Phoronix

Intel has updated its currently out-of-tree Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 patches for compatibility against the Linux 4.9-rc1 kernel plus made other improvements to the code...

Plasma 5.8 was only released at the beginning of October but already there has been a number of Wayland improvements queuing up for the next milestone, Plasma 5.9...

It's been a while since last running any major Linux graphics tests with Intel Haswell era hardware, but in preparing for a big Linux 3.x/4.x kernel comparison with a Core i7 Haswell, I ran some fresh graphics benchmarks with OpenGL and Vulkan.

The first alpha release of the upcoming LibreOffice 5.3 open-source office suite was tagged a short time ago in Git...

Nintendo announced their new "NX" portable console today as the Nintendo Switch. While we don't focus on game consoles at Phoronix, hardware and talk of graphics APIs do excite us...

ARM has posted a new video showing off the side-by-side performance of OpenGL ES and Vulkan graphics APIs on ARM hardware...

The supported Linux 4.8/4.7/4.4 kernel series have seen stable point releases today to address a new CVE security issue nicknamed "Dirty COW" that is a local privilege escalation issue and could allow attackers to overwrite files to which they don't own write access...

MPV Player 0.21 is now available as the latest version of this popular fork of MPlayer/MPlayer2...

This morning's release of the Mad Max game for Linux lists only NVIDIA graphics as supported, but it does turn out at least for newer AMD GPUs using the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver things should work -- well, assuming you are using the latest open-source driver code...

Another early feature being talked about for Fedora 26 is no longer installing the Syntaptics X.Org driver by default...

A short time after Mesa 13.0 was branched in Git yesterday, well known AMD open-source developer Marek Olšák was landing new work in master...

SDL 2.0.5 is now available as the latest version of this library used by many cross-platform games and is part of the Steam Runtime. SDL 2.0.5 brings many new features and improvements...

DragonFlyBSD is now defaulting to LibreSSL throughout its operating system stack and is planning to completely remove OpenSSL in the near future...

Feral Interactive's port of Mad Max to Linux (and macOS) is now officially out and can be found on Steam...

Now that release manager Emil Velikov has worked through his LLVM issue, Mesa 13.0 Release Candidate 1 is now officially available as the first development release that has core OpenGL 4.4/4.5 support in Mesa...

Now that Linux 4.9-rc1 is out, it's onward to testing this new Linux kernel on the dozens of test systems at Phoronix. With some early testing on a Core i7 6800K Broadwell-E box, there are some promising improvements...

The Anaconda installer is never done evolving... The Anaconda installer will be updated, again, with Fedora 26 but hopefully won't see the major fallout during one of its earlier reworks when it was in very bad shape. This time around they are just looking to add Blivet-GUI...

The Mesa 12.1/13.0 release dragged out a bit to allow the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver to be merged and then some Gallium3D Nine fixes, which have landed. The branching / feature freeze didn't happen last week though as planned, but Emil Velikov the release manager has now provided an update...

Stemming from an issue of slow performance inside LXDE's file manager, the Raspberry Pi VC4 Gallium3D driver has received an optimization for better texture upload performance...

While Linux 4.9-rc1 was only released this past weekend, the EFI subsystem changes are already being staged for the next kernel cycle...

With having delivered a number of RADV Radeon Vulkan benchmarks recently, time to turn the tables to see how the Intel Vulkan driver stack is comparing to its i965 classic Mesa DRI driver. Dota 2 benchmarks up today under Ubuntu 16.10 while using Mesa 12.10-dev and Linux 4.9...

While there are many new features in Linux 4.9, there is some functionality we've been looking forward to that sadly isn't yet in the mainline kernel tree...

Version 1.2.1 of the promising Solus Linux distribution is now available and also premieres a MATE edition ISO to complement its original Budgie desktop...

As usual when there's a new Ubuntu Linux, the requests come in for running OpenGL graphics/game benchmarks under the different desktop options. For some Ubuntu 16.10 on Intel Mesa graphics tests are results for GNOME Shell, Xfce, LXDE, KDE Plasma, Openbox, MATE, and Unity running atop X.Org.

While Fedora has always supported ARM/AArch64 hardware well, they've missed out on the whole Raspberry Pi craze even as the ARMv7 hardware has been shipping for a while and there are plenty of Pi-focused Linux distributions out there. With Fedora 25, there's finally going to be good support for the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 devices...

Canonical has formally moved forward with its enterprise kernel livepatching service, which it's making free to the Ubuntu community -- assuming you have three Ubuntu installations or less. Like the other approaches, this is about applying in real-time critical security fixes to the kernel without rebooting...

The JDK 9 release schedule is indeed being pushed back by four months and now will be released in late July...

The annual GStreamer Conference took place last week in Berlin alongside the Linux Foundation's Embedded Linux Conference Europe. The videos from this multimedia open-source conference are now available...

Re-basing to last week's Wine 1.9.21 release is a new version of Wine-Staging that incorporates various experimental/testing patches atop this code-base for running Windows binaries on Linux and other operating systems...

NVIDIA this morning is expanding the Pascal family with the announcement of the GeForce GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti lower-cost graphics cards...

KDE Plasma developers talked this week about their plans for the new development cycle and what they want the desktop to look like moving into 2017 and further ahead into 2018...

With all the new features in Linux 4.9, obviously Tux put on a bit of weight this kernel cycle... Here's some numbers...

There is less than one month to go until openSUSE Leap 42.2 will be officially released while today marks the RC1 availability...

The GTK+ Scene Graph Kit (GSK) has landed in mainline GTK+ Git as the "spiritual successor to Clutter" and now providing a scene graph for this GNOME toolkit...

Intel's Clear Linux open-source operating system continues advancing as one of the less heard of but highly performant rolling-release distributions for servers, cloud, containers, and other applications...

Fresh patches are available for GCC to get OpenMP offloading to the NVIDIA PTX ISA working for accelerating OpenMP on NVIDIA GPUs with the GNU Compiler Collection...

This weekend was the release of Linux 4.9-rc1 to mark the end of the 4.9 kernel merge window. As such, here's our usual feature overview recapping all of the changes to Linux 4.9 that have us excited about the next version of this open-source kernel.

Zend has begun developing a new JIT (Just-In-Time) Engine for PHP and is expecting it will likely be ready for PHP 8.0...

Ending out the alphabet, Ubuntu 17.04 is.....

Interest is growing around shipping software as LLVM IR and will be discussed at this year's LLVM Developers' Meeting...

Development on the GTK+ 4.0 tool-kit continues moving along and this weekend has seen 100+ commits dropping various deprecated and outdated code...

Now that the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver has landed in Mesa Git and Linux 4.9-rc1 is out, I figured it was time for some fresh benchmarks of the Radeon Vulkan driver against the RadeonSI Gallium3D OpenGL driver. Here is the first of that new data.

The Live CD Linux distribution focused on showcasing the potential of Wayland across different desktops, toolkits, and applications is out with a new ISO release...

Lighttpd 1.4.42 was released this Sunday morning as the newest version of this open-source, lightweight HTTP web-server...

Earlier this week was a discovery of a "serious performance fix" For the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver by disabling ReZ. That change landed in Mesa Git already so I ran some before/after benchmarks...

VK9 is the project formerly known as SchaeferGL as an open-source project implementing Direct3D 9 over Vulkan...

Linus Torvalds decided to release the Linux 4.9-rc1 kernel today as opposed to tomorrow (Sunday) to fend off any subsystem maintainers from submitting last minute feature pull requests...

The past week or two in our forums and elsewhere there's been a lot of comments about Khronos' conformance testing for OpenGL 4.4/4.5 with the Mesa drivers finally reaching that point, concern over Khronos' fees being prohibitive for open-source projects (particularly in cases like Nouveau where it's community driven without a main corporate backer), and some FUD related to this matter. I've now received some clarification from The Khronos Group to lay these concerns to rest...

Chad Versace, the Intel OTC developer turned Googler who is part of the Chrome OS driver team, has been baking the EGL_MESA_platform_surfaceless extension and its implementation inside Mesa...

The Talos Secure Workstation that we previously have covered on Phoronix has now launched on crowd-funding where they hope to raise close to four million dollars to make this POWER8 system that's free down to the firmware a reality...