Phoronix

Today's Linux benchmarking is looking at the performance of the open-source Radeon R600g Gallium3D driver for pre-GCN GPUs over the past two years. A Radeon HD 6870 was used while testing all of the Ubuntu Linux releases going back to Ubuntu 13.04, plus the latest Git code as well.

The first alpha release of the upcoming Qt 5.6 tool-kit release is now available...

For those that follow the various Linux graphics mailing lists may have noticed several updated patches today for the "soft pinning" work to the Intel open-source graphics driver...

For Jolla Phone users part of their early access user group, the Sailfish OS 2.0 user interface is now available...

While there were Catalyst 15.7.1 and 15.8 Beta releases for Windows, AMD hasn't updated the Catalyst Linux driver with a new public release in two months, but a new one may be near...

In his spare time outside of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center, Martin Peres has been working on a few improvements to the Nouveau DRM driver when it comes to voltage controls...

FFmpeg 2.8 is now available as the latest major update to this important open-source multimedia project. This is also the first major release since the longtime FFmpeg leader resigned this summer...

Just one month after the gigantic release of Go 1.5, the first minor point release is now available...

Epiphany 3.17.91 was released this morning, the near-final version of the GNOME web browser update ahead of GNOME 3.18 later this month...

Last week it was mentioned that Microsoft would support VP9 and other open-source codecs within their new Edge web-browser. Today there's an interesting blog post from Microsoft about their support for Google's VP9 video codec...

DebConf 15 happened last month in Heidelberg where there was many interesting sessions, not just for Debian GNU/Linux but also Debian GNU/Hurd...

Xen virtualization has a few new features for Linux 4.3...

Linux 4.2 is now officially powering Ubuntu 15.10...

Besides working on the legacy X11 support atop Mir, Canonical developers working on this display server have just implemented evdev device detection for Mir...

Samba 4.3.0 was announced today as the newest stable version of this open-source software for interacting with the SMB/CIFS networking protocol for Windows file/print sharing...

While a lot of features/changes have merged so far for the Linux 4.3 kernel, one feature you won't find at least not yet is KDBUS...

Building off last week's release of Wine 1.7.51 is the equivalent Wine-Staging update. Besides re-basing off this new Wine release that has XAudio2 support and other new functionality, the staging update has some new CSMT patches for boosting the Direct3D gaming performance...

HippyVM is an open-source project that's striving for 100% compatibility with Zend PHP while being more than seven times faster than stock PHP and more than twice as fast as Facebook's HHVM...

CUDA 7.5 is officially available this morning for NVIDIA customers wishing to use their proprietary compute API...

The arguably best town in the world is now even better! The beautiful city of Munich has become "a major contributor to open-source."..

Oracle's German team in Munich has announced the release of VirtualBox 5.0.4...

KDE Plasma 5.4.1 was released this morning as the first monthly bug-fix update for the Plasma 5.4 desktop stack...

Canonical posted a video today showing the state of running a Unity 8 session with Mir while supporting legacy X11 applications that lack a Mir back-end...

The Librem 13 has been an effort to be a 13-inch crowd-funded laptop that "respects your rights" and follows in the foot-steps of the previously-funded Librem 15...

The latest monthly update to the Unvanquished open-source first person shooter game is now available...

Intel's xf86-video-intel 3.0 display driver has now been in development for two years, but it doesn't look like they are in a rush to release it before Wayland takes over the Linux desktop...

A developer at KDAB, a Qt consulting company, has written about using static analysis to improve performance...

WebAssembly, the low-level programming language for in-browser, client-side scripting that's a joint effort by all leading web browser vendors, continues making progress...

Just over three years ago was a call by an open-source developer to deprecate the Linux kernel's FBDEV drivers. While more companies these days are investing more into DRM drivers, FBDEV drivers are still maintained by the latest Linux kernel releases...

The DRM changes landed in Linux 4.3 already and we've written about the prominent changes for these kernel graphics drivers for the next Linux kernel release...

Overall it seems the file-system driver updates for the Linux 4.3 kernel aren't too exciting with the work mostly consisting of bug fixes -- XFS isn't any different...

Francisco Jerez has been tackling L3 cache partitioning for the Intel DRM driver, which will yield some interesting possibilities moving forward...

The third release candidate to Mesa 11.0 is now available...

Darren Hart sent in the x86 platform driver updates today for the Linux 4.3 kernel...

Last month was the much-viewed article about losing trust in the Nest Protect following an obnoxious false alarm and the device not silencing, which resulted in me taking a sledgehammer to the offending unit. Since then, I've decided to give the Nest Protect a second shot as they sent out replacements for all of my devices with the second-generation design.

While most everyone would agree Mesa could benefit from more developers of this important piece of the open-source Linux desktop stack for providing OpenGL/3D graphics drivers, it seems slow patch review times are frustrating at least some casual developers wanting to contribute...

Version 14.0.1 of the Trinity Desktop Environment is now available, a fork of the KDE 3 Desktop Environment...

SDDM, the QML-based display manager popular with KDE distributions/desktops, is up to version 0.12...

The second point release to Debian 8 "Jessie" is now available...

With PHP 7.0 RC2 having just been released, I've been testing it out thoroughly across a range of Linux systems at Phoronix. To the say the least, the performance claims made by PHP developers about the upcoming PHP7 release are very accurate: it's pretty darn fast and about twice as fast as PHP 5.6. Here are some benchmarks I did on Ubuntu Linux x86_64 comparing the performance of PHP 7.0 RC2 to PHP 5.3/5.4/5.5/5.6, along with some HHVM results tossed in at the end.

We're about half-way through the Linux 4.3 kernel merge window so here's a look at the features that have got me excited over the past week as new features and improved/changed functionality for this next major update to the Linux kernel...

The latest Mesa 10.6 point release is now available for those sticking to stable updates until the official release of Mesa 11.0 in a week or so...

Systemd developers plan to release systemd 226 next week and with this release will come new features...

David Airlie has sent in the main pull request of the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver updates for the Linux 4.3 kernel merge window...

Alex Deucher of AMD has sent in yet more AMDGPU DRM driver updates for targeting the Linux 4.3 kernel merge window...

While the F2FS and EXT4 updates for Linux 4.3 weren't too meaty, there's a bit more going on in the Btrfs camp...

The latest pull request to talk about for the Linux 4.3 kernel are the input driver updates...

The proprietary firmware files for Carrizo, Fiji, Tonga, and Topaz graphics processors from AMD have been added to the linux-firmware tree...

KDE developers continue making progress on porting to Wayland...

Continuing in our compiler benchmarks this week are some GCC vs. Clang C/C++ compiler performance benchmarks on Intel's new Skylake processor while testing from Ubuntu Linux 64-bit.