphics stack is performing. Here are some initial results with Mesa 11.2-devel Git built against LLVM 3.9 SVN (thanks Padoka!) and using the Linux 4.5 Git kernel...

Google has released the Chrome 49 beta today for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, OS X, and Windows...

AMD this morning updated its Kaveri APU line-up and also released a new Athlon X4 processor...

With the falling prices of solid-state storage, it's becoming increasingly affordable to build a RAID array of SSDs. I have delivered many Btrfs RAID benchmarks on Phoronix over the years while today I have some fresh RAID0 and RAID1 numbers for Btrfs atop the latest Linux 4.5 development kernel when using two low-cost SSDs that retail for just around $40 USD a piece.

It's been quite a while since last having anything major to talk about with the MythTV open-source DVR software, but at least today they have put out a new point release...

Marek Olšák's latest Mesa patch series is hooking up support for the vendor-based OpenGL memory information reporting extensions to the Mesa and Gallium3D drivers...

Super-computing researchers part of the Institute of System Research for the Russian Academy of Sciences recently presented on using the open-source Radeon driver for OpenCL...

It's been more than five years since the launch of Illumos as the concerted, community-based effort around the OpenSolaris code-base. This truly-open Solaris stack continues to be at the heart of OpenIndiana, SmartOS, Dyson, and other operating systems...

The Kodi HTPC software formerly known as XBMC is -- at least temporarily -- dropping their Wayland support...

The Steam Survey has been updated with results for January 2016...

With the upcoming Linux 4.5 kernel, one of the new hardware drivers is the long-in-development Etnaviv DRM driver for providing reverse-engineered, open-source support to Vivante GPUs found in use by multiple SoC vendors...

Last week AMD launched GPUOpen and began shipping their new and open code. Today the company has published a guide for taking advantage of the Boltzmann stack with their Radeon Open Compute Kernel and Runtime...

Ubuntu developer Dimitri John Ledkov has started a public conversation about dropping the Ubuntu Desktop i386 ISOs in favor of focusing resources on the 64-bit Ubuntu desktop...

While the Linux 4.5 kernel's merge window ended more than one week ago, it looks like the AMDGPU driver may get a late feature arrival: ACP support...

Qt 5.6 is running a solid three months behind schedule while Qt developers are hoping to offset further delays in the Qt5 release train by going into a feature freeze now for Qt 5.7...

In case you haven't realized it yet, LLVM is relied upon by quite the number of software projects both open and closed. LLVM continues making new leaps and bounds not just as a traditional C/C++ compiler but in other innovative areas as well...

Since yesterday's release of Linux 4.5-rc2 there was at least one report of AMDGPU performance improvements with Linux 4.5-rc2 for an R9 Fury "Fiji" graphics card...

For more than a year we've been looking forward to VLC 3.0, but it's not quite baked yet. Once VLC 3.0 does finally ship, there are already early plans for VLC 4.0...

François Revol presented at FOSDEM this weekend about the prospects of Haiku OS ever becoming a BSD distribution. Haiku OS, the well known BeOS re-implementation, does currently rely upon some BSD components but more integration is possible...

Eduardo Lima of Igalia spoke this weekend at FOSDEM about the work done over the past year on switching the Mesa Intel i965 back-end to using the NIR intermediate representation...

With a report that Linux 4.5-rc2 manages to improve the AMD R9 Fury (Fiji) performance, I spun up a Linux 4.5-rc2 kernel this morning for easing those wanting to test the AMDGPU driver atop Ubuntu...

More Fedora 24 features were approved at Friday's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee meeting...

Running rm -rf / on any UEFI Linux distribution can potentially perma-brick your system...

Jono Bacon, the former Ubuntu Community Manager who is currently employed by GitHub, has proposed a hypothetical new open-source project that effectively comes down to bringing the Linux user-space -- complete with the GNOME Shell -- over to Mac OS X...

With Linux 4.5-rc2 that was released last night, the new AMDGPU DRM driver is supposedly much faster compared to last week's 4.5-rc1 kernel...

Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 4.5-rc2 this weekend as was expected as the next weekly test version of this new kernel...

Well, January was off to a good start for 2016 with a ton of open-source / Linux announcements whether you fancy Linux gaming, distribution performance, graphics drivers, or kernel subsystem topics. Here's a look at what was most interesting to readers so far this year...

Not only was a new beta of digiKam 5.0 released today for ending out January, but KDevelop 5.0 Beta 2 has shipped as the first update to KDevelop 5 in several months...

Whew, tons of Linux graphics benchmarks this weekend, in large part for getting more eyes looking at the new OpenBenchmarking.org web interface that's now in beta so feedback can be received and get it all tuned up for the official release in February. The latest of these benchmarks this weekend is comparing the out-of-the-box Ubuntu 15.10 performance against the speed when upgrading the Linux kernel and Mesa for the AMD R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers...

The Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D driver is very close to OpenGL 4.2 compliance as I wrote about this weekend and there's been other Gallium/NVC0 GL4 extension progress this weekend. The weekend is not over yet and Ilia Mirkin has already published another patch series.....

Two weeks back I wrote about Brainstorming Further Cooling Improvements To The Linux Benchmarking Room with the idea of replacing the vinyl floor tiles and underlayment and using porcelain tiles directly on the concrete slab for helping to absorb some of the heat during the coming summer months. That project is moving forward...

The port of the digiKam digital camera software to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5 is nearing its stable release...

A few days back I showed the Radeon vs. AMDGPU vs. Catalyst kernel driver potential when testing on the R9 290 "Hawaii" graphics card that has experimental and disabled-by-default support for the new AMDGPU kernel driver primarily designed for AMD GCN 1.2 GPUs and newer. Those results were interesting and showed some areas where AMDGPU came out faster than Radeon, so I decided to run experimental tests on another GCN 1.1 Sea Islands GPU that can be made to work with this kernel driver...

Jason Ekstrand of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center had a main track presentation on Saturday at FOSDEM about Vulkan...

The latest batch of open-source Linux benchmarks to share this weekend are doing some P-State and CPUFreq scaling driver benchmarks and also trying each driver's different CPU scaling governor options when using the AMD Radeon R9 285 graphics card on the AMDGPU kernel driver of Linux 4.5...

Prolific Mesa contributor Ilia Mirkin has published a set of patches for hooking in shader image support within the Mesa state tracker, an important step particularly for OpenCL use-cases...

One year ago was a status update on GNU Hurd where it was mentioned that GNU Hurd lacks 64-bit, audio, and USB support among other features for this micro-kernel free software project alternative to the Linux kernel. Sound support for Hurd is now in the works, but other features remain missing...

While the Nouveau NVC0 and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers were tied for a while in terms of their OpenGL 4 extension coverage, the NVC0 driver for NVIDIA Fermi GPUs and newer has advanced further with two more extensions -- one for OpenGL 4.2 and the other for OpenGL 4.3 -- now being supported by this open-source, reverse-engineered driver...

When it comes to OpenGL 4 support on the AMD R600 Gallium3D driver for pre-GCN graphics cards, currently the only R600g-supported cards advertising OpenGL 4.1 right now are the Radeon HD 5800 "Cypress" and Radeon HD 6900 "Cayman" series. Here are some tests done with OpenGL 4.1 on a Radeon HD 5830 compared to Cayman and various GPUs with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

With ZFS file-system support continuing to spread via OpenZFS, you may be one of the many out there still wondering about the benefits of ZFS...

This morning was news about Libreboot supporting another AMD server motherboard. Another motherboard -- this time an Intel board -- was added today since then to this Coreboot downstream that initializes the hardware without any proprietary firmware/microcode...

Hans de Goede of Red Hat and Pierre Moreau, an independent Nouveau contributor, are speaking at FOSDEM's graphics development room tomorrow about compute support for Nouveau...

Here are some thermal test results when switching from some Intel and AMD water coolers over to $20 Arctic Cooling heatsinks in the test lab...

This week I've already delivered a number of AMDGPU/Radeon benchmarks from the in-development Linux 4.5 kernel now that there's AMDGPU PowerPlay and other improvements. With the week not being over, here are some more AMD Radeon graphics card benchmarks from Linux 4.5 while also using Mesa 11.2-devel Git with LLVM SVN...

Debian is still working to add a ZFS kernel module to the Debian GNU/Linux repository...

Following the news yesterday that KDE is incubating a new "KDE Neon" project, it's now been launched from FOSDEM this weekend in Brussels, Belgium...