Phoronix

The WebKitGTK+ build of the WebKit rendering engine for GNOME desktop applications has seen measurable Wayland improvements ahead of this month's GNOME 3.28 debut...

Linus Torvalds has gone ahead and released the Linux 4.13 kernel...

While it will be quite some time before Debian 10 "Buster" is released, the first alpha of its installer is now available...

With the experimental AMDGPU DRM driver's support for GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" and GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" graphics processors as an alternative to the default Radeon DRM driver, one of the disadvantages of that experimental kernel driver is losing out on UVD video decoding. But a port is in the works...

Unless there is a last minute hiccup, the Linux 4.13 kernel should be officially released before the day is through...

The Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution is deciding to retire their x86 32-bit support...

It looks like the Oracle layoffs just before the US Labor Day indeed hit the SPARC and Solaris groups hard...

ReactOS 0.4.6 is now available as the latest version of this "open-source Windows" operating system still striving for API/ABI compatibility...

With the DNF package manager working out well on recent Fedora releases, Yum could soon see retirement on the Fedora front...

Intel added a new extension to the VA-API video acceleration API over the summer called the Flexible Encoding Infrastructure...

Chad Versace, the former Intel Linux graphics driver developer now working at Google, has posted a set of 23 patches for bringing Android support to the Intel open-source Vulkan driver...

Coreutils 8.28 is now available as the collection of core components found on GNU/Linux systems from cp, mv, df, tail, and many other common commands to command-line users...

While the Linux browser/desktop market-share rose above 3% in August, the Linux gaming marketshare made a measurable decline...

Queued in the btrfs-next tree for Linux 4.14 is Zstd compression support...

Wine 2.16 is now available as the latest bi-weekly development release for running Windows games and applications on Linux and other operating systems...

With the Power Use, RAM + Boot Times With Unity, Xfce, GNOME, LXDE, Budgie and KDE Plasma tests this week, many expressed frustration over the heavy KDE packaging on Ubuntu leading to the inflated results for the Plasma 5 desktop tests. For some additional reference, here is how KDE Plasma (and GNOME Shell) compare when running on Ubuntu 17.04 vs. openSUSE Tumbleweed...

While the Ryzen CPUs have been available for a few months now and the higher-wattage Threadripper and EPYC processors are now available too, the Linux thermal driver remains missing in action and it's looking less likely that it will materialize for Linux 4.14...

For those with a system containing the new Realtek RTL8822BE wireless chipset, initial support for it will be found with the upcoming Linux 4.14 LTS kernel...

The debut of the Radeon RX Vega graphics cards as well as the launch of the Ryzen Threadripper and getting more information on the Ryzen "performance marginality problem" occupied most of August...

According to Net Applications' Netmarketshare, the Linux market share on the desktop as judged by browser interactions may now be above 3%...

Following the AMD Threadripper Linux tests of this week today I finally had a chance to try out some of the BSDs with this 16 core / 32 thread system...

The first beta is available today for the Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" release for the flavors opting in to participate in this development milestone ahead of the official launch in October...

With the Razer Blade laptop on Linux I've been playing with the past few days, here are some fresh OpenGL vs. Vulkan benchmarks using this Kabylake laptop/ultrabook with its HD Graphics 620...

Oracle is celebrating Labor Day in America this weekend by reportedly doing a fresh round of layoffs and it's sounding like it could affect a number of heads...

Seventy-seven new patches were posted today for the AMDGPU DC (formerly DAL) display code that reworks around six thousand lines of this massive codebase...

Feral Interactive has delivered a punctual release of XCOM 2: War of the Chosen for Linux and macOS gamers...

Mesa 17.2 was supposed to be released earlier this month but the release process has been extended and we're now up to the sixth release candidate for testing...

It's been a while since last having anything to report on the Simple Desktop Display Manager (SDDM) but that changed with today's v0.15 release of this Qt5-powered log-in/display manager...

With the soon-to-be-released LLVM 5.0 there is the initial AMD Zen scheduler model for the compiler to benefit Ryzen / EPYC processors. But now already hitting the LLVM development code for LLVM 6.0 is a revised scheduler model...

Following the rumors of an eight-core / sixteen-thread Threadripper, the 1900X is now officially available beginning today...

PHP 7.2 has matured past the alpha and beta stages and is now out with its first release candidate...

If you missed out on one of the past Valve hardware sales, the Steam Controller and Steam Link are back to their reduced prices...

With having the Apple MacBook Air out for the Razer Blade Stealth Linux testing comparison, I decided to see how the latest releases of macOS Sierra and Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty Zapus were competing.

Many Phoronix readers have written in over the past day being excited over the prospects of being able to disable a newer version of Intel's Management Engine...

One of the first follow-on requests from this morning's Razer Blade Stealth Linux testing was for on top of all the other data-sets shared in that article to also look at the RAM usage, battery power draw, and boot times for the different desktop options on Ubuntu 17.04. As the request came in from a Phoronix Premium supporter, I jumped on that and here are some of those numbers.

QEMU 2.10 is now available as the latest release for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

Earlier this year Razer co-founder and CEO Min-Liang Tan announced that Razer is planning better laptop support on Linux. He noted that more customers are requesting Linux support and they formed a goal of figuring out how to make "the best notebook in the world that supports Linux." Razer doesn't have any Linux laptop announcement to make yet, but for seeing the current state of affairs, they sent over the Razer Stealth laptop so we could put it through our Linux testing paces at Phoronix. Here is a look at the Razer Stealth ultrabook on Linux as well as a variety of interesting performance metrics, including some power metrics compared to Windows.

Version 17.08 of the Genode open-source operating system framework is now available with a variety of changes...

One of the unique test requests coming in as part of our Threadripper on Linux testing is to see how well the LLVMpipe and OpenSWR CPU-based OpenGL implementations within Mesa perform for this 16 core / 32 thread single-socket processor. Here are those results...

With Google Summer of Code 2017 now in the books, the final reports on the various projects carried out within the BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system are now available...

LLVM 5.0 was supposed to be officially released last week, but instead another release candidate was warranted while the stable debut is expected in the days ahead...

While we routinely run various Linux distribution / operating system comparisons at Phoronix, they tend to be done on desktop class hardware and the occasional servers. This is our look at the most interesting enterprise-focused Linux distribution comparison to date as we see how Intel's Xeon Scalable platform compares on different GNU/Linux distributions when using the Tyan GT24E-B7106 paired with two Dual Xeon Gold 6138 processors. The tested configuration has 96GB of DDR4-2666 memory and 40 cores / 80 threads to see how different modern Linux distributions are affected with the latest-generation Xeon platform.

It has been a few months since the last Cairo 2D graphics library update, which is used by programs ranging from Firefox to GTK and WebKit, but today the notable 1.15.8 release is now available...

Taking a brief break from their Librem 5 smartphone campaign, there's a new Purism blog post today that explains at length why this summer's Librem laptop shipments were delayed due to a pesky Coreboot bug lasting weeks and what it took to come to a workaround...

For those craving to see some fresh OpenGL and Vulkan Linux gaming benchmarks with the recent high-end Intel/AMD CPUs at Phoronix, this article is for you.

Google Summer of Code participant Jacob Lifshay has written his final recap about the work he did this summer on starting the "Vulkan-CPU" project for writing a soft/CPU-based implementation of the Vulkan API...

Lead Intel ANV Vulkan driver developer Jason Ekstrand has landed support for the VK_KHR_external_fence extension within this open-source Linux Vulkan driver...

Since earlier this year NVIDIA posted their work on "Flang", an LLVM-based Fortran compiler, to GitHub while now they have done a formal announcement and update about its status...

For those interested in the work being done to the HAMMER2 file-system that's being developed by Matthew Dillon for DragonFlyBSD, it is indeed getting closer to being a working reality...

Introduced in the Linux 4.13 kernel for the Direct Rendering Manager drivers was the concept of DRM synchronization objects while for Linux 4.14 this feature will be improved upon...