Phoronix

While it doesn't yet support OpenCL 2.0/2.1, Intel Open Source Technology Center's Beignet doesn't really get the attention it deserves and sadly isn't shipping out-of-the-box on most Linux distributions...

LibreOffice has continued receiving more GTK3 improvements and this week was no different with this open-source office suite now having better support for GNOME's toolkit...

Mozilla platform engineer Chris Lord is trying to make the case for developers to put greater focus on making Mozilla's Gecko layout engine more embed-able friendly so that it can be more easily deployed for new use-cases...

For those interested in the state of various open-source desktop programs on Wayland, there is a nice read about the compatibility with these modern Linux programs...

Microsoft has announced today they are acquiring Xamarin, the company backed by Mono developers including Miguel de Icaza, GNOME's founder...

Fedora's DNF package manager that succeeded Yum officially in Fedora 22 is going to go through a phase of being rewritten in C...

Calamares 2.0 was released today as the newest major release of this distribution-independent, open-source installer framework...

While the open-source Doom 3 community hasn't been too vibrant since id Tech had open-sourced the Doom 3 code (id Tech 4) back in 2011, one of the more vibrant open-source D3 projects is looking at adding Vulkan renderer support to the engine...

NVIDIA developer Alexandre Courbot who has been liaising with the open-source Nouveau driver developers over providing GeForce GTX 900 "Maxwell" series support has sent out a revised patch series for the "Secure Boot" support...

As it's been a month since our last large Linux distribution comparison (a 10-way Linux distribution battle), here are some fresh benchmarks of six Linux distributions to see how their out-of-the-box performance compares. From a Core i7 Broadwell system, the updated versions of Clear Linux, Fedora 23, CentOS 7, openSUSE 42.1, Ubuntu 15.10, and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS were compared.

Version 7.11 of the GNU Debugger (GDB) was released this morning...

The Qt Company has finally announced the release of the Qt 5.6 release candidate...

Canonical has announced they are making a 64-bit ARM developer environment based on Ubuntu Core and will use the DragonBoard 410c as its reference platform...

ARM only announced the Cortex-A32 ARMv8 32-bit processor yesterday but already they've gone ahead and landed the support inside the GNU Compiler Collection...

The Ubuntu Design Team has put out a fresh blog post detailing some of their latest work on the visual design of convergent apps and have included plenty of screenshots / mock-ups...

To date most of the XDG-App talk for application sandboxing has been within the GNOME camp, but it's great to see a KDE developer is now looking at supporting this important technology outside of the GNOME space...

One week after being first out the gate with a Vulkan driver for x86 Linux, NVIDIA has released an updated Vulkan graphics driver for Linux and Windows with a few more changes...

Canonical developers have put out version 0.20 of Mir in time for the next OTA update for Ubuntu Phones...

Just last week NVIDIA finally released the signed firmware files for the GTX 900 "Maxwell" GPUs to finally allow open-source 3D driver support on these latest-generation processors. Those firmware blobs are now living in linux-firmware.git so that they can be easily distributed...

While poking around OpenBenchmarking.org this afternoon I noticed an interesting collection of benchmark results for anyone interested in high-end Linux disk setups...

The Wine crew has today released Wine-Staging 1.9.4 as the latest version of this experimental proving grounds for upstream Wine and based off last week's release of Wine 1.9.4...

Thanks to the fabulous open-source graphics driver porting work done by François Tigeot, the DragonFlyBSD kernel's i915 Intel DRM graphics driver is up to a comparable state to the code ported from the Linux 4.2 kernel...

Version 1.5.0 of the XRandR (X11 Resize and Rotate) CLI utility for interfacing with the server's RandR extension has been released...

Insurgency: Sandstorm is a new title being developed by New World Interactive for release in 2017 on Linux, OS X, Windows, and the game consoles...

The X.Org Foundation is set to hold elections beginning next month for four new board of directors as well as the adoption of changes to the foundation's by-laws for allowing it to become part of SPI...

An in-memory shader cache landed for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver on Sunday and made it in time for the Mesa 11.2 branching...

A number of Phoronix readers have been requesting some fresh AMD Kaveri Linux graphics driver benchmarks, so here you go. For your viewing pleasure today is an AMD open vs. closed-source driver comparison on Ubuntu 16.04 plus some extra runs featuring upgrades to the Linux kernel and Mesa as well as manually enabling DRI3 support.

ARM Holdings today announced the release of the ARM Cortex-A32 as a smaller version of the Cortex-A35 processor...

Libinput 1.2.0 was officially released this morning by Red Hat's Peter Hutterer for improving the Linux input support on X.Org, Wayland, and Mir systems...

Godot, the cross-platform game engine that was open-sourced two years ago, is up to version 2.0...

The newly-opened Mesa 11.3-devel code-base already has support for another OpenGL ES 3.2 extension...

One week after the big Phoronix Test Suite 6.2-Gamvik roll-out and the official debut of the new OpenBenchmarking.org, the first point release is now available...

For those curious about the performance impact between the CPUFreq and P-State scaling drivers and the different scaling governors when using an Intel Core i5 "Skylake" CPU with the latest Linux 4.5 kernel, here are some fresh benchmarks...

Valve today announced the release of a free program for measuring the performance potential of your system for SteamVR to see if your system can handle the number of emerging VR products. Unfortunately, for now at least, the test is Windows-only...

NVIDIA today pushed out the big Android 6.0 "Marshmallow" update to SHIELD TV owners and with this update comes support for the Vulkan graphics API...

The Trion 150 has been generating a fair amount of buzz since its release back in January as being a nice budget solid-state drive ideal for first-time SSD buyers. The Trion 150 is a true budget SSD with the 480GB SATA 3.0 drive retailing for just $140 USD, or about 30 cents per GB. Tests and results of the OCZ Trion 150 under Windows have been rather favorable so I figured it would be interesting to test out this drive under Ubuntu Linux.

With Canonical heavily promoting ZFS for Ubuntu 16.04 with the file-system support being added to their default kernel, their latest work is on creating an Ubuntu ZFS guide for those wanting to play with this advanced file-system...

The first release candidate of Mesa 11.2 is now available and this also signifies the branching of 11.2 from Mesa Git master...

The past few days Red Hat / Fedora developers have been rebuilding Fedora Rawhide packages with the GCC 6 compiler. Out of the 17,741 packages, 577 packages ran into issues relating to GCC 6 (~3% of the packages)...

Ethan Lee who has ported dozens of games to Linux (mostly indie titles like FEZ, VVVVVV, Waveform, and others) while also leading the development of FNA as a Microsoft XNA re-implementation presented at this year's MAGFest conference in Maryland about Linux/SteamOS gaming...

As I've written about a few times now, I've been working towards eliminating the all-in-one water cooling setups from our Linux benchmarking lab since the performance of these aging water cooling loops hasn't been too incredible and they've been blocking me from migrating the last of my systems in ATX cases over to 4U enclosures. This weekend I finally phased out the last two water cooling systems in favor of well-performing ~$20 USD heatsinks...

For the past two years WebKit has had an LLVM JIT back-end for its JavaScript engine, but now with the latest upstream code, Mac x86_64 users of WebKit have a new compiler implementation not based on LLVM...

The Android-x86 open-source project is partnering up with Jide Technology, the company behind Remix OS...

LDC 0.17.0 was released this past week as the newest version of this LLVM-based compiler for the D programming language...

A Phoronix reader wrote in with the work he's done on implementing a full-functioning Btrfs file-system driver for Windows...

While playing around with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS this weekend in its current development state, I was a bit surprised to see that this next Ubuntu release still isn't shipping with VDPAU, VA-API, or OpenCL support by default...

Samsung kicked off their Mobile World Congress presence by launching the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge. While we don't generally cover new Android phone launches, making us excited about the S7 launch today is that it's the first post-Vulkan 1.0 launch and Samsung has made a big deal about supporting Vulkan...

Most often when running GCC vs. LLVM Clang compiler benchmark comparisons it's done on Intel/AMD x86 hardware or occasionally on ARM when benchmarking an interesting ARMv7/ARMv8 system. However, in having remote access last weekend to the prototype of the Talos Secure Workstation powered by a POWER8 design, I was very anxious to run some compiler benchmarks to see how these open-source compilers compete on the alternative architecture.

XDG-App is the GNOME-backed design for sandboxed applications to allow third-party applications to better work across multiple distributions and for running applications with minimal access to the host...

Shashlik is the KDE-aligned project for running Android apps on Linux outside of a traditional Android environment. A new version of this open-source project is now available...