Phoronix

With X.Org Server 1.19 being quickly scheduled for release next month, the merge window's closure is imminent (in fact, already a few days past the original proposal). Today some last minute xf86-video-modesetting and cursor changes landed...

For those making use of the exciting Jetson TX1 platform, NVIDIA is reporting they've now managed to"make it twice as fast and efficient" with their JetPack developer tools upgrade...

Intel's Precise Touch and Stylus (IPTS) technology offers GPU-accelerated multi-touch/stylus handling using OpenCL. While there have been kernel patches for a few months floating around, this support has yet to be merged into the mainline Linux kernel...

The latest Raspberry Pi VC4 DRM driver changes have now landed in DRM-Next for in turn landing in the mainline kernel when the Linux 4.9 merge window opens in a few weeks...

VirtualBox 5.1.6 was released on Monday with many fixes and minor improvements for this Oracle cross-platform virtualization tech...

An Intel developer continues working on the "Kernel NET Policy" as a step towards better and simplified network configuration for better performance...

There has already been more improvements hitting Mesa Git this week...

The HIP project has made good progress over the summer. HIP from AMD's GPUOpen project is part of the puzzle for converting CUDA to portable C++ code. That source code can then run on AMD GPUs while having little to no performance impact, at least according to AMD...

The latest high-profile open-source software project having a bad security day is MySQL... MySQL 5.5/5.6/5.7 has a nasty zero-day vulnerability...

The Btrfs file-system finally has a concise status page so users can quickly and easily know the status of various features...

While GCC 7 is still under heavy development and the GCC 7.1 stable release will not come until a few months into 2017, here are some early benchmarks of GCC 7.0 compared to GCC 6.2 and GCC 5.4 on an Ubuntu Linux x86_64 system.

Vi IMproved has been further improved with today's Vim 8.0 release. In fact, this is the first major release of Vim in the past decade!..

Intel China developers quietly announced the release of their open-source Beignet 1.2 OpenCL implementation at the end of August for HD/Iris Graphics hardware. Beignet 1.2 continues supporting OpenCL 1.x while sadly their experimental OpenCL 2.0 branch hasn't been touched now in three months...

Rex Zhu of AMD published his latest set of 16 patches for refactoring PowerPlay code within the open-source DRM driver space. This is a big refactoring: nearly 19,000 new lines of code and 34,000 deleted lines of code...

FreeType 2.7 has been officially released and it's actually a big deal as it aims to bring font rendering that's better in line with what's offered by DirectWrite and ClearType on other operating systems...

Videos from last week's LLVM Cauldron are now available if you wish to learn more about a variety of compiler happenings...

Just minutes ago the Linux 4.8-rc6 kernel was released...

Maxime Ripard of Free Electrons has sent in the Allwinner DRM driver pull request that will ultimately land for the Linux 4.9 kernel merge window...

There is finally a new Wine-Staging version with release notes to talk about for this more-experimental version of Wine...

After raising more than $103,000 USD last year via crowd-funding the RoundCube-Next web-based email client doesn't really appear to be going anywhere...

The ioquake3 open-source game engine project that's built around the Quake III: Arena code-base is finally moving to its new renderer by default and abandoning the original 17-year-old renderer...

For your viewing pleasure this weekend are benchmarks of TrueOS 20160831 (the rolling-release distribution formerly known as PC-BSD), DragonFlyBSD 4.6, GhostBSD 10.3, FreeBSD 11.0-RC2, and PacBSD 20160809 (formerly known as Arch BSD) all benchmarked from the same system! Plus for reference to the Linux numbers are Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS and Clear Linux 10040 being compared to these BSDs on the same tests and hardware.

The RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver continues to look promising and there's been a lot more code being merged the past few days...

KDE Frameworks 5.26 was released this weekend as the newest version of these KDE add-on libraries to complement Qt...

With this summer's PulseAudio 9.0 release was support for Memfd-based transport. That support is now enabled by default in time for PulseAudio 10...

ZFS On Linux 0.6.5.8 was released on Friday as the newest version of this OpenZFS file-system implementation...

After testing seven Linux distributions and eight BSDs on the new Xeon E5-2609 v4 Broadwell-EP + MSI X99A WORKSTATION system, I next decided to try getting some fresh Solaris-based results...

More than one year after the last Elementary OS Linux distribution update that focuses upon design elegance, v0.4 "Loki" was released today...

Recently I purchased a Xeon E5-2609 v4 Broadwell-EP processor as a $300 Xeon with eight physical cores but clocked at just 1.7GHz and without any Turbo Boost while the TDP is 85 Watts. Here are some benchmarks compared to other LGA-2011 v3 CPUs in my possession under Linux along with an AMD FX reference point too and followed by some Skylake Xeon benchmarks.

The Single Loop Power Controller (SLPC) was an interesting addition to Skylake hardware but even with Skylake processors being out more than one year and the SLPC patches for the Intel DRM Linux driver having been out for a number of months, this GuC-based SLPC support has yet to be merged. The latest version of the patches was just published...

Version 5.4 of the V8 JavaScript Engine has been released. This is another hefty update to V8 and it brings the favorite kind of work we like talking about: more performance improvements...

As covered previously, threaded input finally landed in the X.Org Server. It's 2016, and these patches had even been sitting around for a few years with no action, while finally this beneficial feature will be shipping with next month's X.Org Server 1.19 release...

It's been a while since last having a Sailfish OS update from Jolla to talk about, but that's changed with the "Aurajoki" release finally hitting supported devices...

With many Linux gamers having looked forward to the Linux release of Rocket League, I tested out the Linux port of the game when using Mesa RadeonSI Gallium3D as well as the AMDGPU-PRO blob...

Following the seven-way Linux distribution benchmark comparison published earlier this week, on the same system I set out to test a variety of BSD distributions on the same system and ultimately benchmark their out-of-the-box performance too. Those performance benchmark results will be published later this week while today were a few remarks I wanted to share when trying out TrueOS, DragonFlyBSD, GhostBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, MidnightBSD, and PacBSD (Arch BSD) on this modern Intel Xeon system.

A game that many Linux gamers have been waiting months to see has finally been released on Steam for Linux: Rocket League...

NVIDIA's Unix team today released the 370.28 driver as their newest Linux/BSD/Solaris driver in their short-lived branch...

Intel's open-source developers have been working on a GPU-based high-performance 2D renderer that can be nine times faster than Cairo's CPU-based renderer and still multiple times faster than Qt (even with OpenGL), Cairo with OpenGL, or even Google's Skia with OpenGL rendering. The focus of this new project, FastUIDraw, is ultimately for speeding up the rendering of web content and being able to accelerate all of the HTML5 canvas operations...

Coming up in just two weeks is the X.Org's XDC2016 conference taking place in Helsinki, Finland. Here's a preview of some of the interesting talks...

Playing legacy/X11 games on Wayland via XWayland may soon be in better shape with the latest slew of X Server patches...

TigerVNC 1.7 was released today as the newest version of this open-source, high-performance, cross-platform VNC implementation...

While it may just feel like recently when DNF 1.0 was released and Fedora switched from Yum to DNF by default, DNF 2.0 is already in development and hitting Fedora Rawhide systems...

DragonFlyBSD is now the latest operating system that has decided to switch from OpenSSL to LibreSSL by default...

Wireshark 2.2 is now available as the newest version of this widely-used packet analyzer program...

A mini-ITX board running the GNU Libreboot downstream of Coreboot sounds interesting for a fully free software HTPC/media center PC, right? Too bad this new motherboard port is for an i945 board released back in 2008 and has integrated a painfully slow original, single-core Atom chip...

With Google's Android Runtime for Chrome (ARC) it turns out that this technology for letting Android apps run on Chrome OS is making use of the Wayland protocol and could open up other Wayland clients to running on Chrome OS...

Samba 4.5 is now available as the latest release of this major open-source project for improving Windows interoperability (i.e. SMB/CIFS) on Linux and other platforms...

A new version of the X-Plane desktop flight simulator, which is arguably the world's most advanced flight simulator, is now available. The Linux version remains in-step with the Windows and OS X builds...

A few months back I wrote about Arcan: A New Open-Source Display Server Built Atop A Game Engine. Sadly with most niche and ambitious open-source projects along these lines, they tend to disappear over time, but Arcan on the other hand continues moving forward so far...

Veteran Mesa developer Ilia Mirkin has been working on finishing up the core plumbing for OpenGL ES 3.2 / Android Extension Pack support for the Mesa drivers...