Phoronix

GNOME Maps has become a much more viable piece of software with transit routing support having landed in Git master...

Facebook's team working on HHVM, their high-performance implementation of PHP and also what's used by their Hack language, is now up to version 3.18...

On Monday I published a Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux gaming performance comparison with NVIDIA GeForce graphics while today the tables have turned and is a Windows vs. Linux gaming benchmark battle with AMD Radeon graphics.

Epic Games announced the release this morning of Unreal Engine 4.15...

Futhark was presented earlier this month at FOSDEM as a "purely functional array language" with its compiler able to "efficiently generate high-performance GPU code."..

FreeBSD has long had a SVR4 (System V Release 4) compatibility layer, but FreeBSD 12 will likely do away with this support...

With the release of Flatpak 0.8.3, this open-source sandboxing tech is a bit more suited for Linux gaming...

A Phoronix reader has taken to improving the situation around being able to deploy Mozilla's Firefox web-browser natively on Wayland, particularly for Arch Linux distributions as well as those distributions supporting both Wayland and Flatpak...

Bryce Harrington today announced the Wayland 1.13 Release Candidate along with the Weston 2.0 Release Candidate in hoping to push out these Wayland feature updates next week...

If you are using Intel Broadwell graphics with Mesa's ANV Vulkan driver, the performance should be better for Dota 2 and potentially other workloads...

For those using GParted as a way to visually manage your Linux disk partitions/file-systems, GParted 0.28 was released as a Valentine's Day present for Linux users...

NVIDIA's Unix graphics driver team has experienced a busy day with releasing the big 378 Linux driver feature update and two legacy driver releases while now they also have a stable update in their long-lived 375 driver series branch...

KDE developer Jan Grulich already tackled Flatpak KDE portals support and one of his latest support has been integrating a Flatpak back-end into KDE Discover...

It looks like Feral Interactive might be getting closer to releasing their first Linux game port using Vulkan...

You may have noticed recently that Timothy Arceri has been working on AMD Mesa/Gallium3D improvements while previously he mostly focused on the Intel driver stack at Collabora. It turns out this change-over is due to Arceri having joined Valve to work on the open-source AMD Linux driver stack...

In addition to NVIDIA releasing the 378.13 big feature release, this morning they also announced updates to their two legacy drivers...

NVIDIA's Unix driver team is celebrating Valentine's Day by releasing their first stable driver in the 378 driver series for Linux...

While Qt 5.8 was released less than one month ago, the Qt 5.9 Alpha release is on approach for landing...

While yesterday's Mesa 17.0 release took Intel Haswell hardware from OpenGL 3.3 to OpenGL 4.5, this quarterly update didn't end up bring the older Ivy Bridge hardware past OpenGL 3.3. But consulting firm Igalia has continued working on their patches to bring Ivy Bridge hardware up to OpenGL 4.0...

With Debian and Ubuntu dropping 32-bit PowerPC support in their future releases, you may be curious how the older PowerPC hardware compares to Intel's modern x86 processors if you are wishing to switchover. Here are some benchmarks...

Red Hat developer David Malcolm has shared the work he's been doing on improving the GCC compiler's internal testing to ensure the GNU Compiler Collection is working as anticipated and is generating correct code...

Matthias Clasen has issued the newest GTK4 development release with more feature work...

FreeBSD has issued their latest quarterly report covering Q4'2016, from October to December of development highlights...

Last week Collabora's Timothy Arceri posted TGSI shader cache patches for Mesa that so far benefit the R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers but could also help out the other Gallium3D drivers too. The second version of those patches have now been published...

SQLite 3.17.0 was released today as the newest version of this widely-used embedded database library...

While Mesa 17.0 was just released, new feature development continues building up for Mesa 17.1...

It's been a while since last testing Windows 10 vs. Linux on different, newer Linux game ports with a variety of GPUs, but that changed this week. As mentioned this weekend, I've been working on a large, fresh Windows vs. Linux gaming performance comparison. The results available today are for NVIDIA with testing a GeForce GTX 1060 and GTX 1080 on Windows 10 Pro x64 and Ubuntu 16.10 x86_64 with the latest drivers and using a variety of newer Direct3D 11/12 / OpenGL / Vulkan games.

Longtime GNOME developer Emmanuele Bassi has pleaded his case that Vala is a "dead" language and that new applications/developers should look at alternatives or first work on improving this GNOME-centered language...

This September will mark 10 years since the public launch of the RadeonHD DDX driver (xf86-video-radeonhd) that was developed by SUSE during the Radeon X1000 and HD 2000/3000 days in conjunction with ATI/AMD. While we've talked about what started AMD's open-source strategy in the past and dozens of other RadeonHD articles, new stories are still coming to light...

Mesa 17.0 is now officially available...

We've been talking about WireGuard for months and it's hoping to go mainline in the Linux kernel this calendar year. Earlier this month at FOSDEM was a status update on the project...

An early feature for LLVM Clang 5.0 is a prototype implementation of clangd, a server component for the compiler...

The Linux 4.10 kernel didn't end up being released today, but was pushed back by an extra week. However, in looking forward to next weekend, here are ten of the features that excite us about Linux 4.10...

In the past on Phoronix we have mentioned ToaruOS a few times. It's a "hobby" kernel and operating system written mostly from scratch yet supports Mesa, GCC, Python, and more. It's been in development since 2011 while now the operating system's 1.0 release finally took place...

While many were hoping that Linux 4.10 would be released today, instead it's been pushed back to next Sunday...

This was one of the busiest weeks in Firefox's history with having more than ~10,000 change-sets affecting ~97,000 file changes...

In yesterday's Core i3 2100 "Sandy Bridge" vs. Core i3 7100 "Kabylake" comparison I included all of the power consumption and performance-per-Watt results. If you are looking for additional power numbers from other Kabylake CPUs, here is some additional data...

There's going to be fresh AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce Windows 10 vs. Linux comparisons on Phoronix in the week ahead. Here are the early details and a RFC for our patrons...

The patch landed in Intel's drm-intel-next-queued branch this week for enabling atomic support by default on the hardware platforms where it's fully supported...

Just a quick note for anyone who routinely builds the latest X.Org Server from Git, the video driver ABI has been broken again, thus you'll need to rebuild your dependent DDX drivers assuming they have been modified for this new ABI...

While Raptor Engineering was unsuccessful with their Talos Secure Workstation effort to build a high-end, libre POWER8 workstation, they are now backing a more realistic effort: opening the Baseboard Management Controller of an ASUS server motherboard still on the market...

Xfce developers have restored work on their Parole Media Player as the primary media player for this lightweight desktop environment...

Available this weekend is the newest release of the Ardour digital audio workstation software for Linux, macOS, and Windows...

OpenBenchmarking.org, the cloud component to the Phoronix Test Suite for providing a centralized results storage location for analysis as well as hosting all of the test profiles and test suites so they can be downloaded independently of the Phoronix Test Suite version, has reached a new milestone. Just moments ago, OpenBenchmarking.org crossed the threshold of delivering 22 million test profile and test suite downloads since the Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 premiere in February of 2011...

Vulkan 1.0.40 is now available as the newest minor version bump to the Vulkan 1.0 API specification. This isn't nearly as exciting as the significant Vulkan 1.0.39 update but does include a new extension...

At the end of January I published my initial Core i3 7100 Linux benchmarks while for those still on older Sandy Bridge hardware and thinking of upgrading to a Core i3 Kabylake, here are some interesting comparative benchmarks. For these weekend tests are raw performance and performance-per-Watt metrics for the Core i3 2100 Sandy Bridge to the Core i3 7100 Kabylake processors.

Having now published RADV/RadeonSI Mesa 17.0 benchmarks and Intel i965/ANV Mesa 17.0 benchmarks compared to Mesa 13.0 and 17.1-devel, here are now benchmarks of the Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D driver for seeing how this open-source NVIDIA 3D driver performs on the imminent Mesa 17.0 release...

GNOME developers continue investing in the Meson Build System and the results continue to be much faster than Autotools and generally other build systems too...

Google developers have been working on a number of open-source projects in the Vulkan space and one of their latest is SPIR-V processing with Rust...

Vulkan is going on one year old and while the hardware driver support has continued to advance, we haven't yet seen a software implementation of Vulkan for running on a CPU. Of course, not for expecting any performance miracle or the like, but as a vendor-neutral platform for being able to test Vulkan's behavior, certain fallback scenarios, and other use-cases like Mesa's LLVMpipe/swrast/Softpipe software rasterizers...