Phoronix

Following yesterday's news of Canonical dropping work on Unity 8 and Ubuntu Phone and switching back to GNOME as their desktop environment, some community developers are determined to keep the projects going...

Red Hat developer David Howells has posted a series of patches to make it possible to lock-down the running Linux kernel image in an effort to prevent user-space from modifying the running kernel image...

Jerome Glisse has published his latest massive patch-set for supporting Heterogeneous Memory Management within the mainline Linux kernel...

With Unity 8 (and Mir) being years behind schedule, Mark Shuttleworth today made the surprise announcement of abandoning Unity 8 and shifting back to GNOME while also stopping their Ubuntu Phone efforts. This was the biggest Ubuntu shock in years and as such I've thrown together today a bit of a tribute or look back at the various desktop milestones of Ubuntu since its first release covered by Phoronix back in 2004. Check it out if you are a relatively new Linux user or just wish to relive the old screenshots of GNOME2, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Ubuntu TV, the early Unity days, the ambitious Mir plans, and more.

Thunderbird 52.0 is now available as the latest stable release for those using this Mozilla-developed mail client...

Canonical has announced via Mark Shuttleworth they are ending their development of the Unity 8 desktop environment and will be switching back to GNOME desktop by Ubuntu 18.04...

Ubuntu developer Ted Gould has written a fresh blog post about the current planning for supporting X11 apps on Ubuntu Personal -- Ubuntu with Unity 8 and Mir -- while keeping applications secure...

Nicolai Hähnle has been busy today with Mesa Git as in addition to landing ARB_sparse_buffer for RadeonSI, he's now landed ARB_shader_ballot as another useful OpenGL extension -- it can be used as part of the "AZDO" techniques...

If you are an X.Org Foundation member, be sure to vote this week! Besides the routine elections, there are the proposed membership agreement changes that needs a majority of the members to vote...

While Razer is exploring better Linux support for its products and not just limited to laptops, for now they don't have any official Linux configuration software for their products. Fortunately, community solutions exist, including Polychromatic that's been one of the more popular Razer open-source configuration tools in recent times...

Landing today within Git for Google's Chrome/Chromium web-browser is initial support for supporting native desktop notifications under Linux...

The necessary GPU firmware for providing accelerated support for NVIDIA's Tegra X2 SoC found on the Jetson TX2 developer board has landed within linux-firmware.git...

AMD developer Nicolai Hähnle has landed ARB_sparse_buffer support within the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. RadeonSI is the first Mesa/Gallium3D driver supporting this OpenGL extension...

Lucas Stach has sent in the Etnaviv DRM updates to DRM-Next that will target the Linux 4.12 kernel, just in time for this weekend's DRM deadline...

Timothy Arceri has posted a series of a patches to further improve the Mesa shader cache's hot and cold load times...

There is just one week to go until the Ubuntu 17.04 "Zesty Zapus" release yet landing now is X.Org Server 1.19.3...

Less than two months after hitting 22 million test/suite downloads, OpenBenchmarking.org has now served up over 23 million test profile and test suite downloads to Phoronix Test Suite users...

Sam Lantinga updated SDL tonight with support for several more game controllers. The most notable perhaps is the Nintendo Switch Pro controller now being handled by mainline SDL, the library that's widely-used by a majority of Linux games...

While Amarok has not seen a release in years and Juk development not being too vibrant, now there's another new KDE music player option: Elisa...

LPGPU is a new research initiative funded by the European Union to explore low-power GPU technologies...

With Xonotic 0.8.2 having been released this past weekend and was the first update to this open-source game in more than one year, I was curious to put it through its benchmark paces...

The alpha release of Fedora 26 has finally shipped...

With the recent release of some new Linux games like the Serious Sam 2017 update and Mad Max, also with featuring Vulkan renderers, here are some fresh Intel P-State vs. ACPI CPUFreq frequency scaling driver and governor comparisons with a variety of Linux games.

Linaro and other ARM/embedded developers continue working on minitty, a minimal TTY implementation for the Linux kernel that's targeting embedded systems...

Croteam has done the full release of Serious Sam VR: The Second Encounter on Steam today, just days after SSVR: The First Encounter left early access...

Last week's Vulkan 1.0.46 update added a new extension and it's now supported by Mesa's Intel ANV and Radeon RADV drivers...

While NX bit has been around for many years with AMD64 for marking page tables as no-execute or not, the DragonFlyBSD kernel is now only making use of it...

After Linus Torvalds was upset about the DRM pull request for Linux 4.11, the deadlines of new feature changes for the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) code targeting Linux 4.12 is being strictly enforced...

The monthly status report on the BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system reveals their latest efforts...

More and more recently we have found ourselves talking about Mir's abstraction layer, MirAL. It turns out that this set of interfaces to Mir has advanced from being a hobby project by a Canonical developer to now being a formal project within the organization and more of Unity 8 is making use of MirAL's API/ABI...

Over the past few days I have posted some RX 480 tests and R9 Fury OpenGL/Vulkan tests for the new AMDGPU code slated for Linux 4.12. I've also carried out some R9 285 "Tonga" tests and happy to report seeing some performance gains there too...

For getting April started, here is a fresh comparison of various BSDs and Linux distributions tested on an Intel Core i7 6800K Broadwell-E box. Tested operating systems included Antergos, Clear Linux, DragonFlyBSD 4.8, FreeBSD 11.0, Scientific Linux 7.3, TrueOS 20160322, Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS, and Ubuntu 17.04 20170330.

Just as planned, Mesa 17.0.3 was released this weekend...

Apple has been the largest customer of Imagination Technologies with continuing to rely upon PowerVR graphics IP in their chips, but it looks like that is changing and Apple could be rolling out their own GPUs...

Last week when writing about the release schedule for GNOME 3.26, one of the first questions was about what features are coming to this next installment of the GNOME desktop...

As reported last month, KDE's speech recognition software is being revived and released today is a new development release...

If you have never made use of Linux's perf subsystem, it can provide some valuable insight to what is slowing down your game/application...

Following last month's ioquake3 security issue, the project has been reassessing their state of security and could use some help on that front as well as other matters...

ARM has open-sourced a new compute library with GPU support via OpenCL as well as CPU support with NEON usage. This library has basic arithmetic functions but also goes further to offer color manipulation, convolution filters, SVM, SGEMMs, convolutional neural network building blocks, and more...

Linus Torvalds has just announced the fifth weekly RC test release to the upcoming Linux 4.11 kernel...

A Phoronix reader pointed out that last month Google developers landed some significant multi-threading performance improvements into their official VP9 video encoder...

On Friday I posted some early AMDGPU benchmarks of the DRM-Next code slated for Linux 4.12 using a Radeon RX 480 "Polaris" graphics card. As some additional reference points, here are some Linux 4.10 vs. 4.11 vs. (4.12; DRM-Next) code with an R9 Fury "Fiji" graphics solution...

It looks like the recent Linux game releases of DiRT Rally, HITMAN, and Civilization VI along with the debut of SteamVR for Linux was enough for Linux gamers to fire up their Steam clients in March...

For those interested in a fancy dock for your desktop if trying to make it look perhaps more like macOS, the developers behind Now Dock and Candil Dock have joined forces to create a new dock solution called Latte Dock. Today marks the first release of this Qt/KDE-focused Latte Dock offering...

An independent developer wrote a message on the Wayland mailing list this weekend how Wayland should "move away from C." While Rust is all the fun these days to those looking towards a "safer" programming language, it was suggested Wayland be re-implemented in Haskell...

A few days ago I wrote about Inputfd as a new Wayland protocol proposal for better supporting gaming devices. Peter Hutterer who drafted the proposal has now released a larger overview on this proposed addition...

Intel has queued changes for their GVT-g graphics driver stack for Linux 4.12, allowing some improvements around their newly-mainlined graphics virtualization tech support for running VMs with accelerated graphics capabilities...

Matthias Clasen on Friday released version 3.90.0 of the GTK+ tool-kit...

It's been more than one year since an update to Xonotic, the open-source first person shooter formerly from Nexuiz, but that changed today with the v0.8.2 release...

For student developers wishing to look for an interesting summer project while being paid by Google, the GSoC application deadlines are on Monday, 3 April. Sadly, the X.Org/Wayland/Mesa turnout so far for applicants are very low...