Phoronix

After rumors were swirling last week that Dell was planning to buy EMC, the parent company of VMWare, for $50 billion USD, today that information was firmed up and the purchase price is actually $67 billion -- making it one of the largest tech deals ever...

With the Qt 5.6 beta planned for this week ahead of the planned Qt 5.6.0 official release before the end of the year, and being well past the feature freeze, here's a look at some of the features coming to Qt 5.6...

With the majority of the low, underlying changes for Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 "Hammerfest" complete, my latest focus has been on some improvements to the web-interface for Phoromatic...

A Phoronix Premium subscriber inquired this weekend about whether Intel "Haswell" HD Graphics have any performance gains when going from Ubuntu 15.04 to Ubuntu 15.10, now that Haswell has reached a mature state on Linux and most of the Intel Linux developers are busy with Skylake and Broxton...

Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 4.3-rc5 kernel as the latest weekly development release leading up to Linux 4.3...

Bas Nieuwenhuizen has been working on enabling Delta Color Compression (DCC) support for newer AMD Volcanic Islands (VI) GPUs within the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

With the latest Git code pushed into Coreboot this morning, the Apple MacBook Air 4,2 is now supported...

Kai Uwe has written a blog post about some of the new features coming to the KDE Plasma 5.5 desktop...

Well known Mesa developer Marek Olšák has published a new patch series that yields better LLVM IR generation with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

Emil Velikov released the latest Mesa 11.0 point release on Saturday...

Blender 2.76 is another hearty update to this open-source 3D modeling software...

With Ubuntu 15.10 set to be released later this month, I've started preparing for a variety of Linux performance comparisons involving the Wily Werewolf. This morning I ran some Ubuntu 15.04 vs. 15.10 benchmarks on one of my frequent test beds and it's revealed a few significant changes in some of the benchmarks...

Eric Anholt has published an updated BCM2835 KMS driver for supporting the Raspberry Pi budget SBCs with this DRM driver...

Many Phoronix readers have been requesting merchandise like Phoronix T-shirts as a way to support all of our open-source and Linux work at Phoronix to complement PayPal tips and Phoronix Premium subscriptions. That's now been setup...

While the Unigine engine isn't used by too many games compared to its presence in simulation and other industries, it remains one of my favorite engines for its top-notch Linux support over the years, beautiful OpenGL capabilities, and powering the most demanding Linux graphics tech demos. Today Unigine Corp is excited to announce the release of Unigine 2.0...

Just days after the release of KDE Plasma 5.4.2 is now the release of KDE Frameworks 5.15.0...

SteamDB has revealed some new references to Half-Life 3 content within today's Dota 2 game update...

While many initially looked at ioDoom3 as the exciting fork of id Software's id Tech 4 / Doom 3 source-code as it was done by some of the same folks as ioquake3, there sadly hasn't been much to report on in recent times for the project. Fortunately, the independent "dhewm3" is making strides as an open-source Doom 3 project...

New KDBUS patches continue being published for this in-kernel IPC mechanism based on D-Bus, but it hasn't been communicated yet whether Linux 4.4 is the next target for hoping to mainline this controversial code...

With development activity on the Linux 4.3 kernel settling down, here are some fresh benchmarks comparing the Linux 4.2 and Linux 4.3 Git kernels atop Ubuntu when using an Intel Core i5 6600K Skylake system.

Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 Milestone 3 has been released as the latest development version of Hammerfest...

Virtual Programming has published their latest in-development titles for Mac and Linux, which includes the Overlord and Saints Row games making it over from Windows...

Firefox continues making progress on loosening web developers' and users' dependence on NPAPI plug-ins with a goal still in place to remove support for most NPAPI plugins by the end of 2016...

While open-source AMD Linux users have largely been able to take it for granted for years that the Radeon DRM/KMS driver will at least light up their display when using an older GPU, after the Radeon KMS problems I ran into on DragonFlyBSD, I didn't expect this hardware to play nicely on FreeBSD/PC-BSD 10.2. Fortunately, I was proven wrong and this AMD FirePro graphics card driving a DisplayPort monitor managed to run nicely out-of-the-box...

Julia, the high-performance, high-level technical computing programming language written against LLVM, has made it to version 0.4...

Developers behind the Unity Game Engine have announced that they'll be dropping their Web Player support in favor of exporting web content to using open standard APIs with WebGL...

The Creative Commons has announced that their BY-SA 4.0 license has been found to be one-way compatible with the GPLv3 license...

Fedora has updated its packaging policy to allow more software to be bundled in the Fedora repository, but not everyone is happy with this change...

Martin Gräßlin has shared a monthly status update about the work accomplished in recent weeks for running KDE/KWin atop a native Wayland environment without depending upon any X11 code-paths...

Given the recent releases of FreeBSD 10.2 and NetBSD 7.0, plus the H2'2015 Linux distribution updates rolling around, I've just started work on a new BSD vs. Linux operating system performance comparison...

AMD sent in a batch of fixes for the AMDGPU kernel driver today for Linux 4.3. One notable change with this AMDGPU DRM driver update is that it marks the Iceland/Topaz graphics processor support as experimental so it's no longer enabled by default until the support has been better vetted...

The GNOME2-forked MATE-Desktop has tagged version 1.11.0 as their newest milestone...

Enlightenment DR 0.20 Alpha has been released as the first step towards E20 with one year having passed since E19...

While the Enlightenment developers were quick to implement Wayland support as an alternative to X11, with this week's v0.9.12 Enlightenment release it drops the Wayland support. However, this is just temporary and isn't much of a big deal...

The Intel China developers have released the newest point release of Beignet for open-source OpenCL acceleration on Linux for Intel HD/Iris Graphics hardware...

While this year's Google Summer of Code has long passed, the KDE development community is now once again starting the Season of KDE 2015 as an initiative to get new developers involved with KDE projects...

With the upcoming releases of the Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web-browsers is support for the W3C Subresource Integrity (SRI) specification...

Sarah Sharp stepped down as a Linux kernel developer this week over what she feels is bad and toxic behavior on the Linux kernel mailing list with a lack of respect and colorful language. Her announcement sparked a lot of people to come out with polarized views and Matthew Garrett also ended up stepping away from making mainline kernel contributions. Well known kernel developer James Bottomley has now published a blog post expressing different views...

NetBSD 7.0 was quietly released at the end of September...

While the Internet has been buzzing recently about the new FLIF image format, libjpeg-turbo developers released a new version of their JPEG library...

Last week I posted some initial Kingston HyperX Predator M.2 SSD Linux benchmarks. Since those results, which were rather disappointing when factoring in the cost of this solid-state storage, I've run some more tests. While the performance has improved with a newer Skylake Linux system, the results are still not as great as advertised and I'm just returning the darn drive.

SUSE Labs is looking to hire another Linux graphics developer to be involved with Linux kernel and user-space driver development, including both X.Org and Wayland...

Daniel Vetter sent in a fresh intel-drm-next pull request today for landing more changes into DRM-Next as preparations for the Linux 4.4 kernel...

Lennart Poettering released systemd 227 a few minutes ago with what he describes as "lot's of new awesomeness, and many bugfixes!"..

Since this summer we've known that Canonical developers have been looking at Vulkan in regards to supporting this forthcoming graphics API by Unity 8 and Mir. Since then we've seen work done in Mir to support renderers other than OpenGL with this Ubuntu display server. As another sign of working towards Vulkan, more of Mir's OpenGL code continues to be re-factored...

Following the Krita 3.0 porting work to Qt5 and KF5, Calligra Words is benefiting from the porting of shared code by Krita that they too now can be a "pure" Qt5 tool-kit plus KDE Frameworks 5 application...

Earlier this week I posted a number of openSUSE Leap benchmarks of their different kernels: debug, default, desktop, and vanilla. Here's some follow-up tests with more results from comparing the openSUSE 42.1 Leap Beta kernel builds...

If you're fortunate enough to have a powerful 64-bit ARM board, Xen virtualization support is now available via CentOS ARM64 packages...

For anyone dependent upon PHP's PEAR extensions, version 1.10 of PEAR is now available ahead of next month's planned PHP 7 release...

In the past year or so there's been a lot to talk about when it comes to eBPF in the Linux kernel as an in-kernel virtual machine. The latest functionality being worked on is supporting eBPF for unprivileged users...