Phoronix

If you are interested in the X-Video output mechanism at all for video presentation under X11, thanks to a new patch it could soon be working under XWayland for maintaining legacy support...

Phoronix Test Suite 6.2 (codenamed "Gamvik") is available today as the latest version of Phoronix Media's open-source, cross-platform benchmarking software. The release of Phoronix Test Suite 6.2 is joined by a new version of OpenBenchmarking.org to facilitate greater result collaboration and analysis by the open-source communities around the world.

Less than 24 hours after NVIDIA finally posted the signed firmware images for the GTX 900 "Maxwell" GPUs, Nouveau developers have succeeded in already getting 3D games running on their open-source driver stack...

Peter Hutterer announced the release today of libinput 1.1.902 as the latest development snapshot of this input handling library becoming very common to Wayland / Mir / X11 systems...

The latest version of the Mesa DRM library (Libdrm) is now available with a number of additions...

When running Valve's Dota 2 game on Linux and using the Linux 4.5 kernel and Mesa 11.2, the performance of the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver with Radeon and AMDGPU DRM drivers is performing remarkably well compared to the proprietary AMD Linux graphics driver...

With LLVM 3.8 scheduled to be released this week, here are benchmarks of the LLVM Clang 3.8 compiler code compared to Clang 3.7 and Clang 3.6 for a variety of C/C++ performance benchmarks.

One week after the first FreeBSD 10.3 beta, FreeBSD 10.3 Beta 2 is now available with more fixes...

The VirGL Virtual OpenGL Renderer -- a.k.a. Virglrenderer -- is growing up and getting ready for primetime...

While Clang has long been talked about as producing better warnings/errors and diagnostics than the GNU Compiler Collection, the GCC developers have been ramping up their error/warning reporting to be more helpful to developers in debugging compile-time issues. GCC 5 had brought a number of improvements on this front while GCC 6 will be even more helpful...

Over the weekend a number of readers reported that they haven't been able to see any of the benchmark graphs shown within our numerous Linux performance articles. This is due to an issue outside of our control and related to your browser plugins...

FFmpeg 3.0 is now available for your open-source multimedia needs...

As the start to a beautiful week, after about a year and a half, NVIDIA has finally released the signed firmware images and support code for enabling the GeForce GTX 900 "Maxwell" series under the open-source NVIDIA driver...

With a new developer stepping up to the plate, it's looking like the OpenChrome DDX driver will see its first release in more than two and a half years...

Linus Torvalds has announced the release today of the Linux 4.5-rc4 kernel...

If you are a Linux gamer and not using the open-source Radeon driver with an AMD GPU, chances are your Linux gaming system is running a GeForce graphics card with the proprietary NVIDIA driver. So with yesterday's latest Dota 2 benchmarks with the R600g and RadeonSI drivers, this morning I finished up some complementary Dota 2 OpenGL comparison with the NVIDIA 361.28 proprietary driver with an assortment of Kepler and Maxwell GeForce graphics cards...

As a lot of people have been interested in the routine, casual weekend updates to the evolution of the turning a basement into a Linux benchmarking server room, here's the latest...

To complement the xf86-video-ati vs. xf86-video-modesetting benchmarks from quite a while ago, here are some tests of the 3D performance in seeing any performance differences between the xf86-video-amdgpu DDX for the GCN 1.2 GPUs versus using the generic xf86-video-modesetting driver...

For those interested in the Talos Workstation libre system, the preliminary specifications have been revised...

This morning I posted some Ubuntu 14.04 vs. 16.04 LTS Radeon graphics benchmarks while if open-source AMD graphics driver evolution doesn't get you excited, in this article are results from other non-graphics benchmarks in comparing the Ubuntu 14.04 vs. 16.04 performance for these long-term support releases in their current form...

It's been another exciting weekend of Mesa development activity by the independent developers working on the Nouveau driver for open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics support...

While NVIDIA has long supported G-SYNC on Linux as their adaptive sync technology for eliminating screen tearing, AMD hasn't supported their FreeSync tech via their open or closed-source Linux drivers. Fortunately, it's looking like that will change...

With now having a workaround for Dota 2 for my benchmarking needs, here are some benchmarks finally of this popular multiplayer online battle arena under Linux when using the R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers with the latest Linux 4.5 and Mesa 11.2 components...

Samuel Pitoiset began pushing his Gallium3D Mesa state tracker changes this morning for supporting compute shaders via the GL_ARB_compute_shader extension...

Here are some fresh comparison benchmarks on Linux 4.5 and Mesa 11.2 when comparing the Radeon and Nouveau (NVIDIA) open-source Linux driver performance.

While FFmpeg has offered hardware-accelerated HEVC decoding using NVIDIA's VDPAU API since last summer, this support for the FFmpeg-forked libav landed just today...

While not yet as versatile as say Google Maps, GNOME Maps for GNOME 3.20. is looking to be a nice upgrade...

With Valentine's Day this weekend, it's a great time to consider showing your support of Phoronix with all of the work invested daily for our timely open-source news, Linux hardware reviews, open-source benchmarking, and much more. As my appreciation for the community, I'm running a Valentine's Day special as well as working on some special content for the days ahead...

While the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver stack is capable of running The Talos Principle puzzle game by Croteam, the performance is rather poor and there are some bugs...

As some complementary data to this week's Radeon Gallium3D OpenGL Performance From Fedora 18 To Fedora 23 and the earlier Ubuntu 6.06 LTS to 16.04 LTS benchmarks is a look at the Ubuntu 14.04 vs. 16.04 (in its current development state) performance with an AMD FirePro graphics card...

Apologies for the brief downtime this evening of the forums with upgrading to the latest major release of the forum software...

While first person shooter games tend to dominate the Linux gaming landscape, if you are curious about some numbers for a puzzle video game like Talos Principle, here are some fresh benchmark results for a slew of different GeForce graphics cards on the latest Linux driver...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) approved another round of features/changes for Fedora 24 at their weekly meeting...

Developer Pavlo Rudyi has written a blog post about his experiences with the different desktop environments currently supporting Wayland. The results aren't a big surprise, but nevertheless it's great to see the continued interest in Wayland and the ongoing work by many different parties in ensuring Wayland will be able to dominate the Linux desktop...

NVIDIA has continued their recent trend of blog posts about the next-generation, yet-to-be-released Vulkan graphics API...

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...