Phoronix

QEMU 2.6-RC3 was released this week and QEMU 2.6.0 should be officially released at the beginning of May. Here's a look at some of the new features coming to this important piece of the Linux open-source virtualization stack...

There's another weekly point release of the Vulkan high performance graphics API...

Google announced this week the participating student projects for this year's Summer of Code...

The NVIDIA 364.19 Linux graphics driver was released today as the first stable release in the NVIDIA 364 driver series...

The Linux Foundation was hosting their "Vault" Linux storage and file-system conference the past two days in Raleigh, North Carolina...

OpenIndiana 2016.04 has been released as the newest version of this operating system based on Illumos and originally derived from OpenSolaris...

My NICs appear to enjoy sleeping in with the mornings being particularly brutal on the network hardware...

While some distributions like Fedora have opted to enable DRI3 by default with their (mostly Intel) X.Org driver packages, Ubuntu 16.04 didn't pursue such behavior. But that just means with an easy xorg.conf tweak you can generally get better performance unless you happen to hit one of the few remaining DRI3-related issues...

Fedora Linux has moved towards demoting 32-bit images and Fedora Cloud was the first official flavor of Fedora Linux that will no longer be spinning 32-bit install images post F23...

Matthew Garrett has taken time away from working on his new SATA power management patches for the Linux kernel to share his thoughts on Ubuntu's Snap packaging format and its security...

On top of many other new features and various improvements to GCC 6 is also maturing OpenACC 2.0 support...

Mark Shuttleworth has posted a very short blog post where he seems to reveal the Ubuntu 16.10 codename...

Since the recent news about the Linux kernel being in worse shape than some people imagine, there's already been some downstream corrective action taking place. Clear Linux is one of the distributions already patching/tweaking their kernel for better scheduler performance but so far we haven't heard anything from the Ubuntu camp. Fortunately, there's been others working on their own solutions...

Ceph 10.2.0 "Jewel" was announced today as their latest long-term stable release. Notable about Ceph 10.2.0 is that CephFS has been declared stable and production ready...

For those running a Linux system powered by an AMD "Carrizo" APU, there's an updated firmware blob out today to benefit your UVD video decoding experience...

Libinput 1.3 has stepped closer to being released with today's RC2 release. Libinput 1.3 will further enhance input handling for Wayland, X.Org, and Mir powered systems...

Daniel Vetter of Intel OTC sent in another round of feature updates for DRM-Next to in turn premiere with Linux 4.7...

For those looking at making Python code execute even faster, PyPy 5.1 is now available as one of the alternative Python interpreters...

Firebird 3.0 was released this week as the newest version of this popular, open-source relational database system...

With today's release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Snappy package management is being more broadly supported across the Ubuntu ecosystem. This complementary packaging format to Debian packages for Ubuntu will allow third-party applications to be more easily updated. One of the other organizations already on board with using the Snap packaging format is Mozilla...

There are both Radeon/AMDGPU and Intel DRM driver fixes queued up for Linux Git this week and will find their way into Linux 4.6-rc5...

Ubuntu 16.04 "Xenial Xerus" has been released as the newest Long-Term Support distribution from Canonical...

The official release of NetworkManager 1.2 has finally happened...

The latest from AMD/RTG's GPUOpen initiative is the release of ROC 1.0...

Last week I published benchmarks showing Nouveau's "boost" patches offering much performance potential compared to the current state of the open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver but generally still not enough performance to compete with NVIDIA's proprietary Linux graphics driver. I've since carried out some fresh open-source AMD Linux results for reference to see how the NVIDIA vs. AMD GPU open-source speeds are comparing.

Those working on the KDE Neon initiative for making it more easy to consume the bleeding-edge KDE software have today announced their User Edition Tech Preview...

While Ubuntu 16.04 is being prepped for release, Fedora developers are preparing for their beta release of Fedora 24...

A day ahead of the launch of Ubuntu 16.04 as the sixth Long Term Support release, Canonical is talking about the new features for this release codenamed the Xenial Xerus...

Marek Olšák's latest big patch series has landed...

This week the Khronos Group released the provisional specification of OpenCL 2.2 and SPIR-V 1.1 while today from the Aviation Electronics Europe in Munich they announced the release of he OpenGL SC 2.0 specification...

Karol Herbst has sent out his latest set of 37 patches for trying to improve volting and clocking on NVIDIA GeForce 400 "Fermi" GPUs and newer...

AMD this afternoon announced CodeXL 2.0 as the newest version of their GPU debugger, CPU/GPU profiler, and static kernel analyzer. CodeXL 2.0 is a big leap forward and is now open-source!..

The AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for GCN GPUs now has support for OpenGL Compute Shaders within the latest Mesa code!..

Recently I picked up the ASRock C236M WS motherboard as a micro-ATX board for supporting Skylake LGA-1151 Xeon processors. This motherboard has been running nicely under Linux.

Already it's looking like the research from the recently covered The Linux Scheduler: a Decade of Wasted Cores that called out the Linux kernel in being a poor scheduler is having an impact...

Yesterday Feral Interactive published the Linux system requirements for Tomb Raider. They mentioned Mesa 11.2 support on the AMD side, but the graphics card's minimum requirement is very different from what's actually the minimum requirement...

Adding in more experimental patches over last week's Wine 1.9.8 development release is the routine Wine-Staging update...

Besides planning for the Servo and Browser.html initial release this summer there are a lot of other exciting items on the roadmap for developers working on Mozilla's Servo next-generation engine written in Rust...

The Khronos Group today announced the provisional specification of OpenCL 2.2 with OpenCL C++ kernel language support. The provisional specifications include OpenCL 2.2, SYCL 2.2, and SPIR-V 1.1...

Last week I posted results of Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 when looking at NVIDIA's OpenGL performance. As those results were quite interesting, the next installment of our Windows vs. Linux benchmarking are some numbers for AMD Radeon graphics. Tested here were Radeon Software Crimson Edition on Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 with AMDGPU vs. Ubuntu 16.04 with the new AMDGPU PRO driver stack.

Linux kernel developer Matthew Garrett has revised his work around improving power management for modern Intel systems via SATA...

With prepping for the imminent release of Tomb Raider for Linux, Feral Interactive today published the Linux system requirements for this popular game...

Another Sunday night, another Linux kernel release candidate...

Derek Bruening of Google has announced the company's interest in creating an "Efficiency Sanitizer" for LLVM/Clang for analyzing targeted performance problems...

Mesa 11.2.1 is now available as the first maintenance release for Mesa 11.2...

It seems more and more independent developers are interested in getting involved in Mesa open-source graphics driver development, but aren't really sure where to start or what are some easy tasks to get started...

If you have a NVIDIA GeForce 600/700 "Kepler" graphics card and wish to help out the Nouveau driver developers by testing out the experimental "boost" re-clocking patches covered yesterday on Phoronix thanks to the work by Karol Herbst, here's a 4.5-based Ubuntu kernel build to try out this weekend...

Some Phoronix readers have been requesting fresh tests of OpenGL graphics/gaming performance on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with its different desktop environment options. For some brief results to share this Sunday, here are some Intel Skylake numbers when running Ubuntu 16.04 and testing out Unity, Xfce, KDE Plasma, LXDE, GNOME, MATE, and Openbox.

Karol Herbst has been one of the independent developers leading the charge to improve Nouveau re-clocking support. Within his Git tree he's been queuing up re-clocking and voltage handling improvements for this reverse-engineered NVIDIA Linux driver. He's hoping the improved re-clocking code will be ready for the Linux 4.7~4.8 kernel, but I decided to try out his Git tree this week for some benchmarking of this experimental support.

The second release candidate of the upcoming Slackware 14.2 is now available...