Phoronix

Ittiam has announced an OpenCL-based VP9 encoder for high performance, power efficient HD video encoding...

Paolo Bonzini sent in the first pull request this morning for KVM (Kernel-Based Virtual Machine) changes for Linux 4.5...

As our first multi-way Linux distribution comparison of 2016, I took ten different modern Linux distribution releases and benchmarked them on the same Intel Haswell system. Being benchmarked were various releases of Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Debian, Clear Linux, Fedora, Antergos, and CentOS.

Debian's PHP package maintainers are preparing for PHP 7.0 packages for Debian Stretch that will also contain some changes compared to how they packaged PHP5...

The media updates for the Linux 4.5 kernel merge window are very heavy...

Up to now the LLVMpipe Gallium3D-based software rasterizer has been one of the GPU drivers to be black-listed by Google's Chrome/Chromium web-browser, but that may soon change...

As of a few days ago in the latest LLVM development code is support in the AMDGPU back-end for using the new linker...

The latest proposed feature for Fedora 24 is support for Google's Go 1.6 programming language...

Five years ago Mozilla launched Persona.org as a decentralized authentication system focused on privacy and utilizing the BrowserID protocol, but given its limited use, Mozilla will be putting an end to the server...

For those enjoying Synaptic as a lightweight GUI package manager alternative to Ubuntu Software Center, GNOME Software Center, and others, the version 0.83 release is now available via Debian unstable...

For those using Ardour as their open-source digital audio workstation on Linux and OS X systems, the Ardour 4.6 release is now available as the latest major version of the program...

The cgroup v2 interface will be made official with the in-development Linux 4.5 kernel...

Now that Skylake Xeon processors are appearing at major Internet retailers in sufficient quantities (such as the recently reviewed Intel Xeon E3 1245 v5), prices on older-generation Xeon CPUs are falling further. With prices on DDR3, SSDs, and Haswell-compatible motherboards also continuing to fall, it's possible to build a sufficiently powerful yet cheap Haswell Xeon system.

While Plasma 5.5 was just released last month with many improvements and appears to be in great shape -- as outlined by Ken Vermette's big review of Plasma 5.5 -- even more great stuff is coming for Plasma 5.6...

While we've already been writing at length about the DRM graphics driver changes you will be able to find with the Linux 4.5 kernel, here's a nice overview of the Intel-specific i915 DRM graphics changes for this next version of the Linux kernel...

A new spin and a new SIG of Fedora Linux have been proposed for the upcoming Fedora 24 release...

Ingo Molnar has already been sending in his many Git pull requests for the newly-opened Linux 4.5 merge window...

Feral Interactive just announced that the Medieval II: Total War Collection will be released for Linux (and OS X) this week...

The latest Linux-libre kernel is now available for those wanting a fully de-blobbed Linux kernel that doesn't support drivers depending upon proprietary firmware/microcode or other non-free code...

Here's another GNU project I never knew exist until now: GNU Health...

With the Linux 4.5 merge window's hwmon subsystem pull request is an update for new AMD Family 15h processors to support power monitoring...

What a surprise waking up to find that at long-last the OpenShot 2.0 beta is now available to early-backers of this open-source video editor's Kickstarter project...

Following yesterday's tests of the Liquorix 4.3 kernel, a Phoronix reader pointed out another customized kernel I previously hadn't heard of: XanMod...

While it was looking like Nouveau might not have any big updates for Linux 4.5, a last-minute pull request was honored for DRM-Next that will provide some new/improved functionality to this open-source NVIDIA Linux kernel driver...

The fifth alpha release of the Debian Installer being prepared for the 9.0 "Stretch" release is now available...

As anticipated, the Linux 4.4 kernel has been officially released...

KDE Frameworks 5.18.0 was released this weekend with the latest add-on components for complementing Qt 5...

With the recent news of X.Org possibly losing its valuable domain, many have commented in our forums and elsewhere how this could have possibly happened... However, in reality, it is sadly not much of a surprise...

PHP 7 was just released over one month ago but there is already much work going into PHP 7.1, the next major update to this widely-used web programming language...

GNOME developer Bastien Nocera has landed support in GNOME Settings Daemon for supporting the airplane (WiFi and Bluetooth) hot-keys with small notification overlays...

A Phoronix Premium supporter has again inquired about some fresh Liquorix kernel tests, so ask and you shall receive.

As reminded this weekend by Red Hat developer Mark Wielaard, GCC 6 will warn you about misleading code indentations...

More changes are inbound for GNOME 3.20...

This year we should finally see the release of the highly anticipated AMD Zen processors that will hopefully better position their processors to compete with Intel. However, one of the unanswered questions about this next-gen platform is whether it will support Coreboot as an optional open-source firmware to replace the proprietary UEFI/BIOS...

Released last weekend to not much fanfare was SDL 2.0.4, a significant update to the Simple DirectMedia Library, which is commonly used by cross-platform games...

The crew working on the open-source Unvanquished game powered by their Daemon Engine announced their Alpha 47 release last weekend...

The Free Software Foundation is more than 30 years old now and in charting a potential new course for the organization, they are looking for your help by filling out a survey...

With this morning's article about New AMDGPU Details and Looking Forward To Major Radeon Linux Improvements In 2016, there is much to be excited about with the new driver model finally set to roll-out and other open-source projects coming about. However, if you are a relatively new Linux users, you may not know how this whole process began...

When ending out 2015 I wrote about some of the open-source Linux letdowns of the year while since then Phoronix readers have suggested more items that they were sad to see not materialize this year...

The Wine project's first development release of 2016 is now available...

Friday afternoon I had a call with a few AMD representatives talking about their Linux driver plans for 2016. Here's the details for those wondering about AMDGPU, Vulkan, GPUOpen, and more.

Thanks to work done by Netflix and NGINX, a new, drop-in-replacement sendfile syscall has been written for FreeBSD that is much faster...

While the KDE Akonadi PIM storage service has been criticized as being slow, among other complaints, it's continuing to be developed and improved upon in the Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5 world...

Matthias Clasen has released GTK+ 3.19.6 in the road towards the GNOME 3.20 release in March...

Yesterday we wrote that it looked like Fedora 24 would be delayed and today FESCo has indeed decided to delay the release and all milestones by two weeks, but it might be dragged out to at least three weeks...

Canonical's Colin King has looked at the number of FIXME and TODO comments within the Linux kernel tree...

Ken Vermette has written a lengthy article for us about his thoughts on the state of the KDE Plasma 5 desktop as of the recent 5.5 release. If you are curious how KDE Plasma 5 is panning out, how it works on Wayland, and much more, this article is a definite must-read.

Unless there's a miracle, the X.Org Foundation stands to lose one of its biggest assets: its single-letter domain name...

The latest feature work on Libinput is for supporting three and four finger pinch gestures...

Ilia Mirkin has landed some more notable feature code into Mesa this evening...