Phoronix

As of a change yesterday to Intel's i965 Mesa driver, the Vec4 back-end is unconditionally using NIR rather than GLSL IR with the option being removed...

Kubuntu 15.10 "Wily Werewolf" is being released later this month and it will feature the very latest KDE Plasma 5.4 point release...

One of the big items still in the works as part of AMD's unified Linux driver strategy is that the Catalyst proprietary driver will be isolated to user-space and make use of the AMDGPU kernel DRM driver. Being publicly now in development in a few code branches are changes to the AMD DRM code for beginning to suit more of it to Catalyst's driver design...

Since August I've been delivering various Linux benchmarks of the Core i5 6600K "Skylake" processor, but unfortunately don't have access yet to a i7-6700K Linux box. Fortunately, thanks to the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software and the OpenBenchmarking.org collaborative cloud component, there are already numerous result files...

Emil Velikov announced Mesa 10.6.9 today as the newest point release for the aging Mesa 10.6 series...

The third alpha release of the Kodi 16 HTPC open-source software is now available for testing with long-press support...

If you are looking for an open-frame, four-post rack cabinet that's the perfect size for some home server/media equipment and doesn't run floor-to-ceiling, the StarTech.com 25U 4POSTRACK25U is a great fit. After having had great success with my 48U StarTech.com racks, I turned to the 25U rack for something smaller that can fit and look more normal outside of the server room.

Oracle announced the release today of VirtualBox 5.0.6, the newest version of their virtualization platform...

FLIF is short for the Free Lossless Image Format and is the newest open-source (GPLv3) attempt at being a better image for the web than JPEG, PNG, WebP, etc...

While most Phoronix readers are familiar with Linux system providers System76 and ZaReason, less of you probably are familiar with eRacks even though they've been building open-source systems since the late 90's...

It's been one month since the last Wine development release, but Wine 1.7.52 was just tagged and made available today...

While Valve's Steam Controller isn't expected to formally launch until 10 November, at least some of those who pre-ordered this gaming controller early are now reportedly set to receive their device any day now...

AMD hasn't gotten lucky financially speaking in quite a while and their latest measure to fend off further losses is by getting rid of another 5% of its staff, or about 500 people based on their current head count of just under 10,000 employees left...

While more games continue to be ported over to Linux and offered on Steam, the overall Linux gaming market-share remains under 1%...

For those wondering about the state of GNOME, their annual report is now available...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has today approved a release schedule for Fedora 24...

While last quarter was exciting for Linux users as was all of the open-source activity last month, this final quarter of 2015 is looking to be even more exciting for Linux enthusiasts...

There was a lot of interesting open-source and Linux news during September!..

Yesterday I published the results of a 6-way Linux distribution performance comparison but not part of that original article were any Gentoo Linux results. However, with Calculate Linux 15 having been released yesterday and is a well known Gentoo derivative, I decided to run some extra benchmarks...

Systemd 227 hasn't been released yet but it appears that it will be coming out quite soon. Here's a look at some of the changes...

It's been a while since last having anything to report on Xoreos, but this week they're out with a new release. For those out of the loop, Xoreos is an open-source re-implementation of BioWare's proprietary Aurora Engine. With Xoreos the aim is to make it possible to power Neverwinter Nights and similar games off this GPLv3+ engine while still relying upon the game's assets...

NixOS, the "purely functional Linux distribution" built around the Nix package manager, is out with a new release...

Earlier this month was an inquiry to upstream LLVM developers about including an Atmel AVR back-end in the mainline repository, which up to now has been developed out of tree. LLVM developers are now discussing this back-end and it's looking like it may be added once reviewed...

Apple released OS X 10.11 "El Capitan" today as a free update for Apple computer owners. Are you interested in some fresh OS X vs. Linux benchmarks?..

Honoring the latest round of Phoronix Premium reader requests is a fresh six-way Linux distribution comparison. Tested were Manjaro 15.09 and Linux Mint 17.2 and then the latest development versions of Fedora 23, openSUSE 42.1 Leap, Debian Stretch Testing, and Ubuntu 15.10.

Calculate Linux 15 was released today in its KDE, MATE, and Xfce desktop spins along with Calculate Linux Directory Server, Linux Scratch, Scratch Server, and Media Center editions...

Roy Spliet has just published his latest work to better handle re-clocking for select NVIDIA GPUs with the open-source Nouveau driver...

AMD has announced that their new PRO A-Series processors have begun to ship. The PRO A-Series is based on Carrizo...

SMPlayer, a popular Qt front-end to MPlayer, is out with a new version that adds a variety of new features...

It's been quite a while since last having anything to report on the OpenShot 2.0 non-linear, open-source video editor, but an update on it was issued yesterday...

It's been over six months since the last POCL release, the Portable Computing Language open-source project that's implementing OpenCL on CPUs. The next POCL release isn't out yet, but we know it will be introducing new features...

Mir 0.16 was quietly released a few days back as the newest upstream release of this display server for Ubuntu Linux...

For the past several months I've been using a Scythe Mugen Max heatsink on one of my Core i7 5960X Haswell-E systems. That heatsink has been working out great, but the only problem is that it's too big -- particularly if trying to fit it in a 4U chassis. In needing to cool this 140 Watt CPU while moving the system into a 4U rackmount chassis, I ended up trying out the much cheaper and smaller Freezer i11 from Arctic Cooling.

Google announced a number of new devices today plus improvements to their services like Google Photos along with confirming Android 6.0 Marshmallow is coming next week...

Generally Ubuntu Linux hasn't allowed new minor point releases of software to be sent down as stable release updates (SRUs) once the Ubuntu release ships, but there's been many exceptions, and now Ubuntu's Technical Board has agreed to make changes to make it easier to send down micro-release updates as well as offering new features to existing LTS (Long-Term Support) releases...

It's sad right now that we're going through a time where many new Linux game releases only work with NVIDIA graphics and flat out fail with AMD's Catalyst driver. While AMD is known to deliver game fixes several months late, making matters worse, it seems some game developers don't even know who to contact at AMD about Linux driver issues...

The MIPS P5600 processor is now supported by LLVM thanks to a now-merged patch from Imagination Technologies...

Mesa's Gallium3D "Clover" state tracker still lacks full OpenCL 1.2 support, but as of yesterday the CL 1.2's clCreateImage() function was hooked up...

Mozilla's next-generation, Rust-written Servo web layout engine now has an experimental renderer for drawing web content on the GPU. The Servo WebRender aims to do all the rasterization work on the graphics processor and the initial results are promising...

While Mark Shuttleworth talked up before that an Ubuntu Phone supporting their much talked about "converged" experience would be available in 2015, it appears now to be delayed until some time in 2016...

Raspbian, the Raspberry Pi's Debian-based Linux distribution, has re-based their platform atop Debian 8 "Jessie" and with it they're now making use of GTK+3 and other new features...

Python 3.5 was released earlier this month with new functionality. Unfortunately, Python 3.5 is too late for Fedora 23 but is being planned for Fedora 24...

If you woke up this morning expecting to play Alien: Isolation with today being the expected release date for OS X and Linux, Feral Interactive has unfortunately had to push back the release...

The Free Software Foundation has endorsed the Taurinus X200 laptop as a laptop that respects your freedoms...

Git 2.6.0 was released yesterday by Junio Hamano...

Five years ago today marked the fork of OpenOffice.org into LibreOffice and coincidentally the Apache Software Foundation put out news this weekend that a new version of OpenOffice is coming...

Canonical's design team has been working on redoing the user-interface to the Ubiquity installer that also converges with the setup wizard for Ubuntu Phones...

While recently I've posted a number of Linux solid-state drive benchmarks from low-end SATA 3.0 SSDs being used in Linux test systems not frequently being stressed by disk/file-system workloads, here are some benchmark results using a higher-end M.2 SSD. Benchmark results today are from the Kingston HyperX Predator 240GB M.2 Gen2 x4.

While there's sadly not been much in the way of new feature development activity for Reiser4, this out-of-tree file-system continues to be ported to new versions of the Linux kernel...

While the year is not close to being over yet, there's already been a surprising number of Linux and open-source related announcements made by Microsoft in 2015!..