Phoronix

Since last year the NVIDIA Linux binary graphics driver has exposed the NVENC API for GPU-based video encode support. FFmpeg has supported NVENC for offloading the encode job to newer NVIDIA graphics processors and now they've extended that code to support H.265 encoding on the GPU...

More of Direct State Access from OpenGL 4.5 is now working within mainline Mesa!..

With this month's release of the Catalyst 15.3 Beta for Windows, FreeSync Technology support was added. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like any Linux support is imminent...

Following last week's QEMU 2.3-rc0 release, out today is 2.3-RC1 with over 100 changes in the past few days...

Red Hat has published a new KMS driver for the VirtIO GPU used within their Linux virtualization stack...

Announced today on the Linux kernel mailing list was the Library Operating System (LibOS) for Linux...

Last week BioShock: Infinite was finally released for Steam on Linux. Following the premiere of that game for Linux, posted were the AMD Catalyst Linux results for this game followed by a preview of the AMD vs. NVIDIA graphics card results. For those curious about the performance of this game for a broader graphics card selection, here's the BioShock: Infinite results from eighteen different graphics cards while running this new Linux game.

For making its desktop more accessible to users, GNOME 3.16 has improvements when it comes to its high contrast theme with the shell and toolkit both having received accessibility improvements this cycle...

Phoronix Test Suite 5.6 was released today as the quarterly update to Phoronix Media's open-source, cross-platform benchmarking and automated testing software.

A change made to systemd yesterday is working on the stateless Linux systems feature...

Version 5.6 of the Phoronix Test Suite is being released this morning...

The Epiphany open-source web-browser has benefited from a number of changes ahead of tomorrow's GNOME 3.16 release...

Pixar has made a free, non-commercial version of its RenderMan software available to the public...

Libinput 0.13 was released today as one of the final steps before Libinput 1.0...

The final v3.16.0 releases of the GNOME Shell and Mutter window manager are available this Monday afternoon...

Martin Gräßlin has shared some of his recently-landed work for the KWin 5.3 development cycle as it largely pertains to Wayland...

The BPF In-Kernel Virtual Machine will likely see new functionality with the next Linux kernel release cycle, Linux 4.1...

The Linux 4.1 kernel will feature support for Radeon DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport so that this open-source AMD Linux graphics driver can work with the latest high resolution DP displays and modern laptop docking stations...

Another GNOME 3.16 package christened this morning for Wednesday's release is WebKitGTK+ 2.8.0...

The X.Org Foundation elections have finally got underway after being delayed to vote on new directors as well as having the X.Org members decide whether the foundation should dissolve its 501(c)3 status and become a sub-project of the SPI Inc...

It's GNOME 3.16 week! Matthias Clasen checked in the important GTK+ 3.16.0 package prior to the deadline tonight...

GNU Nano 2.4.0 was released this morning as the first stable update to this open-source CLI text editor in a number of years...

Linus Torvalds released the weekly release candidate to the Linux 4.0 kernel last night...

Version 1.5 of the open-source, cross-platform Red Eclipse first person shooter was released this weekend. Red Eclipse, which in turn is based on the Cube Engien 2, has seen some significant updates with this being the first major update in about two years...

Following Friday's release of Wine 1.7.39, Wine-Staging 1.7.39 was released this Sunday with hundreds of extra patches on top of Wine...

A new Apple Mac Mini happened to arrive at Phoronix that sports Intel Iris Graphics. It's now time to start benchmarking this Apple system with Intel Core i5 processor and run some comparative tests against Linux...

A patch published on Sunday for the new AMDKFD HSA kernel driver adds support for using more than one graphics card/driver...

With the recent BioShock Infinite Linux benchmark results and the big Metro Redux graphics card comparison on Linux, a fair number of Linux gamers have been bringing it up in the forums with their hypothesis that NVIDIA's Linux gaming performance wins is due to their driver supporting OpenGL threaded optimizations. Well, that's not always the case, as shown in this article with a __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS comparison in many Linux games with different GeForce hardware.

For those thinking about potentially running a Linux system with a combination of SSD and HDD so that the solid-state drive would be able to act as a performance cache for commonly used data, BCache and LVM-cache/dmcache are two of the commonly used solutions...

AMD issued two job postings this past week for hiring more open-source Linux graphics driver developers...

The 2015 X.Org Elections are finally getting started tomorrow after being delayed and running close on time for responding to SPI's resolution. Just in time for the elections to start, the revised foundation by-laws have been published that shift the focus of what the X.Org Foundation is about...

While in the process of benchmarking BioShock Infinite on Linux with AMD and NVIDIA hardware given the Linux release of the title this week, I also took this opportunity to run a 22-way graphics card comparison of Metro Last Light Redux and Metro 2033 Redux on the latest AMD and NVIDIA graphics drivers atop Ubuntu 15.04. Here's those results.

While Google Chromebooks up to this point have tended to be ARM-based along with some using low-power Atom x86 SoCs, it appears Imagination Technologies is working towards some MIPS design wins for these Internet-focused devices. Imagination has been working on MIPS improvements within Coreboot as a ChromeOS partner...

Timothy Arceri has moved on to working towards finishing up work on the ARB_arrays_of_arrays extension as needed by OpenGL 4.3...

Mozilla announced the updated release this week of their NSS (Network Security Services) libraries...

Linux users are getting frightened after yesterday's news of SecureBoot on Windows 10 potentially not being disable-able...

Allwinner has yet to clarify their license position on their media codec code or fully open up their encode/decode library for that matter when it's fairly clear they're violating the GPL and recently they've been trying to cover it up by obfuscating their binaries...

The HDMI CEC (Consumer Electronics Control) framework for the Linux kernel has been revived after being stalled in development for quite some time...

For student developers wishing to get involved with upstream open-source projects this summer and to be paid $5500 USD by Google for the work, there's one week left to apply to participate in this year's Google Summer of Code. Here's some of the most exciting project ideas I've seen thus far...

While this winter brought many exciting milestones for Linux and open-source fans, there's also some milestones/features hoped for this winter that haven't yet come to fruition...

It's been over three years since the last major Open64 compiler update and development of Open64 seems more or less over. This open-source compiler with a long history vanished from the web this week and some question whether its website will even return...

With winter now officially over in the Northern Hemisphere, here's a look back at the most popular Linux news and milestones for this past winter...

This week's release of BioShock Infinite for Linux reinforces the common recommendation by Linux game developers that those seeking the best support and performance should use the proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver. Here's an initial look at the BioShock Infinite performance on Ubuntu between AMD and NVIDIA graphics.

The newest bi-weekly development release of Wine is now available for testing to kick off spring...

While NVIDIA is working towards Vulkan and SPIR-V support, they aren't done optimizing for OpenGL as OpenGL will still be in use for years to come and there's many titles still seeking better performance. With the newest NVIDIA drivers, there's now NV_command_list support for further lowering the OpenGL overhead within the NVIDIA binary blob...

While Mesa still doesn't officially support the OpenGL 4.0 specification, the Direct State Access (DSA) extension of OpenGL 4.5 has been worked on quite a bit so far and the Mesa implementation is nearly done...

Sirius is an open-source, end-to-end Intelligent Personal Assistant (IPA) service. Sirius is able to recognize speech or imagery and return the results in natural language...

GCC 5 is almost in shape to be released with the latest status update on this big GNU compiler update showing a significant drop in the number of high-priority bugs...

Next week is when the X.Org Foundation plans to finally start their Board of Directors elections along with having the X.Org members vote to decide whether they should become part of SPI Inc...

This week BioShock Infinite was finally released for Linux and thanks to this AAA game having good support for automated Linux benchmarking, I've been running some tests over the past two days. In this article is a look at the AMD Catalyst Linux performance for BioShock Infinite while another article in the next few days will compare the graphics card results to the NVIDIA GeForce line-up on Ubuntu, once completed.