Phoronix

AMD's Nicolai Hähnle has taken over where KDE developer Fredrik Höglund left off in working on accelerated texture uploads from Pixel Buffer Objects for Gallium3D drivers. This is a change just not for the Radeon Gallium3D drivers but for all of the drivers using the Mesa state tracker...

A request recently came in (yes, from a premium user) for doing some fresh benchmarks atop the brand new Linux 4.4 kernel while comparing the P-State and CPUFreq CPU scaling drivers and their different scaling governor options...

While Google's annual Summer of Code has been done for several months now, the KDE project published this weekend their final overview of all the progress that was made this past summer by these promising student developers...

Beyond NetworkManager 1.2 having a MAC address randomization feature, WiFi scanning has also been improved...

The Pitivi open-source non-linear video editor designed around GNOME components and making use of GStreamer just landed a big feature that also relieves another blocker in nearing the Pitivi 1.0 milestone...

Ubuntu developers have been working on sending out some updated phone/convergence apps that take advantage of their new Suru visual language...

If you are interested in the Intel NUC6i3SYK with its Core i3 Skylake CPU, benchmarks have been published on OpenBenchmarking.org...

For providing network tracking protection and out of privacy concerns, NetworkManager 1.2 has added a feature that was first found in Apple's iOS 8 and has since been found in Windows 10 too...

NVIDIA has released new patches today for helping the open-source Nouveau driver step towards properly supporting the GeForce GTX 900 "Maxwell" graphics cards as well as better supporting Tegra...

Linus Torvalds pulled in the security subsystem updates this weekend for the Linux 4.5 kernel...

Zlib is likely the most widely-used data compression library on open-source systems, but it's now at great risk of becoming obsoleted by more modern codecs for data compression...

Version 4.12 of Xen Orchestra is now available, the open-source project built around XenServer. The Xen Orchestra 4.12 release brings new features and is one of the few remaining before focusing on Xen Orchestra 5...

Datamash is a GNU program for performing numeric/textual/statistical operations in textual data files via the program's CLI...

When it comes to open-source C/C++ compilers, most of the coverage these days is about new features and functionality for GCC and LLVM Clang. However, the Portable C Compiler with its history originally dating back to the 1970s continues to be in-development...

The Btrfs file-system updates were mailed in Sunday evening for the Linux 4.5 kernel. There is one big but experimental feature with this pull...

David Airlie sent in the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver updates today for targeting the Linux 4.5 kernel merge window...

The controversial, crowd-funded Librem laptop that aimed to be fully open down to the firmware but ended up shipping with an AMI UEFI firmware for the initial release has now been ported to Coreboot for the Librem 13 model. The Coreboot support wasn't done by Purism, the company behind the Librem, but rather a Coreboot developer at Google...

For those not following me on Twitter, the past week I've been busy running a huge OpenGL performance comparison (with performance-per-Watt metrics) on basically every NVIDIA GeForce GPU I have available going back to the GeForce 6 days up through the GeForce GTX 900 series and GTX TITAN X...

We are only half-way through January yet there's been so much exciting news already for open-source and Linux enthusiasts as well as when it comes to interesting computer hardware...

As there have been a number of readers inquiring about it recently, HTTPS support is now enabled by default, assuming you are a premium member...

We are one week into the two week merge window for the Linux 4.5 kernel. There have been multiple Phoronix articles daily about changes and new features of Linux 4.5. If you're looking at catching up on your reading this weekend, here is a look at the interesting changes that landed this week...

The release of Krita 3.0 is coming closer with this weekend's release of a pre-alpha snapshot...

Alongside a lot of other exciting work for GIMP 2.10 is a new light theme for those wanting a brighter experience...

Come April it will be five years since the release of GNOME 3.0. The GNOME desktop has certainly evolved a lot since going back to GNOME 3.0, but what do you think of it?..

With yesterday's news about AMD planning GLVND support for their Linux driver -- which follows the NVIDIA 361 driver being the first to ship GLVND, years after NVIDIA began working on this OpenGL Vendor-Neutral Dispatch Library -- many have been wondering how Mesa fits into the equation...

Two years ago at this time all of the excitement was building up around Valve's VOGL OpenGL debugger. While the VOGL source code hasn't even been public for two years yet, there hasn't been any new public activity to report on with the debugger in over a half-year...

Takashi Iwai sent in this weekend the sound/ALSA code updates targeting the Linux 4.5 kernel...

The other follow-up question I received an answer to on Friday from AMD's media liaison was whether the company is looking at supporting the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library (GLVND) to make it easier to install and maintain their user-space GL driver on Linux systems...

While the modifications I did to the big basement Linux server room back in December have been yielding excessive "free heat" and the heating bills this winter have been at a minimum, I've already begun thinking of ways to improve the cooling of our benchmarking basement by the time summer rolls around...

Eric Griffith, our former summer intern, is back this weekend writing about his experiences with enjoying Wasteland 2: Director's Cut on Linux. He's been gaming on the open-source drivers with Fedora 23. While he enjoys the game, some problems were encountered on Linux that he found it worthwhile writing about even though this title is already a few months old.

Support for Drag-n-Drop (DnD) actions have been added to the Wayland protocol...

One month after releasing ReactOS 0.4.0 RC1, the second release candidate is now available of this next ReactOS update that continues marching towards a Windows ABI compatible operating system for applications and drivers...

Earlier today I wrote about how AMD will only be supporting Vulkan with the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver and not the more common Radeon DRM kernel driver. Here's a few more points to clarify the situation...

For those that haven't been following the SteamOS 2.0 "Brewmaster" updates, it's been a rather exciting 2016 so far...

I've just received confirmation from AMD that their forthcoming Vulkan driver will only work with the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver. This means that unless this AMDGPU kernel driver is extended to support pre-VI hardware, only the very latest AMD GPUs on Linux will work with Khronos' next-generation API...

While the Radeon DRM driver has had support for doing GPU resets in case of hangs, the AMDGPU DRM driver for newer graphics processors haven't had this feature...

Earlier this week I posted the results of a 10-way Linux distribution battle on the same Intel Xeon system and using all of the popular and latest Linux distribution releases. Taking things further, the article today has those results complemented by results on the Xeon system for several BSD operating systems. For seeing how the BSD performance stacks up to Linux, DragonFlyBSD, OpenBSD, and the FreeBSD-based PC-BSD were benchmarked.

Canonical developers continue making progress in replacing the Ubuntu Software Center with GNOME Software...

Version 2.0 of the KDE Partition Manager has been released...

More than a few times over the years various Linux users have come forward to profess their "new" idea for improving open-source Linux GPU driver performance: the CPU-based LLVMpipe should work in tandem with a graphics card's hardware driver to deliver better performance...

Back on Halloween there were patches published to provide Allwinner A10 display engine support via a new DRM driver called sun4i-drm. We hadn't heard much more about that driver until this week...

There's a rather hefty pull request of PowerPC architecture updates pending for the Linux 4.5 kernel...

A NVIDIA engineer has penned a post about engaging with Vulkan and how this soon-to-be-released graphics API is great going forward...

Neil Brown has sent in his final MD subsystem pull request. Past this Linux 4.5 work, he's stepping down...

SUSE's Jiri Kosina sent in his pull requests today for the subsystems he maintains within the mainline Linux kernel...

Any OpenSSH client released in the past six years is prone to two vulnerabilities by malicious SSH servers that could cause memory disclosures and a buffer overflow...

For those relying upon the out-of-tree ZFS or Reiser4 file-systems, they have each been updated now to work with this week's release of the Linux 4.4 kernel...

Christian König of AMD's open-source driver team landed some improvements this week into Gallium3D's video acceleration state tracker...

As expected, AMD today finally released the Opteron A1100 "Seattle" SoC but sadly the 96Boards HuskyBoard or other lower-cost A1100-powered products have yet to be announced...

What's the best way to beat the winter blues? Benchmarking, of course! For starting off our 2016 of graphics card benchmarking under Linux, I've been working on a large round-up of re-testing AMD Radeon graphics cards from the HD 2900XT (R600) graphics card through the latest R9 Fury (Fiji) graphics card while running Ubuntu and using the very latest open-source graphics driver stack. Here's an interesting look at how the OpenGL graphics performance has evolved on the AMD side over the past decade while also looking at the performance-per-Watt.