Phoronix

Many of you already have expressed your displeasure over Intel's Active Management Technology (AMT) and Management Engine (ME) for various reasons in the past and now it's been disclosed that for years there has been a vulnerability in this business-oriented feature that could open your Intel systems up to attackers...

Yesterday marked an updated release of a community edition build for the NVIDIA-owned PGI code compiler that focuses on code compilation for CPU and GPU execution...

The Linux 4.12 kernel is to enable KASLR support by default for x86-based systems to further improve the security...

Last week I posted benchmarks showing off F2FS performance with its multi-drive feature that isn't formal RAID but can still yield better I/O performance. For additional context, here are some results on that same system and with the Linux 4.11 kernel when using Btrfs with its native RAID capabilities.

The third weekly release candidate to Mesa 17.1 is now available for testing...

Freshly derived from the Linux 4.11 kernel release less than 24 hours ago, GNU Linux-libre 4.11 is available with additional "deblogging" to make the kernel more free software friendly...

Khronos has today unveiled the OpenVX 1.2 specification from this week's Embeded Vision Alliance Summit (EVS)...

While the original SPIR intermediate representation from the Khronos Group was derived from LLVM IR, SPIR-V that's used by OpenCL 2.1+ and Vulkan is not. But there is still work underway on being able to translate from LLVM IR into SPIR-V via a new back-end...

It looks like the mainline Linux kernel will support one less CPU architecture come Linux 4.12...

For those with a first-generation Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptop, it's now supported by mainline Coreboot...

Linus Torvalds has announced the Linux 4.11 stable kernel release as anticipated...

The open-source Haiku operating system still maintaining compatibility with BeOS is nearing its first beta milestone...

It was another busy month on Phoronix with publishing 31 featured articles/reviews and 285 news items. Here's a look back at what readers found most interesting for April...

In the latest monthly progress report on Linux Mint, some of the upcoming changes for the GNOME3-forked Cinnamon Desktop Environment were shared...

VSXu, the OpenGL-accelerated audio/music visualizer combined with a visual programming language, released their v0.6 release to end out April. The VSXu 0.6 milestone incorporates more than two years of work...

Our latest Windows 10 Creator Update versus Linux benchmarking is taking a quick look at the Intel HD Graphics 630 Kabylake performance with Windows 10 on the latest Intel driver compared to Ubuntu 17.04 and Clear Linux.

Back in August of 2015, DirectFB disappeared with its project site and code vanishing. Last November DirectFB re-appeared along with a new site and renewed focus on the project. Unfortunately, it's once again gone silent...

While QNX remains targeted as an operating system for mobile/embedded solutions, a BlackBerry developer in his spare time has fitted QNX 7 with a Qt5 desktop...

After it was postponed last weekend, the Linux 4.11 kernel is set to be officially released in a matter of hours...

GJS -- the GNOME JavaScript system that allows for GObject introspection and other capabilities via JavaScript on the desktop -- is planning for further improvements with GNOME 3.26...

Another feature to look forward to with the Linux 4.12 kernel for those using newer hardware featuring USB Type-C is a port manager...

The Sway Wayland compositor that aims to be i3-compatible continues picking up new features...

After carrying out the recent Amazon EC2 Cloud benchmarks vs. Intel/AMD CPUs I also decided to run some Linux distribution tests in the Elastic Compute Cloud with not having done any such comparisons in a long time. So for those wondering how different Linux distributions compare in Amazon's cloud, this article is for you.

The upcoming Linux 4.12 kernel cycle plans to introduce support for CryptoCell hardware within ARM's TrustZone...

While convergence may be dead at Ubuntu/Canonical, KDE developers continue working on Plasma Mobile and their convergence vision driven in part by the Kirigami user-interface framework...

The ARM changes for the mainline Linux kernel are usually quite extensive each cycle and with the Linux 4.12 merge window likely opening on Sunday evening it will be no different this time around...

While the DRM-Next merge window is over for new feature material ahead of the Linux 4.12 merge window opening tomorrow, some AMDGPU fixes have been sent out for this next kernel cycle...

Epic Games on Friday released the first public preview of the upcoming Unreal Engine 4.16...

GNOME 3.25.1 is now available as the first development milestone in the road to this September's GNOME 3.26...

The Chromium/Chrome web-browser should now be seeing GTK3 support flipped on for those relying upon 32-bit builds...

Mesa 17.0.5 is now available as the newest stable release on the Mesa 17.0 series...

Wine 2.7 has been released as the newest bi-weekly development release of Wine...

Windows 10 Creators Update was released earlier this month by Microsoft as the latest installment to Windows 10. Since it's been a few months since last benchmarking the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" (WSL), a.k.a. "Bash for Windows", here are some fresh benchmarks of Ubuntu atop Windows 10 Creators Update vs. Intel's Clear Linux vs. Ubuntu 17.04.

More feature work landed today in xserver Git for what will eventually become X.Org Server 1.20...

We are just one month away from seeing the next KDE Plasma 5 desktop release...

Earlier this week I posted some fresh AMD Radeon Windows vs. Linux gaming benchmarks using the newly-released Windows 10 Creator Update and Ubuntu 17.04. For your viewing pleasure today are some fresh NVIDIA Windows vs. Linux benchmarks using a high-end GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card.

Curious about the Beignet OpenCL performance impact on a Broadwell-U laptop/ultrabook and just going through bare metal benchmarking withdrawals while away this week in Russia, I was running some Beignet tests on the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon...

It seems like it would have been done long ago, but upstream SDL2 now finally has out-of-the-box Steam Controller mappings for Linux and iOS...

While Timothy Arceri at Valve had just made the change to a 5% cache size limit of your disk space from an original 10% maximum threshold, he's now changed it to just a 1GB cache limit...

The VK_KHX_multiview extension that is important for VR games/applications is expected to soon land within Mesa Git for Intel's ANV driver. Meanwhile, the VK_KHX_external_memory extensions have landed for this open-source Intel driver...

With Debian 9.0 not being far away from releasing, the Debian CD Images Team has issued an update over their fundamental changes happening for this "Stretch" cycle...

Initial Meson build system integration has landed in the xorg-server code-base for testing...

A few days back I posted benchmarks of the initial GTX 1050/1060/1070/1080 Nouveau 3D support. As expected, the performance was rather abysmal with re-clocking not being available for Pascal (or Maxwell) GPUs on this open-source NVIDIA Linux kernel driver. For those trying to use Nouveau for Linux games or care about your GPU clock speeds, currently the GTX 600/700 "Kepler" series is still your best bet or the GTX 750 "Maxwell 1" is the last NVIDIA graphics processors not requiring signed firmware images and can properly -- but manually -- re-clock with the current Nouveau driver.

Debian 9.0 "Stretch" has seen UEFI Secure Boot support no longer being considered a release blocker but is now just a stretch goal for this upcoming release...

The first development snapshots of GNOME Shell and Mutter in the 3.25 series were released today in preparation for this week's GNOME 3.25.1 milestone...

Judging by the massive Rust fan base in our forums, those of you reading this will be delighted today about the newest version of Rustlang, v1.17...

The second release candidate is now available for GStreamer 1.12, the next version of this widely-used, open-source, cross-platform multimedia framework...

Qt developers have begun a fresh round of discussions over the supported platforms / operating systems of Qt 5.10 that will be released in the later part of this calendar years...

KDE Plasma is getting web-browser integration initially for Google Chrome and is expected to be followed by Mozilla Firefox support...

Mesa previously had a hard-coded limit to not take up more than 10% of your HDD/SSD storage, but now that limit has been halved...