Phoronix

On top of many other new features and various improvements to GCC 6 is also maturing OpenACC 2.0 support...

Mark Shuttleworth has posted a very short blog post where he seems to reveal the Ubuntu 16.10 codename...

Since the recent news about the Linux kernel being in worse shape than some people imagine, there's already been some downstream corrective action taking place. Clear Linux is one of the distributions already patching/tweaking their kernel for better scheduler performance but so far we haven't heard anything from the Ubuntu camp. Fortunately, there's been others working on their own solutions...

Ceph 10.2.0 "Jewel" was announced today as their latest long-term stable release. Notable about Ceph 10.2.0 is that CephFS has been declared stable and production ready...

For those running a Linux system powered by an AMD "Carrizo" APU, there's an updated firmware blob out today to benefit your UVD video decoding experience...

Libinput 1.3 has stepped closer to being released with today's RC2 release. Libinput 1.3 will further enhance input handling for Wayland, X.Org, and Mir powered systems...

Daniel Vetter of Intel OTC sent in another round of feature updates for DRM-Next to in turn premiere with Linux 4.7...

For those looking at making Python code execute even faster, PyPy 5.1 is now available as one of the alternative Python interpreters...

Firebird 3.0 was released this week as the newest version of this popular, open-source relational database system...

With today's release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Snappy package management is being more broadly supported across the Ubuntu ecosystem. This complementary packaging format to Debian packages for Ubuntu will allow third-party applications to be more easily updated. One of the other organizations already on board with using the Snap packaging format is Mozilla...

There are both Radeon/AMDGPU and Intel DRM driver fixes queued up for Linux Git this week and will find their way into Linux 4.6-rc5...

Ubuntu 16.04 "Xenial Xerus" has been released as the newest Long-Term Support distribution from Canonical...

The official release of NetworkManager 1.2 has finally happened...

The latest from AMD/RTG's GPUOpen initiative is the release of ROC 1.0...

Last week I published benchmarks showing Nouveau's "boost" patches offering much performance potential compared to the current state of the open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver but generally still not enough performance to compete with NVIDIA's proprietary Linux graphics driver. I've since carried out some fresh open-source AMD Linux results for reference to see how the NVIDIA vs. AMD GPU open-source speeds are comparing.

Those working on the KDE Neon initiative for making it more easy to consume the bleeding-edge KDE software have today announced their User Edition Tech Preview...

While Ubuntu 16.04 is being prepped for release, Fedora developers are preparing for their beta release of Fedora 24...

A day ahead of the launch of Ubuntu 16.04 as the sixth Long Term Support release, Canonical is talking about the new features for this release codenamed the Xenial Xerus...

Marek Olšák's latest big patch series has landed...

This week the Khronos Group released the provisional specification of OpenCL 2.2 and SPIR-V 1.1 while today from the Aviation Electronics Europe in Munich they announced the release of he OpenGL SC 2.0 specification...

Karol Herbst has sent out his latest set of 37 patches for trying to improve volting and clocking on NVIDIA GeForce 400 "Fermi" GPUs and newer...

AMD this afternoon announced CodeXL 2.0 as the newest version of their GPU debugger, CPU/GPU profiler, and static kernel analyzer. CodeXL 2.0 is a big leap forward and is now open-source!..

The AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for GCN GPUs now has support for OpenGL Compute Shaders within the latest Mesa code!..

Recently I picked up the ASRock C236M WS motherboard as a micro-ATX board for supporting Skylake LGA-1151 Xeon processors. This motherboard has been running nicely under Linux.

Already it's looking like the research from the recently covered The Linux Scheduler: a Decade of Wasted Cores that called out the Linux kernel in being a poor scheduler is having an impact...

Yesterday Feral Interactive published the Linux system requirements for Tomb Raider. They mentioned Mesa 11.2 support on the AMD side, but the graphics card's minimum requirement is very different from what's actually the minimum requirement...

Adding in more experimental patches over last week's Wine 1.9.8 development release is the routine Wine-Staging update...

Besides planning for the Servo and Browser.html initial release this summer there are a lot of other exciting items on the roadmap for developers working on Mozilla's Servo next-generation engine written in Rust...

The Khronos Group today announced the provisional specification of OpenCL 2.2 with OpenCL C++ kernel language support. The provisional specifications include OpenCL 2.2, SYCL 2.2, and SPIR-V 1.1...

Last week I posted results of Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 when looking at NVIDIA's OpenGL performance. As those results were quite interesting, the next installment of our Windows vs. Linux benchmarking are some numbers for AMD Radeon graphics. Tested here were Radeon Software Crimson Edition on Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 with AMDGPU vs. Ubuntu 16.04 with the new AMDGPU PRO driver stack.

Linux kernel developer Matthew Garrett has revised his work around improving power management for modern Intel systems via SATA...

With prepping for the imminent release of Tomb Raider for Linux, Feral Interactive today published the Linux system requirements for this popular game...

Another Sunday night, another Linux kernel release candidate...

Derek Bruening of Google has announced the company's interest in creating an "Efficiency Sanitizer" for LLVM/Clang for analyzing targeted performance problems...

Mesa 11.2.1 is now available as the first maintenance release for Mesa 11.2...

It seems more and more independent developers are interested in getting involved in Mesa open-source graphics driver development, but aren't really sure where to start or what are some easy tasks to get started...

If you have a NVIDIA GeForce 600/700 "Kepler" graphics card and wish to help out the Nouveau driver developers by testing out the experimental "boost" re-clocking patches covered yesterday on Phoronix thanks to the work by Karol Herbst, here's a 4.5-based Ubuntu kernel build to try out this weekend...

Some Phoronix readers have been requesting fresh tests of OpenGL graphics/gaming performance on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with its different desktop environment options. For some brief results to share this Sunday, here are some Intel Skylake numbers when running Ubuntu 16.04 and testing out Unity, Xfce, KDE Plasma, LXDE, GNOME, MATE, and Openbox.

Karol Herbst has been one of the independent developers leading the charge to improve Nouveau re-clocking support. Within his Git tree he's been queuing up re-clocking and voltage handling improvements for this reverse-engineered NVIDIA Linux driver. He's hoping the improved re-clocking code will be ready for the Linux 4.7~4.8 kernel, but I decided to try out his Git tree this week for some benchmarking of this experimental support.

The second release candidate of the upcoming Slackware 14.2 is now available...

A number of Phoronix readers have been pointing out material to indicate that the Linux kernel scheduler isn't as good as most people would assume...

OpenMW 0.39 is now available as the latest version of this open-source Elderscrolls III: Morrowind reimplementation...

Just as planned, the Vulkan code has been merged into mainline Mesa...

Werner Koch announced the release today of libgcrypt 1.7, a major update to this general cryptographic library...

Another end of the week, another Vulkan specification update...

Wine 1.9.8 is now available as the latest development snapshot of this program for running Windows programs/games on Linux, OS X, and other operating systems...

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) made it today to having no P1 regressions (the highest priority) and thus they've now branched the code for the GCC 6 series, GCC 7.0 is now on the master branch, and GCC 6.1 should be released next week...

When it comes to CPU workloads, stunning in our Linux distribution comparisons has been Intel's Clear Linux distribution. This Intel Open-Source Technology Center project has led many of our distribution / OS comparisons with Intel engineers investing heavily in performance optimizations via AutoFDO, LTO-optimized binaries, aggressive compiler flags by default, and more. But how does the OpenGL performance compare for Clear Linux? Here are some graphics benchmarks and in select cases the results are quite a surprise.

Over on LinuxBenchmarking.com you can now sign up for email notifications when there are new results uploaded and/or when the new results detect performance changes -- whether they be improvements or regressions...

Qt 5.7 continues moving along and due to the concurrent release work with the much-delayed Qt 5.6 that finally shipped in March, the Qt 5.7 beta is already imminent...