Phoronix

With Ubuntu dropping support for the AMD fglrx/Catalyst driver in their upcoming 16.04 LTS "Xenial Xerus" release and manually installing the driver doesn't sound like an option, many have renewed interest in how the open-source Radeon driver stack is performing for Ubuntu 16.04 that's due out next month. In this article are benchmarks comparing the performance of Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS (on both the open and closed drivers) to that of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with the sole AMD Linux driver option on a variety of graphics cards.

WebAssembly, the year-old effort for creating a low-level programming language for in-browser client-side scripting with cross-browser support is making more progress...

In recent kernel cycles we've seen more and more x86 Assembly code get rewritten in C and for Linux 4.6 this process has continued...

The Chrome 50 web-browser will usher in the stable build of V8 5.0 as its JavaScript engine...

The power management updates for Linux 4.6 are quite hearty...

If Linus Torvalds agrees to honor the pull, the Linux 4.6 kernel will feature an in-kernel debugger with full x86/x86_64 disassembler support...

Released a few days back was the newest version of AMD/RTG's HIP compiler as part of their Boltzmann initiative in porting CUDA code to run on Radeon hardware with their new software stack...

Paul Rouget of Mozilla has shared plans for making an initial alpha release of their next-generation Servo Engine and Servo-based Browser.html web browser release for this summer...

With an effort led by John Stultz at Linaro, developers have managed to get a Google Nexus 7 tablet running on a mainline Linux kernel...

With GDC happening this week, AMD took the opportunity tonight to announced the Radeon Pro Duo, a dual Fiji GPU graphics card...

Intel OTC's PowerTOP utility has been around for nearly a decade for making it easy to carry out power optimization tweaks on Intel Linux systems. However, is this program still useful or are modern Linux distributions and upstream code now better optimized by default for delivering an ideal power-savings experience? As it's been a while since the last time I tried PowerTOP, I fired it up today on an Intel Haswell ultrabook running a development snapshot of Ubuntu 16.04...

The crew behind the incredible Krita KDE drawing program has today announced they've gone into a feature freeze for Krita 3.0 and have decided to release 3.0 Pre-Alpha 3...

Broadcom's Eric Anholt sent in the VC4 DRM driver updates today for DRM-Next merging to in turn get into the Linux 4.6 kernel merge window...

OpenBSD 5.9 is gearing up for release at the start of May as the next feature release of this BSD operating system...

Paolo Bonzini has sent in the KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) changes for the Linux 4.6 kernel merge window, which he describes as "one of the largest releases for KVM."..

It looks like Qt 5.6 is finally ready to be released...

Besides the 4.6 scheduler updates, another interesting pull request today by Ingo Molnar are the mm updates...

Ingo Molnar is once again very punctual with sending his pull requests in right away for the next Linux kernel merge window for the numerous areas he oversees as the maintainer. One of his interesting pull requests this morning is of the scheduler updates...

The latest monthly alpha release for the Unvanquished open-source first person shooter game is now available. This release also marks four years since these releases began by this project derived from Tremulous...

The Nouveau driver updates for the Linux 4.6 merge window were staged on Sunday into the DRM-Next tree...

Today only you can get a quad-core ARMv7 development board for less than $15 USD...

Linus Torvalds went ahead and released Linux 4.5 over the night...

For those sticking to Mozilla's stable channel, following this week's release of Firefox 45 was the public beta of Firefox 46.0...

While waiting on the new tile in the server room to dry, I figured I would share a brief update on the state of the air cleaning systems being used...

GNOME Games, a game manager/organizer for the GNOME desktop, has added support for MAME and Neo-Geo Pocket...

After writing yesterday about F2FS support being worked on for GRUB2, I decided to explore what features are coming for their GRUB 2.02 release...

AMD's Nicolai Hähnle on Sunday posted another large Mesa patch series, this time more preparation work for shader images support within Gallium3D...

There is still time if you wish to nominate yourself or someone else to run in the elections for this year's X.Org Foundation Board of Directors...

If you purchase computer hardware or anything else at NewEgg, you can now (once again) easily support us by clicking our link before making your purchase...

In preparation for the anticipated FreeBSD 10.3 release later this month, 10.3-RC2 is now available...

Our 60+ Linux test systems will be down for a few days due to aforementioned plans for hopefully increasing the cooling efficiency of the basement server room, etc...

Besides Linux 4.5 expected this weekend, the release of Mesa 11.2 is also imminent...

The inaugural release of Gneural Network is now available, a new GNU Project to implement programmable neural networks...

Another week, another minor revision to the public Vulkan API specification. Vulkan 1.0.6 is now available to succeed Vulkan 1.0.5...

If you are a student looking to participate in this year's Google Summer of Code or a woman or other under-represented group in tech, the Outreachy deadline is too coming up...

With Linux 4.5 expected this weekend, I've been running some more, one-off tests of this new kernel. One of the latest test runs was looking at the power use of the kernel on an Intel Haswell ultrabook...

Samuel Pitoiset has been continuing in his performance counters / compute support quest for the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver. Samuel's latest accomplishment is landing MP performance counters for the GK110 GPUs...

Following the recent news of KDE's Partition Manager adding F2FS support, a Phoronix reader reminded us that F2FS support for GRUB is still being addressed...

Intel's Mesa-based Vulkan driver is now making use of the X.Org Server's modern Present Extension...

While there is nothing to report yet on the release of X.Org Server 1.19 even though we're nearing a half-year since the 1.18.0 debut, the latest xorg-server 1.18 point release is now available...

A new Steam client beta is out today for those planning on doing some Linux / OS X / Windows gaming this weekend...

Every year or two we run >32-bit vs. 64-bit Linux benchmarks. While x86_64 Intel/AMD hardware has been extremely common for quite some time, we continue to be amazed at the number of people still running an i686 Linux distribution on x86_64 hardware.

This is some surprising but welcoming news today... Croteam's latest open-source/Linux greatness is the open-sourcing of the Serious Engine...

GNOME developers working on NetworkManager are hoping to further improve this important networking component of the Linux desktop. In particular, they are hoping to make the command-line NetworkManager (nmcli) more useful...

For those using the KDE Partition Manager as a KDE/Qt alternative to GParted, the version 2.1.0 release is out along with an update to its underlying KPMcore 2.1.0 library...

A new open-source driver patch series was published today by an engineer at NVIDIA...

With Linux 4.5 likely coming out this weekend, here's a look at some of the new features/functionality coming for Linux 4.6 -- with this article looking at a portion of the expected DRM driver changes...

Earlier this week was the news that Catalyst/fglrx was being deprecated in Ubuntu 16.04. While there was some hope that one could simply install the driver manually on Ubuntu 16.04, it doesn't look like that will be supported as it sounds like there won't be any new Catalyst / Radeon Software release to support X.Org Server 1.18...

There is a quick update to the XWayland Gets GLAMOR X-Video Support story...

Back in 2001, Steve Ballmer who was leading Microsoft at the time called Linux a "cancer", but now he no longer has those views...