Phoronix

While earlier this year the future of Android-x86 was questioned, so far the project is moving along and released this week was Android-x86 6.0-r3 as the latest Marshmallow update...

An Enlightenment developer has been working on support for accelerating EFL Evas filters with OpenGL shaders...

Last week I began posting a number of AMD Radeon RX 580 Linux benchmarks but not covered so far has been the OpenCL compute performance considering the Clover-based compute stack isn't good enough for benchmarking and is basically unmaintained these days by AMD. Meanwhile, their ROCm stack is still being brought up and is not yet fully-opened nor optimized yet for performance. Thus for those with desktop cards looking for basic OpenCL support are left with the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver with its closed-source OpenCL driver. In this article are some fresh OpenCL benchmarks of AMDGPU-PRO on the RX 580 and other Radeon GPUs compared to NVIDIA with its Linux OpenCL driver.

If you are in the market for a dual-band USB WiFi adapter, the Panda PAU09 N600 WiFi adapter works well on modern Linux distributions and will cost you just about $20 USD.

A Phoronix Premium reader recently requested some fresh boot time comparisons and power consumption numbers for Intel laptop hardware, so here are some numbers.

After talking about it for a long time, Intel Optane Memory is now officially available. A 16GB module will cost just $44 USD or $77 for a 32GB capacity...

In aiming to enhance online video streaming, the SRT video protocol has been open-sourced and an alliance forming around that for low-latency video...

For those wishing to try out the FreeBSD-based desktop-focused TrueOS operating system, formerly known as PC-BSD, there is a new stable release...

Emil Velikov has released the second weekly RC release ahead of next month's Mesa 17.1...

Initial support for Radeon RX Vega support in Mesa landed for Mesa 17.1 at the end of March. However, this initial support was limited to OpenGL 3.1 while now patches have come to take Vega up to OpenGL 4.5...

LLVM developers have been wanting to move from their 3-clause BSD-like "LLVM license" to the Apache 2.0 license with exceptions. It's been a while since last hearing about the effort while now a third round of request for comments was issued...

For fans of MPV as the media player forked from MPlayer/MPlayer2, a new release was tagged this weekend...

While GCC 7 is being released in the days ahead, the OpenIndiana crew continuing to advance the open-source Solaris stack has begun offering GCC 6 as an auxiliary/supplementary compiler...

OpenLara is an open-source effort to have a engine re-implementation of the classic Tomb Raider game...

While last week Linus Torvalds was looking at releasing Linux 4.11 this weekend, Linux 4.11-rc8 instead was issued today...

arkOS, the Arch-based Linux distribution focused on "securely self-hosting your online life" with aims to make it easy to deploy servers for web-based services, is being discontinued...

Patches posted today for Nouveau NVC0, the open-source NVIDIA driver for modern GeForce GPUs, implement OpenGL compute shader support for Pascal hardware...

With the Linux 4.11 kernel potentially being released as soon as today, here are some fresh benchmarks of Btrfs / EXT4 / F2FS / XFS on a solid-state drive and comparing the performance of 4.11 Git back to Linux 4.9 and 4.10.

Not only is the BFQ I/O scheduler coming for mainline Linux 4.12 but there are also some more fixes to Btrfs for improving the file-system's native handling of RAID5 and RAID6 modes...

It's been a while since hearing anything of the VK9 project: the effort largely by one developer to implement Direct3D 9 over the Vulkan graphics API...

What comes after openSUSE Leap 42.3 for SUSE's community non-rolling distribution? Version 15...

Debian developers continue making progress with a -- currently unofficial -- port of their Linux operating system to RISC-V...

The past number of weeks I've been able to test the Nighthawk X10 router as my main home/office router and it's been working out great. This router is powered by a 1.7GHz quad-core processor and its wireless connectivity is great, but those interested in the device, it will set you back $450 USD.

There's now yet another open-source media player, but this time focused on the BSD-focused Qt-powered Lumina Desktop Environment...

For those using the xf86-video-nouveau DDX driver rather than the generic xf86-video-modesetting, there is a new release now available...

After leaving the GNU last year and criticizing the Free Software Foundation and all the drama that ensued after this project was just part of the GNU for months, Libreboot is considering re-joining the GNU...

It's looking less and less likely like Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) will be mainlined for the Linux 4.12 kernel. This is the long-in-development effort by Jerome Glisse that would benefit CUDA, OpenCL, and more by allow device memory to be transparently used by any device process and for mirroring process address space on a device...

Ubuntu developers today have announced a "tech preview" of their new text-based installer for Ubuntu Server...

The first release candidate is now available for Devuan, the fork of Debian that rids the system of systemd...

We are just a few weeks out from the release of Mesa 17.1 as the latest quarterly update to this important component to the open-source 3D Linux graphics driver stack. With "Mesa 17.1" already having been mentioned in 102 Phoronix articles to date, here's a look at some of the most exciting changes and new features with Mesa 17.1.

In addition to the Ubuntu 17.10 codename of Artful Aardvark coming out this week, the release schedule for this next Ubuntu Linux development cycle has also been published...

If all goes according to plan, the Linux 4.11 kernel will be officially released this weekend and therefore the Linux 4.12 merge window will immediately open for two weeks. There is a lot on our radar for Linux 4.12...

Those trying to run Netflix from Chrome/Firefox on different Linux distributions should now see broader compatibility for this popular streaming service without having to alter your HTTP user-agent strings...

A ton of code hit the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries' (EFL) Git tree yesterday with the latest feature activity...

Just weeks after the Qt 5.9 Beta debut is now a second beta available for those wishing to test this latest tool-kit work...

It looks like with the upcoming Linux 4.12 kernel cycle we will finally see the BFQ I/O scheduler merged...

KDE Applications 17.04 is now available as the latest installment to this collection of KDE-focused programs...

Yesterday I posted the initial Radeon RX 580 Linux benchmarks while now with having more time with this "Polaris Evolved" card I've been able to try out a bit more, like the AMDGPU Linux overclocking support. Here are the ups and downs of overclocking the Radeon graphics card under Linux.

According to Launchpad, it looks like we finally have the codename for the successor to the Zesty Zapus...

For those preferring stable Wine releases to the bi-weekly development snapshots, Wine 2.0.1 is now available as the first point release to this year's Wine 2.0 debut...

With switching back over to the GNOME desktop, Ubuntu is migrating to Wayland by default as presumed. But Mir is to be maintained for IoT use-cases, according to previous comments by Shuttleworth. However, it looks like multiple developers from the small Mir team were sent packing and there's been no public commits to Mir in the past week...

Following the successful launch of Ubuntu 17.04, the Ubuntu Server team is beginning to formalize their plans for Ubuntu 17.10...

Psychec is a research project out of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) in Brazil that is trying to be a type inference engine for incomplete C code. Here is a small guest post by the Psyche team about their work...

In looking to make their Linux-powered systems more appealing and original to the masses, System76 will begin their own product design and manufacturing...

GStreamer 1.12.0 will soon be released as the latest version of this widely-used, open-source multimedia framework...

In case you missed it, last week in Mesa Git we saw OpenGL 4.0+ support finally arrive for Intel Ivy Bridge hardware with this next Mesa release taking these pre-Haswell parts from GL 3.3 to GL 4.2 thanks to FP64 and ARB_vertex_attrib64 landing...

The GCC 7 mainline code-base hit the important milestone today of having zero P1 regressions -- issues of the highest priority -- and as such they branched the GCC7 code-base and GCC 7.1 RC1 is then being announced later this week as they prepare for this first stable release of GCC 7...

For those curious if the Radeon RX 580 "Polaris Evolved" graphics card is worthwhile as a Linux gamer, here are the initial Phoronix figures for the RX 580 8GB graphics card that launched yesterday. These initial tests were done with AMDGPU+RadeonSI/RADV under a variety of OpenGL and Vulkan workloads.

Building off last week's Wine 2.6 release that brought partial Command Stream Multi-Threading support is now Wine-Staging 2.6...

Not long after the Firefox 53 release, Google has promoted Chrome 58 to stable...