Phoronix

While there will be many Android-powered devices, various appliances powered by Linux from drones to kitchen appliances, and other products internally relying upon Linux and open-source software, don't expect to find much with regard to the Linux desktop and even Steam Machines will seem to be rather low-key...

If you are just a casual user of the Linux virtualization stack with the open-source virt-manager, you might not know that for months they have already been supporting UEFI-based installations inside virtual machines...

Arch Linux is now shipping PHP 7.0 via their stable repositories for those relying upon it for web servers or other purposes from an installation of this rolling-release distribution...

One of the most viewed and commented topics on Phoronix this week has been about the untimely passing of Ian Murdock, founder of Debian and former leader of Sun's Project Indiana OpenSolaris project...

The second development milestone release of Phoronix Test Suite 6.2 "Gamvik" is now available for all your bleeding-edge, open-source, cross-platform benchmarking needs...

CME is a new tool to assist in maintaining Debian packages...

The Steam Survey results for December 2015 are now available and the reported Linux use remains below 1%...

Alexandre Prokoudine of GIMP has written an annual report on the project and its GEGL port...

Support for altering the PCI Express speed with the Nouveau DRM driver is still being worked on for improving the open-source NVIDIA driver's performance...

Kieran Kunhya with some documentation in hand and a lot of reverse engineering has been working on allowing support for the GoPro Cineform HD codec from the open-source Linux desktop...

Similar to yesterday's look at the Linux kernel Git code with its nearly 20.8 million lines, I also ran some Git statistics on Mesa to see how its development numbers panned out for the year...

For those recovered from the New Year, here's a look at the most popular Linux/open-source topics that appeared on Phoronix in December...

Ilia Mirkin has seemingly not taken much time off from his Mesa hacking for the holidays. On Thursday this developer who most frequently works on the Nouveau and Freedreno drivers has published patches for better ARB_multi_draw_indirect handling...

Matthew Garrett presented this week at the Chaos Computer Club's 32C3 conference about the state of boot security...

Thanks to everyone who supported Phoronix in 2015 and here's to a Happy New Year to all our readers and may 2016 be even more interesting and fruitful...

The developers working on Calculate Linux decided to release a new version of their Gentoo-based Linux operating system before heading to New Year parties...

The mainline Linux kernel is up to 20.86 million lines spread across more than 52 thousand files, as the latest statistics for the kernel as we end out 2015...

For users of Firefox Nightly builds, WebGL 2 support is now enabled...

This year saw the release of GCC 5, many new features to LLVM Clang, the release of PHP 7, Rust 1.0 was released, Apple open-sourced their new Swift programming language, Microsoft has been pushing .NET in the open, and many other exciting advancements for open-source compilers and programming languages...

Thomas Schoebel-Theuer on behalf of Germany's 1+1 Internet continues working on bringing MARS to the upstream Linux kernel...

Following the recent release candidate, Deepin 15 is now officially available for ending out 2015...

Similar to the recent open-source year end driver recaps, here's a recap of NVIDIA's binary driver activities for 2015 along with some benchmarks comparing the performance of the proprietary driver over the past year.

Continuing on with our other year-end looks, here are lists of the most popular GNOME and KDE desktop happenings of the year...

Webmin, the open-source project offering web-based system/server administration on Linux and an alternative to cPanel, is out with a new release after being a few months in development...

The open-source Nouveau driver has hooked up support for OpenGL's relatively new ARB_shader_draw_parameters extension...

Microsoft has blocked a Linux game port from happening over their publishing deal with a studio...

Tomorrow is the last day for taking advantage of our 2015 Phoronix Premium holiday deal...

Debian's founder, Ian Murdock, has passed away...

The latest win for GNU's Gold linker is with the Rust programming language...

A widely-cited blog post about the major Linux desktop problems has been updated for 2016...

Last week I wrote about some of the open-source / Linux letdowns of the year while today's article is looking at some of the positives from throughout the year...

While NVIDIA has a ways to go on the open-source driver side, when it comes to proprietary drivers on Linux the green graphics giant continued to dominate with their high quality proprietary driver that continued adding in new features...

Microsoft has reportedly said that Windows 10 has been installed on 200 million devices so far worldwide...

With SteamOS being based off Debian, it was another successful year for this Linux distribution but there was also much more to be excited about as Debian users...

This year Ubuntu switched over to using systemd in place of Upstart, other distributions have also decided to take advantage of systemd, this project hosted its first conference, and the systemd feature-set continued to expand...

For those fortunate enough to have a POWER8 system running Linux, the LLVMpipe software rasterizer should now be running faster...

With the releases this year of Fedora 22 and Fedora 23, Fedora stakeholders should be proud of themselves with the quality of Fedora releases/support continuing to go up while driving a lot of new innovation and success into Linux. About the only gripe I have with the latest Fedora releases is that they no longer ship with any fun codenames to talk about.....

Unigine Corp has shared a video of some new rendering tech that they're working on for their advanced engine in 2016...

Both Wayland and Mir advanced a lot in 2015...

If you happened to receive some new computer hardware this Christmas or are weighing a possible upgrade with Skylake PCs becoming more common and AMD Zen coming out next year, you might as well benchmark your system against our vast collection of other systems to see how the performance stacks up...

Eric Anholt is hoping to see mainline support for the Raspberry Pi 2 with the Linux 4.5 kernel...

Back on Christmas was news of patches for implementing tessellation shader support for Intel Ivy Bridge and Haswell graphics hardware after support had already landed for Broadwell and newer within the Mesa driver. Support for those older generations is now present in Mesa...

DragonFlyBSD's Francois Tigeot has done some more great work in allowing their open-source Intel graphics driver to be more featureful and comparable to the Linux i915 kernel DRM driver for which it is based...

WebKitGTK+ WSA-2015-0002 was made public today as a security advisory with more than 100 vulnerabilities being mentioned...

Back in October we heard Ubuntu was planning for better ZFS support and to make it part of the distribution's "standard offering." Work in that direction has continued to advance for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS...

This year the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver (Nouveau) continued to evolve with improvements for re-clocking, the start of OpenGL 4 support, and other new functionality. Here's a recap along with some performance benchmarks showing how the OpenGL performance evolved over the past 12 months.

AMD's open-source graphics driver stack continued maturing in 2015 while Catalyst (now known as Radeon Software) releases were rare. AMD's open-source driver stack now supports OpenGL 4.1 for GCN GPUs and select pre-GCN graphics cards plus the other driver stack also matured in other ways this year...

As part of our end-of-year testing, a Phoronix reader had inquired about whether Linux made any strides in 2015 for improving power efficiency or extending battery life for any broad number of mobile Linux systems...

Ubuntu Linux made a lot of headway in 2015 particularly around their Unity 8 and Mir projects as part of their converged vision between mobile and desktop devices as well as in the Snappy space and the growing IoT market...

Here's another open-source contribution for Microsoft's list of unusual open-source/Linux announcements this year: they've added a CodeView library to LLVM...