Phoronix

The Smallest Server Suite -- also known as TheSSS -- remains a live CD/DVD capable Linux operating system making it trivial to deploy a range of services...

It was a heck of a year for Ubuntu's Mir display server from it starting off as the display server to the now-abandoned Unity 8 desktop and it surviving Canonical's cancelling of the Unity/convergence projects to now not only being fitted for IoT use-cases but gaining Wayland support with hopes some will use it as a Wayland compositor. This also went from Mir 1.0 nearly being released and back to the drawing board to Canonical now hiring more Mir developers and adding Mir to other Linux distributions: what a wild ride 2017 has been for this controversial project...

Earlier this month I wrote how Intel engineers have been busy with continuing to tune glibc's performance with FMA and AVX optimizations. That work has continued but also other architectures continue tuning their GNU C Library performance ahead of the expected v2.27 update...

Hot off the release of the new GIMP 2.9.8 and ahead of the expected GIMP 2.10 release candidates that are expected to begin, a new addition to GIMP is a plug-in supporting the new FreeDesktop.org/Flatpak screenshot API...

KDE Partition Manager 3.3 was released this week as the newest version of this program for managing disk devices/partitions from the KDE desktop...

The Fortran committee decided last month to rename the upcoming Fortran 2015 programming language update to Fortran 2018. GCC support is being prepped...

Matthias Clasen of Red Hat announced the release of GNOME 3.27.3 this weekend...

If you are thinking of gifting yourself (or someone else) a FreeSync-compatible monitor this holiday season, here's a look at how the AMD FreeSync support is working right now, the driver bits you need to be aware of, and how it's all playing out for those wanting to use this tear-free capability for Linux gaming.

As part of our various year-end lists, recaps, and end of year testing, here's a look back at the most prominent NVIDIA open-source/Linux news of the year...

Unity is one of the big public users of the open-source Crunch DXT texture compression library. While it's no longer maintained by Rich Geldreich / Binomial, Unity has continued advancing this open-source code to further improve the compression ratio and speed...

Samsung's Open-Source Group has been working on making their Wayland support in the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) even better...

Christian Schaller who has long been involved in GNOME/Fedora development while serving as a senior software engineering manager at Red Hat and formerly with Collabora has some bold predictions about 2018 for open-source software...

ZFS On Linux 0.7.4 was released this week as the newest stable release for this ZFS file-system implementation for the Linux kernel...

Since last week's code/feature freeze for the upcoming Wine 3.0, the second release candidate is now available...

LunarG has been working to reduce the size of the SPIR-V intermediate representation used by Vulkan (and OpenCL 2.1+) through improvements to the SPIRV-Tools project...

With Amazon AWS this week having released Amazon Linux 2 LTS I was excited to put this updated cloud-focused operating system through some performance tests to see how it stacks up with the more well known Linux distributions.

While the Linux kernel has supported the official Sony PlayStation 3 controller as an input device, some of the off-brand/knockoff models haven't quite behaved correctly on Linux but that's now being rectified...

A new contributor to the Wayland/Weston camp has been working on several improvements to the Weston reference compositor...

Fedora Linux this year picked up support for more multimedia codecs, continued innovating on both the Linux desktop/workstations and servers, the Fedora/RedHat developers continued a lot of upstream improvements throughout the Linux landscape, their Wayland support continues to be solid, and they continued shipping the latest and greatest packages in their distribution releases...

The latest OpenGL extension added to Mesa by Intel developers is the rather new EXT_disjoint_timer_query...

Back at WineConf 2017 VKD3D was announced for bringing Direct3D 12 to Wine by implementing Microsoft's latest graphics API atop the Vulkan graphics API. The initial code for this new library is beginning to take shape...

Amazon AWS has announced their "next generation" version of their Amazon Linux operating system intended for running on their EC2 compute cloud as well as on-site via VMware/VirtualBox/Hyper-V images that are free to all...

Ahead of the holidays Google has pushed out the Chrome 64 beta to all supported platforms...

Lennart Poettering has announced the release of systemd 236 as the init system's final release of 2017...

KDE Applications 17.12 is now available as the newest six-month update to this collection of KDE programs making use of KDE Frameworks 5...

Given this week's release of the big AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 Linux driver update, here are some fresh OpenCL GPU benchmarks comparing the performance of AMD's latest Radeon graphics cards on this newest Linux driver to that of the latest NVIDIA GeForce GPUs on their respective newest driver.

"Bolt" is a new project by Red Hat / GNOME developers in dealing with Thunderbolt 3 security levels on Linux...

The FreeBSD-based operating system TrueOS that's formerly known as PC-BSD has put out their last stable update of 2017...

Emil Velikov of Collabora has announced the release today of Mesa 17.2.7 as the latest point release for this older stable branch of Mesa...

It was four years ago this week that Valve began shipping SteamOS, their Debian-based Linux distribution intended for Steam Machines and those wanting a gaming-oriented Linux distribution. While Valve still technically maintains the SteamOS Linux distribution, the outlook at this point is rather bleak...

Collabora's Tomeu Vizoso is working on a interesting VirtIO DRM patch that lets clients running within a virtual machine communicate with a display compositor of the host system...

The Xen Project has announced version 4.10 of their open-source hypervisor. Xen 4.10 aims for better security, architectural improvements, better documentation, and more...

The past few days Canonical's Mir developers have been preparing their next milestone with pushing this display server along with Wayland protocol support and now that new "v0.29" release is available...

Back in October I wrote about SUSE working on a new, in-kernel bootsplash project. That work has yet to be mainlined but it looks like it's still on track for going upstream in the future with the latest version now being released that addresses issues uncovered during review...

Geoffrey McRae has published the code to the "Looking Glass" project he's been working on as a "extremely low-latency" KVM frame relay implementation for guests with VGA PCI pass-through...

The latest Steam client release on Wednesday rolls out OpenGL and Vulkan shader pre-caching by default...

Oracle has announced the release of their Linux Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 4 Update 6...

Last month on Phoronix I featured the DXVK project that's working to implement Direct3D 11 over Vulkan (not to be confused with VK9 as the separate effort to get D3D9 over Vulkan). This project is making a surprising amount of progress in its early stages...

FreeNAS 11.1 is now available as the latest feature update to this popular FreeBSD-based Network Attached Storage (NAS) operating system...

While SilverStone is mostly known for their computer cases, power supplies, and other peripherals, with the TS421S they have a compelling four-disk drive enclosure on their hands. The TS421S drive storage device supports up to four SAS/SATA 2.5-inch drives over a single mini-SAS SFF-8088 cable.

Back in March we wrote about GAPID as a new Google-developed Vulkan debugger in its early stages. Fast forward to today, GAPID 1.0 has been released for debugging Vulkan apps/games on Linux/Windows/Android as well as OpenGL ES on Android...

NetworkManager now has support for Intel's lean "IWD" WiFi daemon...

Not only are Ubuntu developers working towards demoting Python 2 on their Linux distribution but they are also working on being able to demote the GTK2 tool-kit from the main archive to universe followed by its eventual removal in the future...

It turns out that if firing up KDE's KWin Wayland compositor without XWayland support, it can start up so fast that it causes problems...

With yesterday's release of the Radeon Software Adrenalin driver for Windows, it actually picks up a feature that is roughly similar to something the open-source Radeon driver stack - and all of the Mesa's Gallium3D drivers for that matter - have offered for years...

Wayland had a very eventful year with it conquering more Linux desktops now since the switch to using GNOME Shell on Wayland with Ubuntu 17.10, Ubuntu's Mir compositor still being around but having switched to adding Wayland protocol support, KDE's Wayland support becoming day-to-day usable, and much more...

A new major release is available of Cryptsetup, the user-space utility for dealing with the DMCrypt kernel module for setting up encrypted disk volumes...

Following yesterday's excitement around the Radeon Software Adrenalin Driver as well as word of AMD open-sourcing their Linux driver and making other Linux driver changes, AMD's GPUOpen team has announced the release of a new version of Radeon GPU Profiler...

VLC 3.0 is something we've been looking forward to for years and it's looking like that big multimedia player update could be released very soon...

During last week's Snapdragon Technology Summit, a few references to "Vulkan2" were dropped... Well, here's the official comment from Khronos on that as well as my thoughts on this hypothetical next version of Vulkan...