Phoronix

Most of you will probably agree that 2016 was the best year yet for Linux gaming with having a ton of new game releases, several of which were AAA game titles, the premiere of Vulkan is an important step for the future, Valve working on Linux VR efforts, and the Linux graphics drivers getting into better shape for handling the next era of Linux games...

While the Samsung 960 EVO NVMe SSD was promising at first, after its quick failure I decided to try out the Toshiba/OCZ RD400 NVMe M.2 SSD. For the 256GB model (RVD400-M22280-256G) this high-performance solid-state drive will set you back just $149 USD.

Almost any longtime Linux user or Phoronix reader will surely agree with me that Mesa absolutely rocked this year for the open-source graphics stack...

OpenMW 0.41 was released today as the newest version of this open-source game project working to re-implement the game engine found within Elderscrolls III: Morrowind...

What you will not find as part of the list of new Linux 4.10 kernel features is BUS1, the successor to the un-merged KDBUS initiative and a new approach for in-kernel IPC. While it didn't land in 2016 to the mainline kernel, it's making progress...

This year was quite the year for Red Hat's Fedora Linux distribution with the successful launches of Fedora 24 and 25, the later including Wayland-by-default with the Fedora 25 Workstation release atop GNOME 3.22...

The long in-development "NewGVN" code to provide a new global value numbering (GVN) algorithm within the LLVM code-base has been merged to master...

With this weekend's release of the Darktable 2.2 RAW digital photography workflow software being out and it having OpenCL improvements among other advancements, I've been carrying out some fresh benchmarks for this popular open-source, cross-platform program...

While Linux 4.10-rc1 was only released yesterday and there will be about two months before it rolls around to the Linux 4.11 merge window, Intel OTC already has new code ready for testing...

While Vulkan 1.0 only made its public debut in February, on Phoronix in 2016 were 231 news items so far about this new graphics API from The Khronos Group, not counting the dozens of benchmarking articles looking at length about GPU/driver Linux performance...

Hitting the end of the year as well as yesterday's Linux 4.10-rc1 kernel marking the end of the merge window, here is a look at some kernel development statistics...

With the end of 2016 in sight, here's a look back at the most popular Ubuntu news for the year...

After more than one decade in development, the developer crew behind the HandBrake open-source video transcoder software finally released version 1.0 this weekend...

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...