Phoronix

Yesterday I published the results of a 6-way Linux distribution performance comparison but not part of that original article were any Gentoo Linux results. However, with Calculate Linux 15 having been released yesterday and is a well known Gentoo derivative, I decided to run some extra benchmarks...

Systemd 227 hasn't been released yet but it appears that it will be coming out quite soon. Here's a look at some of the changes...

It's been a while since last having anything to report on Xoreos, but this week they're out with a new release. For those out of the loop, Xoreos is an open-source re-implementation of BioWare's proprietary Aurora Engine. With Xoreos the aim is to make it possible to power Neverwinter Nights and similar games off this GPLv3+ engine while still relying upon the game's assets...

NixOS, the "purely functional Linux distribution" built around the Nix package manager, is out with a new release...

Earlier this month was an inquiry to upstream LLVM developers about including an Atmel AVR back-end in the mainline repository, which up to now has been developed out of tree. LLVM developers are now discussing this back-end and it's looking like it may be added once reviewed...

Apple released OS X 10.11 "El Capitan" today as a free update for Apple computer owners. Are you interested in some fresh OS X vs. Linux benchmarks?..

Honoring the latest round of Phoronix Premium reader requests is a fresh six-way Linux distribution comparison. Tested were Manjaro 15.09 and Linux Mint 17.2 and then the latest development versions of Fedora 23, openSUSE 42.1 Leap, Debian Stretch Testing, and Ubuntu 15.10.

Calculate Linux 15 was released today in its KDE, MATE, and Xfce desktop spins along with Calculate Linux Directory Server, Linux Scratch, Scratch Server, and Media Center editions...

Roy Spliet has just published his latest work to better handle re-clocking for select NVIDIA GPUs with the open-source Nouveau driver...

AMD has announced that their new PRO A-Series processors have begun to ship. The PRO A-Series is based on Carrizo...

SMPlayer, a popular Qt front-end to MPlayer, is out with a new version that adds a variety of new features...

It's been quite a while since last having anything to report on the OpenShot 2.0 non-linear, open-source video editor, but an update on it was issued yesterday...

It's been over six months since the last POCL release, the Portable Computing Language open-source project that's implementing OpenCL on CPUs. The next POCL release isn't out yet, but we know it will be introducing new features...

Mir 0.16 was quietly released a few days back as the newest upstream release of this display server for Ubuntu Linux...

For the past several months I've been using a Scythe Mugen Max heatsink on one of my Core i7 5960X Haswell-E systems. That heatsink has been working out great, but the only problem is that it's too big -- particularly if trying to fit it in a 4U chassis. In needing to cool this 140 Watt CPU while moving the system into a 4U rackmount chassis, I ended up trying out the much cheaper and smaller Freezer i11 from Arctic Cooling.

Google announced a number of new devices today plus improvements to their services like Google Photos along with confirming Android 6.0 Marshmallow is coming next week...

Generally Ubuntu Linux hasn't allowed new minor point releases of software to be sent down as stable release updates (SRUs) once the Ubuntu release ships, but there's been many exceptions, and now Ubuntu's Technical Board has agreed to make changes to make it easier to send down micro-release updates as well as offering new features to existing LTS (Long-Term Support) releases...

It's sad right now that we're going through a time where many new Linux game releases only work with NVIDIA graphics and flat out fail with AMD's Catalyst driver. While AMD is known to deliver game fixes several months late, making matters worse, it seems some game developers don't even know who to contact at AMD about Linux driver issues...

The MIPS P5600 processor is now supported by LLVM thanks to a now-merged patch from Imagination Technologies...

Mesa's Gallium3D "Clover" state tracker still lacks full OpenCL 1.2 support, but as of yesterday the CL 1.2's clCreateImage() function was hooked up...

Mozilla's next-generation, Rust-written Servo web layout engine now has an experimental renderer for drawing web content on the GPU. The Servo WebRender aims to do all the rasterization work on the graphics processor and the initial results are promising...

While Mark Shuttleworth talked up before that an Ubuntu Phone supporting their much talked about "converged" experience would be available in 2015, it appears now to be delayed until some time in 2016...

Raspbian, the Raspberry Pi's Debian-based Linux distribution, has re-based their platform atop Debian 8 "Jessie" and with it they're now making use of GTK+3 and other new features...

Python 3.5 was released earlier this month with new functionality. Unfortunately, Python 3.5 is too late for Fedora 23 but is being planned for Fedora 24...

If you woke up this morning expecting to play Alien: Isolation with today being the expected release date for OS X and Linux, Feral Interactive has unfortunately had to push back the release...

The Free Software Foundation has endorsed the Taurinus X200 laptop as a laptop that respects your freedoms...

Git 2.6.0 was released yesterday by Junio Hamano...

Five years ago today marked the fork of OpenOffice.org into LibreOffice and coincidentally the Apache Software Foundation put out news this weekend that a new version of OpenOffice is coming...

Canonical's design team has been working on redoing the user-interface to the Ubiquity installer that also converges with the setup wizard for Ubuntu Phones...

While recently I've posted a number of Linux solid-state drive benchmarks from low-end SATA 3.0 SSDs being used in Linux test systems not frequently being stressed by disk/file-system workloads, here are some benchmark results using a higher-end M.2 SSD. Benchmark results today are from the Kingston HyperX Predator 240GB M.2 Gen2 x4.

While there's sadly not been much in the way of new feature development activity for Reiser4, this out-of-tree file-system continues to be ported to new versions of the Linux kernel...

While the year is not close to being over yet, there's already been a surprising number of Linux and open-source related announcements made by Microsoft in 2015!..

Since the beginning of the year Sony has been working on landing their PlayStation 4 compiler changes back into upstream LLVM/Clang. More of that code is now hitting mainline...

FFmpeg's ffplay media player has interactive volume controls now that are inspired by the MPlayer-fork MPV...

If you're curious how the open-source VP9 codec performs for video encoding and decoding comparing to H.264 and H.265/HEVC, there's some interesting numbers out this weekend...

Manjaro 15.09 was released this morning with its Xfce, KDE, and net installer spins. Manjaro 15.09 is their first major update since June and is codenamed Bellatrix for this Arch-based distribution...

Since I started delivering my Skylake Linux tests back in August, I've received many inquiries from Phoronix readers curious about what motherboard I've been using, etc. Long story short, all of my initial Intel Skylake Linux testing has been done with the MSI Z170A GAMING PRO motherboard, which has been working out well.

Canonical sadly hasn't made public any sales numbers about the number of Ubuntu Phone devices out in the wild, but an estimate based upon update reporting pegs the number of current Ubuntu Phone users at around 25,000...

With this quarter quickly coming to an end, here's a look at the most popular Phoronix news stories and articles over the past three months...

Google engineers managed to recently uncover a high profile TCP bug in the Linux kernel that has huge implications on network performance and efficiency...

It's not too often these days that we hear about SeaMonkey, Mozilla's all-in-one Internet Suite, but an update to it is available this weekend...

While Linus Torvalds commonly releases Linux kernel updates late into Sunday evenings, this week he's done a Sunday morning release for kernel testers living in the US...

X.Org Server 1.17 was released back in February while finally today two X.Org DDX drivers are finally shipping xorg-server 1.17 support in released form...

With Wayland/Weston 1.9 having been released earlier this week, Wayland 1.10 is now under development and already there's been a lot of new code piling into the Weston compositor...

For those not courageous enough to be riding Mesa Git for the very latest open-source graphics driver features, Mesa 11.0.1 was released this morning as the latest stable build...

Besides Wine switching to yearly releases and making Wine-Staging official, there were many other interesting sessions at this year's WineConf. One such session was discussing the state of Wine for alternative architectures...

It seems that NVIDIA's proprietary Linux graphics driver is having some bad interaction issues with the newest Intel Skylake systems...

The latest OpenBSD kernel finally adds support for Broadwell graphics while Skylake support is still a ways out for this BSD operating system...

If you've been curious how WebGL works in Chromium or other modern web browsers prior to hitting the graphics driver, here's a lengthy explanation...

We've been looking forward to GStreamer 1.6 and now it's been released...