Phoronix

While Ubuntu developers continue work on preparing the Unity 8 desktop for rolling out across all form-factors, Unity 7 is still seeing some new improvements as their interim desktop solution...

With the latest SDL development code is support for the relative mouse mode when using this important library to games and other applications on Wayland...

Unity today announced their 5.5 beta of the Unity Editor for Linux for game developers...

Kicking off September the OpenBSD developers announced the release of OpenBSD 6.0...

This month on Phoronix there were 22 featured Linux reviews and 242 original news articles, here were the most interesting ones...

Ending out August, Google has promoted Chrome/Chromium 53 to their stable channel...

LLVM 3.9 final has been tagged in Git/SVN and will be formally released in the next few days...

While FreeBSD 11.0 is right around the corner, today marks the official debut of GhostBSD 10.3 that in turn is based off FreeBSD 10.3...

With the work on the Intel Vulkan driver, OpenGL 4.x being close to finished off for the main graphics drivers, and AMD doubling down work on performance optimizations, there is already more code changes in Mesa Git this year than all of 2015...

Gallium3D's VA-API state tracker has already supported H.265/HEVC video decoding as well as the support being in Gallium3D VDPAU too with it being supported by Radeon's open-source UVD code. Rounding out the API video-accelerated decode coverage of H.265 is now OpenMAX support...

Linaro has announced the first development board that supports their 96Boards' Enterprise Edition TV Platform specification...

For those using openSUSE Leap rather than the Tumbleweed rolling-release flavor, the Leap 42.2 Beta 1 release is now available for your testing pleasure...

A new release of the Genode operating system framework is now available...

While Microsoft's ReFS file-system has been around for a few years to date there is no mainline Linux kernel driver supporting this file-system that's more advanced than NTFS. But there is now a read-only ReFS Linux driver and it's proprietary...

Bryce Harrington announced the release today of Wayland 1.12 beta and the associated Wayland compositor update...

With word coming out last week that the RADV open-source Vulkan driver can now render Dota 2 correctly, I've been running some tests the past few days of this RADV Vulkan driver compared to AMD's official (but currently closed-source) Vulkan driver bundled with the AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan driver.

With having just wrapped up the Windows 10 vs. Linux Radeon Software Performance benchmarking roundabout, I decided to run some very quick tests with Wine and Wine-Staging while gauging interest to run a larger Wine comparison...

After originally being delayed, Fedora 25 Alpha made it out today for those wanting to test this initial development snapshot of this next version of the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution that is aiming to use Wayland by default...

Intel is making public more details today about their forthcoming 7th Generation Intel Core CPUs, a.k.a. Kaby Lake...

Many Phoronix readers appear excited about the forthcoming GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" support for the AMDGPU DRM driver as an alternative to the Radeon DRM. With the newer AMDGPU DRM support will eventually mean Vulkan and AMDGPU-PRO support for these original Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs. This GCN 1.0 / SI support has taken another step forward with now having "workable" dynamic power management...

OpenShot 2.1 is the latest feature release of this promising open-source video editing solution...

Red Hat developer Olivier Fourdan has proposed adding a keyboard grabbing protocol to Wayland...

The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver continues stepping ever so closely to OpenGL 4.4 and 4.5 compliance...

Florian Müllner announced the release today of Mutter 3.21.91, the near-final version of this compositing window manager and Wayland compositor for the upcoming GNOME 3.22 desktop...

It's looking like the Raspberry Pi Zero might be playing fine out-of-the-box with the upcoming Linux 4.9 kernel cycle...

After making the Direct3D 11 vs. Vulkan vs. OpenGL benchmarks available to Phoronix Premium subscribers this weekend, these results are now available to everyone. Enjoy...

With working on some Broadwell-EP Linux comparison benchmarks this weekend, as part of that onslaught of benchmarks I decided to run the CPU-only Caffe build on a few different Intel CPUs. For fun, afterwards I checked to see how the performance compares to Caffe with CUDA+cuDNN on a few Maxwell/Pascal GPUs...

After already making a ton of improvements to the RadeonSI Gallium3D stack this month, Marek Olšák is looking to end the month on a high note with yet more fixes to the open-source AMD driver...

Seen as silly to come, the stock compiler of FreeBSD doesn't (at least not yet) ship with OpenMP support enabled by default...

The Mir display server may already be ready for working with AMD's FreeSync or VESA's Adaptive-Sync, once all of the other pieces to the Linux graphics stack are ready...

Version 2.78 of the Blender open-source modeling software is coming soon and it adds NVIDIA Pascal support on top of fixing some Maxwell performance issues...

Two or so years back or so it was looking hopeful that the mainline Linux kernel would finally have a proper VIA DRM/KMS driver for the unfortunate ones still have VIA x86 hardware and using the integrated graphics. However, that work was ultimately abandoned but there is talk of it being restored...

The Linux kernel to now hasn't provided proper support for NVMe power-savings via APST, Autonomous Power State Transitions, but it's coming...

The Vulkan 1.0.x release train has been slowing down a bit with not seeing releases every week now but sometimes it's now every other week...

As alluded to earlier and on Twitter, the past few days I have been working on a fresh Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux graphics/gaming performance comparison. This time it's looking at the latest Radeon performance using an R9 Fury and RX 480. Tests on Windows were obviously done with Radeon Software Crimson Edition while under Linux were the two latest AMD/RTG Linux driver options: the hybrid AMDGPU-PRO driver and the fully open-source driver via Linux 4.8 and Mesa 12.1-dev.

Continuing his Sunday tradition, Linus Torvalds released a few minutes ago the Linux 4.8-rc4 kernel...

As I wrote about a few days ago, I'm in the process of my first Broadwell-EP Linux build and for it I had purchased the Xeon E5-2609 v4, a CPU that costs just $300 USD and has eight physical cores while a combined TDP of just 85 Watts, but it lacks Turbo Boost and clocks up to just 1.7GHz. But how does it perform?..

There's an active proposal to incorporate a back-end into LLVM for AAP, a processor ISA for deeply-embedded Harvard architectures...

Early on LLVM's Clang compiler offered much better debugging / error messages than GCC but in the past few years the GNU Compiler Collection developers have been working on generating more helpful messages too. With GCC 7 there will will be more improvements in this space and more...

The Simple Desktop Display Manager has released version 0.14 of their project that's used by Hawaii, some KDE installations, and more as the login/display manager...

With the sync validation framework leaving the staging area in Linux 4.9 and other work going on around the Android sync framework and explicit fencing, this functionality is becoming a reality that ultimately benefits the Linux desktop...

For those interested in C/C++ compiler performance, for some fun numbers to dive into this weekend are LLVM Clang vs. GCC benchmarks atop FreeBSD 11.0 RC1 AMD64 on an Intel Xeon Haswell system.

One of the exciting innovations within the Linux kernel in the past few years has been extending the Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) to become a more generalized in-kernel virtual machine. The eBPF work with recent versions of the Linux kernel allow it to be used by more than just networking so that these programs can be used for tracing, security, and more...

The open, upgradeable ARM development board that traces back to the failed KDE Vivaldi project managed to pass its funding goal just in time. This open-source hardware project currently powered by some older Allwinner hardware managed to raise more than $170k...

There was another long-time Intel open-source Linux graphics driver developer that left the company earlier this summer and is now working at Google on the Chrome/Chromium OS graphics stack...

LLVM 3.9 isn't being released as it was hoped for, but it appears the final release is still just days away...

As a quick follow-up to OpenGL ES 3.1 coming for Intel Haswell graphics, those patches have now landed in Mesa Git...

The former developers of ownCloud who forked the project to Nextcloud have today released Nextcloud 10, just two months after the Nextcloud 9 release...

KDE Connect is the interesting project for integrating notifications and more from your phone or other mobile device onto the KDE desktop. With KDE Connect you can receive smartphone notifications on your computer as well as using your phone as a remote control to the desktop...

Today marks the release of the third development milestone release of the upcoming Phoronix Test Suite 6.6-Loppa version...