Phoronix

EFL 1.20 is now available as the newest version of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries...

Fans of the BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system will see a lot of work going into the open-source OS over the summer...

Zstd (also known as Zstandard) is a lossless data compression developed by Facebook that has been open-source since last year. This BSD-licensed compression algorithm aims to offer compression similar to zip/gzip but with faster speeds both for compression and decompression. Facebook developers are now looking at adding this support to the Linux kernel...

Git 2.14 is now available as the latest feature update to this widely-used, open-source revision control system...

Debian developers are evaluating whether to continue producing "Debian Live" images or not. Should they go away, there would no longer be a Live DVD/CD/USB environment to try out the operating system short of going through the Debian Installer process...

Following my recent Windows 10 WSL CPU scaling benchmarks to see how well Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux for running native Linux binaries compared to various distributions, I did a comparison of Ubuntu and openSUSE on WSL compared to running these distributions bare metal.

The mystery around the future of Solaris, ZFS, and SPARC continues with Oracle reportedly letting go of more developers and other staff members...

NVIDIA is ending out the week with their first release candidate of CUDA 9...

With running a number of new Ryzen Linux tests lately, a number of readers requested I take a fresh look at the reported Ryzen segmentation fault issues / bugs affecting a number of many Linux users. I did and still am able to reproduce the problem...

Nouveau developers continue working to support the GeForce GT 1030 "GP108" graphics processor that unfortunately is lagging behind the other Pascal GPUs in their open-source NVIDIA driver coverage...

Intel developer Jason Ekstrand has posted a set of patches for implementing the Vulkan VK_KHR_external_semaphore extension within the open-source "ANV" driver...

Khronos' glTF 2.0 standard for the "OpenGL transmission format" or a standardized means of exchanging 3D assets continues seeing wide adoption. From Microsoft demonstrating glTF 2.0 support in their products this week at SIGGRAPH to many programs and game engines picking up support for this format, Godot Engine is now the latest...

It's been a while since last having anything to report on the OpenChrome project for providing open-source Linux graphics support for vintage VIA x86 graphics hardware. But it's still going and what is one of the only contributors left on the project has issued an update...

Oracle has pushed into public beta their first snapshot of the upcoming VirtualBox 5.2 virtualization software...

The massive set of AMDGPU "DC" (formerly "DAL") display code has been re-based against their work-in-progress Linux 4.14 DRM code and is residing in amd-staging-drm-next...

Facebook developers have released HHVM 3.21 as their alternate PHP implementation that also powers their Hack programming language. HHVM 3.21 is a long-term support release that will make it maintained for nearly one year...

At the end of July AMD began shipping the Ryzen 3 entry-level Zen processors. While it may not be as exciting as a 16-thread Ryzen 7 or Threadripper, the Ryzen 3 1200 and Ryzen 3 1300X offer surprising value with being quad-core parts priced at just above $100 USD. With Linux users especially craving multi-core systems if running Arch or other distributions where you are frequently compiling your own packages, the Ryzen 3 CPUs can make for a low-cost but practical Linux system. Here are my initial benchmarks of these first two Ryzen 3 processors.

Coming one day early off their bi-weekly Friday release cadence, the Wine 2.14 development release is now available...

Officially out today is Ubuntu 16.04.3 as the newest point release for this Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) release...

DragonFlyBSD 4.8.1 has been released by Justin Sherrill with various minor updates -- particularly for Intel DRM graphics and other kernel improvements -- over the recent v4.8 milestone...

There has been some mixed messages by Ubuntu developers in recent weeks about the default GNOME Shell session planned for Ubuntu 17.10 and whether Wayland would be used. The latest is that Wayland-by-default is still on...

It's been an interesting week for Linux storage with Red Hat deprecating Btrfs and Stratis being their next-gen Linux storage bet. Independent of that is now the announcement of NOVA, a new Linux file-system coming out of university research into file-systems for persistent memory...

Epic Games has an interesting goal of eventually being able to use the Vulkan graphics API by default on Linux systems running the Unreal Engine...

Intel's Jordan Justen has added to Mesa's features.txt the current Vulkan extensions as well as indicating the current state of each Mesa Vulkan driver regarding their support...

A very special milestone is being celebrated today for our open-source, Linux-driven benchmarking efforts... Earlier today, OpenBenchmarking.org crossed the milestone of having served more than 25 million test profile and test suite downloads by the Phoronix Test Suite!..

In the past few days I have posted benchmarks showing how AMD's latest open-source Radeon Linux driver code is faster than their hybrid/proprietary driver for OpenGL and perhaps most excitingly is finally how AMD Radeon GPUs are beginning to really compete with NVIDIA GPUs on Linux and in some cases performing better against the GeForce competition than they do under Windows. This comes after years of work on their open-source driver stack and especially a lot of work done over the past year not only by AMD but also Valve and other open-source contributors to Mesa, their RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, their AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end continues to be refined for compute and graphics, and the AMDGPU kernel driver. So here are the latest Windows vs. Linux gaming benchmarks on the Radeon side to see where things stand now with this latest code.

Yesterday at Phoronix we were the first to broadcast about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 deprecating Btrfs and since then it's become more clear what their "next-gen" Linux storage focus has become...

Today is The Khronos Group's big day at SIGGRAPH 2017 with a day full of talks about their different projects...

Today marks the release of GNU C Library version 2.26 and it's a big release with one feature we have been looking forward to...

Intel's upcoming Gemini Lake hardware will offer better VP9 video decoding support...

Last week was KDE's annual Akademy conference where developers and enthusiasts came together to recap the past year of KDE software development as well as some of what's ahead...

Keith Packard who has been working on some low-level driver/X improvements for SteamVR on Linux on contract for Valve has published updated patches...

It's always wonderful waking up to some hearty commits in Mesa Git and this morning was one of those days...

Bryce Harrington at Samsung has announced the release candidates for Wayland 1.14 and the Weston 3.0 reference compositor...

With a new month comes the latest numbers from Valve's controversial Steam Survey...

For fans of OpenMW, the open-source re-implementation of the engine powering Elderscrolls III: Morrowind, a new feature release is now available...

Red Hat has (again) deprecated the Btrfs file-system from their Red Hat Enterprise Linux product, but this time it appears it may be for good...

Feature development on the Qt 5.10 tool-kit will soon be coming to an end...

Adding to the list of changes for X.Org Server 1.20 that will be released in the future is grab protocol support for XWayland...

Following last week's Linux/BSD CPU core scaling tests when seeing how different operating systems competed with going between one and twenty threads with the Intel Core i9 7900X, my latest benchmarking target of curiosity was seeing how Windows 10 with its Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) would compare on this system against the other Linux distributions.

Red Hat is out today with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 release...

While there is no big Vulkan update this week for SIGGRAPH17, The Khronos Group has gone ahead and issued Vulkan 1.0.57. Besides fixes, there are some new extensions...

While Mesa Git is looking very good for RadeonSI performance, AMD developer Marek Olšák continues working on more micro-optimizations to this Gallium3D driver...

A new subsystem is being proposed for the Linux kernel for the MIPI I3C sensor specification...

Red Hat developers have been working to improve the performance of multi-threaded workloads on NUMA systems...

Independent commentator Artem S. Tashkinov is back at it again with his latest thoughts on GNU/Linux and its problems in a post entitled "Why Linux/GNU might never succeed on a large scale"...

AMD Ryzen continued to be a very popular area of interest by Phoronix readers as did our Linux vs. Windows benchmarks, among other hardware tests in July. Last month on Phoronix your's truly authored 23 featured articles/reviews and 290 news articles...

With the Radeon RX Vega 56 and Vega 64 shipping in two weeks, here are some benchmarks of the latest Radeon and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers with an assortment of modern GPUs. With these latest Linux GPU results are also the current performance-per-Watt and thermal metrics as recorded automatically via the Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. This Radeon vs. NVIDIA Linux comparison should be particularly interesting given the very good Mesa Git performance results posted yesterday that show RadeonSI performing well beyond the AMDGPU-PRO OpenGL levels.

While covered in our OpenGL 4.6 overview from when the embargo expired this morning on this updated graphics API, the Mesa feature list has been updated to reflect the state of OpenGL 4.6 support...

One month after the Phoronix Test Suite 7.2.1 release, the first development milestone release of Phoronix Test Suite 7.4-Tynset is now available for cross-platform, open-source benchmarking evaluation...