Phoronix

Rapid Photo Downloader, the open-source software for Linux which its developer claims is "the Linux desktop's best photo and video downloader/importer", is out with a new release after two and a half years in development...

This is your last chance to participate in the 2017 Linux Laptop Survey. There's nearly twenty-thousand submissions so far, but the survey is expiring at the end of day Thursday...

Version 6.4 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is now available as the latest bug-fix release for those relying on GCC6 that haven't yet migrated to GCC7...

The Linux 4.13 kernel that's in development will pick up a big code contribution from Canonical as they have prepped a lot of their AppArmor security changes for mainlining, some of which code has been sitting in Ubuntu's kernel build for years...

Rafael Wysocki has submitted the ACPI and power management updates for the Linux 4.13 merge window...

Bryce Harrington at Samsung OSG has laid out plans for releasing Wayland 1.14 and Weston 3.0 next month...

The GNU Linux-Libre 4.12 kernel is now available and is the sanitized version of the Linux 4.12 kernel to ensure no binary-only firmware blobs are loaded or used by this trimmed down Linux kernel...

The RADV Radeon Vulkan driver now has support for 64-bit integers with shaderInt64 capability now being set...

The block changes for the Linux 4.13 kernel include some interesting changes...

Greg KH has sent in the staging code updates for the Linux 4.13 merge window...

With the first half of the year in the books, here's a look back at our most popular articles on Phoronix for H1'2017. Written in the first six months of the year were 1,710 news items and 187 featured articles/reviews...

Greg KH has submitted pull requests of Linux 4.13 feature updates for the various subsystems he oversees, including the char/misc driver patches...

The hwmon (hardware monitoring) subsystem updates have been submitted for Linux 4.13 and what's sad about the pull request is what isn't present...

Scheduler improvements are en route for the Linux 4.13 kernel...

Ubuntu's desktop team and designers are still working through their planned desktop experience with the switch from Unity 7 to GNOME...

The Linux 4.13 kernel will bring at least one new subsystem...

Peter Hutterer has released libinput version 1.8 for X.Org and Wayland systems as the generic input handling library...

The Linux 4.12 kernel has now been officially released...

Earlier in the Linux 4.12 cycle I delivered a number of I/O scheduler benchmarks from a solid-state drive while for this article are some fresh I/O scheduler tests using a slower SSD as well as a conventional HDD. Schedulers tested were CFQ, Noop, deadline, MQ None, MQ Kyber, MQ BFQ, and MQ Deadline.

Among the sound changes coming for Linux 4.13 is supporting some new Realtek audio codecs...

Phoronix reader "Yoshi" has graciously allowed me remote access to his newly-minuted Radeon Vega Frontier Edition workhorse paired with an AMD Ryzen 7 processor...

For fans of the QNX operating system, SDL2 mainline can now run on QNX 7.0...

Just in case you had any doubt of AMD launching the Radeon RX Vega graphics card later this month at SIGGRAPH, they've now made it publicly clear...

Valve's monthly Steam Survey metrics show a relatively large decline in the Linux market-share for the past month...

With Linux 4.12 likely coming out this weekend, here's a look at some of the features you will likely be able to find within Linux 4.13...

The first release candidate for FreeBSD 11.1 is now available for testing...

There are some additional milestones to celebrate at the end of June...

Keith Packard has published another update on his work around DRM leases and his objective of improving the open-source driver stack for SteamVR / Linux VR...

A few days back NVIDIA released the Vulkan 381.10.10 Linux beta that featured performance improvements as well as new Vulkan/OpenGL interoperability extensions. That beta driver has already been succeeded by a new driver...

KDE developer Martin Gräßlin has written more about KWin's auto test suite with KDE system administrators having set up a new continuous integration system...

Last month was another eventful period on Phoronix and also as we celebrated the 13th birthday of Phoronix and the 9th of the Phoronix Test Suite. During June on Phoronix were 31 featured articles/reviews and 249 news items written by your's truly...

Andres Rodriguez of Valve has published initial support for the OpenGL EXT_external_objects within Mesa, the new GL extensions likely to be part of OpenGL 4.6...

Mesa 17.1.4 is now available as the newest stable point release for the Mesa 17.1 series...

Just as scheduled, last night marked the release of Radeon Open Compute (ROCm) v1.6 being released...

If all goes according to plan, the Linux 4.12 kernel will be officially released before the weekend is through. Here's a recap of some of the most exciting changes for this imminent kernel update...

AMD has silently pushed out an updated AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 driver but the changes are unknown...

We have some OpenGL numbers for Radeon Vega Frontier Edition on AMDGPU-PRO under Linux...

We will likely be seeing more driver-specific per-application performance/workaround tuning within Mesa Gallium3D drivers moving forward...

Continuing on with our Core i9 7900X Linux benchmarking this week are some numbers when testing this ten-core Skylake-X processor on various Linux distributions under an array of different workloads. Tested for this roundup was Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS, Ubuntu 17.04, Fedora 26, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Manjaro 17.0.2, and Clear Linux 16160.

The Qt Company has made good on their word to improve release management and get Qt 5.9.1 shipped punctually...

An open-source contributor has begun working on a new open-source driver for the ARM Mali-400 GPU...

Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" Alpha 1 is now available as the first official development release (sans the daily ISOs) for this upcoming milestone...

Ending out H1'2017 is Phoronix Test Suite 7.2.1-Trysil as the first and only planned point release for this release series...

When buying the MSI X299 SLI PLUS for our initial X299 + Intel Core X Series Linux benchmarking from NewEgg it came with the MSI DS502 Gaming Headset as a free gift. Curiosity got the best of me today, and it actually works just fine under Linux...

Today NVIDIA released their first 384 series Linux driver beta and for the occasion I fired up some fresh OpenCL / Vulkan / OpenGL benchmarks in seeing if there are any performance changes for users to see with this new series that will eventually succeed the 381.22 stable release...

Micro Machines World Series rolled out today and it's greeted by same-day Linux support...

Thanks to this week's Radeon Vega Frontier Edition launch, AMD pushed out a new build of their hybrid driver stack for Linux, AMDGPU-PRO. This new release is marketed as AMDGPU-PRO 17.20 and is only found when looking for the Frontier driver, but it's been working out fine so far in my Polaris/Fiji GPU testing. Here are some benchmarks compared to their current stable series, AMDGPU-PRO 17.10, as well as the newest open-source AMDGPU+RadeonSI/RADV driver stack.

NVIDIA has today announced the 384.47 beta driver for Linux, which succeeds their current 381 short-lived stable release series...

Intel developers have begun prepping support for upcoming Cannonlake SoCs in Coreboot...

Following my initial Intel Core i9 7900X Linux benchmarks this week were questions raised about its power use and thermal efficiency. Here are some tests looking at those factors, including the performance-per-Watt.