Longtime Nouveau contributors Martin Peres and Karol Herbst presented at this week's XDC2017 X.Org conference at the Googleplex in Mountain View. It was a quick talk as they didn't have a whole lot to report on due to their open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver efforts largely being restricted by NVIDIA Corp.
X.Org Server 1.19 is already almsot one year old and while X.Org is currently well off its six month release cadence, version 1.20 is being figured out for an early 2018 release.
Just a quick heads up for those that haven't noticed yet, HTTPS is now used by default across all of Phoronix.com as of this week.
The X.Org Foundation board announced during this week's XDC2017 summit that they have officially completed the paperwork to become a Khronos adopter.
Intel OTC developers are working on support for huge GTT pages for their Direct Rendering Manager driver.
Earlier this year Keith Packard started a contract gig for Valve working to improve Linux's support for virtual reality head-mounted displays (VR HMDs). In particular, working on Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) and X.Org changes needed so VR HMDs will work well under Linux with the non-NVIDIA drivers.
Arcan, the open-source display server powered by a game engine, is out with a new release. Its Durden desktop environment has also been updated.
It's been a few weeks since last delivering any large RADV/RadeonSI open-source AMD Linux graphics benchmark results due to being busy with testing other hardware as well as battling some regressions / stability problems within the AMDGPU DRM code and Mesa Git. But with Linux 4.13 stable and the newest Mesa 17.3-dev code, things are playing well so here are some fresh OpenGL vs. Vulkan benchmarks on three Radeon graphics cards.
The Pitivi open-source non-linear video editor has been in development for thirteen years while its v1.0 release is finally near.
While most of the talks that take place at the annual X.Org Developers' Conference are around the exciting progress being made across the Linux graphics landscape, at XDC2017 taking place this week at Google, the open-source GPGPU / compute talk is rather the let down due to the less than desirable state of the open-source OpenCL ecosystem.
Kevin Brace, the sole active developer left working on the OpenChrome driver stack for VIA x86 graphics, presented yesterday at XDC2017 about his work on this driver and how in the years to come he still hopes to work on other vintage GPU support.
While busy covering the many new features of Linux 4.14, one important change slipped by that I have long been waiting to see merged: Heterogeneous Memory Management.
Java 9 (JDK 9) has finally reached general availability! Following setbacks, Java 9 is officially available as well as Java EE 8.
Recently I wrote about a BFQ regression fix that should take care of a problem spotted in our recent I/O scheduler Linux 4.13 benchmarks while now that work has yielded a set of four patches working to improve this recently-merged scheduler.
J.A. Suarez Romero of Igalia is preparing Mesa 17.1.10 as the final point release for the Mesa 17.1 release stream.
Last week it was decided to delay the Fedora 27 beta due to bugs while this week they've been forced to delay the release a second time.
Kaveh Nasri, the manager of Intel's Mesa driver team within the Open-Source Technology Center since 2011, spoke this morning at XDC2017 about the accomplishments of his team and more broadly the Mesa community. Particularly over the past year there has been amazing milestones accomplished for this open-source driver stack.
Besides the CryENGINE 5.4 release happening today, Epic Games has made public their first preview release of the upcoming Unreal Engine 4.18.
Eric Anholt of Broadcom just finished presenting at XDC2017 Mountain View on the state of the VC4 driver stack most notably used by the Raspberry Pi devices. Additionally, he also shared about his early work on the VC5 driver for next-generation Broadcom graphics.
One day after releasing updated GeForce Linux legacy drivers, NVIDIA is now out with an update to their long-lived 384 branch.
Crytek today has shipped the exciting CryENGINE 5.4 game engine update.
We recently looked at several Noctua cooler options for Intel's Core X-Series while today the tables have turned and we tried out Noctua's TR4-SP3 heatsink that is capable of cooling the high-Wattage Threadripper and EPYC processors with air cooling.
The first release candidate of PostgreSQL 10.0 is now available for testing.
Besides working on the new Unix device memory allocator project, they have also been engaged with upstream open-source Linux developers over preparing the Linux desktop for HDR display support.
For those making use of Beignet for Intel graphics OpenCL acceleration on Linux, it finally has added support for LLVM 5.0.
The first batch of drm-intel-next changes are ready to be queued in DRM-Next as feature work for eventually merging to mainline come the Linux 4.15 merge window.
One of the many interesting talks at yesterday's XDC2017 conference was Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais talking about GPUVis.
Intel's Clear Linux team has rolled out their Clear Containers 3.0 technology.
A few months ago was a vibrant discussion about a Meson proposal for libdrm/Mesa while today the initial patches were posted in bringing a possible Meson build system port for Mesa.
James Jones of NVIDIA presented this morning at XDC2017 with their annual update on a new Unix device memory allocation library. As a reminder, this library originated from NVIDIA's concerns over the Generic Buffer Manager (GBM) currently used by Wayland compositors not being suitable for use with their driver's architecture and then the other driver developers not being interested in switching to EGLStreams, NVIDIA's original push for supporting Wayland.
TVE200 is a new Direct Rendering Manager driver being queued for Linux 4.15.
The X.Org Developers Conference kicked off a short time ago at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA. But even if you are not at the event, there is a livestream.
Wine Staging 2.17 is now available as the latest experimental/testing build of Wine with various patches added in.
The Rust-written Redox operating system is out with a new feature release.
One week after announcing KDE cooperation on the proposed Librem 5 smartphone with plans to get Plasma Mobile on the device if successful, the GNOME Foundation has sent out their official endorsement of Purism's smartphone dream.
NVIDIA has issued new releases of its two legacy drivers for Linux.
Google has rolled out their public beta of the upcoming Chrome/Chromium 62 web-browser update.
Last week we began with our EPYC 7601 Linux benchmarking of this high-end AMD server CPU featuring 32 cores / 64 threads per socket. Earlier this week were also some 10-year old Opteron vs. EPYC benchmarks and power efficiency tests while the latest in our EPYC Linux testing is seeing how the new AMD processor compares to various Amazon EC2 cloud instances.
If you want CPU temperature monitoring to work under Linux for your Ryzen / Threadripper / EPYC processor(s), it's working on hwmon-next.
For the past few weeks that I have been testing the AMD Threadripper 1950X on Linux, I have been using the Gigabyte X399 AORUS Gaming 7 motherboard. Overall, it's been a pleasant experience and is running fine under Linux. Here's a quick summary.
Following our reporting of Mir picking up initial support for Wayland clients, Mir developer Alan Griffiths at Canonical has further clarified the Wayland client support. It also appears they are still planning to get Mir 1.0 released in time for Ubuntu 17.10.
KDE contributor Bhushan Shah has shared some highlights of Plasma Mobile progress made from this year's Randa Meetings in Switzerland.
Red Hat has quietly been working on PipeWire for years that is like the "video equivalent of PulseAudio" while now it's ready to make its initial debut in Fedora 27 and the project now has an official website.
Phoronix Test Suite 7.4.0-Tynset has been officially released as the newest quarterly feature update to our cross-platform, open-source automated benchmarking software.
I've begun running some Linux 4.14-rc1 kernel benchmarks and in some areas there appears to be nice gains with this in-development kernel.
The clang-refactor tool is now living within the LLVM Clang SVN/Git codebase.
For those that haven't jumped fully on the Meson build system bandwagon, the SCons 3.0 software construction utility is now available.
Christian König of AMD yesterday sent out an AMDGPU kernel patch for boosting the default fragment size for GCN graphics cards pre-Vega.