Phoronix

The merge window for Linux 4.8 closed this past weekend and while our feature overview covers all the exciting changes there is some functionality we wish would be in this kernel -- or existing functionality to otherwise be changed / improved upon -- that unfortunately is not...

So much for Secure Boot being so secure... After a mistake by Microsoft, the "golden key" is now out in the wild...

Earlier this week I published some Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux OpenGL benchmarks showing how the native gaming performance is different between the competing platforms. Ubuntu Linux lost nearly all of those results with the Intel Mesa driver to Windows 10. In this article are those previous benchmarks plus now having Intel Clear Linux benchmarks added in the mix. Months ago in previous tests we've found Clear Linux to have faster Linux graphics performance than other distributions.

The open-source VIA/Chrome Linux graphics driver stack may not have an up-to-date DRM/KMS driver or working Mesa/Gallium3D driver, but the lone community developer left working on this code has continued to improve the DDX driver over the past few months...

Yesterday I published early open-source benchmarks of the Radeon RX 470 while today is a full 18-way graphics card comparison including the newly-launched Radeon RX 460 and Radeon RX 470 graphics cards alongside the RX 480 Polaris graphics card. All of the AMD graphics cards tested for this article were running the very latest open-source driver stack on the Linux 4.8 kernel and Mesa 12.1-dev Git.

During the early days of kernel mode-setting (KMS) one of the frequently talked about future improvements that could be made as a result of it were improved error messages (like Windows BSODs) in the case of problems and other improvements on that front. While patches have emerged from time to time, it still seems like functionality that's still less than fulfilled compared to the original talked about goals. Patches this week have been revived for DRM panic handling...

The latest feature to land in the GIMP 2.9 development code for the much anticipated GIMP 2.10 milestone is support for WebP image files...

Continuing Wayland release manager Bryce Harrington at Samsung has laid out plans for shipping Wayland/Weston 1.12 in just over one month...

The patches written about last week for using unflushed fences for deferred flushes has now landed within the Radeon Gallium3D code. Performance win!..

The previously talked about KDE Kirigami UI framework has now experienced its first public release...

When Microsoft and Canonical brought Bash and Ubuntu's user-space to Windows 10 earlier this year I ran some preliminary benchmarks of Ubuntu on Windows 10 versus a native Ubuntu installation on the same hardware. Now that this "Windows Subsystem for Linux" is part of the recent Windows 10 Anniversary Update, I've carried out some fresh benchmarks of Ubuntu running atop Windows 10 compared to Ubuntu running bare metal.

As I mentioned in this morning's Early Open-Source Linux Benchmarks Of The AMD Radeon RX 470, coming up tomorrow I will be publishing the first benchmarks of the Radeon RX 460 under Linux in a AMD/NVIDIA graphics card comparison. However, for those impatient, here are some standalone Linux OpenGL benchmarks of the RX 460 on the AMDGPU+RadeonSI driver stack so you can see how your own system compares...

The first update following the major digiKam 5.0 release is now available. DigiKam 5.0 was the dramatic port to Qt5 and many other improvements/changes...

The first 16.04 beta is now publicly available of UbuntuBSD, the unofficial Ubuntu derivative that pairs the Ubuntu user-space with the FreeBSD kernel...

Version 2.1 of the Godot Engine, a cross-platform 2D/3D game engine that was opened up back in 2014, is now available...

The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has picked up support for two more OpenGL ARB extensions outside of what's mandated by OpenGL 4.5...

With my Radeon RX 470 retail unit finally having arrived yesterday, I've been running many benchmarks of this graphics card compared to other AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards under Linux. For your viewing pleasure today is the very tip of the iceberg of many RX 460 and RX 470 Linux benchmarks to be published on Phoronix over the days to come.

Just as a quick word of warning, the open-source AMD Linux driver stack won't be supporting HDMI/DP audio with the new Radeon RX 460/470/480 "Polaris" graphics cards until its massive DAL code-base is merged...

The Reiser4 file-system now has support for the latest stable Linux kernel series, Linux 4.7...

Today marks the Fedora 25 Alpha release that also means it's time for the software string freeze and Bodhi activation point. If all goes well, Fedora 25 will be released three months from yesterday...

One of the latest initiatives worked on by Eric Anholt at Broadcom for the VC4 Gallium3D driver -- the open-source driver used most famously by the Raspberry Pi hardware -- is lower memory use...

The PC-BSD/TrueOS developers have announced the release of the Lumina Desktop Environment 1.0...

Google engineers today put out the first public beta of the upcoming Chrome/Chromium 53 web-browser update...

Pitivi 0.97 was released today as the newest development release of this open-source non-linear video editing software followed quickly by a 0.97.1 point release just for a fix to show the correct version string...

SQLite 3.14 is now available as the newest version of this popular, cross-platform, embed-able SQL database software...

Earlier this year AMD made CodeXL 2.0 open-source as a developer tool with GUI centered around profiling/optimizing D3D, OpenGL, and Vulkan (since CodeXL 2.1) under Windows and Linux. Today marks the release of CodeXL 2.2...

With Microsoft having recently released the Windows 10 Anniversary update I've been running some fresh Windows vs. Linux performance comparisons. The first of these comparisons for your viewing pleasure is looking at the latest Windows 10 build with the latest Intel driver compared to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS while also comparing the performance when manually upgrading to the Linux 4.7 kernel and Mesa 12.1-dev for delivering the latest OpenGL performance potential.

Just days after the Radeon RX 470 began shipping, the Radeon RX 460 is shipping this morning and the embargo concerning the RX 460 has expired...

Qt developers are preparing for the feature-freeze of the upcoming Qt 5.8 tool-kit...

ELLCC, the embedded cross-compiler toolchain that's powered by LLVM, is out with a new release...

Just like clockwork, the first release candidate / development version of the Linux 4.8 kernel is now available for testing...

AMD developer Marek Olšák continues leading their recent charge on looking to boost the performance potential out of Mesa / Gallium3D...

Today marks the closure of the Linux 4.8 kernel merge window so as usual here is our recap of all the features we've been monitoring over the past two weeks. Among the highlights for Linux 4.8 are AMD GPU OverDrive overclocking, initial NVIDIA Pascal support, a new ARM Mali display driver, mainline support for the Raspberry Pi 3 BCM SoC, HDMI CEC support, big reworks to Btrfs and XFS file-system code, and a number of new security features, among other changes.

The second development release of Phoronix Test Suite 6.6-Loppa is now available for your cross-platform, open-source benchmarking needs...

With a new script, it's possible to get Valve's Steam Linux game client running relatively well on FreeBSD...

Last week was the main XFS feature pull for Linux 4.8 while one day before the 4.8 merge window is expected to close, XFS maintainer Dave Chinner is hoping to land a big new feature...

With DragonFlyBSD 4.6 having been released this week, here are benchmarks comparing its performance to that of the previous DragonFlyBSD 4.4 release as well as seeing how it compares to some Linux distributions.

Going along with the recent Linux 4.7 file-system benchmarks, here are some tests of Btrfs' built-in RAID functionality when tested on the Linux 4.7 kernel across four SATA SSDs.

The sole new driver in the kernel's staging area for Linux 4.8 is for some SDIO WiFi cards...

The power supply updates for Linux 4.8 adds a "reboot mode" driver to the kernel...

Being mid-way through Ubuntu 16.10's development cycle, here are some fresh benchmarks showing how its performance has changed (if at all) compared to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS as well as compared to Intel's high-performance Clear Linux distribution as a reference point...

The second beta of the upcoming PHP 7.1 major release is now available for testing...

Wine 1.9.16 is now available as the latest bi-weekly release of Wine for running Windows programs on Linux and other operating systems...

Collabora's Timothy Arceri, one of the firm's open-source graphics driver developers, has written a blog post about recent work they've done to the open-source Intel Mesa driver stack...

It turns out the RAID5 and RAID6 code for the Btrfs file-system's built-in RAID support is faulty and users should not be making use of it if you care about your data...

FreeBSD 11.0 has seen a very minor set-back in getting its release out the door...

Version 6.2 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is expected to come quite soon...

There is a second round of Btrfs file-system updates for the Linux 4.8 merge window...

The visually stunning and longtime Linux-friendly Unigine Engine is up to version 2.3 with a number of new features...

Continuing on from yesterday's Linux 4.4 To 4.7 - EXT4 vs. F2FS vs. Btrfs Benchmarks comparison, here is a wider look at mainline file-systems on the Linux 4.7. File-systems tested on the NVMe SSD included Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, XFS, and NTFS...