Phoronix

A Phoronix reader recently asked about adding perf profiling to PTS for helping to better identify performance problems within the Linux kernel. As it was easy to do and further shows how easy and extensible the Phoronix Test Suite can be, I added such a module today. Here's some more details on how -- whenever running any benchmark -- via the Phoronix Test Suite you can very trivially expose all of the performance event counts on a universal per-test basis.

Recently there were a number of requests about testing the latest state of Liquorix, the self-prcolaimed "better distro kernel" that is an optimized version of the Linux kernel with extra patches that makes it optimal for desktop, multimedia, and gaming workloads. Here's some fresh Liquorix vs. mainline Linux kernel performance benchmarks...

Open-source support is still being worked on for GPU switching with pre-Retina Apple MacBook computers...

Samsung is just one of many companies that has grown increasingly fond of the LLVM compiler infrastructure and Clang C/C++ front-end. Clang is in fact the default compiler for native applications on their Tizen platform, but they have a whole list of reasons why they like this compiler...

Wayland has been ported to DragonFlyBSD along with its Weston compositor!..

Alexandre Courbot, a developer at NVIDIA who has been working on the Tegra open-source graphics support a lot for Nouveau, presented last week at LinuxCon Europe 2015...

Last month I wrote about an experimental Nouveau code branch that offered better GDDR5 Kepler re-clocking support. For some, this branch allows Nouveau users to finally fully re-clock their GeForce GTX 600/700 series graphics cards. Those patches are now being offered up for mainline Nouveau...

The Wasteland 2 Director's Cut was released today in the Americas and will be out worldwide later this week. This Director's Cut edition is a free upgrade for current Wasteland 2 owners and upgrades the game engine to Unity 5...

AMD has enabled VCE video encoding support in the R600 Gallium3D driver for the older Trinity and Richland APUs...

The Xen Project has announced version 4.6 of their software this morning, which they describe as the most punctual and highest quality release yet...

While the LLVM community tends to be very respectful to one another and I'm having a hard time thinking of when things have ever gotten out of hand in their mailing list discussions, they are now pursuing a Community Code of Conduct...

With an Ubuntu Long Term Support release coming up in just a half-year, the discussion has been re-ignited again about whether Firefox should remain the default web-browser for the platform...

While Ubuntu 15.10 has Mesa 11.0 and it provides OpenGL 4 support for the Nouveau driver, it doesn't for RadeonSI. The issue is that in Ubuntu 15.10 is still an older version of LLVM that in the AMDGPU LLVM back-end lacks the needed support for OpenGL 4.0/4.1 compliance. Fortunately, a PPA has been updated for Ubuntu Wily with said support...

Landing tonight within Mesa Git master is ARB_gpu_shader5 support in the Radeon R600g driver...

A Google Summer of Code student who worked on GTK+ and Nautilus has managed to overhaul the search feature of GNOME's file manager...

Ben Skeggs at Red Hat has started queuing up the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver patches that are being aimed for the Linux 4.4 kernel...

It's been a while since last running any BSD vs. Linux benchmarks, so I've started some fresh comparisons using the latest releases of various BSDs and Linux distributions. First up, as for what's completed so far, is using the FreeBSD-based PC-BSD 10.2 compared to Ubuntu 15.04 stable and the latest development release of Ubuntu 15.10.

The first public beta in NVIDIA's 358 driver series for Linux, BSD, and Solaris is available! Building off the NVIDIA 355 series, the 358 series adds in more pieces of the puzzle for interfacing with DRM/KMS and continues stepping closer to Mir/Wayland support...

Last week I delivered some Linux 4.3 Git kernel benchmarks on Intel Skylake comparing it to Linux 4.2 stable. However, for those not yet on Intel's latest generation of processors, here are some Linux 4.2 vs. Linux 4.3 benchmarks with older hardware...

There hasn't been much modern hardware supported by Libreboot, the downstream of Coreboot that eliminates all binary blobs to be fully free software, but now the ASUS Chromebook C201 is supported by Libreboot...

Andreas Gruenbacher published the tenth version of the Richacls patch set on Sunday. After a lot of work, it looks like at least the core and local file-system code changes might be merged for the Linux 4.4 kernel...

Nearly a year after BusyBox 1.23 was released, BusyBox 1.24 is now available today...

GNOME Software abandoned their "star rating system" over issues with abuse, lack of standardization by reviewers, and that package rating system really not working out. Now they're going to introduce a "kudos" rating system...

Over the summer I wrote about DirectFB.org disappearing with no signs of what happened to the project. Fortunately, while DirectFB.org remains M.I.A., the code has appeared on GitHub...

After rumors were swirling last week that Dell was planning to buy EMC, the parent company of VMWare, for $50 billion USD, today that information was firmed up and the purchase price is actually $67 billion -- making it one of the largest tech deals ever...

With the Qt 5.6 beta planned for this week ahead of the planned Qt 5.6.0 official release before the end of the year, and being well past the feature freeze, here's a look at some of the features coming to Qt 5.6...

With the majority of the low, underlying changes for Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 "Hammerfest" complete, my latest focus has been on some improvements to the web-interface for Phoromatic...

A Phoronix Premium subscriber inquired this weekend about whether Intel "Haswell" HD Graphics have any performance gains when going from Ubuntu 15.04 to Ubuntu 15.10, now that Haswell has reached a mature state on Linux and most of the Intel Linux developers are busy with Skylake and Broxton...

Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 4.3-rc5 kernel as the latest weekly development release leading up to Linux 4.3...

Bas Nieuwenhuizen has been working on enabling Delta Color Compression (DCC) support for newer AMD Volcanic Islands (VI) GPUs within the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

With the latest Git code pushed into Coreboot this morning, the Apple MacBook Air 4,2 is now supported...

Kai Uwe has written a blog post about some of the new features coming to the KDE Plasma 5.5 desktop...

Well known Mesa developer Marek Olšák has published a new patch series that yields better LLVM IR generation with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

Emil Velikov released the latest Mesa 11.0 point release on Saturday...

Blender 2.76 is another hearty update to this open-source 3D modeling software...

With Ubuntu 15.10 set to be released later this month, I've started preparing for a variety of Linux performance comparisons involving the Wily Werewolf. This morning I ran some Ubuntu 15.04 vs. 15.10 benchmarks on one of my frequent test beds and it's revealed a few significant changes in some of the benchmarks...

Eric Anholt has published an updated BCM2835 KMS driver for supporting the Raspberry Pi budget SBCs with this DRM driver...

Many Phoronix readers have been requesting merchandise like Phoronix T-shirts as a way to support all of our open-source and Linux work at Phoronix to complement PayPal tips and Phoronix Premium subscriptions. That's now been setup...

While the Unigine engine isn't used by too many games compared to its presence in simulation and other industries, it remains one of my favorite engines for its top-notch Linux support over the years, beautiful OpenGL capabilities, and powering the most demanding Linux graphics tech demos. Today Unigine Corp is excited to announce the release of Unigine 2.0...

Just days after the release of KDE Plasma 5.4.2 is now the release of KDE Frameworks 5.15.0...

SteamDB has revealed some new references to Half-Life 3 content within today's Dota 2 game update...

While many initially looked at ioDoom3 as the exciting fork of id Software's id Tech 4 / Doom 3 source-code as it was done by some of the same folks as ioquake3, there sadly hasn't been much to report on in recent times for the project. Fortunately, the independent "dhewm3" is making strides as an open-source Doom 3 project...

New KDBUS patches continue being published for this in-kernel IPC mechanism based on D-Bus, but it hasn't been communicated yet whether Linux 4.4 is the next target for hoping to mainline this controversial code...

With development activity on the Linux 4.3 kernel settling down, here are some fresh benchmarks comparing the Linux 4.2 and Linux 4.3 Git kernels atop Ubuntu when using an Intel Core i5 6600K Skylake system.

Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 Milestone 3 has been released as the latest development version of Hammerfest...

Virtual Programming has published their latest in-development titles for Mac and Linux, which includes the Overlord and Saints Row games making it over from Windows...

Firefox continues making progress on loosening web developers' and users' dependence on NPAPI plug-ins with a goal still in place to remove support for most NPAPI plugins by the end of 2016...

While open-source AMD Linux users have largely been able to take it for granted for years that the Radeon DRM/KMS driver will at least light up their display when using an older GPU, after the Radeon KMS problems I ran into on DragonFlyBSD, I didn't expect this hardware to play nicely on FreeBSD/PC-BSD 10.2. Fortunately, I was proven wrong and this AMD FirePro graphics card driving a DisplayPort monitor managed to run nicely out-of-the-box...

Julia, the high-performance, high-level technical computing programming language written against LLVM, has made it to version 0.4...

Developers behind the Unity Game Engine have announced that they'll be dropping their Web Player support in favor of exporting web content to using open standard APIs with WebGL...