Phoronix

Earlier this year we heard of a science fiction MMORPG game making use of Unigine 2 after switching from Unreal Engine 4. It's been a few months since hearing about this game, which is targeting Linux support, but now there's a slew of new information as they just launched a Kickstarter campaign...

Bryce Harrington announced the release candidates on Tuesday for the upcoming Wayland 1.12 and Weston 1.12 compositor releases...

LLV8 is an experimental compiler for the V8 JavaScript Engine as shipped in Chrome, etc. LLV8 makes use of LLVM's MCJIT for code optimization and while it takes longer to compile this way, the generated code should be superior...

While I've been running PC-BSD on some systems for years I hadn't tried out any of its rolling-release FreeBSD 11.0-based spins under the new TrueOS brand nor had I tried out the project's Qt-based Lumina Desktop Environment since it reached 1.0. That changed today with trying out the latest weekly spin of TrueOS x64...

Vulkan 1.0.26 was released as the first update to the Vulkan 1.0 API for September...

We've known for a while that FreeBSD has been working on a CentOS 7 compatibility layer while now that work has finally landed in FreeBSD ports...

In testing out a new Broadwell-EP system as well as for final validation of the new Phoronix Test Suite 6.6, I carried out a fresh Linux OS distribution comparison last week. Here are those results from Ubuntu, Clear Linux, Scientific Linux, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Fedora, Antergos, and Sabayon Linux.

Phoronix Test Suite 6.6.0-Loppa is now officially available as the latest quarterly update to our open-source benchmarking software for Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows, OS X, and Hurd platforms...

For those making use of the xf86-video-ati DDX driver in a PRIME-capable system with Radeon GPU, there's more effective tear-free rendering support with the latest development code...

A fix landed in Mesa Git today that should address various performance issues people have been seeing in different rare setups. The fix mostly seems to be for Radeon/Intel users seeing low performance recently with glxgears but also appears to help those affected by the much talked about R9 290 regression...

Great news for users of the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" graphics driver: the long-awaited boost patches are now queued up to land with Linux 4.9...

Greg Kroah-Hartman announced he's planning on Linux 4.9 to be the next long-term supported kernel that he will maintain for a period two years...

KDE developers have decided to switch to Wayland by default for KDE Neon's unstable/developer OS...

While the ultimate vision of the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver isn't yet clear with RADV being the front-runner so far as the community-based driver while AMD has yet to open up their official Vulkan driver and there's been few remarks about RADV from AMD employees (aside from John Bridgman in our forums), RADV inched forward today in moving closer to being merged in mainline Mesa...

The GNU Compiler for Java (GCJ) while made a lot of progress in its early years as a free software Java compiler, in recent years it's basically been in maintenance mode and might now be removed entirely from GCC...

The long-awaited Mesa point release update to Mesa 12 is now available with a variety of fixes for these open-source graphics drivers...

Following the AMDGPU SI / GCN 1.0 support hitting Mesa, the libdrm changes for AMD Southern Islands support has also landed...

The RPM-based Mageia Linux distribution has decided to offer Fedora's DNF forked version of Yum in their next major release...

Fedora 26 was originally talked about for a May release, but the schedule approved Friday by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee puts it for an early June debut...

Adobe stopped updating its NPAPI-based Linux Flash Player four years ago and planned to stop supporting it entirely in 2017, but now the company has backtracked on those steps with a commitment to regularly update their NPAPI and PPAPI versions of the Flash Player for Linux...

Last week's Qt 5.8 Alpha preliminary packages have now been promoted to being the official alpha packages for this next major version of the Qt5 tool-kit...

Linus Torvalds announced the release a short time ago of the Linux 4.8-rc5 kernel, which ends up weighing in as bigger than last week's 4.8-rc4...

Last year we covered SMAF as the project aiming to allow for secure DMA-BUF usage. While that was written about nearly a year ago and had already gone through multiple patch revisions, unfortunately that code has yet to be mainlined...

Following this week's release of OpenBSD 6.0, this BSD operating system has added LLVM and its Clang C/C++ compiler to its base archive...

LXQt 0.10 was released last November and is currently the desktop environment's current latest release of this Qt-written desktop forked from LXDE. There's talk though of a new release possibly coming soon, but the project doesn't appear ready yet to commit to any release schedule or routine cadence for new versions...

Unity rendering expert Aras Pranckevičius has started the SMOL-V open-source project aiming as a compression utility for the SPIR-V intermediate representation used by Vulkan and OpenCL...

It's been since last November that X.Org Server 1.18 was released and while the project previously stuck to a six month release cadence, that didn't happen for xorg-server 1.19. Now, however, out of the blue Keith Packard has put together a proposal for quickly shipping it next month...

Linux power management and ACPI maintainer Rafael Wysocki has published a set of new "iowait boost" patches for P-State and Schedutil that he's looking to see benchmarked by interested parties...

Beginning with the Firefox 51 web-browser release, FLAC audio will finally be supported natively...

In addition to the relative mouse mode for Wayland support landing within the SDL2 code-base, the ongoing work around audio capturing was also committed to mainline...

Just earlier this week I published initial open-source benchmarks of the RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver that is the community-driven, unofficial AMD open-source Vulkan code-base for now. At the rate the driver is continuing to evolve, it probably won't be not more than a few days before some fresh benchmarks are warranted...

KDE developers announced today the KDE Software Store, a Free-as-in-Freedom AGPL-licensed sharing platform...

Git 2.10 was released today by Junio Hamano...

It's time for another stable QEMU update...

Things don't appear to be looking up for AMD's ARM efforts. It's looking like we probably won't be seeing AMD ARM development boards publicly available this year, if not the end of 2016, and there won't be many of them going around...

Wine 1.9.18 was released today as the newest development snapshot of this program for running Windows applications/games on Linxu and other operating systems. The Wine 1.9 release continues building up for the Wine 2.0 release later this year...

As expected, LLVM 3.9 was released today as the newest version of this widely-used and innovative compiler stack...

While the Intel Vulkan Linux driver has been part of mainline Mesa for months and shipped in Mesa 12.0 with support for running Dota 2 and The Talos Principle, the Fedora packages don't yet enable the Vulkan driver but that should soon change...

A Phoronix reader had success getting Virgil 3D up and running on Arch Linux with libvirt, SPICE, Virt-Manager, and Wayland...

This week marked the release of the Xenko 1.8 game engine that brings a new multi-threaded engine with Vulkan support. There is also SSAO, cel shading, and other rendering improvements...

With the progress LibreOffice is making these days, many of you probably forgot OpenOffice was still even around. It is, but the Apache developers are currently debating the possibility of retiring it...

The official GNOME 3.22 desktop release is happening this month...

The start of the new month brings a new percentage about the estimated Linux gaming population as measured by the Steam survey...

While it doesn't get talked about as much as Nouveau or Freedreno, the Etnaviv project has been another effort leading great progress on a full-functioning open-source graphics driver through reverse-engineering. Etnaviv is the reverse-engineered driver for Vivante graphics...

In case you missed it last month, PC-BSD is completely re-branding itself as TrueOS, that's across the board for their desktop, server, and embedded editions while they will abandon the PC-BSD name. More details are coming to light on the inaugural TrueOS release...

The Qt Project is readying the Qt 5.8.0 Alpha toolkit release...

Aside from the major Mesa 12.0 release, this month has been relatively quiet for Mesa stable point releases, which traditionally have come around every two weeks. It looks like that will be back on track shortly...

Epic Games announced the release this morning of Unreal Engine 4.13 as the newest version of their advanced game engine...

This issue comes up every so often by people suggesting it or otherwise inquiring about it... No, AMD has no intentions of open-sourcing its low-level firmware / microcode for their Radeon GPUs...

Earlier this summer at a hackfest of GTK+ developers they came up with a plan for GTK4 and beyond with reworking how they'll do long-term stable releases. With GNOME/GTK+ 3.22 approaching, they are firming up their plans...