Phoronix

A new release is available of the nginx web server that's continuing to take on Apache with reportedly now having around a 33% web server market-share while Apache has dipped below 50%...

Last week we were the first to exclusively report that Jane Silber would be out as Canonical's CEO with Mark Shuttleworth returning to the role as CEO. Today, Jane Silber has publicly announced she's indeed stepping down...

Released at the end of last week was a long-awaited update to the Radeon hybrid Linux driver, AMDGPU-PRO. The AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 update brings support for newer kernel releases so this driver finally deploys nicely on Ubuntu 16.04.2 / 16.10 and also has a number of fixes. Here are some benchmark results of this latest AMDGPU-PRO release compared to the latest open-source Radeon Linux driver stack in the form of the Linux 4.11 kernel and Mesa 17.1-dev with OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks.

Matthias Clasen has announced the first point release to last month's big GNOME 3.24 desktop release...

While there was the KDE-aligned Shashlik effort for trying to get Android apps running on the Linux desktop, Anbox is a new initiative made public this week by a Canonical developer for running Android programs on the Linux desktop...

Comparing the hybrid AMDGPU-PRO proprietary Linux driver to the RadeonSI Gallium3D open-source driver stack with the newly-released OpenGL 4.5-using Unigine Superposition has shown how far the open-source driver stack has come...

The folks behind StreamComputing BV are looking to strengthen the OpenCL compute ecosystem by improving the documentation and code samples as well as better overviews for those wishing to learn this Khronos compute standard...

Intel's compiler team is working on getting an Altera Nios II back-end mainlined within LLVM...

Canonical developer Alan Griffiths has been blogging a lot in recent days about the Mir display server. He's been trying to get the community to support Mir and even potentially add native Wayland client support. His latest post is entitled "Why Mir" with many still wondering why they should care about Mir when Wayland has proven to be the tested and widely-adopted path forward...

Blender 2.79 is under development and it sounds like this release should be quite exciting for those into performance improvements or better OpenCL support...

It's already been seven years since Unigine Corp rolled out the Unigine Heaven tech demo and four years since Unigine Valley while in that time while we have seen thousands of Linux game ports emerge, but few can match the visual intensity of these tech demos. In looking to set a new standard for jaw-dropping graphics and preparing to torture current Pascal and Polaris graphics cards as well as future Volta and Vega hardware, Unigine Corp today is releasing Unigine Superposition 1.0. Unigine Superposition is one godly GPU benchmark and is a beauty to watch.

Samuel Pitoiset, one of the developers on Valve's open-source Linux driver team focused on better Radeon support, has posted a set of 26 patches for changes needed to support ARB_bindless_texture and is in the process of getting this feature working for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

Open-source AMD developers have been discussing in recent days how to better deal with the experimental support of GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" (and GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands") support in AMDGPU and making it easier to enable while ensuring the Radeon DRM driver with its mature GCN 1.0/1.1 support doesn't interfere...

While Unity 8 and Mir may be on their way out, Canonical continues backing Snappy and the involved developers have got Snap support integrated into Fedora 24 and newer...

While Canonical is expected to maintain Mir for IoT use-cases, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is expected to use the GNOME desktop on Wayland. The community forks so far of Unity 8 also appear to want to switch to Wayland eventually rather than Mir. In trying to maintain relevance for Mir, longtime Mir developer Alan Griffiths is asking whether the community would be interested in native Wayland client support in Mir...

Theo de Raadt has announced the release of OpenBSD 6.1...

While writing DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) drivers were once a rather daunting task and not really considered much by ARM/embedded developers, over the past few years DRM has evolved a lot as it's picked up new drivers -- especially for today's many ARM SoCs -- and its core infrastructure has improved with picking up many new helpers and other improvements that lower the barrier of entry for DRM development...

Today marks AMD formally launching the Ryzen 5 line-up with immediate availability...

While NVIDIA's GeForce 400/500 "Fermi" graphics cards have since been succeeded by Kepler, Maxwell, and now Pascal, the Fermi hardware is still receiving some love from open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) developers in taking baby steps towards working re-clocking support...

The stock kernel of Ubuntu 17.04 is doing away with Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) support for a number of ancient graphics processors...

Eric Anholt's work on the VC4 Raspberry Pi driver stack continues with his most recent activities being the start of DMA-BUF fencing support and continuing efforts around using the Meson build system in the X.Org world...

Work on Godot 3.0 as the next major update to this open-source, cross-platform 2D/3D game engine is advancing with an alpha now in sight...

With last week's surprise decision by Mark Shuttleworth to abandon Unity 8 efforts and switch back to the GNOME desktop by Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, while some applauded the decision, others begged the question why not switch to KDE or "Ubuntu should default to [your favorite DE]."..

Mediatek developers have been working to mainline their MT2701 SoC support in the Linux kernel the past number of months and with Linux 4.12 will come support to their DRM/KMS driver...

A new, unofficial project at Google is XRTL, creating a cross-platform real-time rendering library, with support for Vulkan and other graphics APIs...

Last September we wrote about RoundCube-Next being woefully behind schedule even after they raised more than one hundred thousand dollars for this massive overhaul to the RoundCube webmail software. Sadly, not much has changed since and the project has yet to see any Git commits in 2017...

Last week when posting an eight-way BSD/Linux OS comparison there were a few premium members who requested seeing Solus results side-by-side. For those interested, here are some fresh benchmarks of this promising Linux distribution.

The Portable Computing Language (POCL) has issued a new release of their open-source CPU-based OpenCL implementation...

The Kotlin programming language continues to be developed by JetBrains and while it originated as a new language built atop the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), there is now experimental support for native compilation...

For fans of BeOS-inspired Haiku OS, the operating system now has Mesa 17.0 and LLVM 4.0 for the latest graphics driver and compiler support...

OpenELEC 8.0 was released this weekend as the newest version of this mediacenter / multimedia focused Linux distribution...

The third release candidate to Debian Installer for 9.0 "Stretch" is now available for testing...

KDE Frameworks 5.33 was released this weekend as the latest monthly installment to this large set of KDE libraries to complement Qt...

Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 4.11-rc6 as the latest weekly test version of what will officially become Linux 4.11 around the end of April...

With this weekend being the deadline for submitting new feature material to DRM-Next for in turn landing to Linux 4.12, Rob Clark has sent in the MSM DRM updates...

GCC 7 is expected to see its first stable release this month, GCC 7.1, so here's a look at some of the features to find with this annual feature update to the GNU Compiler Collection...

UBports is one of the leading teams right now planning a fork of the Unity 8 desktop now that it's being abandoned by Canonical. While a lead Mir developer hopes Mir will stick around and see compatibility with Wayland and Mark continues to believe in Mir, the UBports team is looking at getting Unity 8 on Wayland...

On Friday, Intel's Daniel Vetter submitted a final pile of feature material for DRM-Next that will target the Linux 4.12 kernel, with the deadline for 4.12 DRM-Next being this weekend...

Jonas Ã…dahl's latest GNOME work to benefit the GNOME Wayland support and other areas is a rework of Mutter so it now handles all low-level monitor configuration...

Xfce-test is a Xubuntu 17.04 based container image designed for Docker that makes it very easy to deploy some of the latest Xfce Git components...

PostgreSQL developer Robert Haas has shared a look at the features coming up to PostgreSQL 10 and it's quite impressive for those using this database system...

Following the work laid by AMD developers on wiring ARB_shader_ballot into RadeonSI, a student developer working on Nouveau has posted support for this OpenGL extension...

Jussi Pakkanen of the Meson Build System has issued a project status report following more projects like X.Org and Mesa exploring Meson...

By now you have probably read Mark Shutttleworth's Google+ comments from Friday concerning Ubuntu GNOME, including the continuing of Snaps, UBports looking to take over Unity 8, and the desire to move quickly in supporting Ubuntu GNOME. He has now provided more follow-up comments...

Another week, another update to the Khronos Vulkan specification. This Saturday morning brought the Vulkan 1.0.47 release...

X.Org, GStreamer, Wayland, LibreOffice, Mesa, VA-API, Harfbuzz, and SPICE are among the many projects hosted by FreeDesktop.org that now appear to be on a contributor covenant / code of conduct...

Ben Skeggs has queued up some of the last patches from NVIDIA's open-source enabler who last week left the company and queued up the code in DRM-Next for introduction in Linux 4.12...

Unigine's first public Unigine 2 tech demo, Superposition, was due to be released yesterday (6 April) but was delayed at the last minute. But next week Linux (and Windows) users -- including RadeonSI drivers -- should be able to have fun torturing your hardware with this demanding OpenGL benchmark...

AMD has released the AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 hybrid Linux graphics driver...

AMD already sent in their major feature pull request to DRM-Next of new AMDGPU/Radeon DRM material slated for Linux 4.12 while another pull has now landed for -next...