Phoronix

During October on Phoronix were 262 original news articles and 20 featured articles/reviews written by your's truly with many exciting announcements, new hardware launches, and more having happened last month...

LibreOffice in Git master (what will become LO 5.3 next year) has enabled its new layout engine by default for providing better rendering on all platforms...

GIMP is taking another step towards the long overdue GIMP 2.10 image program update with a new milestone release being on the horizon...

For those with a NVIDIA Optimus laptop or other dual-GPU system, Fedora QA has organized a test day this week for testing the switchable graphics support for Fedora 25 that will be shipping later this month...

There are a lot of operating system updates to end out October and begin November... Even the "open-source Windows" ReactOS is out with a new test release...

A new version of the Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution is available and continues with its Xfce desktop choice while a KDE Plasma 5.8 version is also available...

The latest version of OpenIndiana, the Illumos-powered Solaris distribution letting OpenSolaris live on in community form, is now available...

Valve released a Steam client beta for Halloween 2016, but without any apparent spooks...

For fans of FreeDOS as an alternative to MS-DOS, the 1.2 Release Candidate is now available...

Last week marked the release of the AMDGPU-PRO 16.40 driver as AMD's first hybrid driver since the 16.30 driver series over the summer that rolled out Polaris GPU support. With this first AMDGPU-PRO update in a few months, here are some fresh benchmarks comparing the performance to the latest open-source driver code.

Last month Adobe returned to updating their NPAPI Linux Flash plug-in after they went four years without updating it. In September was Flash Player 23 for Linux while available now is the Flash Player 24 beta...

Collabora employee and Mesa release manager Emil Velikov has announced the availability of Mesa 13.0-RC3 and he expects to do the final Mesa 13 release in a matter of hours...

There's talk of potentially using more Rust code within the GNOME desktop environment as opposed to C/Vala code...

The Phoronix Test Suite has offered basic Linux perf subsystem integration for being able to record automatically various perf metrics when running any of the hundreds of benchmarks available via our open-source benchmarking software/framework. Now with the latest development code, there is support for generating CPU Flame Graphs (FlameGraph) for each of the tests still in a fully-automated manner while benchmarking with PTS...

The Debian Release Team has decided upon the official release architectures for next year's Debian 9.0 "Stretch" release...

Now having had the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti graphics cards in my possession for a few days I have some more interesting data to share today compared to just last week's raw OpenGL/OpenCL/Vulkan raw Linux performance data. In this article is a look at the power use and performance-per-Watt of the GeForce GTX 650, GTX 750, GTX 750 Ti, GTX 950, GTX 1050, and GTX 1050 Ti compared to the AMD Radeon RX 460 and RX 470. Additionally, for the newer cards still relevant, there is also performance-per-dollar metrics too.

Trailing this weekend's release of GNOME 3.23.1 is the first development update for the GNOME Shell in the road to GNOME 3.24...

Nothing is set in stone yet but since Friday there's been an active discussion on the LLVM mailing list about having Clang default to LLVM's LLD sub-project linker...

If you've been wondering how the AMDGPU+RadeonSI open-source driver stack has evolved since the hardware publicly launched, I ran some fresh benchmarks this weekend comparing my current driver numbers to that of my original Radeon RX 470 Linux review...

Not directly Linux related, but if you haven't heard about the Tesla Solar Roof since Elon Musk announced it on Friday night, I'd recommend you check it out...

While in 2016 one wouldn't think that a USB disk enclosure would be much of an issue under Linux when they have generally worked well going back more than one decade, but this week I encountered a popular 2.5-inch SSD enclosure from Amazon that doesn't seem to work well...

Expert Mesa developer Marek Olšák at AMD is spending this weekend hacking on some new OpenGL threading code to benefit the open-source Radeon Linux driver stack...

The Enlightenment project has introduced a new launcher/taskbar/iconify manager called Luncher...

There is finally an update on the proposed HSAIL front-end for GCC for supporting the BRIG binary form of the Heterogeneous System Architecture Intermediate Language...

With GTK Scene Kit landing and various OpenGL improvements coming to the GTK+ tool-kit, GNOME developers have found the need to improve the OpenGL Windows support...

AMD's Tom Stellard has laid out a proposal to ship the LLVM 3.9.1 point release in early December...

Linus Torvalds released the Linux 4.9-rc3 kernel as the latest test version of the massive Linux 4.9 code-base...

GNOME 3.23.1 has been released as the first development milestone towards GNOME 3.24 that will be released next March...

Yesterday I published the first GeForce GTX 1050 Linux benchmarks with OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan coverage. With now having my hands on the EVGA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti SC GAMING graphics card, here are the first Linux benchmarks of the GTX 1050 Ti graphics card that can be fetched for less than $150 USD.

At the beginning of the month well-known independent kernel contributor Con Kolivas confirmed he was working on a new project called MuQSS as an evolutionary successor to his Brain F*** Scheduler. This Saturday morning he's now announced the first stable major release of MuQSS...

X.Org Server 1.19 was supposed to be released last week but that didn't happen while now available today is the second release candidate...

Mesa release manager Emil Velikov has setup a tracker bug to indicate all of the bugs that are blockers for the upcoming Mesa 13.0 release...

If you are looking for some Linux gaming this weekend, Black Mesa was recently released in early form for Linux / SteamOS...

Wine 1.9.22 has been released as the newest development snapshot leading up to Wine 2.0...

Mozilla's latest secret project to go public is Quantum, a new browser engine for Firefox. But before wondering what happened to Servo, don't worry, Quantum makes use of Servo and Rust...

Earlier this week NVIDIA began shipping the GeForce GTX 1050 graphics cards and our first review is of a Zotac GeForce GTX 1050 Mini. A GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Linux review is still coming up plus some other articles looking at performance-per-Watt and other interesting areas for these low-cost Pascal-based GPUs. Here are results of the latest NVIDIA Linux performance compared to the latest open-source AMD Linux driver with various Radeon GPUs.

Collabora went public today with their new spin-off project from Wayland: meet Waltham...

With Linux 4.9 there is unfortunately no new feature code for Nouveau due to being late to merge the new functionality, but that work that missed 4.9 is now staged in DRM-Next for merging to mainline when the Linux 4.10 merge window rolls along...

The X.Org merger with the SPI is almost complete and the X.Org Foundation is soon going to begin accepting donations...

With the latest Chrome/Chromium browser builds from Google, X Input 2.1 smooth scrolling / high-resolution scrolling is now supported. This should make for a more responsive and smoother scrolling experience atop recent versions of the X.Org Server...

Clement Lefebvre has confirmed that Linux Mint 18.1 will still be shipping before the end of the year...

Adam Williamson of the Fedora QA team has sent out a list of the bugs currently outstanding that could block the Fedora 25 release from happening on its current schedule should they not be fixed in time...

Alex Deucher has sent in the first pull request to DRM-Next of early material to stage for Radeon/AMDGPU DRM kernel driver changes targeting Linux 4.10...

There is finally a new release of the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid Radeon graphics driver stack for Linux...

Sadly the upcoming Deus Ex Linux port will only be using OpenGL while the macOS port is using Metal and the Windows game supports Direct3D 12. But on the bright side, Feral Interactive is planning for Vulkan Linux game ports in the first half of next year...

This morning I published the Power Consumption and Efficiency Of The Linux Kernel For The Last Three Years article containing power consumption data for an Intel Haswell system going back to the Linux 3.11 kernel through Linux 4.9 Git. Those were some interesting power consumption numbers under load while here are the idle numbers...

BFQ developers had hoped to replace CFQ in the mainline Linux kernel with Budget Fair Queueing for a variety of reasons but it hadn't ended up making it mainline. Now the developers are hoping to introduce BFQ back to mainline as an extra available scheduler...

Last week was the disclosure of the Linux kernel's Dirty COW vulnerability while the latest high-profile open-source project going public with a new security CVE is GNU's Tar. Tar CVE-2016-6321 is also called POINTYFEATHER according to the security researchers...

The Nouveau DDX X.Org driver, xf86-video-nouveau, hasn't supported NVIDIA's GTX 750/900 Maxwell graphics processors even though there's been the reverse-engineered, open-source support within the Nouveau DRM kernel driver and NVC0 Gallium3D Mesa driver. Patches revised today implement Maxwell support for the X.Org driver...

Earlier this week I published Linux 3.9 through Linux 4.9 kernel benchmarks looking at the raw performance of various subsystems when testing each of the major kernel releases as far back as this Core i7 Haswell system was supported. From that same system, today is a look at testing the kernels going back to Linux 3.11 when Haswell graphics support was first in good shape for this Core i7 4790K box while looking at the raw power consumption and performance-per-Watt for these 19 major kernel releases.