Phoronix

With last week's CMake 3.7 release one of the less-advertised features is the build system's server-mode functionality, which is sure to excited integrated development environments (IDEs)...

The KDE community has today announced the release of KDE Frameworks 5.28.0 as the latest update to this massive collection of add-on library components to complement Qt5...

CVE-2016-4484 was disclosed on Monday as a Cryptsetup issue that allows users to easily gain access to a root initramfs shell on affected systems in a little over one minute of simply hitting the keyboard's enter key...

The second development milestone/test release of the upcoming Phoronix Test Suite 6.8-Tana is now available for your cross-platform, open-source benchmarking needs...

Intel's SDK for OpenCL Applications 2016 Release 3 was quietly made available earlier this month and it offers some interesting Linux changes...

The latest Chromium open-source browser development code adds support for motion sensors under Chrome OS and Linux...

Raspberry Pi's Raspbian Debian-based Linux distribution had been using xcompmgr as its compositing window manager on the desktop, but now they will likely be switching to the Compton fork for better performance...

Today and tomorrow is a very basic Ubuntu Online Summit (UOS) where the developers are plotting their work for Ubuntu 17.04, the Zesty Zapus...

Feral Interactive announced a few minutes ago on Twitter that they will be releasing Total War: WARHAMMER for Linux on 22 November...

Mozilla has uploaded the final Firefox 50.0 binaries to their servers for all supported operating systems...

After running my initial Intel Kaby Lake Linux tests last week using a Core i5 MSI Cubi 2 with new "KBL" processor, which was done under Ubuntu 16.10, I turned my focus to testing a few other distributions with this newest-generation Intel processor...

AMD used the SC16 super-computing conference today announce version 1.3 of the Radeon Open Compute platform...

GCC 7 feature development is officially over with the development phase entering stage three now where the focus is on bug-fixing...

While we have seen a number of ARM vendors in recent years open-source and mainline DRM/KMS drivers in the Linux kernel for supporting their display blocks on modern SoCs, there has been little activity in the open-source 3D space still for ARM SoCs...

While there were initially concerns by users over OpenGL 4.4~4.5 support being exposed for open-source Mesa drivers due to the Khronos OpenGL conformance test suite for these newer versions and the associated costs, those concerns were laid to rest and the X.Org Foundation is moving ahead with becoming an official Khronos adopter for Mesa...

Ilia Mirkin, the prolific independent contributor to Mesa who started off on improvements to the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver a few years ago and has also contributed to Freedreno, has now turned to Intel's SWR Gallium3D software rasterizer as his latest target...

The recent slowdowns seen with AMDGPU-PRO 16.40 on my test systems may be attributed to the Linux 4.8 kernel being not properly supported by this hybrid kernel driver...

When finding out a few days back about the ETLegacy 2.75 open-source update with the improvements made around its OpenGL 3.2 renderer, I couldn't help but try it out to relive the original Enemy Territory on Linux with this modernized engine work...

With the SuperComputing '16 event taking place in Salt Lake City, the latest TOP500 list of super-computers has been published...

For those wanting a concise look at how FreeBSD's development has evolved recently, their third quarter 2016 status report was published this weekend to offer a glimpse at the latest development projects...

German conglomerate Siemens has announced they are acquiring Mentor Graphics, a company that's involved with Linux in several areas...

Mesa 13.0.1 is now available as the first point release to the massive Mesa 13.0 that brought OpenGL 4.5 to Intel, the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver, and much more...

Out this weekend is the eighth alpha release of the Debian Installer for the upcoming Debian 9.0 "Stretch" release due out in 2017...

Linus Torvalds released Linux 4.9-rc5 a few minutes ago as the latest weekly test release of the forthcoming Linux 4.9...

Back in 2012 I wrote about Project Darling as an effort to run Mac OS X software on Linux -- to Wine is for Windows software on Linux, Darling is for Mac software on Linux. Work on Darling seems to have picked up recently after a brief hiatus...

Vulkan 1.0.33 is now the latest version of the Vulkan 1.0 API specification from The Khronos Group...

One of my favorite Linux-native games of all time would definitely be Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Wonderful memories of that excellent id Tech 3 game and back when I had time to game on Linux, when not being challenged by early Linux GPU driver issues. This game continues to live on via the community ETLegacy open-source project and recently did issue a major update...

This week marked five years since the release of the Open64 5.0 compiler in what is the latest and likely last-ever release of this once-promising code compiler...

The AMDGPU backend within LLVM that's used by the open-source Radeon graphics driver stack has landed half-precision / FP16 support...

The VC4 open-source graphics driver stack for notably supporting the Raspberry Pi Broadcom SoCs is nearing support for threading as another potential performance win...

Today's PyPy2.7 v5.6 release as a Python interpreter alternative to CPython 2.7 while offering better performance has added some new functionality...

For those wondering the current benefits of switching over to Mesa Git (13.1-devel) on Ubuntu 16.10 compared to the stock Mesa 12 drivers, here are some benchmark comparisons for RadeonSI Gallium3D using an R9 Fury. There are also tests when moving to Linux 4.9 from the Ubuntu 16.10 "Yakkety Yak" Linux 4,8 kernel...

En route to the mainline GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is support for OpenACC routines...

The second and final planned point release to GNOME 3.22 is now available...

For those that wait for the first point release to a new Mesa stable series before switching over to the latest open-source graphics driver stack, Mesa 13.0.1 is just around the corner...

The LLVM Clang compiler now has a -Og optimization level inspired by GCC...

Version 3.7 of the CMake build system is now available...

Wine 1.9.23 is now available as the newest development version of this popular program for running Windows applications/games on Linux and other operating systems...

Intel's Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 (ITMT) patches for the Linux kernel have been pushed to their eighth revision as it prepares for mainline integration...

Last week marked the highly anticipated release of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided for Linux. At launch it only offered official support for NVIDIA GPUs on Linux with the AMD support being less than stellar. While the open-source Linux graphics driver Git code is quick to move along and adapt for new games, a new Phoronix Premium member requested some tests for seeing how the latest code is now working for this demanding AAA Linux game ported by Feral Interactive.

NVIDIA this week announced the introduction of the VK_NVX_device_generated_commands Vulkan extension for allowing the GPU to generate rendering commands on its own...

In time for any weekend Linux gaming you might do or Linux GPU driver testing, The Talos Principle has a new public beta available and it offers improvements to its Vulkan renderer...

We've talked a lot on Phoronix about PHP 7 due to the mighty impressive performance improvements found in this major update that was released at the end of last year. Many companies have blogged about their positive performance experiences in upgrading to PHP7, many of which we've shared on Phoronix, and Tumblr is now the latest company to boast about their migration from PHP5 to PHP7...

Around three dozen apps from the KDE Applications suite could be dropped if they don't see a port from kdelibs4 to KDE Frameworks 5 within the next year...

Two weeks back Intel submitted their first set of feature changes for Linux 4.10 to DRM-Next so that they can be staged for this next major kernel cycle. Coming in now is a second set of feature additions and other changes/improvements...

One of the most discussed items this week on the Fedora developers' mailing list is in regards to changing the hostname on Fedora 26 and future versions...

During this year's systemd conference there was talk of A New Wireless Daemon Is In Development To Potentially Replace wpa_supplicant. At that time the code wasn't yet public to this new open-source WiFi daemon developed by Intel, but since then the code has now opened up...

KWave is a graphical sound editor that's been in development since 1998 and is finally working its way into KDE Multimedia for becoming a proper part of KDE...

For those sticking to the Mesa 12.0 stable series until the huge Mesa 13.0 has further stabilized, Mesa 12.0.4 is now available as the latest point release...

Fedora 25 is not coming out next week as planned but has been pushed back to 22 November...