Phoronix

A Phoronix reader recently inquired about whether power-saving utilities like Intel PowerTop and TLP are still useful for conserving power on modern Linux distributions and modern hardware. The short answer is, yes, and here are some numbers.

For those interested in the open-source Coreboot project that serves as a replacement to proprietary UEFI/BIOS, the videos from their European Coreboot Conference are now available...

Broadcom developer Eric Anholt has offered an update on the state of the VC5 Gallium3D driver for OpenGL support as well as the work being done on the "BCMV" Vulkan driver. Additionally, the VC4 Gallium3D driver for existing Raspberry Pi devices continues to get better...

The open-source Darktable RAW photography software that's long been available for Linux and macOS has finally been ported to Microsoft Windows. But fortunately that's not all to be found in Darktable 2.4...

GNUstep is the long-standing free software project working to implement Apple's Cocoa Objective-C frameworks used by macOS. The GNU project has made new releases of their GUI and Back libraries...

Intel today has announced their new Pentium Silver and Celeron processor line-up powered by their Gemini Lake microarchitecture...

While 2017 was the first year in a decade without seeing a major X.Org Server release, it wasn't due to lack of X.Org Server development activity. Here's a look back at the X.Org 2017 highlights...

The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver's NIR back-end is moving one step closer to feature parity with the existing OpenGL capabilities of this AMD GCN graphics driver...

Linus Torvalds has announced the third weekly test release of the upcoming Linux 4.15 kernel...

The BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system should be issuing its long-awaited beta release by early 2018...

The x86 scheduler model for Skylake AVX-512-enabled servers has been updated ahead of the LLVM 6.0 feature freeze next month...

With some BFQ performance fixes included as part of Linux 4.15 along with other I/O scheduler work and block improvements for this latest Linux kernel series, here are some fresh benchmarks of the different I/O scheduler options using the Linux 4.15 Git kernel.

OpenBSD has graduated its 64-bit ARM (ARM64) architecture to being officially supported...

GNOME had a very successful 2017 with the excellent 3.24 and 3.26 releases that continued improving their Wayland support, adding various features to their applications, etc. GTK4 development continued heavily as well with a plethora of improvements and new features...

It's been four months since the release of GIMP 2.9.6 and while GIMP 2.9 developments are sadly not too frequent, the next GIMP 2.9.8 release is preparing a host of changes...

Linux system vendor System76 has released their new HiDPI daemon for their laptops and desktops to improving the display experience on multi-monitor configurations...

KDE Frameworks 5.41 is now available as the latest monthly update to this collection of add-on libraries complementing Qt5...

The developers working on the KDE Elisa music player, which was announced earlier this year among several ongoing KDE multimedia player projects is out with its first alpha release ahead of Elisa v0.1...

It was another busy year in the GNU camp...

For your viewing pleasure this weekend are some fresh benchmarks of the very latest NVIDIA and Radeon Linux graphics drivers.

A long-standing KDE initiative that hasn't received as much attention as it deserves is KDE Connect for allowing KDE to interface with other devices -- namely smartphones -- for being able to display phone notifications on your desktop and more. A new KDE Plasmoid makes it easy now to send/receive SMS text messages...

For the past number of months AMD has been working on upstreaming more KFD changes, AMDKFD is their kernel driver to the HSA compute stack. AMD began with upstreaming their APU changes while now they have finally moved onto their "dGPU" changes...

Up to now LLVM's Clang C/C++ compiler has defaulted to using C++98/GNU++98 as its default C++ standard, but fortunately that's no more...

For our Russian readers who are fans of the KDE desktop, ROSA Desktop Fresh R10 was released this week as one of the notable Russian Linux distributions that is aligned with a KDE desktop. ROSA Desktop Fresh continues offering both KDE 4 and KDE Plasma 5 desktop options...

Debian 9.3 is the latest update to "Stretch" to provide various bug fixes and security updates while Debian 8.10 was also released today as the newest version of their older "Jessie" release...

With just seven lines of new code, Intel's ANV Vulkan driver is a few percent faster in some Linux games...

Just as planned, the first release candidate for Wine 3.0 and it also marks the project's code/feature freeze...

For those bound to using Microsoft Windows but needing to access EXT4/Btrfs/XFS partitions, the commercial Linux File Systems for Windows eases the headache of using Windows...

There's a little more than two years left until Python 2 will be officially discontinued by upstream and Ubuntu is preparing accordingly for this end of life...

While a few months ago we could have written off Mir as a dead project following the Unity 8 abandonment, Canonical is continuing to push it along in its new route of Wayland support...

Delays pushed back the Mesa 17.3 release from November, but this quarterly update to the Mesa 3D graphics stack is now available for users...

Intel continues contributing performance optimizations to the GNU C Library (glibc) for allowing various functions to make use of modern processor instruction set extensions...

The NetBSD operating system has been working on updating their DTrace and ZFS implementations...

The past few weeks Intel developers working on their Mesa open-source graphics driver have been working on the ARB_get_program_binary OpenGL extension so it actually works for applications wanting to use this extension to retrieve a compiled shader/program by the driver...

While the LLVM 5.0.1 bug-fix release was originally expected last month, after going through three release candidates the stable version is now expected to arrive next week...

Keith Packard has sent out his latest X.Org Server side patches for the improvements he's been working on the past year for improving the SteamVR / VR HMD support on the Linux desktop...

NVIDIA has launched their latest TITAN ultra high-end graphics card, the TITAN V, which they say is the most powerful PC GPU ever created. The TITAN V is based upon their Volta architecture and will set you back $2,999 USD...

Back in October is when GCC began prepping C17 support patches for their compiler as a minor update to the C programming language. LLVM's Clang compiler has now landed its initial support for C17...

Last week Intel submitted their first batch of i915 DRM driver changes to DRM-Next that in turn is slated for Linux 4.16. Today they sent in their second round of feature updates...

Hans Wennborg as the continuing LLVM release manager has begun drafting plans for the LLVM 6.0 release process...

This week marked the release of the long-awaited POCL 1.0 release candidate. For the uninformed POCL, or the Portable Computing Language, is a portable implementation of OpenCL 1.2~2.0 that can run on CPUs with its LLVM code generation and has also seen back-ends for its OpenCL implementation atop AMD HSA and even NVIDIA CUDA. I've been trying out POCL 1.0-RC1 on various Intel and AMD CPUs.

With the latest AGESA update for Ryzen-based systems, AMD is reportedly allowing the Platform Security Processor (PSP) to be disabled. The AMD PSP akin to Intel's Management Engine...

Phoronix Test Suite 7.6.0-Alvdal is now available as the latest quarterly feature update to our cross-platform, open-source benchmarking software...

Today marks the release of GNU Guix 0.14 as well as the GNU Guix SD (System Distribution) that is the Linux-based operating system built around this package manager...

Qt 5.10 is now officially out as the half-year update to the Qt5 tool-kit...

This year on Phoronix has been more than 290 original news articles pertaining to advancements and changes within the Linux kernel. Here are those highlights...

Last month Red Hat developer David Airlie landed shader image support and other GL4 extension work for the R600 Gallium3D driver that is used for older, pre-GCN AMD graphics processors. For those still relying upon these aging GPUs, David Airlie is continuing with improvements on R600g this month...

Alex Deucher of AMD sent in today their first batch of feature updates for Radeon/AMDGPU/TTM feature code for DRM-Next, which has already been queued, and will in turn land next year with the Linux 4.16 kernel...

Back in September there were developers from Samsung's Open-Source Group adding initial OpenGL ES 3.0 support to Cairo. The GLESv3 upbringing in Cairo is still ongoing and not yet fully vetted, but Bryce Harrington of Samsung OSG has now blogged about this effort...

The Debian project has issued the second alpha release of the Debian Installer that eventually will be used by Debian 10.0 "Buster"...