Phoronix

For those relying upon the Phoronix Test Suite for your open-source, automated benchmark needs on Linux, BSD, Solaris, and other operating systems, a number of new test profiles were recently made available...

With many Phoronix readers being curious about reverse-engineering graphics drivers for open-source enablement, along the same lines you may also be curious about how reverse-engineering is done with video formats / video decoding by multimedia applications...

Longtime free software developer Carsten Haitzler, better known as Rasterman, presented at last weekend's FOSDEM conference about Enlightenment on Wayland. As part of that, with Samsung's Tizen environment using Enlightenment, they too are after Wayland as being the superior solution to X11...

More of the proposed Fedora 24 changes were mailed out this morning to the Fedora development list for discussion ahead of FESCo officially deciding on whether the changes will make the cut for the next Fedora Linux release...

With yesterday having started to run some fresh basic OpenCL benchmarks on the open-source Radeon driver given the interesting remarks by some super-computing researchers about having more hope for the open-source drivers than the proprietary Catalyst, here are some results comparing the latest open-source AMD Radeon Linux driver code to the proprietary driver.

Build2 was announced today by Code Synthesis with an alpha release of this new cross-platform toolchain for building and packaging C++ code-bases...

Wine 1.8.1 was released this morning as the first stable point release to Wine 1.8...

The dates for the next Ubuntu Online Summit have been finalized and will take place two weeks after the release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS...

Mir 0.19 was quietly released at the end of last week while Mir 0.20 is now officially under development with the latest Bazaar code...

While Haswell processors have been available for a few years now, finally work is materializing on supporting the hardware's Observation Architecture...

Ubuntu developers have released Snapcraft 2.1, their tool for building packages as a snap for their new Snappy package management system...

XCOM 2, the turn-based tactical video game developed by Fireaxis Games off Unreal Engine 3, is set to be released this Friday! However, come 5 February, hopefully you are a NVIDIA Linux gamer using the proprietary drivers otherwise you may have a hard time running the game...

The Wayland 1.10 beta (v1.9.92) is now available...

With the Enlightenment folks back from FOSDEM, Enlightenment 0.20.4 was released today as the latest bug-fix release...

The AMDGPU DRM driver support for Iceland (Topaz) graphics processors is now considered stable with the experimental flag set to be removed...

A Google Chromium engineer has interestingly provided patches for Qualcomm Adreno 430 display support within Freedreno's MSM DRM driver...

Landing last month in the LLVM SVN/Git code-base was the SI machine scheduler for the AMDGPU LLVM back-end. This scheduler has the potential to improve the performance for some hardware/workloads, but not by the wide margins originally reported by some early testers...

The OpenChrome driver for open-source VIA graphics on Linux isn't quite dead yet... There's a new developer wanting to step up and take over maintainership of the X.Org driver...

Following this morning's article about Russian Super-Computing Users Get Tired Of Catalyst, Start Looking At Open-Source AMD, I decided to run some fresh Radeon open-source OpenCL benchmarks on my own using the Gallium3D Clover state tracker with the HPC researchers also being curious how this very latest open-source AMD graphics stack is performing. Here are some initial results with Mesa 11.2-devel Git built against LLVM 3.9 SVN (thanks Padoka!) and using the Linux 4.5 Git kernel...

Google has released the Chrome 49 beta today for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, OS X, and Windows...

AMD this morning updated its Kaveri APU line-up and also released a new Athlon X4 processor...

With the falling prices of solid-state storage, it's becoming increasingly affordable to build a RAID array of SSDs. I have delivered many Btrfs RAID benchmarks on Phoronix over the years while today I have some fresh RAID0 and RAID1 numbers for Btrfs atop the latest Linux 4.5 development kernel when using two low-cost SSDs that retail for just around $40 USD a piece.

It's been quite a while since last having anything major to talk about with the MythTV open-source DVR software, but at least today they have put out a new point release...

Marek Olšák's latest Mesa patch series is hooking up support for the vendor-based OpenGL memory information reporting extensions to the Mesa and Gallium3D drivers...

Super-computing researchers part of the Institute of System Research for the Russian Academy of Sciences recently presented on using the open-source Radeon driver for OpenCL...

It's been more than five years since the launch of Illumos as the concerted, community-based effort around the OpenSolaris code-base. This truly-open Solaris stack continues to be at the heart of OpenIndiana, SmartOS, Dyson, and other operating systems...

The Kodi HTPC software formerly known as XBMC is -- at least temporarily -- dropping their Wayland support...

The Steam Survey has been updated with results for January 2016...

With the upcoming Linux 4.5 kernel, one of the new hardware drivers is the long-in-development Etnaviv DRM driver for providing reverse-engineered, open-source support to Vivante GPUs found in use by multiple SoC vendors...

Last week AMD launched GPUOpen and began shipping their new and open code. Today the company has published a guide for taking advantage of the Boltzmann stack with their Radeon Open Compute Kernel and Runtime...

Ubuntu developer Dimitri John Ledkov has started a public conversation about dropping the Ubuntu Desktop i386 ISOs in favor of focusing resources on the 64-bit Ubuntu desktop...

While the Linux 4.5 kernel's merge window ended more than one week ago, it looks like the AMDGPU driver may get a late feature arrival: ACP support...

Qt 5.6 is running a solid three months behind schedule while Qt developers are hoping to offset further delays in the Qt5 release train by going into a feature freeze now for Qt 5.7...

In case you haven't realized it yet, LLVM is relied upon by quite the number of software projects both open and closed. LLVM continues making new leaps and bounds not just as a traditional C/C++ compiler but in other innovative areas as well...

Since yesterday's release of Linux 4.5-rc2 there was at least one report of AMDGPU performance improvements with Linux 4.5-rc2 for an R9 Fury "Fiji" graphics card...

For more than a year we've been looking forward to VLC 3.0, but it's not quite baked yet. Once VLC 3.0 does finally ship, there are already early plans for VLC 4.0...

François Revol presented at FOSDEM this weekend about the prospects of Haiku OS ever becoming a BSD distribution. Haiku OS, the well known BeOS re-implementation, does currently rely upon some BSD components but more integration is possible...

Eduardo Lima of Igalia spoke this weekend at FOSDEM about the work done over the past year on switching the Mesa Intel i965 back-end to using the NIR intermediate representation...

With a report that Linux 4.5-rc2 manages to improve the AMD R9 Fury (Fiji) performance, I spun up a Linux 4.5-rc2 kernel this morning for easing those wanting to test the AMDGPU driver atop Ubuntu...

More Fedora 24 features were approved at Friday's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee meeting...

Running rm -rf / on any UEFI Linux distribution can potentially perma-brick your system...

Jono Bacon, the former Ubuntu Community Manager who is currently employed by GitHub, has proposed a hypothetical new open-source project that effectively comes down to bringing the Linux user-space -- complete with the GNOME Shell -- over to Mac OS X...

With Linux 4.5-rc2 that was released last night, the new AMDGPU DRM driver is supposedly much faster compared to last week's 4.5-rc1 kernel...

Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 4.5-rc2 this weekend as was expected as the next weekly test version of this new kernel...

Well, January was off to a good start for 2016 with a ton of open-source / Linux announcements whether you fancy Linux gaming, distribution performance, graphics drivers, or kernel subsystem topics. Here's a look at what was most interesting to readers so far this year...

Not only was a new beta of digiKam 5.0 released today for ending out January, but KDevelop 5.0 Beta 2 has shipped as the first update to KDevelop 5 in several months...

Whew, tons of Linux graphics benchmarks this weekend, in large part for getting more eyes looking at the new OpenBenchmarking.org web interface that's now in beta so feedback can be received and get it all tuned up for the official release in February. The latest of these benchmarks this weekend is comparing the out-of-the-box Ubuntu 15.10 performance against the speed when upgrading the Linux kernel and Mesa for the AMD R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers...

The Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D driver is very close to OpenGL 4.2 compliance as I wrote about this weekend and there's been other Gallium/NVC0 GL4 extension progress this weekend. The weekend is not over yet and Ilia Mirkin has already published another patch series.....

Two weeks back I wrote about Brainstorming Further Cooling Improvements To The Linux Benchmarking Room with the idea of replacing the vinyl floor tiles and underlayment and using porcelain tiles directly on the concrete slab for helping to absorb some of the heat during the coming summer months. That project is moving forward...

The port of the digiKam digital camera software to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5 is nearing its stable release...