Phoronix

Being half-way now through the year and Linux 4.7 coming later this month, I figured it would be fun to run some statistics on the Linux kernel Git repository to see how this year is stacking up compared to past years...

Thunderbolt networking support is still being worked on for the mainline Linux kernel...

Last week we reported on Kristian Høgsberg, the founder of Wayland and a long-time Linux graphics developer, leaving his position at Intel. We now know he headed off to Google...

There are more updates in the openSUSE land for both rolling-release Tumbleweed users as well as preparations for the 42.2 Leap update due out in November...

Thanks to work by AMD developers, there is support for accelerated H.264 video encoding with the VA-API implementation in Gallium3D...

There is less than two weeks to go until SIGGRAPH 2016 kicks off in Anaheim, California...

There are some new feature proposals to talk about for Fedora 25, which will be officially released around November...

The developers at Igalia continue working on the necessary OpenGL functionality to be able to advertise OpenGL 4.x support in Mesa for Ivy Bridge and Haswell "Gen 7" graphics...

Many of you have been wondering what's the "exciting" Skype Linux news that the Microsoft-owned developers have been teasing since last week... Here's the details...

For quite a while now Intel and Collabora developers have been working on an on-disk shader cache similar to what's offered by the NVIDIA proprietary driver for allowing GLSL shaders to be compiled and then cached on-disk, making it quicker to load the shaders in the future. It's looking like the Intel shader cache implementation may soon be ready for Git...

Libertine is the new Ubuntu/Canonical project for running X11 Debian packages on the next-gen Ubuntu desktop powered by Mir and Unity 8. There's now a video of showing off their new tech for running X11 apps under Unity 8...

Several of you in the forums have occasionally asked about our intern last summer, Eric Griffith, whom many of you know through his numerous articles -- including some he continues to occasionally contributes as well as his presence within the Phoronix Forums. For those wondering what he's up to, he is now trying to become the Fedora Community Action and Impact Lead at Red Hat!..

Eric Anholt at Broadcom has sent in his VC4 DRM driver changes of material for DRM-Next to in turn land with the Linux 4.8 kernel...

GIMP 2.9.4 was tagged this afternoon as the newest development version of this popular open-source image manipulation program...

Oracle announced the release this afternoon of VM VirtualBox 5.1...

Yesterday I published Blender Cycles Render Engine Benchmarks With NVIDIA CUDA On Linux numbers that included the GTX 1000 and GTX 900 series for the Blender 3D modeling software now that there's an automated test profile for Blender via OpenBenchmarking.org for the Phoronix Test Suite. Here are more Blender CUDA benchmarks from a more diverse range of NVIDIA hardware...

Mozilla will be taking their first Rust programming language code into production with Firefox 48...

Peter Hutterer has announced the first release candidate of the upcoming libinput 1.4 release for this input handling library used by X.Org, Wayland, and Mir systems...

Today is Amazon's second annual Prime Day where they are offering up a plethora of sales for Prime members. Just a quick friendly reminder to please click our affiliate link if you'll be making any purchases there, in order to help support our site with the Linux hardware testing operations done here daily...

It's coming later but better than never: LLVM 3.8.1 has been released by AMD's Tom Stellard as the first update to LLVM 3.8...

Just a few hours ago I was writing about NVIDIA making public the GP100 "Pascal" GPU firmware binaries needed for as a requirement for bringing up GeForce GTX 1000 series hardware acceleration on the open-source driver stack. Now the initial support has landed in Nouveau's NVC0 Gallium3D driver within Mesa for allowing 3D support...

If you want to relive gaming from the early 90's, Day of the Tentacle Remastered is now available for Linux...

After it took NVIDIA until earlier this year to release the signed firmware for the GeForce GTX 900 "Maxwell" GPUs, I expected -- and based upon what I heard -- that it could be months before seeing the firmware for GeForce GTX 1000 "Pascal" GPUs in order to enable hardware acceleration with these latest-generation GPUs. Thus it's a huge surprise today to see NVIDIA already making public their Pascal GP100 firmware images!..

Here is a look at the performance of the Blender 3D modeling/creation software with its Cycles Engine when making use of NVIDIA's CUDA API for GPU acceleration. Tests for this initial comparison include NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1000 "Pascal" and GTX 900 "Maxwell" graphics cards.

Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 821 SoC this morning as its fastest processor to date and comes out slightly ahead of the Snapdragon 820...

KDE Plasma 5.7 was advertised as having better multi-screen support, but it turns out there's still more work to do as various problems in the open-source Linux desktop stack are leading to a less than ideal experience...

Linux input expert Peter Hutterer at Red Hat has shared an upcoming feature of libinput 1.4: mode switching support for graphics tablet (e.g. Wacom tablets) for switching through different behavior depending upon button presses...

Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 4.7-rc7 as the seventh weekly test release to Linux 4.7...

After finishing up this weekend's AMDGPU R9 Fury + RX 480 benchmarks of DRM-Next for material that will land with Linux 4.8 along with RX 480 overclocking support, tables turned to run some fresh benchmarks of the Intel DRM-Next code that will premiere in Linux 4.8...

The promising Unvanquished open-source first person shooter game has been in development for years, is powered by the Daemon Engine as a distant derivative of id Tech 3, and has shown much potential from the engine to artwork. However, the past few months have been eerily quiet...

With the Linux 4.8 kernel coming later this year one of the main end-user additions to the AMDGPU kernel driver is GPU overclocking support via OverDrive. This is the first time AMD GPU overclocking is being offered via their open-source Linux driver and so I decided to try it out with the AMD Radeon RX 480 using this experimental DRM-Next code.

Veteran X.Org/X developer Keith Packard along with well known open-source advocate Bdale Garbee have been working on an "inexpensive yet robust" USB-based hardware random number generator...

Being half-way through the year now and also given the recent Mesa 12.0 release I decided to run some Git statistics on Mesa to see how this year is panning out for its development...

It's possible to run the Unity desktop with Compiz window manager atop Windows 10...

KDE Frameworks 5.24.0 was released today as the newest version of these KDE libraries to go along with the recent release of Plasma 5.7...

With the main batch of Radeon/AMDGPU driver changes ready for DRM-Next that will in turn land for the Linux 4.8 kernel, I've begun testing this new code with various AMD GPUs. Here are my AMDGPU results when comparing Linux 4.7 Git to this code that's coming for Linux 4.8 with a Radeon R9 Fury and RX 480...

Started a few years back was Debian's Long-Term Support (LTS) project whereby releases were given five years of security support and this would also allow users to skip a release. This project, which is financed by sponsors, continues to make progress and provide for a more secure and longer-supported Debian...

BSD fans looking to do some testing this weekend can try out the beta of the upcoming FreeBSD 11.0...

While there isn't yet any 3D/hardware acceleration support, the first milestone of open-source bring-up for the latest-generation NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1000 "Pascal" graphics processors is now available for Nouveau...

Sadly, another blow to report on with regard to Intel's open-source efforts... Just days after reporting on Intel losing its chief Linux/open-source technologist, Dirk Hohndel, there's another high profile departure in the open-source world. Today marks the last day at Intel for Wayland founder Kristian Høgsberg...

Here is the latest look at the performance of Debian GNU/Linux 8.5 vs. Debian Testing on the same system for showing how the performance is looking for Debian 9 "Stretch" ahead of its release next year...

It's been a while since Microsoft-owned Skype last did a serious update to their Linux client, but it looks like that could be changing.....

Wine 1.9.14 was released today as the newest bi-weekly Wine development release for running your favorite Windows games/applications on Linux and other operating systems...

While it's coming late, the huge Mesa 12.0 release is now official! Mesa 12.0 is easily one of the biggest updates to this important open-source user-space OpenGL driver stack in quite some time and will offer much better support and features especially for Intel, Radeon, and NVIDIA open-source Linux desktop users/gamers.

Alex Deucher has submitted the main feature pull request for DRM-Next of the Radeon and AMDGPU DRM driver changes for the next kernel cycle, Linux 4.8...

DebConf 16 is wrapping up as Debian's annual conference, which this year is being held in Cape Town. For those not in South Africa, most of the session videos have been uploaded...

Java Training Wheels has become the newest GNU package...

Oracle has released the first RC development release of the upcoming VirtualBox 5.1...

It's not often we get to talk about NVIDIA developers making open-source contributions to Mesa... After all, their contributions to the Nouveau driver tend to be limited just to the Nouveau DRM/KMS kernel driver and even there seeing patches from the green giant tend to be very infrequent. The latest Mesa patches from NVIDIA aren't even tied to Nouveau but just for wiring up an EGL extension...

Version 1.10 of the Rust programming language is now available...