Phoronix

This weekend was the ambitious proposal to delay Mesa 12.0 until there's OpenGL 4.5 support in this open-source driver stack, which could tack on around an extra month to the release schedule. It's now looking like this change in release planning will not happen...

It took a while, but there's finally the start of an open-source, community-driven Raspberry Pi bootloader...

Intel's Mesa driver is now at OpenGL 4.0 compliance with the landing of ARB_gpu_shader_fp64...

As expected, Linus Torvalds has officially released the Linux 4.6 kernel...

There's traction building around delaying the next Mesa release, which is currently scheduled to be out in June and for a feature freeze in just a few days. A new proposal is to make Mesa 12.0 be the release with initial OpenGL 4.5 support...

The developers working on the FFmpeg multimedia library have finally implemented support for VA-API accelerated video encoding...

Friday was a big day for AMD's open-source team as beyond publishing experimental Southern Islands / GCN 1.0 support for AMDGPU they also published for the first time open-source OverDrive overclocking support for the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver...

The lead maintainer of GrSecurity, Brad Spengler, that is a set of patches to the Linux kernel for providing security enhancements has written an opinion piece about the Linux 4.6 kernel security...

With Linux 4.6 expected today, here's a look at some of the features we can hope to see merged over the next two weeks once the Linux 4.7 merge window opens...

The ZFS file-system upstream has offered native encryption support but unfortunately it came after ZFS was closed up by Oracle. The Illumos folks have been working on ZFS encryption while it looks like soon there will finally be encryption support available for ZFS On Linux...

Yesterday I published some Radeon DRM-Next performance tests for the Radeon DRM code queued up for the Linux 4.7 kernel merge window. Today I'm testing the DRM-Next-4.7 code for AMDGPU for looking at the performance improvements coming to this newer AMD DRM driver with the next Linux kernel cycle. The DRM-Next-4.7 performance was compared to Linux 4.6 in this article for a Tonga and Fiji graphics card.

If all goes well before the day is through will be the release of the Linux 4.6 kernel. If you've been behind on your Phoronix readings the past few weeks, here are the highlights to look forward to with Linux 4.6...

The upstream LLVM developers have been discussing possible changes about how they manage their releases in hopes of making it more optimal in working with downstream stakeholders of this widely-used, open-source compiler stack...

While the Intel i965 Mesa driver is currently at OpenGL 3.3 while waiting for the FP64 support to land for hitting OpenGL 4.2, various other OpenGL 4.3/4.4/4.5 extensions continue to move along for this open-source graphics driver...

Axel Davy who has been one of the prolific developers involved on the "Nine" Gallium3D state tracker for providing a basic Direct3D 9 implementation under Linux has sent in a set of 39 patches that he hopes to land in time for next month's Mesa release...

With the AMDGPU and Radeon changes all settled down for what's proposed for Linux 4.7, this weekend I'm benchmarking both of these open-source AMD Linux Direct Rendering Manager drivers. First up is the Radeon DRM driver with various OpenGL benchmarks in conjunction with Mesa 11.3-devel.

Samuel Pitoiset's patches take the Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D driver's support up to OpenGL 4.2 for GeForce 400/500 "Fermi" graphics cards...

Here are some extra GCC 6.1 compiler benchmarks to share this weekend, complementing the recent GCC 4.9 vs. GCC 5 vs. GCC 6 comparison and the GCC 6.1 vs. Clang 3.9 compiler comparison...

Intel's Tiago Vignatti has written a blog post about sharing CPU and GPU buffers on Linux using a new API introduced by DMA_BUF with the Linux 4.6 kernel...

Google engineers have been busy this week working on Coreboot: monsterous work at the start of the week, adding in a Qualcomm "Gale" device later in the week, and now today adding in support for another Chromebook...

The weekly updates to Vulkan show no sign of slowing down with Vulkan 1.0.13 being their Friday the 13th update...

ZFS On Linux 0.6.5.7 was released this week as the newest version of the ZFS file-system code for Linux...

Tonight AMD will be releasing their (experimental) patches for supporting GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" graphics processors under their newer AMDGPU kernel DRM driver as an alternative to the mature GCN 1.0 support found within the longstanding Radeon DRM driver...

AMD has published patches today for the AMDGPU Linux kernel DRM driver that finally make it possible to overclock the GPU when using the open-source driver...

For the past number of months GNOME developers have been working on XDG-App as their sandboxing mechanism for desktop applications built atop Linux standards. XDG-App is now no more but say hello to Flatpak...

The latest Linux distribution seeing ZFS file-system packages officially added is none other than Debian...

Similar to this week's article of looking at the OpenGL performance from the GeForce 9800GTX through GeForce GTX 980 Ti and TITAN X in preparation for Pascal Linux testing ahead, today I am doing a similar comparison while looking at the OpenCL compute performance. For thirteen NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards from Fermi to Maxwell I ran a popular OpenCL benchmark while comparing not only the raw performance but also the performance-per-Watt.

If you are fortunate enough to get your hands on one of Intel's Xeon Phi co-processors based on their Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture, it can run fairly well under Linux...

For those using Raspberry Pi's Debian-based operating system, a major update is available this Friday morning for Raspbian...

As part of the Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative, kernel developers continue working on a GCC plugin infrastructure for use by the Linux kernel with this code originally developed by the GrSecurity/PaX maintainers...

For those wanting to try out the latest Radeon and AMDGPU DRM driver code that's being queued up for Linux 4.7, here's the Radeon DRM-Next code spun into a Debian/Ubuntu kernel package for easy testing...

Here is an elegant explanation by an upstream Wayland developer about what the consensus outside of NVIDIA mostly comes down to in the EGLStreams vs. GBM debate that's been occupying Wayland stakeholders the past month...

Martin Peres, the organizer of this year's annual X.Org Developers' Conference, has issued a call for papers (CFP) for those wishing to present at this conference...

When working on the story this week about Intel Is Preparing A Major Restructuring Of Their Graphics Driver, I found out another bit of information worth relaying: a longtime contributor to the Intel Linux graphics driver stack has left the company to focus on a new venture...

It's been over one month since NVIDIA presented their proposed Weston patches for supporting Wayland with NVIDIA's Linux binary driver but the discussion over their proposed approach remains heated...

While for years developers working on FreeBSD have been porting DRM/KMS driver changes from the Linux kernel over to their kernel, they have trailed greatly behind the mainline Linux kernel driver state due to the amount of changes they have been making to the driver when re-basing it against a new Linux kernel release. Now they are pursuing a new approach of using a compatibility layer where they hope to be able to more closely follow the upstream Linux DRM/KMS drivers...

Frederic Peters announced the release today of GNOME 3.20.2 as the second and last planned point release for the GNOME 3.20 series...

For those currently running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and thinking about trying out the Padoka PPA for easily deploying the latest Mesa code on your desktop rather than using Xenial's stock Mesa 11.2, here are some fresh reference benchmarks...

The latest open-source fruits of AMD's GPUOpen project is the Compressonator...

Yet another feature landing in Mesa Git ahead of the upcoming Mesa 11.3/12.0 branching for release next month is lossless compression in the Intel Mesa DRI driver...

It's now easier having basic H.264 support on Fedora Linux with there now being an official way thanks to cooperation with Cisco...

There are new Mesa happenings in the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library (GLVND) space...

Going back six years has been work on bringing threaded input to the X.Org Server whereby the input event code would run on its own CPU thread. The work has yet to be merged in full, but Keith Packard has now revised the patches...

PostgreSQL 9.6 is now up to its beta stage with a number of new features...

The latest patches from Igalia have been published for finishing up the ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 implementation within Intel's Mesa driver, which would bring it into supporting OpenGL 4.2 (thanks to the other extensions already being completed) for the latest generations of Intel hardware...

The developers behind the QEMU open-source processor emulator have announced their v2.6.0 release...

Intel is brewing a makeover of their graphics driver stack through a large restructuring and consolidating initiative that will be formally announced in the coming weeks.

More AMDGPU DRM driver changes have been queued up for the Linux 4.7 kernel merge window that's expected to open next week...

In preparing to hopefully test the GeForce GTX 1070/1080 "Pascal" graphics cards under Linux in the days ahead, I've been re-testing my collection of available NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards going back to the GeForce 9800GTX up through the Maxwell-based GeForce GTX 980 Ti and GTX TITAN X. Besides looking at the OpenGL performance at 1080p and 4K, I've also been recording the power metrics and performance-per-Watt data.

For fans of Sid Meier, Civilization VI was announced today and there's already confirmation of Linux support...