Phoronix

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...

The Free Software Foundation has certified ThinkPenguin's latest mini-router as a device that "respects your freedom" per their standards...

AMD this morning unveiled their XConnect technology to connect an external, high-performance Radeon graphics card to a notebook or 2-in-1 device...

With Ubuntu 16.04 LTS due for release next month, I found it time to do my occasional 32-bit vs. 64-bit Linux OS comparison for showcasing the performance difference of using the 64-bit software on supported hardware. This time around, at a premium member's request, I also did some power consumption monitoring between the 32-bit and 64-bit builds of Ubuntu 16.04 on an Intel laptop/ultrabook...

PyPy 5.0 has been released today as the alternative Python interpreter and JIT compiler focused on performance and efficiency...

While the main AMDGPU pull request for Linux 4.6 happened back in February, another pull request was sent in today with more AMDGPU DRM fixes into DRM-Next that in turn will make it for Linux 4.6...

Google developers are looking at starting a new LLVM sub-project around parallel runtime and support libraries for GPUs, CPUs, and other platforms. As part of it, they are also looking to open-source their StreamExecutor that wraps around the CUDA and OpenCL runtimes...

Longtime GCC developer Richard Biener shared a status update today concerning the state of the GNU Compiler Collection 6...

X.Org Server 1.18 is now available via the Xenial Xerus archive for users of the upcoming Ubuntu 16.04...

With Linux 4.5 expected this weekend, Daniel Vetter of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has offered a glimpse of what's coming with the i915 graphics driver changes of Linux 4.6...

To many users, Intel's codename of Bay Trail for the recent Atom SoCs would be more accurate if it was named Bay Fail...

It's been less than one week since the Wayland-Protocols 1.2 release while out now is Wayland-Protocols 1.3...

Today AMD released the Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.3 driver (formerly known as Catalyst), but sadly the Linux driver update is not in tandem with this new driver update which now provides official Vulkan support...

AMD's Daniel Rakos has written a blog post for GPUOpen concerning Vulkan's validation layers and making use of them for debugging and testing your code using this new high-performance graphics API...

In a surprise move and while Android Marshmallow adoption isn't yet too great, the first developer preview release of Android N is now available...

Ubuntu developers have deprecated the fglrx / Catalyst Linux display stack for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Users of this upcoming Ubuntu release are now encouraged to use the open-source Radeon display stack...

Phoronix Test Suite 6.2.2 has been released as the last planned point release in the Phoronix Test Suite 6.2-Gamvik series...

Succeeding January's 10-way Linux distribution battle is now a 15-way Linux distribution comparison on an Intel Xeon "Skylake" system with Radeon R7 graphics. Distributions part of this Linux OS performance showdown include Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, OpenSUSE, Antergos, Sabayon, Void Linux, Zenwalk, KaOS, Clear Linux, and Alpine Linux.

Over the past week of running benchmarks on the Raspberry Pi 3 we have seen how warm this new $35 quad-core ARM 64-bit developer board can get and it's significantly hotter than the Raspberry Pi 2...

Back in 2014 is when longtime open-source graphics driver developer Jerome Glisse began pushing his patches for Heterogeneous Memory Management in the Linux kernel while that work is still ongoing but has now been renewed...

The xf86-video-ati DDX driver's TearFree option will work for rotated and reflected display outputs...

AMD developers have today sent out patches for implementing HEVC Main 10 provide video decode support to the open-source RadeonSI UVD driver stack...

Today is the alpha freeze for the upcoming Fedora 24 Linux distribution update...

Well, Microsoft is continuing in their open-source/Linux announcements. Succeeding yesterday's announcement of Microsoft SQL Server coming to Linux, today the Windows maker announced they are joining the Eclipse Foundation...

The Mir team at Canonical now has initial support for Vulkan with their next-generation display project...

While running late, the release of LLVM 3.8 and Clang 3.8 is now officially available...

Mozilla developer Chris Lord wrote recently about renewed interest in embedding Gecko, the current Mozilla layout engine used by Firefox and Thunderbird, while today he's out with a new post about the state of embedding Gecko into other applications...

OwnCloud 9.0 has been released today as "the biggest and most important ownCloud release so far with a ton of performance improvements, bug fixes, cleanup but also new features."..

A controversial point of Intel's Coreboot support has been the FSP, or Firmware Support Package, which is needed for initializing the systems on all recent hardware generations. With the upcoming Apollo Lake it appears there is now a "FSP 2.0", but still relies upon binary blobs...

Mozilla Firefox 45.0 is now available as the newest version of this open-source, cross-platform web browser...

While the Rust-written Servo engine being developed by Mozilla is still experimental, Google's Jake Archibald has done a performance comparison of Servo against other engines and the results are mighty impressive...

With Linux 4.5 looking like it will release next weekend, here's a look at my favorite features/changes of Linux 4.5..

With the big AMDGPU/Radeon feature pull already having been submitted into DRM-Next for merging in turn to Linux 4.6. another pull request was honored this week to land some fixes for the new open-source driver functionality...

Building off last Friday's release of Wine 1.9.5 is now the Wine-Staging update that adds in extra patches...

The upcoming release of GNOME Photos 3.20 brings a number of improvements and new features for what was traditionally the GNOME image viewer...

While Kodi 16 just recently shipped, the developers behind this open-source HTPC software formerly known as XBMC have already set their sights on Kodi 17...

With the Linux 4.5 kernel comes the net Etnaviv DRM kernel driver while some improvements have already been baking for Linux 4.6...

GNOME News is one of the desktop's applications for serving as an RSS feed reader, but it's in pretty rough shape compared to the rest of the competition and is in need of more development help...

Microsoft made many interesting open-source / Linux announcements last year and already in 2016 it's been interesting with Microsoft buying out Xamarin and continuing their open-source ambitions. Microsoft's latest announcement is the availability of their SQL Server for Linux...

Almost two weeks ago the Superhot Team put out their independently developed, Kickstarter-funded, 3D FPS. What began as an online demo grew into a full game, albeit a short one, thanks to Kickstarter, and publisher IMGN.PRO...

Mesa 11.2.0-rc3 is now available via Git as the latest weekly test release to this upcoming major Mesa release...

Following the KaOS and Void Linux benchmarking as part of our next big Linux distribution comparison was firing up Alpine Linux for some benchmarking...

Since last year we have been waiting for AMD to launch their "HuskyBoard" ARM development board built around their Opteron A1100 ARM 64-bit SoC. That board was originally supposed to ship in Q4'15 while now available for pre-order is a new A1100 development board that looks like it may be taking its place...

As part of the numerous Raspberry Pi 3 benchmarks published this weekend, I had an article devoted to how the Raspberry Pi 3 gets rather warm under load. For those interested, here are some follow-up tests showing just how warm the RPi3 gets in comparison to the Raspberry Pi 2...

Wayland-Protocols 1.2 was released this morning as the newest version of this official Wayland protocol collection...

Linus Torvalds announced the availability just moments ago of the Linux 4.5-rc7 weekly kernel test release...

One of the lesser known distributions requested for testing as part of our upcoming 10+ Linux distribution performance comparison was KaOS. KaOS is a Linux distribution built from scratch but does make use of Arch's Pacman...