Phoronix

A few days ago Intel landed OpenGL tessellation support in their open-source driver as required by OpenGL 4. However, this initial implementation was limited to support Intel's Broadwell hardware and newer. With new patches, that is now changing...

One of the most requested end-of-year articles by Phoronix Premium readers was to compare the performance of AMD graphics cards at the end of 2014 on the open-source driver compared to how they compete these days with the very latest open-source driver code. Well, as one of our Christmas 2015 articles, here's this comparison with a few different Radeon GPUs.

Whether you are celebrating Christmas, another holiday, an excuse to enjoy a few drinks, or simply just enjoying the end of the year and time off work, enjoy and happy holidays from Phoronix...

While we primarily focus on Linux operating system news and releases, I do enjoy watching the *BSD space and covering their major events. This year has saw some great updates for DragonFlyBSD, FreeBSD, and friends. Here's a look at the most popular BSD news on Phoronix for 2015...

TigerVNC, the high performance VNC server/client backed by Red Hat and others, has released version 1.6.0 to end out the year...

While I've been writing a lot the past few days about the AMDGPU kernel driver given it's landing PowerPlay support for Linux 4.5, I took some time today for running some Radeon (non-AMDGPU) DRM tests to see if the performance of this DRM-next code has changed compared to Linux 4.4 near-final...

While this year there were many great achievements in the Linux/open-source space with a ton of new innovations, exciting free software project releases, and much more (I'll have a recap of the best of 2015 in the days ahead), there were sadly many things that didn't pan out or materialize this year. Here's a look at the open-source and Linux letdowns of 2015...

The Perl 6 Advent Calendar has announced the release of Perl 6...

Complementing yesterday's AMDGPU tests with the new DRM-Next code that has PowerPlay support where the speed of this latest open-source driver code was compared to the proprietary driver, here are some tests showing the AMDGPU driver performance under a few different scenarios.

Darktable 2.0 has been released in time for editing all of your RAW holiday photos. Darktable continues to be one of the leading open-source photography for RAW images...

If you have been wanting to try out the latest GIMP 2.9 development releases to experience all of the new functionality being worked on for GIMP 2.10, it's relatively easy to do so on Ubuntu...

Just a few days ago I was writing about LLVM working on PKU memory protection keys. It seems now GCC has support for Intel's PKU instructions...

If you are a user of GNOME's Totem video player, it looks like video hardware acceleration via the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) is working out better for users if using the new GStreamer-VAAPI v0.7 release...

The release candidate is out on Christmas Eve for Deepin 15, a Linux distribution that continues to strive for a simple and clean experience that makes it easy for all users...

Whether you are celebrating Christmas, another holiday, or no holiday at all this month, I've decided to run another compelling deal for Phoronix Premium in encouraging more users to try out our ad-free, single-page-article viewing experience while supporting the site and all of the Linux hardware testing operations...

Manjaro 15.12 was released today under the Capella codename for this Arch Linux derived operating system...

The enhanced edition of Divinity: Original Sin, a fantasty RPG video game originally funded through Kickstarter, is now available for Linux...

Imagination Technologies announced the release today of the PowerVR Graphics SDK 4.0...

Last week I posted some AMD proprietary vs. open-source AMD Linux driver benchmarks using the very latest code. Left out of that earlier comparison was the R9 Fury series with Fiji GPU as well as newer graphics cards using the Tonga GPU. These graphics cards are supported by the AMDGPU DRM driver rather than the long-standing Radeon DRM driver. As I've been mentioning a lot this week, Linux 4.5 will bring the PowerPlay power management / re-clocking support to AMDGPU. In this article are showing benchmarks of the Fiji and Tonga GPUs under Linux 4.4 and Linux 4.5 DRM-Next along with the Catalyst 15.9 driver as shipped by Ubuntu 15.10.

If you are anxious to help test out the new changes of the Radeon and AMDGPU kernel drivers that will be added to Linux 4.5, I've spun up a kernel for Ubuntu x86_64 systems to try out this experimental code...

As a Christmas present for GNOME users, Richard Hughes has shared the work going on with the GNOME Software app center and with the XDG-App sandboxing tech...

While Linux 4.5 brings support for PowerPlay in the AMDGPU DRM driver to allow the modern discrete Radeon graphics cards to run much faster thanks to re-clocking, this major feature isn't being enabled by default for Linux 4.5...

In response to my article this past weekend about It Doesn't Look Like Ubuntu Reached Its Goal Of 200 Million Users This Year, Dustin Kirkland of Canonical's Ubuntu Product and Strategy team has come out to say that number should be over one billion...

As an exciting early Christmas present for Intel Linux users, ARB_tessellation_shader support has landed in Mesa Git as needed by OpenGL 4!..

Just days after the release of Wine 1.8, the Wine-Staging 1.8 release is now available...

Just minutes after writing about how AMDGPU PowerPlay support made it into AMD's drm-next-4.5 branch, that Git branch is now called for pulling into DRM-Next. Besides the PowerPlay support for the latest Radeon GPUs, there are also a number of other changes...

Alex Deucher has been tidying up his drm-next-4.5 branch for merging the Radeon and AMDGPU DRM driver changes into DRM-Next...

Now through 4 January is the "Steam Winter Sale" with discounts on thousands of games...

The Canonical team working on the Mir display server has just announced their Christmas 2015 update, which brings the version up to 0.18...

The first public preview release of Unreal Engine 4.11 is now available for testing just ahead of the holidays...

Last week I posted benchmarks of the AMD proprietary vs. open-source Radeon R600/RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers of various graphics cards on the newest open-source code. Today I'm doing a similar treatment on the NVIDIA GeForce side with seeing how their proprietary driver compares to the latest open-source Nouveau code.

The final feature pull request has been sent in of the Intel DRM graphics driver for targeting the Linux 4.5 kernel...

For visitors to LinuxBenchmarking.com, the results of our automated, daily benchmarking of Intel's Clear Linux distribution is now public...

It seems a few days ago NVIDIA quietly released some documentation to help open-source driver developers working on Nouveau...

The two latest Saints Row games were released for Linux yesterday. While many were initially excited about these open-world games coming to Linux, many haven't been able to enjoy the experience due to driver issues...

It shouldn't come as much of a surprise since Fedora tends to always ship the latest version of the GNU Compiler Collection at release time, but planning is now underway for landing GCC 6 into Fedora 24...

Many Phoronix readers have been intrigued by the Pine A64, a Kickstarter project for manufacturing the first $15 ARM 64-bit single-board computer. That cheap ARM64 SBC is powered by the Allwinner A64 SoC and the good news is that there's work underway on allowing for mainline Linux kernel support...

Following the latest Mesa and libdrm patches last week for allowing the Nouveau Gallium3D code to take advantage of the Nouveau DRM kernel driver's new interfaces, that work has now landed...

Saints Row IV and Saints Row: Gat out of Hell have been released today for SteamOS/Linux...

A few days ago on the new Intel Xeon E3 1245 v5 "Skylake" system I ran a variety of GCC and LLVM Clang compiler benchmarks to show how the performance of the resulting binaries differ between these competing open-source compilers.

While Intel NUCs powered by Skylake have been announced for some time, it's still next to impossible to find these "NUC6" models at major Internet retailers. I'm told the situation should improve in early 2016, but fortunately there is some early Linux performance result data from two of these Skylake NUCs...

Qt 5.6 remains about two months behind schedule, but the beta release of this tool-kit update with long-term support has been finally realized...

The Solus Operating System is planning to announce its version 1.0 release on Christmas...

Jiri Eischmann of Red Hat's desktop team recently carried out a survey asking Fedora users what they use as their email client...

For those that haven't moved onto the Mesa 11.1 series yet, Emil Velikov has announced the release of Mesa 11.0.8 that backports many fixes to this previous stable series...

2005 was the last year SuperTux saw a stable release, but arriving this weekend just in time for Christmas is SuperTux v0.4...

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 4.4-rc6...

Last week I published a 7-way Linux laptop comparison with processors ranging from Sandy Bridge to Broadwell. Out of interest from readers in an even larger comparison, I've re-tested a Nehlaem-based "Clarksfield" laptop as well as a "Westmere" laptop to show how the raw performance and performance-per-Watt compare to the Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell, and Broadwell devices.

Four years ago at UDS Budapest was a lofty goal laid out by Mark Shuttleworth: 200 million users in four years...

OpenMandriva has largely been a desktop-focused Linux distribution but now apparently they have set their sights on assembling a server offering...