Phoronix

Support for GPU switching on pre-retina Apple MacBook Pro laptops manufactured from 2008 through 2013 will finally be supported by the mainline Linux 4.6 kernel...

Last week we wrote about MaruOS as the project that provides an independent Debian desktop for your smartphone. Since then there has been an overwhelming response to the project and the lone developer working on this "Debian For Android" project has decided to open-source the code for accelerating the project...

Earlier this month Hardkernel announced the ODROID-C2 as a 64-bit ARM development board that would begin shipping in March. Fortunately, you don't need to wait until next month to find out how this $40 USD 64-bit ARM development board is performing: here are some benchmarks...

We weren't the only ones surprised by the massive size of the new AMDGPU DAL display driver. Weighing in at 93k lines of code, upstream Linux graphics developers outside of AMD are also stunned by the size of this code-base for handling display-related functionality with the AMDGPU driver for Tonga / Carrizo / Fiji...

Next week marks GNOME 3.20's feature freeze followed by the GNOME 3.20 (v3.19.90) beta release...

Intel engineers have begun landing support for the next-gen "Apollolake" SoC within Coreboot and support for the initial development board...

AMD's new "DAL" display driver has been posted for review as the new display component to the AMDGPU kernel DRM driver...

It's been a while since last publishing any 2D-focused benchmarks since overall the state of Linux 2D acceleration architectures like GLAMOR and Intel's SNA have become good enough that it's no longer a frequent concern by desktop users. However, as some recently have been inquiring about updated numbers, I ran some fresh Linux 2D benchmarks on different Radeon GPUs using the open-source driver stack...

Just as a friendly reminder, there is one week to go until the Vulkan Webinar that was announced a few days ago. Vulkan is the next-generation graphics API being developed by a working group at Khronos; while it is cross-platform, it's what has many Linux gamers/enthusiasts super excited for the year ahead. Sign up now to learn more about the latest Vulkan progress from this free webinar...

Our friends at PathScale are looking to hire several more engineers to work on their advanced compiler stack...

The last major systemd update was all the way back in November, which is rather strange considering their normal frequent releases, but that changed today with the release of systemd 229...

In the process of landing in the Ubuntu 16.04 "Xenial Xerus" package archive is the newly-minted Mesa 11.1.2. While a point release update for Ubuntu of Mesa isn't usually noteworthy, with this change they are also building against LLVM 3.8 to allow OpenGL 4.1 support for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

For those curious how the open-source Radeon Gallium3D driver has evolved over the past three years, I benchmarked every release from Fedora 18 through Fedora 23 on the same system while looking at the OpenGL Linux performance with an AMD Cypress GPU. Here is a look at the open-source Radeon driver performance evolution on Fedora Linux.

This week a batch of Intel DRM graphics driver updates landed in DRM-Next for in turn hitting the Linux 4.6 kernel when that merge window opens in a few weeks...

Mesa 11.1.2 was released today as the latest bug-fix point release to Mesa 11.1...

With this week's Raspbian update offering experimental OpenGL support via the open-source VC4 driver stack for the Raspberry Pi 2, I decided to try enabling this feature...

Continuing off the work yesterday about Finding The Perfect PC Components For Your Favorite Game Or Workload by the addition of test profile "showdown" pages, more improvements landed today for OpenBenchmarking.org...

Landing today in DRM-Next for eventual merging into the Linux 4.5 kernel source tree is the ARM HDLCD driver...

The release schedule for the upcoming KDE Applications 16.04 bundle has been firmed up...

It has been quite a while since last having any Wine-Staging release to talk about, but nothing has stopped and simply was due to the project not having the time for putting out release notes. Wine-Staging continues to ride off upstream Wine while adding in over one hundred experimental patches for testing.'..

With the Linux 4.5 kernel bringing PCI Express link speed changes and other alterations to the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver, here are benchmarks comparing this unofficial open-source NVIDIA Linux driver on Linux 4.4 and Linux 4.5-rc3 compared to the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver.

For those that haven't heard yet, Opera Software ASA has received a buy out offer led by a Chinese tech group for buying the browser maker for $1.2 billion USD...

A greater number of Android smartphone/tablet vendors are said to be eyeing Ubuntu Phone for new devices later this year...

While for years there has been ongoing work to build the Linux kernel with Clang, in 2015 there wasn't much progress to report and the mainline LLVM Clang compiler still can't build the mainline Linux kernel tree successfully. What's going on?..

Valve released a rather interesting Steam client beta update yesterday with a number of improvements...

The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 5.1 for Linux, Windows, and OS X...

For users of the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed distribution, there has been a major rework of YaST taking place...

Google engineers have open-sourced today a new suite of libraries and tools relating to OpenGL called ION...

The Firefox 46 web browser release will bring smoother scrolling via Asynchronous Panning and Zooming (APZ)...

The first release candidate is out for Wayland 1.10 and its reference Weston compositor...

With the latest code push today on OpenBenchmarking.org has been one of the most sought after features of making it easier to find the best graphics card for your favorite game, the optimal processor for your computational tasks, and other workloads measured via our open-source, cross-platform benchmarking software...

Patches published by Google developers today for LLVM/Clang confirm that the company has at least one in-house processor of its own...

The NVIDIA 361.28 Linux driver was released a short time ago as the newest stable release in the NVIDIA 361 driver series...

For the longest time, when bringing up Wayland a recurring question was "what about network transparency?!" Well, Samsung's Derek Foreman has today published the set of Wayland patches for providing Wayland network traparency by pushing the Wayland protocol over TCP/IP...

Coming three and a half years after the release of XCOM: Enemy Unknown (EU), and two and a half years after the release of Enemy Within (EW), Firaxis welcomes back The Commanders of the world with a bit of a slap in the face: you lost the war.

While all routine Phoronix readers should be well aware of the fact that there still isn't any open-source accelerated support for the GTX 900 "Maxwell" graphics cards yet as the Nouveau developers are blocked on waiting signed firmware from NVIDIA, the GTX 750 series does have some basic support as the original Maxwell GPUs. Here is a look at using this unofficial open-source driver on a GTX 750 with the Linux 4.5 kernel and Mesa 11.2-devel...

A new release of the Raspberry Pi's Debian-based "Raspbian" Linux distribution is now available. This release based off Debian Jessie adds in experimental support for the Pi's new open-source, OpenGL Linux graphics driver stack!..

Dell is moving forward with offering natively UEFI firmware flashing from the Linux desktop...

Well this comes as bit of a surprise... Our friends at Amazon have announced Lumberyard, a new AAA game engine they have been developing that's free and with the source code being public...

If you want to try out Wayland from a Live DVD/USB device, RebeccaBlackOS has seen a new release and ships the very latest Wayland/Weston components as well as for the high-profile software making use of Wayland...

The VC4 DRM kernel open-source driver for providing display support on Raspberry Pi devices is in the process of getting runtime power management and GPU reset capabilities...

As a quick PSA, while you may be wanting to try out DRI3 support with the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver as it is capable of enhancing the performance, so far my latest attempts have been marred by rendering issues...

Red Hat's Adam Jackson today announced the release of X.Org Server 1.18.1 as the first point release building off last year's X.Org Server 1.18 debut...

With the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA still not enabling the experimental AMDGPU PowerPlay or CIK (Sea Islands / GCN 1.1) support in their kernel builds (although they basically are both off by default at runtime), here is my spin of the newly-released Linux 4.5-rc3 kernel with these features turned on...

It has been a while since hearing much anything about HP's "The Machine" computing architecture and its associated Linux++ project, but that changed this past week...

While I'm in the middle of a big Nouveau Linux 4.4 vs. Nouveau Linux 4.5 vs. NVIDIA proprietary driver comparison with multiple NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards, I just wanted to pass along a bit of good, non-performance news about Nouveau on Linux 4.5...

The latest feature added to the popular Vim text editor is asynchronous processing...

Topi Pohjolainen of Intel posted a set of 23 patches today for providing compression of single-sampled color surfaces / lossless compression within the Intel Mesa driver for Skylake "Gen9" and newer...

As part of the GPUOpen initiative that AMD launched last month is an introduction to the Heterogeneous Compute Compiler (HCC) for writing code to take advantage of AMD's new LLVM-based compiler for offloading the work to the GPU...

In just less than two weeks The Khronos Group will be hosting a "special webinar" about Vulkan...