Phoronix

While Xen 4.7 was released this week as the latest for this virtualization hypervisor, the independent Xen Orchestra software that provides a web interface to Xen Server is out with its version 5.0 milestone...

As part of the celebrations with Phoronix turning 12 years old earlier this month I ran some fun tests looking at the Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux gaming performance with the new NVIDIA Pascal GPUs and also a Windows 10 vs. RadeonSI Gallium3D vs. AMDGPU-PRO comparison on the AMD side. To finish things up, here is a fresh comparison of Intel Skylake HD Graphics under Windows 10 and Ubuntu 16.04.

Matthias Klose has provided an update concerning plans for having GCC 6 become the default compiler of Debian 9.0 "Stretch."..

The Wine camp is out with their latest bi-weekly development release where they have continued focusing on some of the same work items they've been trying to address the past few releases...

This summer there has been two summer projects being worked on under the X.Org Foundation via this year's Google Summer of Code...

Version 5.0 of the open-source Dolphin Emulator for playing Nintendo GameCube and Wii games on Windows/Linux/OSX is now available...

For those of you not paying attention to Weston Git or the mailing lists, this reference Weston compositor has been going through a period of refactoring...

With the Linux 4.7 kernel there is an initial Mediatek DRM display driver while further improvements to this open-source code are coming for Linux 4.8...

Earlier this week there were some last minute AMDGPU DRM kernel patches submitted that were needed for AMD's imminent Radeon RX 480 "Polaris" launch while today some last minute Mesa patches have materialized...

Following last month's PostgreSQL 9.6 Beta 1 release, a second beta is now available for testing...

The Xen Project has announced their version 4.7 release...

Given the recent releases of Fedora 24, Solus 1.2, and other GNU/Linux distribution updates, here is our latest performance testing roundabout of seven popular OS releases on the same Core i5 Skylake system.

Not that I can share any early benchmark figures or anything of the Radeon RX 480 "Polaris" graphics card, but the testing commenced today... But I can at least share a couple images...

Yesterday I mentioned how the AMDGPU driver needed some important last minute fixes for the soon-to-launch Radeon RX 480 "Polaris" support. Those patches are now pending to be pulled as part of the next round of DRM fixes heading into Linux 4.7...

Just weeks after their first round of DRM updates for Linux 4.8 were submitted, the Intel crew has their second -- of a possible three -- feature updates readied for the Linux 4.8 kernel via DRM-Next...

Version 9.0 of the once-controversial PulseAudio sound server is now available for your open-source audio needs...

With the imminent Mesa 12.0 release there is now OpenGL 4.3 compliance for Intel Broadwell graphics hardware and newer, rather than OpenGL 3.3 as was the upper limit in the Intel Mesa driver to this point. Now having OpenGL 4.x support with this open-source Intel driver, I decided to see how various OpenGL 4.x games are running with the Intel driver when using a Skylake CPU sporting HD Graphics 530...

While Fedora 24 made great inroads on their Wayland support plans for running GNOME by default off this next-generation technology compared to X11, the Firefox package in Fedora currently relies upon Wayland...

The latest GCC 7 development code now has support for the ARM Cortex-A73 processor...

Qt 5.6.1 was released earlier this month to fix outstanding issues with the Qt 5.6 tool-kit release while today the 5.6.1-1 hot-fix release is available to fix a critical problem...

There are a lot of Wayland support improvements to find in the upcoming release of KDE's Plasma 5.7...

The unstable BusyBox 1.25.0 release was made available today for testing purposes...

Coinciding with today's release of Fedora 24 is the official debut of Flatpak, formerly known as XDG-App...

Emil Velikov announced the release this morning of the fourth and final planned release candidate for Mesa 12.0...

It looks like some last-minute changes to the Linux kernel are needed for prepping the AMDGPU DRM driver to handle the production Radeon RX 400 "Polaris" graphics cards that will soon be shipping...

Timothy Arceri of Collabora has prepped the latest version of his massive patch-set for providing an on-disk shader cache for Mesa, albeit focused for now on the Intel DRI driver...

Fedora 24 is now officially available!..

FreeBSD VGL provides a library for accessing graphics modes and carrying out basic drawing operations atop its syscons console driver. Not only is basic graphics output on a virtual console supported by libvgl, but mouse input is too handled. However, not many people seem to be using this library...

With Phoronix.com having turned 12 years old earlier this month (and Phoronix Test Suite turning 8) plus finishing up my custom build of a butcher-block and steel pipe computer desk, I figured it'd be fun to take a look at my Phoronix office layouts over the years...

Fedora 24 is due to be released in a few minutes and I am super excited to see this (belated) release happen! This is yet another exciting release since the changes introduced a few releases ago with Fedora.Next. I do intend to certainly upgrade to this latest release...

With Fedora 24 set to ship today, here are some benchmarks I carried out yesterday comparing Fedora 23 to Fedora 24 on a Core i5 6600K "Skylake" system with HD Graphics...

What does it mean when developers behind one of the world's most popular desktop environments decide to jump into the deep end and fork a distribution? Depending on who you ask you'll hear madness, excellence, confusion, and excitement as onlookers figure out the exact nature of a new breed of beast and guess what it will do.

With the recent report that Intel's Vulkan Linux driver should now work with Dota 2, I was curious to test out the game -- and Talos Principle -- with the latest Mesa Git code that houses this open-source "Anvil" Vulkan driver...

With this weekend's 5-Way Mesa 12.1-dev + Linux 4.7 Git Radeon Comparison and other tests I've done on Linux 4.7 Git with Radeon hardware, the R9 290 has regressed to the point of performing noticeably worse than other AMD GCN GPUs... Many other Phoronix readers with different Rx 200/300 graphics cards have also confirmed their graphics cards performing poorly on Linux 4.7...

This year has already encountered the releases of the much-delayed Qt 5.6 followed quite quickly by Qt 5.7. Upstream Qt developers are now trying to get Qt 5.8.0 ready to ship this calendar year...

This past week the GTK+ road-map was updated during the GTK hackfest with more plans for the future, on top of their new vision for GTK+ 4.0 and beyond...

NVIDIA used this week's International Super Computing Conference (ISC) in Germany to launch the PCI Express version of their Tesla P100 accelerator...

Version 1.2 "Shannon" of the promising Solus Linux distribution has been released...

Linus Torvalds announced the release of the Linux 4.7-rc4 kernel on Sunday night...

The newest OpenGL extension now supported by Mesa is GL_EXT_window_rectangles...

There's a new technology preview release of QtWebKit for those wanting to use this formerly retired WebKit-based module instead of the newer QtWebEngine that makes use of Chromium's Blink engine...

Following the massive Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 Graphics Performance With Radeon Software, AMDGPU-PRO, AMDGPU+RadeonSI article, I immediately started work on my next article... In preparation for a hardware launch Linux testing later this month, I started testing my collection of AMD cards on Linux 4.7 and Mesa 12.1-dev. Here are some of those results if you are curious, including performance-per-Watt metrics...

The fourth alpha release of the upcoming FreeBSD 11.0 is now available for testing...

Virt-Manager 1.4 has been released and it's a great release for those wanting to easily play with Virgl for OpenGL atop the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

Antergos 2016.06.18 has been released as a re-spin of this Arch-based Linux distribution...

Yesterday I published some Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 Linux gaming benchmarks using the GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 graphics cards. Those numbers were interesting with the NVIDIA proprietary driver but for benchmarking this weekend are Windows 10 results with Radeon Software compared to Ubuntu 16.04 running the new AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver as well as the latest Git code for a pure open-source driver stack.

KDE developers this week at Randa have ben working on improvements for KDE applications on Windows...

There's more work going on in the CUDA/OpenMP space for the LLVM Clang compiler...

If you happen to be in the market for a 4K 28-inch display, here's the latest one I have purchased for our Linux hardware testing here at Phoronix. Right now it also appears to be for a very competitive deal at one particular e-tailer...

Some rendering speed improvements have been worked on recently for the LibreOffice open-source office suite and are now present in LO Git...