Phoronix

Last week I published various Linux workstation/server distribution OS benchmarks for ending out the year on the Linux distro comparison front (though a desktop/gaming focused comparison is coming this week) while for those curious here are some BSD operating system results compared to the Linux workstation/server performance figures.

Yet another open-source project pushing out a big release for the holidays is the Awesome Window Manager Framework. Awesome 4.0 was released today with some big changes for this open-source X11/X.Org window manager and incorporates about four years of changes since Awesome 3.5...

Red Hat developer Dave Airlie spent some of his Christmas committing some fixes to the open-source RADV Radeon Vulkan driver for benefiting id Software's DOOM game with Vulkan renderer...

The merge window is over and the first release candidate to Linux 4.10 is now available for testing...

OpenBenchmarking.org as of today is at 21.2 million test profile and test suite downloads via the Phoronix Test Suite. That number increased by almost eight million this year!..

While I have owned many Western Digital hard drives over the years, last week was my first time trying out one of the company's new solid-state drives (SSDs) under Linux. Some Linux benchmark results to share for reference today are of the WD Blue 250GB (WDS250G1B0A) SATA 3.0 SSD...

The latest open-source project doing a new release timed for Christmas is FreeDOS...

The latest LibreOffice news just days after announcing their MUFFIN user interface initiative is enabling the program's complex text layout mode by default...

For anyone hoping this year that Canonical would have decided to abandon their Mir display server efforts and shift focus back to Wayland, that did not happen, but in the stockings this holiday for Ubuntu users is an updated Mir display server release, version 0.25...

A number of improvements have landed to the GTK4 tool-kit's early back-end work on supporting Vulkan as an alternative to its OpenGL renderer is gaining ground...

The Ruby project has continued in its annual tradition of releasing a new version of their programming language on Christmas, a tradition held up now for the past number of years...

The OpenMandriva developers have timed their Lx 3.01 operating system update release for Christmas...

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, or happy end-of-2016, regardless of whatever celebrations you may or may not be partaking in as we end out this latest exciting year for Linux and open-source software...

Some unfortunate news to hear this Christmas is that Cyanogen Inc is shutting down their infrastructure behind the popular CyanogenMod fork of Google's Android operating system while a new fork is emerging. Lineage, Hello World!..

While it's late in the Linux 4.10 cycle, on top of all the other features/changes for Linux 4.10, Intel developer Len Brown is seeking to land updates to the in-tree turbostat utility...

This Christmas Eve if you have any RAW digital photographs you are looking to manage, the DarkTable 2.2.0 release is now available with many improvements since its 2.0 release...

Unless you want your graphics card to keep you warm this winter, here's a big comparison of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards under Linux looking at their performance-per-Watt using the latest OpenGL Linux drivers as of the end of 2016. A few days back I posted a 31-way GeForce/Radeon Linux comparison looking at the raw performance with each company's latest Linux drivers going back to the Fermi and R700 days while for this article is looking at the system power consumption and power efficiency for this mass assortment of GPUs.

Unigine Corp is preparing their next major Unigine 2 engine update, Unigine 2.4. This should be another exciting update while unfortunately their new technology demo isn't making it out in time for Christmas...

AMD's upcoming Ryzen (Zen) processors appear to be in good enough shape that they are working on the current mainline kernel as far as I can tell based upon limited information available prior to getting my hands on the CPUs or getting any official announcement from AMD, but some Linux kernel patches have yet to be mainlined. The yet-to-be-merged work appears to be more for non-core features and Zen server functionality with those CPUs shipping later than the upcoming Ryzen desktop CPUs...

While many of you probably wish that the AMDGPU DC (DAL) display code could have been mainlined by now, those having extra time over the holidays can test out some fresh patches for this big display stack...

SUSE's YaST Team has shared the improvements they've been working on this holiday season for improving the distribution's installer / setup tool...

Etnaviv project member Christian Gmeiner has sent out the updated patches implementing the Gallium3D driver for Vivante GPU cores...

NVIDIA Linux developer Thierry Reding has posted some Mesa patches this Christmas weekend...

For those nervous about using LLVM Git/SVN of the current 4.0 development code but looking to have the latest fixes atop the stable LLVM 3.9 series, the LLVM 3.9.1 point release is now available...

The third weekly release candidate of Wine 2.0 is now available for testing...

Intel developers are weighing again the possibility of enabling frame-buffer compression (FBC) support by default for Skylake graphics hardware and newer...

For those that haven't yet switched to Btrfs, ZFS On Linux, or running EXT4/XFS but holding out hope for Reiser4, this out-of-tree file-system code has been updated for Linux 4.9...

Debian developers are currently weighing the prospects of enabling automatic updates on new Debian GNU/Linux installations by default...

With the latest "Zesty" development packages for Ubuntu 17.04, there is initial support for driver-less network printer support...

Linus Torvalds is expected to release the Linux 4.10-rc1 kernel this weekend ahead of Christmas and thereby marking the formal end of the 4.10 merge window, but with all of the major pull requests already submitted and Linus tending not to honor last-minute pull requests of big changes, here is our usual look at the exciting changes and new features you will be able to find with the Linux 4.10 kernel.

Our friends at LoveRPI in conjunction with open-source hardware design firm Firefly have been working on a new, higher-end 64-bit ARM development board...

Python 3.6 is now officially available...

We have known of Valve wanting to improve AMDGPU DRM for VR Linux gaming and Valve wanting to contract Mesa developers to improve the open-source AMD driver. Now we know at least one of the faces who is hired by Valve to improve the open-source AMD driver...

There is some very exciting Nouveau news just ahead of Christmas if you are interested in this open-source NVIDIA driver on Maxwell graphics cards...

FreeBSD is making some progress on supporting Wayland/Weston as an alternative to running the X.Org Server...

Flatpak, formerly XDG-App, is starting to mature and is looking good for 2017. As a sign of the times, lead Flatpak developer Alexander Larsson at Red Hat announced version 0.8 this week and it will be a long-term supported stable branch...

Valve just lit up the Steam Winter Sale that's going on until 2 January for getting great deals on a variety of games, including many Steam OS / Linux games...

The Rustlang developers have released Rust 1.14 in time for the holidays...

A new version of the GNU Guix package manager and Guix System Distribution (GuixSD) is now available, version 0.12 is this new GNU release just in time for the holidays...

The lightweight Alpine Linux distribution that is built around Musl libc and BusyBox and popular in the container space has issued a big update to their Linux operating system...

Last week I published some fresh AMD Linux 4.9 + Mesa 13.1-dev benchmarks on many different AMD Radeon GPUs going all the way back to the Radeon HD 4800 series days. Today those numbers are being complemented by an extensive NVIDIA GeForce Fermi / Kepler / Maxwell / Pascal comparison to make up a 31-way NVIDIA/AMD Linux OpenGL performance comparison. If you are curious how the NVIDIA and AMD Linux performance is with the very latest drivers and going back several hardware generations, this holiday article is for you.

Google engineers are working on support for running OpenGL ES / WebGL over Vulkan drivers...

Just in time for Christmas is the release candidate for the upcoming Qt 5.8 toolkit release...

The RADV Radeon Vulkan driver in Mesa has seen some activity last night to enable more fine-grained features...

It's been two years since we last reported on the Leadwerks game engine while this morning the company announced a big update for it that also improves the Linux support...

It appears that ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 for Intel Haswell graphics hardware might finally be merged soon into Mesa and thereby exposing OpenGL 4.0 support...

With Debian Stretch dropping 32-bit PowerPC as a release architecture, Ubuntu is following a similar maneuver and will not be making 32-bit PPC images of future releases...

The latest for your enjoyment of our year-end comparison articles and benchmarks is a fresh comparison of various workstation/enterprise/server oriented Linux distributions when looking at relevant workloads. Testing for this distribution comparison being done from a Core i7 6800K Broadwell-E system while a desktop-focused Linux desktop comparison for winter 2016 will be posted still before year's end.

Matthias Clasen shifted focus today from working on the new recipes program to putting out a new development release in the road to GTK4...

Version 1.1.3 of the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) was released today...