Phoronix

Matthias Clasen, well known Fedora / GNOME contributor at Red Hat, has written a blog post about the ongoing modularity work in the Linux desktop realm...

KDE Plasma 5.7 continues to look more and more like it will be running reasonably well on Wayland with close parity to the KDE stack running on X11...

The Mir back-end inside SDL2 now has support for the relative mouse mode as is important for some games...

Ahead of the official Mesa 12.0 debut later this month, Mesa release manager Emil Velikov of Collabora has announced 12.0 Release Candidate 2...

Qt 5.7 is right around the corner and it's coming with many new graphics features, including support for NVIDIA's DRIVE CX platform...

Several new benchmarks were added today to the Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org and with their GPU-accelerated focus of the new tests, I couldn't help but run them on the mighty powerful GeForce GTX 1080 and friends...

The final expected binaries of Firefox 47.0 are now available ahead of the expected official debut tomorrow...

This past weekend I offered a look at the most popular Linux news on Phoronix over the past twelve years, given Phoronix's birthday yesterday. Today is a look at the most popular featured articles / Linux hardware reviews on Phoronix during this time...

Shadow of Mordor is a beautiful game on Linux, but quite demanding on the hardware. Here's how it performs with Linux...

Not everyone has been happy with the state of Qt 5.6.0, that was released after months of delay and Qt 5.7 is just around the corner. Fortunately, Qt 5.6.1 should be out this week with some important bug fixes...

Manjaro Linux 16.06 "Daniella" was released today as the latest stable version of this popular Linux distribution derived from Arch Linux...

In addition to Phoronix turning 12 years old yesterday, 5 June marked the Phoronix Test Suite turning eight years old since its version 1.0 release...

The Linux kernel DRM/KMS drivers continue moving ahead with their atomic conversion...

The DragonFlyBSD kernel now has an initial NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) driver for supporting these modern, super-fast storage solutions...

Linus Torvalds has tagged the Linux 4.7-rc2 kernel...

Now that my initial GeForce GTX 1080 Linux review is out the door, I spent this weekend working on a "fun" comparison out of curiosity to see how the raw OpenGL and OpenCL performance has improved over the generations going back to the once-powerful GeForce 9800GTX plus including the top-end cards of the GeForce 600/700/900 Kepler and Maxwell series too.

Marek Olšák posted a patch today to significantly boost the performance for games using multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) on both the R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers...

There are more than four times as many Linux games available today as there were two years ago...

Nearly two weeks ago I warned that You May Want To Think Twice About Trying Linux 4.7 Git Right Now. Fortunately, all is well now and those problems have cleared up...

Phoronix turns 12 years old this morning, it's almost a teenager! Back on 5 June 2004 I was thinking why the heck is it difficult getting my ATI RV250 and USB mouse playing nicely with Mandrake, and went on to launch Phoronix for what would become the leading source for Linux hardware reviews...

A few days back I wrote about the Steam Link being just $35 USD for your streaming Linux gaming needs via Valve's platform. Now, Amazon is finally listing the Steam Controller at $35 USD as well...

Yet again with today's GeForce GTX 1080 Linux review there were multiple people asking "why XYZ Linux game wasn't tested", a recurring topic now over the past several years...

With Phoronix turning 12 years old tomorrow, here's a look at the most popular news items covered in that time regarding open-source and Linux happenings...

Continuing on from this morning's NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Linux review are some other OpenGL and OpenCL benchmarks ran from this $699+ high-end Pascal graphics card...

Debian updated their stable and old-stable releases this weekend...

$699 USD is a lot to spend on a graphics card, but damn she is a beauty. Last month NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 1080 as the current top-end Pascal card and looked great under Windows while now finally having my hands on the card the past few days I've been putting it through its paces under Ubuntu Linux with the major open APIs of OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, and VDPAU. Not only is the raw performance of the GeForce GTX 1080 on Linux fantastic, but the performance-per-Watt improvements made my jaw drop more than a few times. Here are my initial Linux results of the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 Founder's Edition.

After more than three years in development, version 3.0 of the Lightweight Java Game Library (LWJGL) is now available. LWJGL is an open-source Java library for helping game developers but can also be used by other application developers for accessing other functionality that otherwise isn't offered by the Java API...

GNU Taler "v0.0.0" was announced today as the initial alpha release of this project aiming to be a free software electronic payment system but so far just fits alongside some of the other obscure or early-on GNU projects...

I've still been swamped with my 18+ hour days this week of testing the GeForce GTX 1080 and friends for our Linux review. Tomorrow morning is when my initial GeForce GTX 1080 Linux review will be published with OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan benchmarks. Additional tests and other fun comparisons featuring the GTX 1080 will continue through the weekend. But while waiting for those featured articles, you can easily compare your own system's results to some of my initia GTX 1080 numbers...

Oracle's VM VirtualBox team has been working on VirtualBox 5.1 as a minor update to this cross-platform virtualization software...

The GNU Toolchain has continued making improvements this year beyond just the recent GCC 6 stable compiler release...

For Ubuntu Linux users it's now easier trying out the latest development state of the Intel Vulkan graphics driver...

Version 5.4 of the GNU Compiler Collection is now available...

Hans de Goede at Red Hat has been working on a DRM KMS kernel driver for the Grain Media GM12U320 hardware...

Similar to past Qt5 tool-kit releases, Qt 5.7 has been running behind schedule but they are now out with a release candidate and hope to officially ship this update later in June...

Upstream Wayland developers have decided to drop the specialized Raspberry Pi back-end and renderer from the Weston compositor code-base...

In part due to the Phoronix 12th birthday this week with running various historical performance comparisons and other interesting benchamrks and in part due to prepping for some long-term comparison data to the Radeon RX 480 launch later this month, for your viewing pleasure this morning are benchmarks testing a variety of graphis cards going back to the Radeon HD 3000 (RV600) series up through the Radeon R9 Fury (Fiji) graphics cards. Enjoy this fun article focusing primarily on the OpenGL performance under Linux over the several generations of ATI/AMD GPUs along with calculating the performance-per-Watt.

This morning it went public that ownCloud was forked into Nextcloud by many of the former contributors including ownCloud's founder. The ownCloud company has now responded...

If you've read Phoronix for any real length of time you've likely come across articles talking about Intel's Mesa driver and various work on the intermediate representations (IRs) of the driver. If you still are wondering about the Mesa driver's IR, here's a introductory blog post done by our friends at Igalia...

Over the past year or two you've likely heard of Endless Computers for their work on building a $79 PC for the "offline world" as a Linux PC for developing countries. Or you may have also heard of Endless Computers due to their upstream contributions to GNOME, since their "Endless OS" is based upon the GNOME desktop environment. Up to now their Linux distribution has just been available for their low-cost PCs, but now they are making it available for free...

Earlier this year I tested the CompuLab Airtop as a completely fanless, high-performance PC. Many Linux users were interested in the Airtop and its innovative design. The only downsides with the Airtop is that it's very expensive to ordinary consumers and you don't have free rein over what components you wish to install. Fortunately, more standards-compliant fanless cases have been coming to the market -- including some that support fanless CPU cooling. One of the newer contenders in that space is the Streacom FC5 Alpha, which is a fanless aluminum case I've been using the past month and could work out well for a SteamOS Linux gaming living room PC or HTPC.

Steam Link is Valve's game streaming solution where when paired with a controller makes for easy gaming from a living room TV. The Steam Link is Linux-based and it does support game streaming from Steam running on SteamOS or any Linux distribution...

Mike Blumenkrantz has tagged the release candidate of the upcoming Enlightenment 0.21 release...

The folks responsible for the Ardour Digital Audio Workstation on Linux and OS X have tagged v5.0-pre0...

I've been extremely anxious since the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070/1080 "Pascal" announcement last month to see how these cards perform under Linux using open standards like OpenGL, Vulkan, and OpenCL, and you probably have been too if you're reading Phoronix. Fortunately, the start of the GeForce GTX 1080 Pascal benchmarks will be revealed tomorrow...

Eight years to the week since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 "Trondheim" and twelve years to the week since the start of Phoronix.com, Phoronix Media today announced the release of Phoronix Test Suite 6.4 "Hasvik" as the latest version of our open-source, enterprise-rated, cross-platform benchmarking software...

Intel's first batch of i915 DRM kernel graphics driver changes for targeting the future Linux 4.8 kernel cycle has now been queued into DRM-Next...

Landing in Coreboot Git this week is a "hybrid graphics driver" that benefits seemingly all Lenovo laptops (except the mux-less models) with dual GPUs...

The embargo just expired so I can now share what's been happening at OwnCloud: those that left ownCloud recently have formed a new company where they are now forking ownCloud...

While Mesa 12.0 was just branched days ago and is going to be an extraordinary release, new work is already building up for Mesa 12.1-dev that will be released around September...