Phoronix

A few days back I wrote about the Steam Link being just $35 USD for your streaming Linux gaming needs via Valve's platform. Now, Amazon is finally listing the Steam Controller at $35 USD as well...

Yet again with today's GeForce GTX 1080 Linux review there were multiple people asking "why XYZ Linux game wasn't tested", a recurring topic now over the past several years...

With Phoronix turning 12 years old tomorrow, here's a look at the most popular news items covered in that time regarding open-source and Linux happenings...

Continuing on from this morning's NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Linux review are some other OpenGL and OpenCL benchmarks ran from this $699+ high-end Pascal graphics card...

Debian updated their stable and old-stable releases this weekend...

$699 USD is a lot to spend on a graphics card, but damn she is a beauty. Last month NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 1080 as the current top-end Pascal card and looked great under Windows while now finally having my hands on the card the past few days I've been putting it through its paces under Ubuntu Linux with the major open APIs of OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, and VDPAU. Not only is the raw performance of the GeForce GTX 1080 on Linux fantastic, but the performance-per-Watt improvements made my jaw drop more than a few times. Here are my initial Linux results of the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 Founder's Edition.

After more than three years in development, version 3.0 of the Lightweight Java Game Library (LWJGL) is now available. LWJGL is an open-source Java library for helping game developers but can also be used by other application developers for accessing other functionality that otherwise isn't offered by the Java API...

GNU Taler "v0.0.0" was announced today as the initial alpha release of this project aiming to be a free software electronic payment system but so far just fits alongside some of the other obscure or early-on GNU projects...

I've still been swamped with my 18+ hour days this week of testing the GeForce GTX 1080 and friends for our Linux review. Tomorrow morning is when my initial GeForce GTX 1080 Linux review will be published with OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan benchmarks. Additional tests and other fun comparisons featuring the GTX 1080 will continue through the weekend. But while waiting for those featured articles, you can easily compare your own system's results to some of my initia GTX 1080 numbers...

Oracle's VM VirtualBox team has been working on VirtualBox 5.1 as a minor update to this cross-platform virtualization software...

The GNU Toolchain has continued making improvements this year beyond just the recent GCC 6 stable compiler release...

For Ubuntu Linux users it's now easier trying out the latest development state of the Intel Vulkan graphics driver...

Version 5.4 of the GNU Compiler Collection is now available...

Hans de Goede at Red Hat has been working on a DRM KMS kernel driver for the Grain Media GM12U320 hardware...

Similar to past Qt5 tool-kit releases, Qt 5.7 has been running behind schedule but they are now out with a release candidate and hope to officially ship this update later in June...

Upstream Wayland developers have decided to drop the specialized Raspberry Pi back-end and renderer from the Weston compositor code-base...

In part due to the Phoronix 12th birthday this week with running various historical performance comparisons and other interesting benchamrks and in part due to prepping for some long-term comparison data to the Radeon RX 480 launch later this month, for your viewing pleasure this morning are benchmarks testing a variety of graphis cards going back to the Radeon HD 3000 (RV600) series up through the Radeon R9 Fury (Fiji) graphics cards. Enjoy this fun article focusing primarily on the OpenGL performance under Linux over the several generations of ATI/AMD GPUs along with calculating the performance-per-Watt.

This morning it went public that ownCloud was forked into Nextcloud by many of the former contributors including ownCloud's founder. The ownCloud company has now responded...

If you've read Phoronix for any real length of time you've likely come across articles talking about Intel's Mesa driver and various work on the intermediate representations (IRs) of the driver. If you still are wondering about the Mesa driver's IR, here's a introductory blog post done by our friends at Igalia...

Over the past year or two you've likely heard of Endless Computers for their work on building a $79 PC for the "offline world" as a Linux PC for developing countries. Or you may have also heard of Endless Computers due to their upstream contributions to GNOME, since their "Endless OS" is based upon the GNOME desktop environment. Up to now their Linux distribution has just been available for their low-cost PCs, but now they are making it available for free...

Earlier this year I tested the CompuLab Airtop as a completely fanless, high-performance PC. Many Linux users were interested in the Airtop and its innovative design. The only downsides with the Airtop is that it's very expensive to ordinary consumers and you don't have free rein over what components you wish to install. Fortunately, more standards-compliant fanless cases have been coming to the market -- including some that support fanless CPU cooling. One of the newer contenders in that space is the Streacom FC5 Alpha, which is a fanless aluminum case I've been using the past month and could work out well for a SteamOS Linux gaming living room PC or HTPC.

Steam Link is Valve's game streaming solution where when paired with a controller makes for easy gaming from a living room TV. The Steam Link is Linux-based and it does support game streaming from Steam running on SteamOS or any Linux distribution...

Mike Blumenkrantz has tagged the release candidate of the upcoming Enlightenment 0.21 release...

The folks responsible for the Ardour Digital Audio Workstation on Linux and OS X have tagged v5.0-pre0...

I've been extremely anxious since the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070/1080 "Pascal" announcement last month to see how these cards perform under Linux using open standards like OpenGL, Vulkan, and OpenCL, and you probably have been too if you're reading Phoronix. Fortunately, the start of the GeForce GTX 1080 Pascal benchmarks will be revealed tomorrow...

Eight years to the week since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 "Trondheim" and twelve years to the week since the start of Phoronix.com, Phoronix Media today announced the release of Phoronix Test Suite 6.4 "Hasvik" as the latest version of our open-source, enterprise-rated, cross-platform benchmarking software...

Intel's first batch of i915 DRM kernel graphics driver changes for targeting the future Linux 4.8 kernel cycle has now been queued into DRM-Next...

Landing in Coreboot Git this week is a "hybrid graphics driver" that benefits seemingly all Lenovo laptops (except the mux-less models) with dual GPUs...

The embargo just expired so I can now share what's been happening at OwnCloud: those that left ownCloud recently have formed a new company where they are now forking ownCloud...

While Mesa 12.0 was just branched days ago and is going to be an extraordinary release, new work is already building up for Mesa 12.1-dev that will be released around September...

It's been a while since last hearing anything out of the LibreSSL camp, but a new version is now available...

LibreOffice developers have begun maintaining a Flatpak bundle of the open-source office suite. Flatpak is the GNOME-led sandboxing effort formerly known as XDG-App...

The latest version of Unreal Engine 4 is now available to game developers...

With the start of the new month comes the updated Steam Hardware/Software Survey statistics, and what we always pay attention to is their reported Linux market-share...

CoreOS today announced Torus, their latest project that sets its sights on being a modern, distributed storage system...

With the branching this week for the huge Mesa 12.0 milestone, here are some fresh Mesa 11.2 stable vs. Mesa Git benchmarks I ran today/yesterday with several graphics cards on Ubuntu 16.04 with the Padoka PPA for the updated Mesa Git stack plus also pulling down the Linux 4.6.0 stable release...

With preparing for the upcoming release of Phoronix Test Suite 6.4-Hasvik I've been running through my validation tests on all supported versions of PHP going back to PHP 5.3 as well as HHVM. As part of that testing, I've been running my self-hosted tests of the major PHP release series once again up through PHP 7.1-dev. Here are those results if you are curious about some fresh PHP CLI benchmarks...

The latest KWayland feature in the pipe for the next KDE Frameworks 5 update is virtual frame-buffer support for its Wayland server...

One of the developers behind a new open-source 3D game engine written in C++ and using Vulkan and DirectX 12 as rendering back-ends has shared his thoughts on this new Khronos graphics API after diving into it for this project...

Canonical has begun shipping the latest Over-The-Air update for Ubuntu Phones. Ubuntu OTA-11 is starting off the month with providing several new features to Ubuntu Phone early adopters...

Linux 4.6 was officially released two weeks ago and already this exciting upgrade to the kernel has begun appearing in rolling-release distributions...

When announcing the release yesterday of Wayland/Weston 1.11, Bryce Harrington at Samsung also laid out the release plans for Wayland 1.12...

If you weren't able to watch the AMD Computex 2016 live-stream happening now, here are my key notes from the event...

The official releases are out tonight of Wayland 1.11 and Weston 1.11...

What a very fun month with Valve releasing Vulkan support for Dota 2, many AMDGPU improvements, Radeon / Nouveau / Intel Mesa drivers getting OpenGL 4.3, other Mesa improvements, Linux 4.7 is shaping up great, the announcement of NVIDIA's crazy fast GeForce GTX 1070/1080 "Pascal" cards, and then tonight still we have some exciting AMD announcements on tap from Computex...

The HSA Foundation today announced version 1.1 of the Heterogeneous System Architecture...

Just hours to go until AMD's Computex live-stream, details are being leaked out about what's expected. From what we're hearing so far, AMD is going to undercut their prices of Polaris 10 hugely: the Radeon RX 480 is said to be priced retail at $199 USD and will compete with the likes of a GeForce GTX 970~980...

Spun from last week's Wine 1.9.11 release is the new Wine-Staging version that re-bases many existing experimental patches (such as the D3D command-stream multi-threading work) plus adds in some new patches that aren't yet ready to be mainlined in Wine...

Here is the continuation of yesterday's article that was a 10-way NVIDIA GPU Linux comparison with now having more NVIDIA results in plus also testing various AMD GCN GPUs using Linux 4.6.0 and Mesa Git...

While there have been Git mirrors available of LLVM and its sub-projects (including Clang) for some time, this open-source compiler infrastructure project has relied upon SVN as its cental development repository. The LLVM project is now looking at finally transitioning to Git for development and quite likely utilizing GitHub for hosting...