Phoronix

Hitting the linux-firmware Git tree are updates to the firmware/microcode binary-only images for the graphics cards supported by the Radeon and AMDGPU DRM drivers...

While Qt 5.6 was just released after being delayed by months, Qt 5.7 was supposed to be a quick follow-on release but it too is already seeing delays...

While there are around two thousand Linux-native games now available on Steam brought over by many different studios, it was just four years ago that many thought Valve bringing Steam to Linux was a joke or far-fetched rumor...

The Reiser4 file-system has been updated with support for the Linux 4.5 kernel...

QEMU 2.6-rc0 was tagged today as the first milestone leading up to the QEMU 2.6 release in the near future...

Canonical and Microsoft have been working on a joint project the past few months of bringing the Ubuntu user-space to Windows 10 as an initiative for helping developers running this OS...

Toonz is an animation software solution used by studios like Studio Ghibli and has been in development for more than two decades. Earlier this month it was announced Toonz would be open-sourced and then a few days back the code was published as OpenToonz. While Toonz/OpenToonz originally didn't have Linux support, patches are emerging to allow this high-end animation software to run on Linux...

While not nearly as exciting as the changes to find with the latest NVIDIA 364 Linux driver series, the 361.42 Linux driver is out today as the newest version in the 361 long-lived driver series...

For putting the open-source GeForce GTX 900 driver performance into better perspective from the results this week with the new support found on Linux 4.6 and compared to NVIDIA's proprietary driver, hare are some benchmark results when comparing the Nouveau driver performance of the GTX 900 "Maxwell" graphics cards to that of the GTX 600/700 "Kepler" graphics cards with their experimental re-clocking support.

For those still relying upon the FFmpeg-forked libav project, their libavcodec code has added new VA-API encoder support...

Users of OpenSUSE's Tumbleweed rolling-release Linux distribution will soon have access to GNOME 3.20...

KDE announced this morning the new Kirigami UI...

It's been over three weeks since Mesa 11.2 was supposed to have been released while 11.2.0 is now scheduled to make its debut on Friday...

With now having a new maintainer, the OpenChrome DDX driver is preparing for its first release in more than two years...

OpenBSD 5.9 was released today well ahead of its 1 May release schedule...

SQLite 3.12 was released today with performance enhancements and more...

For those making use of OpenGL and VDPAU together, there is better interoperability support within the Gallium3D VDPAU state tracker...

While it was delayed, the alpha release of Fedora 24 is now available...

Hardkernel's ODROID-C2 64-bit ARM single board computer retails for $40 USD and is powered by an Amlogic S905 SoC. While just a fraction more than a Raspberry Pi 3 or the Pine 64+ when factoring in shipping costs, there's very competitive performance out of this board with its four cores running up to 2.0GHz.

Yesterday I posted some of benchmarks of Fedora 23 with available stable updates along with enabling the Rawhide Nodebug repository for easy access to the Linux 4.6 Git kernel. Those numbers weren't terribly interesting, but is it any better on the power consumption front with these kernel upgrades for a Lenovo ThinkPad ultrabook?..

For those curious whether the Linux 4.6 kernel is bringing any noticeable performance improvements to the AMDGPU and Radeon DRM drivers over Linux 4.5, here are some benchmarks in conjunction with using Mesa 11.3-devel built against LLVM 3.8.

While OpenShot 2.0 is long overdue, things are finally looking up for this open-source non-linear video editor with going into beta this past January and today marking the release of the fourth beta...

While it won't help the current GTX 900 Maxwell performance situation on Nouveau due to being blocked on the PMU firmware in order to be able to re-clock these latest-generation GPUs, there's a fresh kernel source tree that's easy to build with experimental Nouveau patches for improving the NVIDIA re-clocking support on this open-source driver...

Git 2.8.0 has been officially released today as the latest version of this widely-utilized distributed revision control system...

Here are some of my earliest Linux 4.6 kernel benchmarks out there from a few different subsystems with the tests happening from a Xeon E5 Haswell system with AMD Radeon graphics...

With Q1'16 quickly coming to a close, I ran some Git statistics on the Mesa repository this morning to see how things are ticking so far in 2016...

Last month Google engineers posted patches to LLVM for "Lanai", an in-house (apparently network/communications oriented) processor as they were looking to upstream the code. This raised some concerns over Google looking to upstream the code when those outside of the search giant can't even benefit from the code due to the hardware not being public and other concerns, but nevertheless, the code was merged today...

With the in-development Linux 4.6 kernel there is the long-awaited NVIDIA GeForce GTX 900 series accelerated support atop the open-source Nouveau driver. While it requires using NVIDIA's signed binary blobs for the firmware, the support is now working. Here are some benchmarks on several different GTX 900 Maxwell graphics cards comparing the open-source driver performance to what's offered by NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver.

Gzip 1.7 was released this morning with two new features...

A new working group is being formed that's focused on making Fedora more modular and to define a base module from which new derivatives of Fedora can be constructed...

While exploring the community game engines/projects making use of Vulkan over Easter, I also encountered another fun project: Vulkano...

Here are some tests of Fedora 23, Fedora 23 with all available stable release updates that currently takes it to Linux 4.4 and Mesa 11.1, along with enabling the Fedora Rawhide Nodebug repository where an early Git snapshot of Linux 4.6 is present...

SystemTap, a DTrace-like means of dynamically profiling Linux with a scripting language and tool, is out with version 3.0...

One month after announcing the Bq Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Tablet, the device is now available for pre-ordering...

Here's the first Skylake motherboard to have failed on me after just four months of daily benchmarking...

Recently when writing about the tiling work and other changes being done in the "basement server room", a Phoronix reader asked how I do so without being concerned of the basement flooding and destroying the 60+ computers...

For anyone running applications or games still relying upon the GL_ATI_fragment_shader extension, this old OpenGL extension is now supported by all Gallium3D drivers...

While Vulkan is still very young, many developers have already taken a stab at starting their own, community-based game engines using a Vulkan renderer...

It's looking incredibly likely that ownCloud, the popular open-source project for easily setting up your own private cloud for file storage, will not be available as Debian packages with next year's 9.0 Stretch release...

ReactOS, the open-source operating system aiming for binary compatibility with Windows drivers and programs, is adding ReiserFS support...

With GNOME 3.20 having been released this week, developers working on the desktop stack have already firmed up their release schedule for the next six-month update, GNOME 3.22...

Mesa's Gallium3D drivers are stepping closer to supporting the NIR intermediate representation as a tier-one IR...

Linus Torvalds ended up tagging the Linux 4.6-rc1 kernel on Saturday night rather than opting for Sunday. While we tend to get excited about every major update to the Linux kernel, Linux 4.6 is coming in particularly heavy with new functionality and notable improvements to existing features. Linux 4.6 is arguably looking like the most exciting release in a few kernel cycles.

Linus Torvalds announced an early release of the Linux 4.6 kernel ahead of Easter...

A new file-system has been merged for the Linux 4.6 kernel...

It's been a while since last having anything to report on the Mandrake/Mandriva-derived Mageia Linux distribution while this weekend they finally managed to put together their first development release of Mageia 6...

As an alternative to the Raspberry Pi 3 for a low-cost 64-bit ARM (AArch64) development board is the PINE 64, which was successfully Kickstarted as a "$15 64-bit single board super computer" that generated more than 1.7 million dollars. The PINE 64 is still shipping out in limited quantities for now, but the folks behind this project were kind enough to send over a sample of their PINE 64 1GB SBC for some benchmarking.

Patches are out for yet another OpenGL 4 extension that may soon be supported by the Gallium3D drivers as another item to mark off the list for OpenGL 4.3...

With KDBUS having faced a large uphill battle in its attempt to be mainlined in the Linux kernel, systemd developers continue working on the new BUS1 project as a new, in-kernel IPC mechanism for Linux...

Mesa 11.2 was supposed to be released in early March but that milestone has yet to be reached...