SMACH Z, the handheld Steam Linux gaming system powered by an AMD SoC, is going back to the drawing board and they've decided to cancel their current crowdfunding campaign...
There are two reasons for doing some end-of-the-year Radeon R600 Gallium3D driver testing with pre-GCN graphics cards. First, since the pre-GCN (HD 6000 series and older) support is being dropped by the new Radeon Software driver. Secondly, the R600g open-source driver finally supports OpenGL 4.1 for select GPUs. In this article is a look at the AMD Catalyst Linux driver with the last official release for HD 6000 series hardware compared to the very latest open-source Radeon graphics stack on Ubuntu Linux with a variety of interesting OpenGL Linux game tests.
Lucas Stach has issued a pull request for the Etnaviv DRM driver for hoping to land this open-source, reverse-engineered DRM driver for Vivante graphics hardware into the Linux 4.5 kernel...
Ben Skeggs has posted the latest revision of his libdrm and Mesa patch series for making use of the new "NVIF" kernel interface for the Nouveau DRM driver...
With this week having looked at the state of Ubuntu 15.10 and Fedora 23 on a brand new Intel Xeon E3 v5 "Skylake" system, next up for testing was CentOS 7 1511...
At the time of writing, the most popular laptop on Amazon.com in the US is the Toshiba Satellite C55-C5241 followed by the ASUS F555LA-AB31. If you are in the market for a new, sub-$500 laptop this holiday season, here are my findings when testing both of these popular laptops under Ubuntu Linux.
For the past few months a developer at Samsung has been working on VA-API support for the Nouveau Gallium3D driver. Those patches today are up to their fifth revision...
Going back many years, SELinux would receive much criticism over slowing down the system's performance and causing an assortment of other problems. In the early days of Fedora it would often be wise to disable Security Enhanced Linux, but in the past few years it's been in good shape. With modern hardware, is there much of a performance impact in keeping SELinux enabled?..
While many Linux distributions are in the process of stopping to support the KDE Plasma 4 desktop, FreeBSD isn't yet ready to make the move to the "KDE 5" packages...
While the LLVM Clang compiler has been working on ARMv8.1 support since earlier this year, the developers focusing on GCC have been working on it still but the first bits have been committed to trunk this morning...
As of earlier this month in Mesa Git is finally OpenGL 4.0 and 4.1 support for the Radeon R600g driver for pre-GCN hardware, albeit the subset capable of advertising GL4 compliance is right now just Cypress and Cayman. I took this opportunity to run some fresh Mesa Git benchmarks on an AMD Cayman GPU and a third run when enabling DRI3...
The PostgreSQL 9.5 release change-log was recently updated in Git to reflect all of the latest changes for this next version of this database server due out in 2016...
Here are some fresh tests of Fedora 23 with the GCC 5.3.1 compiler when running a series of benchmarks after the binaries were compiled each time with an assortment of optimization levels...
A few days ago I wrote about building an Intel Skylake Xeon E3 v5 "Skylake" system and my experiences under Ubuntu. Here's a few notes about this Xeon E3 1245 v5 system when trying Fedora 23 Linux, along with some comparative performance benchmarks...
With ReactOS 0.4 RC1 having been finally released, I decided to spend a few minutes this morning trying out this open-source operating system that's still striving for binary compatibility with Windows programs and drivers.
Canonical's David Henningsson wrote a blog post today explaining why it's taken until this year for Linux to properly support 2.1 speaker systems (two speakers and a subwoofer) with ALSA and PulseAudio...
ReactOS, the open-source operating system aiming for binary compatibility with Windows programs and drivers, is finally closer to its next big release: v0.4...
While Linux 4.5 is set to receive the DRM changes for supporting open-source 3D on the Raspberry Pi and in user-space those bits are settling down in the VC4 Gallium3D driver, the game isn't over and there still is more work ahead before this open-source Raspberry Pi 3D stack will replace the closed-source RPi 3D driver...
With the upcoming Linux 4.5 kernel cycle there's going to be open-source 3D acceleration for the Raspberry Pi via the VC4 DRM driver that was originally added for Linux 4.4..
It's been a while since last having anything to report on about DRM driver changes for Samsung's Exynos ARM SoCs, but that's changed in preparation for Linux 4.5...
While Firefox 43.0 won't be officially released until tomorrow, you can already find this exciting open-source web browser update available via their mirrors...
For those curious about how Intel's laptop/ultrabook CPUs have evolved over the past few generations and whether it's worthwhile upgrading from one generation to the next, here's a fresh Linux laptop comparison with seven different laptops being tested on Ubuntu 15.10 x86_64 and comparing these laptops from Sandy Bridge to Broadwell on a variety of workloads while also doing some performance-per-Watt measurements.
It's been a while since last having anything to report on with Haiku OS, the BeOS inspired open-source operating system. One minor advancement to mention today is they have just landed optional GCC5 compiler support packages...
Version 0.9 of AppStream is now available. As a refresher, AppStream is a FreeDesktop.org specification backed by multiple major Linux distributions as a cross-distribution effort of standardizing Linux component metadata...
Yesterday's article titled Are Open-Source Games and Community Game Engines Fading Away? continues to be one of the most-discussed threads in the forums this weekend...
Now that Xeon Skylake processors are becoming easier to find at major Internet retailers along with supported motherboards, here are the parts I used for assembling an Intel Xeon E3 1245 v5 Skylake system if you are interested in doing a similar Linux workstation build. While my complete Xeon E3 1245 v5 Linux review will come shortly, enclosed are also some initial Ubuntu benchmarks as well.
It's been just one week since the last beta update of Kodi 16 but its development steam is sticking to the "release early, release often" and this morning shipped beta #4...
As a lot of people were interested in my basement server room remodel earlier this year for Linux benchmarking (and the sixth month redux) as well as subsequent updates about a very high performance fan for air cooling the systems during the cooler seasons, here's another quick update...