Phoronix

With all of the Mesa OpenGL 4 happenings -- and most recently OpenGL 4.1 for RadeonSI -- you may be wondering how to run this latest code prior to its official release in September...

SQLite 3.8.11.1 was released yesterday and while it may not sound exciting from the version number, there are some measurable performance improvements with this popular embedded database update...

KDE KWin maintainer Martin Gräßlin held a session at this week's Akademy 2015 conference about porting applications to Wayland...

The OpenGL 4.1 patches for RadeonSI have now landed in Mesa Git master!..

Earlier this week I posted some initial benchmark figures for the NVIDIA Tegra X1 on Ubuntu Linux. Those results showed much promise for this 64-bit ARM big.LITTLE SoC that also bears a Maxwell GPU, but that wasn't tested for the initial comparison. Here are a few more benchmark results from this Tegra X1, including an Ubuntu 15.04 installation to show the difference against the Tegra X1 on Ubuntu 14.10...

I've been playing with Windows 10 since yesterday... I must applaud Microsoft that it's a heck of a lot better than Windows 8, as the Windows 10 desktop experience is alright and Edge is nicer than Internet Explorer, but I still don't have any intentions on switching back to Windows this lifetime...

The Document Foundation and LibreOffice developers are preparing for their major 5.0 milestone due out next Wednesday...

Following the guest post this past weekend about Purism's Librem laptop remaining "blobbed up", the crowd-funded company has put out new information...

While Mir 0.14 just recently appeared in Ubuntu 15.10's archive followed by Ubuntu 15.04, Mir 0.15 is already under heavy development...

It looks like reworking the Fedup upgrade tool may still happen for Fedora 23. The upgrade to this upgrade tool would involve relying on DNF and systemd functionality to provide more reliable Fedora system upgrades...

Since the Linux 4.0 kernel there has been DisplayPort audio support for the open-source Radeon driver. That DP audio handling came after a big rework to the audio code in the Radeon DRM kernel driver. A half-year later it looks like all the audio code is now cleaned up and ready...

Lennart Poettering today announced systemd.conf 2015, its inaugural conference devoted to the future of systemd...

The Khronos Group, the organization behind OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, and others, today announced a standard data format specification that's aptly called the "Khronos Data Format Specification 1.0."..

When AMD announced the Radeon R9 Fury line-up powered by the "Fiji" GPU with High Bandwidth Memory, I was genuinely very excited to get my hands on this graphics card. The tech sounded great and offered up a lot of potential, and once finally finding an R9 Fury in stock, shelled out nearly $600 for this graphics card. Unfortunately though, thanks to the current state of the Catalyst Linux driver, the R9 Fury on Linux is a gigantic waste for OpenGL workloads. The R9 Fury results only exemplifies the hideous state of AMD's OpenGL support for their Catalyst Linux driver with a NVIDIA graphics card costing $200 less consistently delivering better gaming performance.

For users of NetBSD, the second release candidate for its upcoming 7.0 release is now available...

Windows 10 launches today! I'm excited about this latest Microsoft operating system release, but only for running some interesting Windows vs. Linux benchmarks...

Recently, each day has been yielding a bit more of OpenGL 4.x support within Mesa/Gallium3D. The latest patches position the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for enabling OpenGL 4.1 compliance...

Three years ago this week was GUADEC 2012 where GNOME 4.0 was proposed along with GNOME OS. While GNOME 4.0 was supposed to materialize in 2014, that obviously didn't happen, but at least GNOME 3.x has matured a lot and garnered much better support than it had years ago...

Mir 0.14 had been in development since May as a big feature release. Mir 0.14 is already found in the Ubuntu 15.10 "Wily Werewolf" archive while it's soon going to land for Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid users...

As an update to last week's article and for those not following me on Twitter, the R9 Fury graphics card is running right now on Linux. The long-awaited AMD Fiji Linux test results are now imminent...

Wine 1.7.48 didn't make it out last Friday for the usual bi-weekly development released, but is out there today...

NVIDIA's Tegra X1 64-bit ARM SoC running (non-Android) Linux is a beast! I was given access to a SHIELD Android TV that was configured to run Ubuntu Linux, which has led for some exciting benchmarks. In some workloads, the Tegra X1 comes up just shy of an Intel Core i3 "Broadwell" system. The Tegra X1 has me very excited about the future of ARMv8 hardware on Linux and NVIDIA's continued Tegra advancements.

Today the milestone was crossed of having run more than 250,000 open-source benchmark results for our daily Linux performance tracker setup for LinuxBenchmarking.com that continues to monitor the performance of the upstream Linux kernel, Mesa, GCC, and LLVM/Clang on a daily basis from their SVN/Git code...

Fedora developers are readying for the RPM 4.13 update -- which is packing new features -- by landing the RPM 4.13 Alpha (v4.12.90) into Rawhide...

With Ubuntu Phone reviews frequently pointing out the lack of games/apps for Ubuntu Phone compared to other platforms, Ubuntu developers have been working on porting more HTML5 mobile games over to Ubuntu Phone...

NVIDIA released the 352.30 Linux graphics driver this morning that adds support for one GPU plus has a handful of bug-fixes...

The Freedreno driver that provides open-source, reverse-engineered graphics support for the Qualcomm Adreno graphics hardware is continuing to pick up new functionality...

The Xoreos project did their first release of this open-source game engine seeking to re-implement BioWare's Aurora Engine...

From announcing KDE Plasma Mobile to other announcements, KDE's Akademy 2015 conference in A Coruña, Galicia, Spain has been another action-packed KDE event...

Last week I published the results of a 15-way AMD/NVIDIA GPU comparison for 4K Linux gaming that was centered around the proprietary AMD/NVIDIA graphics drivers. However, if you stick to using open-source Mesa/Gallium3D drivers and are a Linux gamer, here are some benchmark results comparing the open to closed-source driver performance at 3840 x 2160.

The number of Fedora packages within their repository has seemed to plateau, but it's not necessarily a bad sign...

Git 2.5.0 was officially released this afternoon...

The FreeBSD project made much progress during this past quarter (Q2'2015) on many fronts from working on FreeBSD 10.2 to landing new work in FreeBSD 11.0-CURRENT for improving their Linux binary emulation layer...

Earlier this month I posted a few benchmarks of one of the cheapest, sub-$40 SSDs under Ubuntu Linux. In needing another solid-state drive for one of the systems in the test lab that's focused on tracking other areas of the Linux kernel's performance on a daily basis, I went searching for another low-cost solution. This latest SSD purchase was the Silicon Power 120GB S60, which retails for about $50 USD.

Google today rolled out the first beta of Chrome 45, their next major web browser version...

With Mesa quickly finishing up OpenGL 4.0~4.2 support and even some OpenGL 4.5 extensions, more Steam Linux games are becoming playable on the open-source drivers...

Last month it was reported that OUYA was being acquired by Razer and now the gaming peripheral manufacturer finally confirmed today they did indeed buy this flopped Android game console...

Back in May was the big "VENOM" security vulnerability affect QEMU whereby VM security could be escaped through QEMU's virtual floppy disk drive. In June was a PCNET controller buffer overflow allowing a guest to escape to have host access. Today there's a similar security vulnerability going public about its virtual CD-ROM drive...

Ubuntu MATE developer Martin Wimpress announced this weekend that they'll be removing the Ubuntu Software Center from their default install of Ubuntu MATE 15.10...

For KDE fans interested in the Akademy conference that started on Saturday in A Coruña, Galicia, Spain, there are a lot of daily reports coming out of the event...

Sliding under the radar last week was Microsoft releasing the source code to its debug engine for the GNU GDB and LLVM's LLDB Debugger...

While Debian supports many CPU architectures, it's working to remove support for the Sun/Oracle SPARC architecture. As of this weekend, Debian has dropped SPARC from their unstable, experimental, and jessie-updates archives...

HarfBuzz, the FreeDesktop.org font/text shaping library that's used by Pango, Qt, Firefox, Chromium, LibreOffice, and others, has reached version 1.0...

Linus Torvalds announced the release today of the Linux 4.2-rc4 kernel, the fourth weekly snapshot of the in-development Linux 4.2...

Emil Velikov announced the release of Mesa 10.6.3 this morning, though of course most Phoronix readers are eaglerly awaiting the release of Mesa 10.7/11.0 with initial OpenGL 4 support...

This week I posted the results of a 15-way graphics card comparison on Ubuntu Linux with AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards while running the very latest proprietary drivers. Those tests were focused on 4K resolution testing in order to stress the latest-generation AMD/NVIDIA GPUs. However, if you want to see 1080p numbers, here are some benchmark-friendly results...

This weekend at the 2015 Akademy conference in A Coruña, Galicia, Spain, KDE Plasma Mobile was announced. There's been a flow of new Plasma Mobile details and reference images being put out this weekend and we're starting to learn more about its proposed software stack, including its usage of Wayland...

The FFmpeg project and its forked Libav have added support for new video decoders based on libmfx, technology from the Intel Media SDK...

One of the latest Direct Rendering Manager drivers in development for the mainline Linux kernel is the Freescale DCU driver...

Those controlling their network devices under Linux with NetworkManager will now be able to configure their Wake-on-LAN options for Ethernet connections...