Phoronix

KDE Plasma 5.7 is now officially out there...

GNOME developer Emmanuele Bassi has shared the latest work he's been doing on GSK -- the GTK Scene Kit and the much anticipated improvements it will bring...

Stephen Webb of Canonical has written about the company's latest project, Libertine. Libertine is their new project for allowing legacy X11-focused Debian packages to run on their next-gen converged desktop with Unity 8, Mir, and Snap packages...

KDE Plasma 5.7 is scheduled to be released today...

There are more change proposals were sent out this morning on the Fedora developer list with plans for these features in Fedora 25...

Announced last year was Bcachefs as a new Linux file-system derived from Bcache that aims for speed while having ZFS/Btrfs-like features. Since doing some early Bcachefs benchmarks last August, we hadn't heard much (anything?) from the project since...

The Lumina Desktop Environment has made available their v1.0 beta release of the Qt-written desktop...

Taking place this week in Cape Town, South Africa is DebConf 16. One of the interesting bits of information out of that event is the codename for Stretch's successor...

The seventh alpha release of the Debian Installer for Stretch is now available...

Linus Torvalds has released the sixth weekly test version to the Linux 4.7 kernel...

The Cairo graphics library that's relied upon by GTK+, Gecko/Firefox, WebKit, Poppler, and many other pieces of Linux software is having problems passing its own build tests...

The folks at CompuLab have announced their latest Linux-friendly PC, the fitlet-RM. The Fitlet-RM is described as "the smallest PC for extreme conditions" and is fanless...

Version 2.1.1 of glbinding has been released, a C++ binding to the OpenGL API...

The second alpha release of Kodi 17 Krypton is now available for testing...

Remember that Improve Dev Board using an open-source, upgradeable design and running Mer from 2013~2014 before the project collapsed? It's back now in the form of a new crowdfunding campaign with some changes to the hardware and the option of a build-your-own laptop...

With the 12-page AMD Radeon RX 480 review under Ubuntu Linux, tests were carried out both with the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver and the pure open-source driver via the Linux 4.7 kernel and RadeonSI Gallium3D Mesa 12.1-dev. In this article are more tests of just the RX 480 when comparing the two Linux driver options for this first AMD Polaris card to make it to market. The CPU usage and power consumption difference are particularly interesting if you have been debating between these two drivers...

If you use Ardour as your digital audio workstation software, you'll want to read this article about the features coming to Ardour 5.0...

Another week, another new Vulkan specification update...

The June 2016 results are now out for Valve's Steam Survey...

Slackware 14.2 was released today to kick off July. Slackware 14.2 has been long in development while today it was christened...

Less than one month after the release candidate to SuperTuxKart 0.9.2, the official release is now available for your open-source racing fun this weekend...

On top of Phoronix turning 12 years old in June, it was a very busy month with many other open-source/Linux announcements and milestones...

Days after OpenMandriva Lx 3 Beta 2 shipped, Mageia with its common lineage from Mandrake/Mandriva has shipped Mageia 6 "sta1" as their first stabilization snapshot...

The Mozilla developers working on the Servo browser layout engine and the Browser.html HTML-based web UI have kept to their goal of making a tech preview available in June...

There's a new release of Calamares, the distribution installer framework used by several Linux distributions like Manjaro, Netrunner, Sabayon, Chakra, OpenMandriva, and others...

Opt-in flavors of Ubuntu Linux wishing to do early development releases have issued their first alpha milestone for the 16.10 "Yakkety Yak" cycle...

Pitivi 0.96 has been released as the first major update to this GNOME-aligned open-source video editor since the v0.95 release last November...

Another Enlightenment release, another round of significant Wayland improvements. Enlightenment continues with its very well vetted Wayland support that should be roughly on par with the GNOME Wayland experience...

Virt-Viewer 4.0 was released today as the newer version of this virtualization VM viewer that's part of the Virt-Manager project...

With the Radeon RX 480 Linux review now being out of the way and our various other RX 480 Linux benchmarks, the latest results I have to share with being a benchmarking fanatic are RX 480 results with high-end AMD GPU tests of each generation going back to the Radeon HD 4850/4870 (RV770) days. This article has high-end GPUs from the RX 480 to RX 200, HD 7900, HD 6900, HD 6800, HD 5800, and HD 4800 series compared side-by-side with the latest open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver code. Not only is the raw performance being looked at but the system power consumption was also being polled in real-time for looking at the performance-per-Watt too. For any other benchmarking fanatics curious about the Radeon GPU evolution over the past eight years (RV770 launch in 2008), here are the numbers to enjoy.

With yesterday's lengthy AMD Radeon RX 480 Linux review and the follow-up posts for this Polaris graphics card launch, I didn't have too much time to run OpenCL compute tests. However, here are some fresh OpenCL Polaris numbers with the AMDGPU-PRO driver stack for those curious about the compute potential of this $199+ graphics card...

The first official builds are now available of Linux Mint 18, the latest installment of the popular Linux distribution and now derived from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS...

Here are some 1080p OpenGL results (as opposed to our plethora of 1440p and 4K data today) for the brand new Radeon RX 480 and available via OpenBenchmarking.org so you can easily compare your own Linux system(s) performance against these reference numbers using the open-source driver stack...

As a follow-up to this morning's article about a new driver beta program, the sign-up application is now available...

Some exciting non-Polaris news today is that Google has open-sourced SwiftShader, the library they use for high-performance graphics rendering on the CPU...

AMD made good on their word and released the AMDGPU-PRO 16.30 Hybrid Linux Graphics Driver today...

After weeks of anticipation, AMD's high-end Radeon RX 480 "Polaris" graphics card is officially launching today! This graphics card starts at just $199 USD (or $239 USD for the 8GB version) and has day-one Linux support! There's available open-source driver support as well as an AMDGPU-PRO update that's expected today for those wanting to make use of this newer hybrid Linux driver stack. I've been testing the Radeon RX 480 under Linux the past week under both driver stacks and have my initial results to share this morning.

Besides the Radeon RX 480 "Polaris" performance numbers no longer being under NDA (see our 12-page Radeon RX 480 Linux review!), also being made public today are the Radeon Software improvements to Radeon Settings around WattMan, the successor to PowerPlay for overclocking/underclocking via the Radeon GUI control panel. But isn't Radeon Settings Windows-only? Yes, for now, but they are looking at the possibility of opening up Radeon Settings for Linux users...

For years AMD had a very active, community-driven semi-private beta program for their (Catalyst, at the time) drivers but in recent years while going through tough financial times they cut back the program. However, they will now be working to restore this program and they will be looking for Linux participants too...

Our just-published 12-page AMD Radeon RX 480 Linux review features a wealth of interesting OpenGL/OpenCL/Vulkan Linux benchmarks along with performance-per-Watt and performance-per-dollar metrics and more. Check it out if you haven't already. This article are just some extra Steam Linux gaming benchmarks for the RX 480 vs. various NVIDIA graphics cards in the games that can't be fully-automated like Tomb Raider, Shadow of Mordor, and Company of Heroes 2 where the benchmarks had to be manually executed...

Valve last night released the SteamOS 2.83 Brewmaster Beta, which includes AMDGPU-PRO RC2 and the NVIDIA 367.27 driver...

Ubuntu developers are once again pondering the possibility of dropping support for i386 (32-bit x86) as installation media for their Linux distribution...

One day ahead of the Radeon RX 480 "Polaris" launch, the necessary firmware updates for the production graphics card support have landed in linux-firmware.git...

For those making use of DRI PRIME for multi-GPU systems (mainly in the context of iGPU + dGPU notebooks), the xorg-server's PRIME code now has synchronization support and double buffering...

If you have been in the market for a dual LCD monitor mount but the price has set you off, there's a great deal right now on such a monitor mount...

Jason Donenfeld announced today WireGuard, what he describes as a next-generation secure network tunnel for the Linux kernel...

With the first half of 2016 quickly coming to an end, here's a look at the most popular open-source and Linux news covering H1-2016 on Phoronix with our daily coverage that so far this year has included 1,695 original news articles and 126 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured articles...

For those still using Libav over FFmpeg, this multimedia library has added a wrapper for OpenH264 decoder support...

For your viewing pleasure this afternoon are some fresh NVIDIA GeForce GTX 900/1000 benchmarks with the 367.27 display driver compared to various Radeon GCN GPUs using a patched Linux 4.7 kernel and Mesa 12.1-dev Git as of this past weekend...

For months there's been talk of a Servo/Browser.html technical preview in June and there's just one week left to the month... It looks like Mozilla is still planning on meeting this milestone!..