Phoronix

Microsoft in 2015 made many surprising open-source and Linux related announcements. By far 2015 has been the most surprising year watching Microsoft from the Linux space...

Our friends at Lover Pi, an Amazon-based retailer of various ARM development boards, are offering some holiday discounts for Phoronix readers...

With the year quickly coming to a close, last weekend I covered the most popular Linux/open-source news this year so far of the 3,100+ original articles written on Phoronix. Today at Phoronix we're looking at the most popular featured articles and Linux hardware reviews in 2015, of which there have been 251 so far this year...

Long-time open-source graphics driver contributor and one of the newer members of AMD's open-source driver team, Nicolai Hähnle, has written an insightful article about debugging GPU VM faults...

Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has some new code ready for testing on their DRM kernel graphics driver...

Following the release of Radeon Software Crimson 15.12 for Windows, Radeon Technologies Group has now released Radeon Software Crimson Edition 15.12 for Linux...

Last month Jolla was in very dire shape with having to go through debt restructuring and major layoffs at the company after their latest round of financing had collapsed. Fortunately, they've received a fresh round of funding to keep the company alive...

My article this morning about Vulkan Looks All But Confirmed For 2016 Launch turned out to be spot-on and there will be no Vulkan API release in 2015...

As some more exciting news today in the KDE Wayland space besides the server-side decoration support is the release of the first KDE Plasma Wayland Live DVD/USB image...

KDE's Martin Gräßlin has announced a Christmas present to everyone looking forward to KDE on Wayland: support for server-side decorations...

In continuation of last week's article about building an Intel Xeon E3 v5 Skylake Linux system, here are my complete performance figures on the Xeon E3-1245 v5 as a $300 Skylake processor featuring HD Graphics P530.

It looks all but confirmed that Vulkan will launch in early 2016 rather than making it out this calendar year as originally planned...

For those with an AMD Tonga or Fiji graphics card that want to try out the latest open-source AMDGPU kernel driver code with PowerPlay support enabled, here's an easy-to-use Ubuntu/Debian kernel spin...

Yesterday Valve released a big update to Team Fortress 2 that brought renderer improvements for OS X and Linux gamers. However, how does it affect the performance of this popular free-to-play game?..

This week mainline LLVM received support for the PKU feature flag as prep work towards supporting the new RDPKRU and WRPKRU instructions for Intel's forthcoming memory protection keys capabilities...

Just in time for those planning to do some holiday gaming next week, Valve has released a major update to the popular free-to-play Team Fortress 2 game...

For the past year Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has been working on the Clear Linux Project as a way to accelerate VMs to the point they are as fast as software containers and provide the best Linux support for Intel hardware in various cloud use-cases. As part of doing this, they've had to make their distribution lightning fast. Clear Linux though can be stretched outside of traditional cloud use-cases if you just want a lean and mean distribution.

A week before Christmas, GNOME 3.19.3 is now available for those wanting to enjoy the very latest GNOME desktop developments...

Work continues on the WebAssembly project that's the joint effort by Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, and Apple to allow C/C++ (and potentially other languages) to target a virtual ISA that would be executed within the web-browser...

Capcom in cooperation with Valve will be bringing Street Fighter V to SteamOS (Linux)...

The past few months have been very busy for Alexander Larsson and other GNOME developers leading the charge on XDG-App, their approach for sandboxing desktop applications...

As part of the preparations for the year-end Linux benchmarking articles, I've published new versions of the Team Fortress 2, DiRT Showdown, BioShock Infinite, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Linux benchmark test profiles...

With the year quickly coming to an end, I've already started work on my usual year-end open-source/Linux comparisons to show how the performance has evolved over the past year...

Clutter 1.25.2 was released this morning by Emmanuele Bassi as the first development release of this tool-kit since Clutter 1.24...

SMACH Z, the handheld Steam Linux gaming system powered by an AMD SoC, is going back to the drawing board and they've decided to cancel their current crowdfunding campaign...

There are two reasons for doing some end-of-the-year Radeon R600 Gallium3D driver testing with pre-GCN graphics cards. First, since the pre-GCN (HD 6000 series and older) support is being dropped by the new Radeon Software driver. Secondly, the R600g open-source driver finally supports OpenGL 4.1 for select GPUs. In this article is a look at the AMD Catalyst Linux driver with the last official release for HD 6000 series hardware compared to the very latest open-source Radeon graphics stack on Ubuntu Linux with a variety of interesting OpenGL Linux game tests.

OpenGL ES 3.1 support is now enabled by default for Intel Gen 8 "Broadwell" graphics hardware and newer in Mesa...

Lucas Stach has issued a pull request for the Etnaviv DRM driver for hoping to land this open-source, reverse-engineered DRM driver for Vivante graphics hardware into the Linux 4.5 kernel...

Ben Skeggs has posted the latest revision of his libdrm and Mesa patch series for making use of the new "NVIF" kernel interface for the Nouveau DRM driver...

With GNOME 3.19.3 due for release this week, Florian Müllner has announced new versions of GNOME Shell and Mutter...

The support code for Raspberry Pi 2 is closer to being upstreamed in the mainline Linux kernel...

QEMU 2.5 has been officially released today as the newest feature release to this critical component to the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

With this week having looked at the state of Ubuntu 15.10 and Fedora 23 on a brand new Intel Xeon E3 v5 "Skylake" system, next up for testing was CentOS 7 1511...

KDE Applications 15.12 was officially released today as the last major KDE component update for 2015...

At the time of writing, the most popular laptop on Amazon.com in the US is the Toshiba Satellite C55-C5241 followed by the ASUS F555LA-AB31. If you are in the market for a new, sub-$500 laptop this holiday season, here are my findings when testing both of these popular laptops under Ubuntu Linux.

For the past few months a developer at Samsung has been working on VA-API support for the Nouveau Gallium3D driver. Those patches today are up to their fifth revision...

Going back many years, SELinux would receive much criticism over slowing down the system's performance and causing an assortment of other problems. In the early days of Fedora it would often be wise to disable Security Enhanced Linux, but in the past few years it's been in good shape. With modern hardware, is there much of a performance impact in keeping SELinux enabled?..

The Unity 3D folks have released some updated WebGL benchmark results for showing what web browsers are doing the best for accelerated graphics...

While many Linux distributions are in the process of stopping to support the KDE Plasma 4 desktop, FreeBSD isn't yet ready to make the move to the "KDE 5" packages...

While the LLVM Clang compiler has been working on ARMv8.1 support since earlier this year, the developers focusing on GCC have been working on it still but the first bits have been committed to trunk this morning...

As of earlier this month in Mesa Git is finally OpenGL 4.0 and 4.1 support for the Radeon R600g driver for pre-GCN hardware, albeit the subset capable of advertising GL4 compliance is right now just Cypress and Cayman. I took this opportunity to run some fresh Mesa Git benchmarks on an AMD Cayman GPU and a third run when enabling DRI3...

The PostgreSQL 9.5 release change-log was recently updated in Git to reflect all of the latest changes for this next version of this database server due out in 2016...

Tails, the privacy-minded Live USB/DVD/SD Linux distribution, released version 1.8 on Tuesday...

Intel's Jordan Justen has sent out the Mesa patches that would enable OpenGL ES 3.1 support by default for "Gen 8" graphics hardware and newer...

Here are some fresh tests of Fedora 23 with the GCC 5.3.1 compiler when running a series of benchmarks after the binaries were compiled each time with an assortment of optimization levels...

A few days ago I wrote about building an Intel Skylake Xeon E3 v5 "Skylake" system and my experiences under Ubuntu. Here's a few notes about this Xeon E3 1245 v5 system when trying Fedora 23 Linux, along with some comparative performance benchmarks...

Mozilla Firefox 43.0 is now officially available, but the GTK3 tool-kit support isn't enabled by default in the official Linux binaries...

With Greg Kroah-Hartman being done with maintaining the Linux 4.2 kernel, Canonical's Kernel Team has stepped up to provide maintenance...

The first development milestone release of Phoronix Test Suite 6.2-Gamvik is now available for testing on all supported platforms...

With ReactOS 0.4 RC1 having been finally released, I decided to spend a few minutes this morning trying out this open-source operating system that's still striving for binary compatibility with Windows programs and drivers.