Last week was the much-viewed blog post asking whether KDE 5 is stable enough for normal users. There were lots of responses in our forums and elsewhere. Now, KWin developer Martin Gräßlin has come out with a blog post with a rebuttal to some of the complaints regarding KDE 5...
Earlier this year Microsoft announced an LLVM-based .NET compiler was entering development, LLILC. Six months later, LLILC continues making progress...
Last week an application was pushed into the Ubuntu Phone Software Store that when installed would give an intruder root access and modify the boot splash screen...
While Ubuntu 15.10 is set to ship next week and has passed its final freeze a few days ago, the default kernel of Ubuntu 15.10 is running into some troubles with select Radeon GPUs on the open-source driver...
The two firmware binary blobs for the mwlwifi driver (88W8864 and 88W8897) have been added to the linux-firmware Git tree. The mwlwifi driver is used by the WRT1900AC router, the device inspired by the WRT54G...
Last week I posted some Ubuntu 15.04 vs. Ubuntu 15.10 benchmarks when comparing the data to FreeBSD 10.2. Enclosed in this article are some more 15.04 Vivid Vervet vs. 15.10 Wily Werewolf performance benchmarks from another system...
Valve's Steam Controller has begun shipping to those who pre-ordered the device earlier this year. Phoronix reader Thomas Frech (a.k.a. Qaridarium) has shared some of his thoughts about using the controller for some Linux gaming on Ubuntu...
In this article are benchmarks comparing the performance of DragonFlyBSD 4.2 to that of Ubuntu 15.10. With these CPU-focused benchmarks, the core scaling performance was also looked at in going from two cores through four cores plus Hyper Threading.
For those that have emailed in, tweeted, and otherwise contacted me about problems logging into the Phoronix Forums this weekend, that issue should be resolved...
While a brand new interface to OpenBenchmarking.org is set to launch later this year in tandem with the Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 debut, a big underlying step forward was made this weekend...
Back in July I wrote about someone working on a SPIR-V to NV50 IR Nouveau translator so that this intermediate representation for Vulkan and OpenCL 2.1+ could then be fed into this open-source NVIDIA driver. A brief, indirect update was shared this weekend and so far it appears the work is progressing slowly...
LibreOffice developers have begun working on a new toolbar layout that at least for now is optional and should provide a better user experience with some desktops...
While the Intel, Nouveau NV50/NVC0, and LLVMpipe/Softpipe drivers have already supported OpenGL 4.3's ARB_texture_view extension, the AMD R600g and RadeonSI drivers have not. However, that's looking to soon change...
For those that don't know or may have forgot, Gallium3D has a Heads-Up Display (HUD) for showing various driver metrics while running OpenGL games/applications. If you're an SVGA VMware user, there's some new HUD queries available...
Samuel Pitoiset has published a new set of sixteen patches for improving the MP counters support for NVIDIA GeForce GTX 400/500 "Fermi" graphics processors...
While the latest Linux kernel has Intel P-State driver support for CPU frequency scaling being done by this Intel-specific driver rather than the common ACPI CPUFreq driver, for some common tests -- especially Linux gaming -- the latest-generation Intel CPUs perform noticeably better using the CPUFreq driver. Here are some CPUFreq vs. P-State drivers when testing the available scaling governors.
While there's been a draft specification of OpenMP 4.1 out for public review since July and compiler developers have already been implementing OpenMP 4.1 support, this next version of the API for parallel programming is now going to be called OpenMP 4.5...
If you'd like to propose a location in Europe to host the X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC) next year and are willing to organize the event, the X.Org Foundation wants to hear from you...
While it's still likely to be a few weeks before the Linux 4.3 kernel is officially released, there's already changes building up for landing in the Linux 4.4 merge window. Here's a very early look at some of the new functionality to expect for Linux 4.4...
KDE contributor Björn Ruberg has written a blog post that he says isn't aimed as a rant but rather expressing concerns about the quality of the current KDE desktop (Plasma 5 + KDE Frameworks 5) and the issues he's experienced when running "KDE 5" on Fedora 22...
With Skylake's retail availability improving, we're starting to see more of the Skylake processors in stock besides just the i5-6600K and i7-6700K. One of the other processors now widely available is the Core i5 6500, which is a step down from the Core i5 6600K, but retails at just $199 USD -- making it an attractive offer for many building new PCs and trying to stick to a decent budget. I've been testing out an i5-6500 under Ubuntu Linux and so far this processor with HD Graphics 530 is running well and offers compelling CPU performance relative to older Intel hardware as well as AMD's APU/CPU competition.
While most Phoronix readers should be well aware of the bug reporting procedures for Mesa drivers, Ian Romanick of Intel has written a lengthy blog post about the process of writing a "good" bug report for the open-source graphics drivers...
A pull request has just been sent in that in turn will target Linux 4.4 for offering on-demand device probing for helping platforms using Device Tree / OpenFirmware...
AMD's Alex Deucher sent in the first pull request today for DRM-Next for kernel graphics driver updates that in turn will target the Linux 4.4 kernel...
The Core i5 6500 is an Intel Skylake CPU that's priced at $199 USD and has begun hitting retail channels. I ended up buying one for Linux benchmarking and have out my initial full Linux comparison and review tomorrow while in the article today are some early performance metrics...
This summer I wrote about some issues I had with the Core i7 5775C on Linux where under Ubuntu 15.04 the experience was unstable but this socketed Broadwell was running great on Fedora 22. Fortunately, the Ubuntu experience for the i7-5775C with Iris Graphics is much better under the upcoming Ubuntu 15.10 "Wily Werewolf" release.
Epic Games announced the release today of Unreal Engine 4.10 Preview 1 for those wishing to play early with this update to the advanced Unreal Engine 4 game engine...
Besides Oracle Linux, OpenSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server were among the first tier-one Linux distributions really backing the Btrfs file-system. SUSE has liked Btrfs for years and at last week's LinuxCon Europe 2015 in Dublin there was a presentation on their use of Btrfs with handling system rollbacks...
Thanks to the weather getting cooler, our power use from the constant open-source Linux benchmarking at Phoronix has dropped slightly over the past month, while it's still well above 2,000 kWh and about four times as high as last year...
It was just last month that legendary CPU designer Jim Keller left AMD and now the company is taking another blow with another high level departure. This time they're losing a corporate fellow and the former president of the HSA Foundation...
Phoronix