Phoronix

With the SuperComputing '16 event taking place in Salt Lake City, the latest TOP500 list of super-computers has been published...

For those wanting a concise look at how FreeBSD's development has evolved recently, their third quarter 2016 status report was published this weekend to offer a glimpse at the latest development projects...

German conglomerate Siemens has announced they are acquiring Mentor Graphics, a company that's involved with Linux in several areas...

Mesa 13.0.1 is now available as the first point release to the massive Mesa 13.0 that brought OpenGL 4.5 to Intel, the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver, and much more...

Out this weekend is the eighth alpha release of the Debian Installer for the upcoming Debian 9.0 "Stretch" release due out in 2017...

Linus Torvalds released Linux 4.9-rc5 a few minutes ago as the latest weekly test release of the forthcoming Linux 4.9...

Back in 2012 I wrote about Project Darling as an effort to run Mac OS X software on Linux -- to Wine is for Windows software on Linux, Darling is for Mac software on Linux. Work on Darling seems to have picked up recently after a brief hiatus...

Vulkan 1.0.33 is now the latest version of the Vulkan 1.0 API specification from The Khronos Group...

One of my favorite Linux-native games of all time would definitely be Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Wonderful memories of that excellent id Tech 3 game and back when I had time to game on Linux, when not being challenged by early Linux GPU driver issues. This game continues to live on via the community ETLegacy open-source project and recently did issue a major update...

This week marked five years since the release of the Open64 5.0 compiler in what is the latest and likely last-ever release of this once-promising code compiler...

The AMDGPU backend within LLVM that's used by the open-source Radeon graphics driver stack has landed half-precision / FP16 support...

The VC4 open-source graphics driver stack for notably supporting the Raspberry Pi Broadcom SoCs is nearing support for threading as another potential performance win...

Today's PyPy2.7 v5.6 release as a Python interpreter alternative to CPython 2.7 while offering better performance has added some new functionality...

For those wondering the current benefits of switching over to Mesa Git (13.1-devel) on Ubuntu 16.10 compared to the stock Mesa 12 drivers, here are some benchmark comparisons for RadeonSI Gallium3D using an R9 Fury. There are also tests when moving to Linux 4.9 from the Ubuntu 16.10 "Yakkety Yak" Linux 4,8 kernel...

En route to the mainline GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is support for OpenACC routines...

The second and final planned point release to GNOME 3.22 is now available...

For those that wait for the first point release to a new Mesa stable series before switching over to the latest open-source graphics driver stack, Mesa 13.0.1 is just around the corner...

The LLVM Clang compiler now has a -Og optimization level inspired by GCC...

Version 3.7 of the CMake build system is now available...

Wine 1.9.23 is now available as the newest development version of this popular program for running Windows applications/games on Linux and other operating systems...

Intel's Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 (ITMT) patches for the Linux kernel have been pushed to their eighth revision as it prepares for mainline integration...

Last week marked the highly anticipated release of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided for Linux. At launch it only offered official support for NVIDIA GPUs on Linux with the AMD support being less than stellar. While the open-source Linux graphics driver Git code is quick to move along and adapt for new games, a new Phoronix Premium member requested some tests for seeing how the latest code is now working for this demanding AAA Linux game ported by Feral Interactive.

NVIDIA this week announced the introduction of the VK_NVX_device_generated_commands Vulkan extension for allowing the GPU to generate rendering commands on its own...

In time for any weekend Linux gaming you might do or Linux GPU driver testing, The Talos Principle has a new public beta available and it offers improvements to its Vulkan renderer...

We've talked a lot on Phoronix about PHP 7 due to the mighty impressive performance improvements found in this major update that was released at the end of last year. Many companies have blogged about their positive performance experiences in upgrading to PHP7, many of which we've shared on Phoronix, and Tumblr is now the latest company to boast about their migration from PHP5 to PHP7...

Around three dozen apps from the KDE Applications suite could be dropped if they don't see a port from kdelibs4 to KDE Frameworks 5 within the next year...

Two weeks back Intel submitted their first set of feature changes for Linux 4.10 to DRM-Next so that they can be staged for this next major kernel cycle. Coming in now is a second set of feature additions and other changes/improvements...

One of the most discussed items this week on the Fedora developers' mailing list is in regards to changing the hostname on Fedora 26 and future versions...

During this year's systemd conference there was talk of A New Wireless Daemon Is In Development To Potentially Replace wpa_supplicant. At that time the code wasn't yet public to this new open-source WiFi daemon developed by Intel, but since then the code has now opened up...

KWave is a graphical sound editor that's been in development since 1998 and is finally working its way into KDE Multimedia for becoming a proper part of KDE...

For those sticking to the Mesa 12.0 stable series until the huge Mesa 13.0 has further stabilized, Mesa 12.0.4 is now available as the latest point release...

Fedora 25 is not coming out next week as planned but has been pushed back to 22 November...

Samuel Pitoiset, one of the few significant contributors to the open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics stack particularly when it comes to the area of performance counters, has now enabled MP performance counters in the NVC0 Gallium3D driver for NVIDIA GTX 750/900 series Maxwell hardware...

Fedora 25 has a lot going for it and yet another benefit for Fedora Workstation users on the desktop is finally having an easy, official path for MP3 playback support. It's 2016 and there's finally good MP3 support coming through official channels, after in Fedora 24 they were able to finally provide H.264 support via OpenH264...

Rust 1.13 is now available as the latest implementation of this popular and growing programming language...

It's been three works that Cutelyst has been in development as a Qt/C++ web framework while today marks the v1.0 release with an ABI/API guarantee...

The well known Linux/open-source focused consulting firm Igalia has joined The Khronos Group as a contributing member...

Fedora 25 is nearly complete and this afternoon we should hear whether it will be formally released next week or will be pushed back one week due to lingering blocker bugs. Nevertheless, I've been carrying out more tests on Fedora 25 on multiple test systems in recent days and have been very pleased with this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution release...

Normally GNOME point releases aren't too worth mentioning over here, but with this morning's release of GNOME Mutter 3.22.2 it's a bit of a different story...

Coming out this morning from the Intel Open-Source Technology Center is their initial hardware enablement code for the future "Geminilake" hardware with their Linux graphics driver stack...

While it's likely a long time before Xfce 4.14 gets released with full GTK3 tool-kit integration, there are some new Xfce4 package updates available this week...

Now having my initial Intel Kaby Lake Core i5-7200U MSI Cubi 2 benchmarks with Ubuntu 16.10 out of the way, this second article is focusing upon the HD Graphics 620 Kaby Lake performance with this latest stable Ubuntu release as well as when trying out Linux 4.9 and Mesa 13.1-dev.

GCC 6 brought OpenMP 4.5 C/C++ support while coming up for the GCC 7 release will be at least partial support for the Fortran programming language with the OpenMP 4.5 specification...

Those rolling on openSUSE Tumbleweed can run the latest package updates to switch from Mesa 12 to the recently-released Mesa 13...

Qualcomm's Falkor core has been added formally to the GNU Compiler Collection...

The lead developer of the Flash-Friendly File-System, Jaegeuk Kim, has published a patch implementing multiple device support for F2FS...

For those still preferring KDE3 to what's offered by KDE4 or KDE5, the Trinity Desktop Environment continues living on as a fork of the KDE3 code-base but with support for making use of modern components...

It's yet another exciting afternoon in Mesa Git world for both of the mainline Vulkan drivers: the Intel "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver and the unofficial "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver...

Kaby Lake mobile processors began shipping last month and while we've seen a number of laptop designs using these processors that succeed Skylake, so far the Intel NUCs haven't surfaced nor many other SFF PCs making use of the next-generation hardware. That changed last week with MSI's Cubi 2 powered by Kaby Lake CPUs beginning to ship. I've been testing an MSI Cubi 2 with Core i5 Kaby Lake processor under Ubuntu Linux and so far the experience has been pleasant. In this article are our first Kaby Lake Linux benchmarks.

Mesa Git continues to be an exciting place to live for open-source GPU driver fans...