Phoronix

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...

With the big shake-up this week at Canonical resulting in abandoning Unity and switching back to GNOME, former Compiz developer and Canonical employee Sam Spilsbury has shared a retrospective on his years of working on Compiz and Unity for Ubuntu...

The open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has picked up support for another one of the extensions that debuted in v1.0.42 back at GDC...

One of the main public-facing figures to NVIDIA's open-source driver efforts has left the company to pursue a new opportunity...

The official Qt 5.9 Beta is now out thanks to The Qt Company and the Qt developer community...

One of the lead developers on the Mir project at Canonical, Alan Griffiths, has finally opened up about this week's news of Ubuntu dropping efforts around Unity 8 and switching back to GNOME. This also is pretty much definitive that Mir is being dropped and Ubuntu will end up making use of Wayland...

There's a big meeting going on today at Canonical regarding changes being made at the company. This follows the dramatic news this week of Ubuntu dropping Unity 8 and switching back to GNOME Shell. There's now information obtained that Mark is planning to reprise the role of CEO...

While there is GIMP for advanced image manipulation and then a few other alternatives for more simpler image manipulation or drawing, a new "GNOME Paint" program is in development...

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers have begun publishing patches for initial hardware enablement of Cannonlake's "Gen 10" graphics and the Cannonpoint PCH...

With the upcoming Linux 4.11 kernel release as well as for the next cycle (Linux 4.12), the Radeon DRM driver remains the default for AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs while the newer AMDGPU DRM driver continues offering "experimental" support for these earlier generations of GCN GPUs. As it's been a while since our last Radeon vs. AMDGPU GCN 1.0/1.1 benchmarks, here are some fresh tests today with Linux 4.11 Git.

After years of many Intel and ARM Chromebooks, the first AMD-powered Chromebook appears to be gearing up for release...

Dustin Kirkland, the leader of product manager at Canonical, recently asked the folks at HackerNews what they would like to see done for Ubuntu 17.10. He's collected their feedback and offered a few insights into the current happenings...

Coinciding with today's NVIDIA Titan Xp announcement is a new beta Linux driver release!..

For those wanting to follow the work Keith Packard is doing for Valve around better supporting VR HMDs (Head Mounted Displays) on the open-source driver stack, he's made a proposal for some changes in what would become RandR 1.6...

NVIDIA's newest graphics card in the ultra high-end Titan line-up is the Titan Xp, a Pascal card that will set you back $1200 USD...

Following news of Ubuntu abandoning Unity 8 there are now reports of headcount reductions happening at Canonical and Mark Shuttleworth eyeing possible outside investments into the company...

An initiative taking place within the Intel open-source Linux driver camp is trying to effectively move libdrm_intel -- the Intel-specific code for the DRM library -- into the i965 Mesa driver itself...

Following yesterday's news of Canonical dropping work on Unity 8 and Ubuntu Phone and switching back to GNOME as their desktop environment, some community developers are determined to keep the projects going...

Red Hat developer David Howells has posted a series of patches to make it possible to lock-down the running Linux kernel image in an effort to prevent user-space from modifying the running kernel image...

Jerome Glisse has published his latest massive patch-set for supporting Heterogeneous Memory Management within the mainline Linux kernel...

With Unity 8 (and Mir) being years behind schedule, Mark Shuttleworth today made the surprise announcement of abandoning Unity 8 and shifting back to GNOME while also stopping their Ubuntu Phone efforts. This was the biggest Ubuntu shock in years and as such I've thrown together today a bit of a tribute or look back at the various desktop milestones of Ubuntu since its first release covered by Phoronix back in 2004. Check it out if you are a relatively new Linux user or just wish to relive the old screenshots of GNOME2, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Ubuntu TV, the early Unity days, the ambitious Mir plans, and more.

Thunderbird 52.0 is now available as the latest stable release for those using this Mozilla-developed mail client...

Canonical has announced via Mark Shuttleworth they are ending their development of the Unity 8 desktop environment and will be switching back to GNOME desktop by Ubuntu 18.04...

Ubuntu developer Ted Gould has written a fresh blog post about the current planning for supporting X11 apps on Ubuntu Personal -- Ubuntu with Unity 8 and Mir -- while keeping applications secure...

Nicolai Hähnle has been busy today with Mesa Git as in addition to landing ARB_sparse_buffer for RadeonSI, he's now landed ARB_shader_ballot as another useful OpenGL extension -- it can be used as part of the "AZDO" techniques...

If you are an X.Org Foundation member, be sure to vote this week! Besides the routine elections, there are the proposed membership agreement changes that needs a majority of the members to vote...

While Razer is exploring better Linux support for its products and not just limited to laptops, for now they don't have any official Linux configuration software for their products. Fortunately, community solutions exist, including Polychromatic that's been one of the more popular Razer open-source configuration tools in recent times...

Landing today within Git for Google's Chrome/Chromium web-browser is initial support for supporting native desktop notifications under Linux...

The necessary GPU firmware for providing accelerated support for NVIDIA's Tegra X2 SoC found on the Jetson TX2 developer board has landed within linux-firmware.git...

AMD developer Nicolai Hähnle has landed ARB_sparse_buffer support within the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. RadeonSI is the first Mesa/Gallium3D driver supporting this OpenGL extension...

Lucas Stach has sent in the Etnaviv DRM updates to DRM-Next that will target the Linux 4.12 kernel, just in time for this weekend's DRM deadline...

Timothy Arceri has posted a series of a patches to further improve the Mesa shader cache's hot and cold load times...

There is just one week to go until the Ubuntu 17.04 "Zesty Zapus" release yet landing now is X.Org Server 1.19.3...

Less than two months after hitting 22 million test/suite downloads, OpenBenchmarking.org has now served up over 23 million test profile and test suite downloads to Phoronix Test Suite users...