Phoronix

I've managed to get my hands on an Intel NUC6i7KYK "Skull Canyon" NUC featuring the Core i7 6770HQ Skylake CPU with Iris Pro Graphics 580. When paired with 32GB of RAM and a Samsung 950 PRO 500GB NVMe SSD, it makes for a very speedy, small form factor Linux-friendly PC.

The folks behind the OpenELEC Linux distribution that's designed around the Kodi HTPC/multimedia software have pushed out their big "7" release to end out 2016...

Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) has been supported since the launch of Skylake CPUs while finally support for it is being added to the GCC compiler...

GNOME's GTK Vulkan renderer continues advancing in Git for GTK+ 4.0. This Vulkan renderer for the GTK Scene Kit is forming into a nice alternative to its OpenGL renderer...

Continuing in our various annual recaps this week as we end out 2016, here is a look at the most popular GNU/FSF news of the year...

Phoronix reader "Darkbasic" who many of you know from the forums and some of his past benchmarks has shared with us his latest numbers when testing the open-source AMDGPU+RadeonSI stack on Arch Linux as well as when using the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver. Enjoy!..

FreeBSD is ending 2016 on a high note by receiving another "Uranium Level" donation, marking it as an additional $500,000 USD for their foundation...

In 2015 Microsoft made many open-source and Linux related announcements while this calendar year their flow of being more open and acknowledging of Linux continued with even more announcements...

At this week's Chaos Communication Congress (33C3) one of the talks interesting us is on console hacking, due to the PlayStation 4 making use of a Radeon GPU and the work done to modify the open-source Radeon Linux GPU driver to run on the PS4...

Last week I published a 31-way Linux graphics card comparison with an assortment of both NVIDIA GeForce and Radeon graphics cards using the latest Linux drivers. I also published a variety of Vulkan benchmarks. In those tests the open-source Radeon driver stack was used given that's what AMD is endorsing these days for Linux gamers with AMDGPU-PRO not even working on all modern Linux distributions. But for those curious how AMDGPU-PRO compares to those big result data-sets, here are those -PRO results to share today.

Wayland much progress in 2016 and arguably the biggest milestone of it shipping by default in Fedora 25 Workstation with the GNOME 3.22 desktop...

With just a few days left to 2016 and no major announcements expected out of Canonical to end the year, what are you hoping out of Ubuntu Phone and their mobile/convergence efforts in 2017?..

A big update to the Open-Source Computer Vision library was quietly released just before Christmas...

Given the fall of CyanogenMod, it appears KDE Plasma Mobile developers are looking at switching its phone/mobile base operating system over to the upstream Android Open-Source Project (AOSP)...

For helping not only their Ubuntu laptop customers but all NVIDIA Linux users, System76 has recently been working with the green GPU firm over getting more fixes into their proprietary driver...

For those curious about the most viewed GNOME and KDE news of 2016, we have you covered...

It's unfortunate that the Beignet developers weren't able to get OpenCL 2.0 support fully working for Intel graphics hardware by the end of 2016, but nevertheless the project is ongoing and more OCL2 work landed today...

Given this weekend's release of Darktable 2.2 as a big upgrade to this open-source RAW photo workflow software, here are some fresh benchmarks of NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards under Linux when making use of the program's OpenCL support, which did see some improvements during this v2.2 cycle.

A new version of the open-source OpenVPN virtual private network software stack is now available...

Arcan is the project we first wrote about earlier this year as an open-source display server built atop a game engine and with Lua scripting support. It's been in development for years and progressed a lot this year. Lately the developer has been working on X11 and Wayland compatibility for Arcan...

A new release of the Sway Wayland Compositor is now available, which continues as an i3-compatible Wayland solution...

Development of the X.Org Server by commits and new code barely passed the low amounts achieved in 2015, which in turn is significantly lower -- halved or more -- than just a few years prior...

Most of you will probably agree that 2016 was the best year yet for Linux gaming with having a ton of new game releases, several of which were AAA game titles, the premiere of Vulkan is an important step for the future, Valve working on Linux VR efforts, and the Linux graphics drivers getting into better shape for handling the next era of Linux games...

While the Samsung 960 EVO NVMe SSD was promising at first, after its quick failure I decided to try out the Toshiba/OCZ RD400 NVMe M.2 SSD. For the 256GB model (RVD400-M22280-256G) this high-performance solid-state drive will set you back just $149 USD.

Almost any longtime Linux user or Phoronix reader will surely agree with me that Mesa absolutely rocked this year for the open-source graphics stack...

OpenMW 0.41 was released today as the newest version of this open-source game project working to re-implement the game engine found within Elderscrolls III: Morrowind...

What you will not find as part of the list of new Linux 4.10 kernel features is BUS1, the successor to the un-merged KDBUS initiative and a new approach for in-kernel IPC. While it didn't land in 2016 to the mainline kernel, it's making progress...

This year was quite the year for Red Hat's Fedora Linux distribution with the successful launches of Fedora 24 and 25, the later including Wayland-by-default with the Fedora 25 Workstation release atop GNOME 3.22...

The long in-development "NewGVN" code to provide a new global value numbering (GVN) algorithm within the LLVM code-base has been merged to master...

With this weekend's release of the Darktable 2.2 RAW digital photography workflow software being out and it having OpenCL improvements among other advancements, I've been carrying out some fresh benchmarks for this popular open-source, cross-platform program...

While Linux 4.10-rc1 was only released yesterday and there will be about two months before it rolls around to the Linux 4.11 merge window, Intel OTC already has new code ready for testing...

While Vulkan 1.0 only made its public debut in February, on Phoronix in 2016 were 231 news items so far about this new graphics API from The Khronos Group, not counting the dozens of benchmarking articles looking at length about GPU/driver Linux performance...

Hitting the end of the year as well as yesterday's Linux 4.10-rc1 kernel marking the end of the merge window, here is a look at some kernel development statistics...

With the end of 2016 in sight, here's a look back at the most popular Ubuntu news for the year...

After more than one decade in development, the developer crew behind the HandBrake open-source video transcoder software finally released version 1.0 this weekend...

Last week I published various Linux workstation/server distribution OS benchmarks for ending out the year on the Linux distro comparison front (though a desktop/gaming focused comparison is coming this week) while for those curious here are some BSD operating system results compared to the Linux workstation/server performance figures.

Yet another open-source project pushing out a big release for the holidays is the Awesome Window Manager Framework. Awesome 4.0 was released today with some big changes for this open-source X11/X.Org window manager and incorporates about four years of changes since Awesome 3.5...

Red Hat developer Dave Airlie spent some of his Christmas committing some fixes to the open-source RADV Radeon Vulkan driver for benefiting id Software's DOOM game with Vulkan renderer...

The merge window is over and the first release candidate to Linux 4.10 is now available for testing...

OpenBenchmarking.org as of today is at 21.2 million test profile and test suite downloads via the Phoronix Test Suite. That number increased by almost eight million this year!..

While I have owned many Western Digital hard drives over the years, last week was my first time trying out one of the company's new solid-state drives (SSDs) under Linux. Some Linux benchmark results to share for reference today are of the WD Blue 250GB (WDS250G1B0A) SATA 3.0 SSD...

The latest open-source project doing a new release timed for Christmas is FreeDOS...

The latest LibreOffice news just days after announcing their MUFFIN user interface initiative is enabling the program's complex text layout mode by default...

For anyone hoping this year that Canonical would have decided to abandon their Mir display server efforts and shift focus back to Wayland, that did not happen, but in the stockings this holiday for Ubuntu users is an updated Mir display server release, version 0.25...

A number of improvements have landed to the GTK4 tool-kit's early back-end work on supporting Vulkan as an alternative to its OpenGL renderer is gaining ground...

The Ruby project has continued in its annual tradition of releasing a new version of their programming language on Christmas, a tradition held up now for the past number of years...

The OpenMandriva developers have timed their Lx 3.01 operating system update release for Christmas...

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, or happy end-of-2016, regardless of whatever celebrations you may or may not be partaking in as we end out this latest exciting year for Linux and open-source software...

Some unfortunate news to hear this Christmas is that Cyanogen Inc is shutting down their infrastructure behind the popular CyanogenMod fork of Google's Android operating system while a new fork is emerging. Lineage, Hello World!..

While it's late in the Linux 4.10 cycle, on top of all the other features/changes for Linux 4.10, Intel developer Len Brown is seeking to land updates to the in-tree turbostat utility...