Phoronix

More than one year after the last Elementary OS Linux distribution update that focuses upon design elegance, v0.4 "Loki" was released today...

Recently I purchased a Xeon E5-2609 v4 Broadwell-EP processor as a $300 Xeon with eight physical cores but clocked at just 1.7GHz and without any Turbo Boost while the TDP is 85 Watts. Here are some benchmarks compared to other LGA-2011 v3 CPUs in my possession under Linux along with an AMD FX reference point too and followed by some Skylake Xeon benchmarks.

The Single Loop Power Controller (SLPC) was an interesting addition to Skylake hardware but even with Skylake processors being out more than one year and the SLPC patches for the Intel DRM Linux driver having been out for a number of months, this GuC-based SLPC support has yet to be merged. The latest version of the patches was just published...

Version 5.4 of the V8 JavaScript Engine has been released. This is another hefty update to V8 and it brings the favorite kind of work we like talking about: more performance improvements...

As covered previously, threaded input finally landed in the X.Org Server. It's 2016, and these patches had even been sitting around for a few years with no action, while finally this beneficial feature will be shipping with next month's X.Org Server 1.19 release...

It's been a while since last having a Sailfish OS update from Jolla to talk about, but that's changed with the "Aurajoki" release finally hitting supported devices...

With many Linux gamers having looked forward to the Linux release of Rocket League, I tested out the Linux port of the game when using Mesa RadeonSI Gallium3D as well as the AMDGPU-PRO blob...

Following the seven-way Linux distribution benchmark comparison published earlier this week, on the same system I set out to test a variety of BSD distributions on the same system and ultimately benchmark their out-of-the-box performance too. Those performance benchmark results will be published later this week while today were a few remarks I wanted to share when trying out TrueOS, DragonFlyBSD, GhostBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, MidnightBSD, and PacBSD (Arch BSD) on this modern Intel Xeon system.

A game that many Linux gamers have been waiting months to see has finally been released on Steam for Linux: Rocket League...

NVIDIA's Unix team today released the 370.28 driver as their newest Linux/BSD/Solaris driver in their short-lived branch...

Intel's open-source developers have been working on a GPU-based high-performance 2D renderer that can be nine times faster than Cairo's CPU-based renderer and still multiple times faster than Qt (even with OpenGL), Cairo with OpenGL, or even Google's Skia with OpenGL rendering. The focus of this new project, FastUIDraw, is ultimately for speeding up the rendering of web content and being able to accelerate all of the HTML5 canvas operations...

Coming up in just two weeks is the X.Org's XDC2016 conference taking place in Helsinki, Finland. Here's a preview of some of the interesting talks...

Playing legacy/X11 games on Wayland via XWayland may soon be in better shape with the latest slew of X Server patches...

TigerVNC 1.7 was released today as the newest version of this open-source, high-performance, cross-platform VNC implementation...

While it may just feel like recently when DNF 1.0 was released and Fedora switched from Yum to DNF by default, DNF 2.0 is already in development and hitting Fedora Rawhide systems...

DragonFlyBSD is now the latest operating system that has decided to switch from OpenSSL to LibreSSL by default...

Wireshark 2.2 is now available as the newest version of this widely-used packet analyzer program...

A mini-ITX board running the GNU Libreboot downstream of Coreboot sounds interesting for a fully free software HTPC/media center PC, right? Too bad this new motherboard port is for an i945 board released back in 2008 and has integrated a painfully slow original, single-core Atom chip...

With Google's Android Runtime for Chrome (ARC) it turns out that this technology for letting Android apps run on Chrome OS is making use of the Wayland protocol and could open up other Wayland clients to running on Chrome OS...

Samba 4.5 is now available as the latest release of this major open-source project for improving Windows interoperability (i.e. SMB/CIFS) on Linux and other platforms...

A new version of the X-Plane desktop flight simulator, which is arguably the world's most advanced flight simulator, is now available. The Linux version remains in-step with the Windows and OS X builds...

A few months back I wrote about Arcan: A New Open-Source Display Server Built Atop A Game Engine. Sadly with most niche and ambitious open-source projects along these lines, they tend to disappear over time, but Arcan on the other hand continues moving forward so far...

Veteran Mesa developer Ilia Mirkin has been working on finishing up the core plumbing for OpenGL ES 3.2 / Android Extension Pack support for the Mesa drivers...

Earlier this year we heard of a science fiction MMORPG game making use of Unigine 2 after switching from Unreal Engine 4. It's been a few months since hearing about this game, which is targeting Linux support, but now there's a slew of new information as they just launched a Kickstarter campaign...

Bryce Harrington announced the release candidates on Tuesday for the upcoming Wayland 1.12 and Weston 1.12 compositor releases...

LLV8 is an experimental compiler for the V8 JavaScript Engine as shipped in Chrome, etc. LLV8 makes use of LLVM's MCJIT for code optimization and while it takes longer to compile this way, the generated code should be superior...

While I've been running PC-BSD on some systems for years I hadn't tried out any of its rolling-release FreeBSD 11.0-based spins under the new TrueOS brand nor had I tried out the project's Qt-based Lumina Desktop Environment since it reached 1.0. That changed today with trying out the latest weekly spin of TrueOS x64...

Vulkan 1.0.26 was released as the first update to the Vulkan 1.0 API for September...

We've known for a while that FreeBSD has been working on a CentOS 7 compatibility layer while now that work has finally landed in FreeBSD ports...

In testing out a new Broadwell-EP system as well as for final validation of the new Phoronix Test Suite 6.6, I carried out a fresh Linux OS distribution comparison last week. Here are those results from Ubuntu, Clear Linux, Scientific Linux, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Fedora, Antergos, and Sabayon Linux.

Phoronix Test Suite 6.6.0-Loppa is now officially available as the latest quarterly update to our open-source benchmarking software for Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows, OS X, and Hurd platforms...

For those making use of the xf86-video-ati DDX driver in a PRIME-capable system with Radeon GPU, there's more effective tear-free rendering support with the latest development code...

A fix landed in Mesa Git today that should address various performance issues people have been seeing in different rare setups. The fix mostly seems to be for Radeon/Intel users seeing low performance recently with glxgears but also appears to help those affected by the much talked about R9 290 regression...

Great news for users of the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" graphics driver: the long-awaited boost patches are now queued up to land with Linux 4.9...

Greg Kroah-Hartman announced he's planning on Linux 4.9 to be the next long-term supported kernel that he will maintain for a period two years...

KDE developers have decided to switch to Wayland by default for KDE Neon's unstable/developer OS...

While the ultimate vision of the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver isn't yet clear with RADV being the front-runner so far as the community-based driver while AMD has yet to open up their official Vulkan driver and there's been few remarks about RADV from AMD employees (aside from John Bridgman in our forums), RADV inched forward today in moving closer to being merged in mainline Mesa...

The GNU Compiler for Java (GCJ) while made a lot of progress in its early years as a free software Java compiler, in recent years it's basically been in maintenance mode and might now be removed entirely from GCC...

The long-awaited Mesa point release update to Mesa 12 is now available with a variety of fixes for these open-source graphics drivers...

Following the AMDGPU SI / GCN 1.0 support hitting Mesa, the libdrm changes for AMD Southern Islands support has also landed...

The RPM-based Mageia Linux distribution has decided to offer Fedora's DNF forked version of Yum in their next major release...

Fedora 26 was originally talked about for a May release, but the schedule approved Friday by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee puts it for an early June debut...

Adobe stopped updating its NPAPI-based Linux Flash Player four years ago and planned to stop supporting it entirely in 2017, but now the company has backtracked on those steps with a commitment to regularly update their NPAPI and PPAPI versions of the Flash Player for Linux...

Last week's Qt 5.8 Alpha preliminary packages have now been promoted to being the official alpha packages for this next major version of the Qt5 tool-kit...

Linus Torvalds announced the release a short time ago of the Linux 4.8-rc5 kernel, which ends up weighing in as bigger than last week's 4.8-rc4...

Last year we covered SMAF as the project aiming to allow for secure DMA-BUF usage. While that was written about nearly a year ago and had already gone through multiple patch revisions, unfortunately that code has yet to be mainlined...

Following this week's release of OpenBSD 6.0, this BSD operating system has added LLVM and its Clang C/C++ compiler to its base archive...

LXQt 0.10 was released last November and is currently the desktop environment's current latest release of this Qt-written desktop forked from LXDE. There's talk though of a new release possibly coming soon, but the project doesn't appear ready yet to commit to any release schedule or routine cadence for new versions...

Unity rendering expert Aras Pranckevičius has started the SMOL-V open-source project aiming as a compression utility for the SPIR-V intermediate representation used by Vulkan and OpenCL...

It's been since last November that X.Org Server 1.18 was released and while the project previously stuck to a six month release cadence, that didn't happen for xorg-server 1.19. Now, however, out of the blue Keith Packard has put together a proposal for quickly shipping it next month...