Phoronix

While it's been several months since the Purism Librem crowd-funding campaing got underway for producing "the first high-end laptop in the world that ships without mystery software in the kernel, operating system, or any software applications," the Librem 15 still relies upon a proprietary BIOS and there's still no easy fix...

A new version is out of Lighttpd, the lightweight, performance-oriented web server. Like the stance of other web servers and browsers, SSL 3.0 support is being disabled by default...

Reviews of the Ubuntu Phone this week by general tech slights have largely expressed disappointment over the current Ubuntu Phone stack while being years in the making...

The latest OpenGL 4+ activity in Mesa this week is a Saturday commit landing another OpenGL 4.5 extension for AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for GCN graphics processors...

The latest ARM platform that NetBSD has been ported to is the NVIDIA Jetson TK1...

With the Linux 4.2 kernel settling down nicely and AMD developers having already sent in a few round of fixes for their new AMDGPU kernel DRM driver, I've started testing out this new kernel driver -- plus the new xf86-video-amdgpu DDX and the associated new Mesa/LibDRM code -- that is providing the open-source accelerated graphics support for Tonga and all new/future GPUs like Carrizo and Fiji.

Libreboot, the downstream of Coreboot that strips out all binary blobs / microcode / firmware, has added experimental support for a new ThinkPad laptop...

Last month I wrote about trying to benchmark the MIPS Creator CI20, a low-cost MIPS development board from Imagination Technologies, but sadly those plans were thwarted by stability issues. Fortunately, it was just a faulty board and the replacement board has been running without any faults.

A new patent pool is forming that wants 0.5% of the gross revenue for H.265 videos from content owners and distributors...

Following up from this morning's post about KDE Announces Plasma Mobile For Fully-Free Software For Mobile Devices, here are some more details...

Back in 2011 we were talking about Cradle as the latest Unigine Engine game and it was expected to launch in 2012 with Linux support. Three years later, this game has finally launched on Steam with Linux support...

The release candidate for FreeBSD 10.2 is now available...

At KDE's Akademy event today, the KDE camp has just lifted the embargo on Plasma Mobile...

It's been a very exciting month so far for Linux and open-source enthusiasts, but I'm hearing that at least one really exciting announcement may still make it out in the next week...

As of this commit yesterday, by Mike Hommey, Firefox nightly builds are now being built with PLATFORM_DEFAULT_TOOLKIT set to cairo-gtk3! It would appear, according to the commit tag, that mainline Firefox will be built with GTK+3 for Firefox 42. Firefox 42 is expected to be released this November...

Following a slight delay, the first milestone release of openSUSE 42.1 "Leap" is now available for testing...

Earlier this week I finished up a 15-way AMD/NVIDIA graphics card comparison on Linux with the very latest proprietary Linux drivers. That earlier article focused on the OpenGL performance and simply put the Catalyst performance on the tested Radeon hardware was abysmal compared to NVIDIA's Linux driver performance. However, there is one area where the Catalyst Linux driver really excels at performance and routinely beats out the green competition.

Daniel Vetter of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has sent in many Intel DRM driver changes to be queued up in DRM-Next for the Linux 4.3 kernel...

This week Mesa development is very exciting with OpenGL 4.0~4.1 support being reached and the open-source hardware drivers now just filling in their gaps. Intel's Mesa i965 DRI driver is getting ready to declare OpenGL 4.0 compliance...

Just two weeks after PHP 7 decided to go into beta, the second beta release is now available for testing...

One week after tagging LLVM 3.7-RC1, Hans Wennborg of Google announced its formal release on Thursday...

Version 3.3 of the CMake open-source, cross-platform build system is now available...

The news today of OpenGL 4 finally being accomplished in Mesa/Gallium3D is quite ironic and memorable as this day five years ago was when the R600 Gallium3D driver reached the milestone of being able to run glxgears on AMD hardware...

GNOME 3.17.4 is now available as the latest development release towards the September debut of GNOME 3.18...

With my Intel Core i7 5775C Linux review having gone out earlier this week, out of curiosity one of the other follow-up tests I wanted to run was comparing the performance and efficiency to an old Pentium 4 and Celeron Socket 478 CPU from the NetBurst era.

The next openSUSE release is scheduled to come in November and developers are still working on putting out the first development milestone release...

The GNOME 3 Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) are turning a year old and are in the process of being updated...

Five years after the OpenGL 4.0 specification was introduced, the open-source Mesa 3D project has finally moved on to supporting the necessary extensions, the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver even exposes OpenGL 4.1 support this morning, and OpenGL 4.2 patches are pending.

Alongside this morning's release of GNOME Shell 3.17.4 is the release of GNOME's Mutter 3.17.4...

Work on wldbg was announced this week, a tool for debugging applications running on Wayland...

GNOME Shell 3.17.4 is now available, but it's not the most exciting development release of recent times.....

Wow, it's like a dream... Waking up to find that Mesa Git now supports all of the necessary GL extensions to claim OpenGL 4.0 compliance by core Mesa. It took more than five years, but it's finally materializing and OpenGL 4.1~4.2 isn't too far behind...

Marek Olšák of AMD finished landing the code needed today in Mesa for exposing the OpenGL 4.0 ARB_tessellation_shader by the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

The latest "GNOME Flashback" packages have landed within the Ubuntu Testing and Ubuntu 15.10 "Wily Werewolf" archives for those wishing to use this GNOME2-like session...

Matias Bjørling continues tackling support for "open-channel SSDs" within Linux. His fourth revision to his Open-Channel SSD patch-set has been published and re-based against code in development for the Linux 4.3 kernel...

Being in the middle of working on Linux reviews for the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti and AMD Radeon R9 Fury, there's been a lot of fresh graphics processor benchmarks running this week at Phoronix. As the first of these updated large Linux comparisons on the very latest public drivers, here is a 15-way NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics card comparison when running various Linux games with a 4K resolution.

With new games seeming to come over to Linux every day courtesy of Steam -- such as this week's Star Wars port -- we're now well past 1,300 games available for SteamOS/Linux...

GNU Guix, the functional package manager designed for the GNU system and GuixSD distribution, is out with a new release that has more than 800 commits over the past two months...

Within the latest GCC developer code is better support for Imagination's MIPS M51xx M-Class CPU family...

Feral Interactive Games, the company that has ported games to Linux like XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Empire Total War and is doing the Batman Arkham Knight port, is teasing another upcoming Linux / OS X game release...

A new point release to DNF 1.0 is now available that addresses the feedback of the Fedora community now that Fedora 22 has been out there a while and forces Yum users over to using this next-generation package management solution...

Junio Hamano announced the release on Tuesday for Git 2.5.0-rc3, which is made up of more than 500 commits since Git 2.4.0...

One of the features coming for glibc 2.22 is a port to Google's Native Client for ARMv7-A while separately there is also a new vector math library (libmvec) for OMP4...

A Google engineer has added support in Coreboot for Glados, a forthcoming Chromebook that will feature a next-generation Skylake SoC...

The latest OpenGL 4.x extension wired up within Mesa and enabled for all present Mesa/Gallium3D drivers is GL_ARB_get_texture_sub_image...

Kodi 15 was released today as the second major version since its renaming from XBMC...

While Debian 9.0 "Stretch" most likely will not be officially released until 2017 given that Debian 8 "Jessie" was just released a few months ago, the Debian Installer team has already put out their first alpha version for Stretch...

For the past few weeks I've been testing out the Core i7 5775C on Linux as mentioned in a few posts up to this point. While there were some initial headaches on getting this socketed Broadwell CPU playing nicely under Linux, once working around those problems, this processor is great on Linux. With its Iris Pro Graphics 6200 is able to serve as a compelling choice for those who want a powerful open-source system.

Yesterday Aspyr Media was teasing a new Linux game launch and today they've indeed ported over another game now available from the Steam Linux store...

In the middle of the night I got an auto-notification... The Radeon R9 Fury is finally in-stock! Few minutes later, this Fiji HBM graphics card was ordered for some Linux testing. We'll have out the first major AMD Fury graphics card tests under Linux in the next few days...