Phoronix

A few days ago Clonezilla, the popular Linux distribution with a focus on disk imaging and cloning, released version 2.4.2-10, and this release is a big one...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee met today to discuss features proposed for Fedora 23...

Epic Games just announced the release of Unreal Engine 4.8 with "189 great changes" for game developers leveraging this AAA game engine...

(X)Wayland has its first security notice today thanks to a discovery made by a Red Hat developer...

Back in May a security vulnerability went public that let VMs escape QEMU's security and gain access to the host via an issue in QEMU's virtual floppy disk driver code. Another QEMU security issue is going public today...

Two weeks ago AMD launched the A10-7870K "Godavari" APU. As there haven't been too many independent benchmarks of the A10-7870K yet, this week I picked up the new high-end APU and have been running a plethora of performance tests under Ubuntu Linux. Here's the first batch of the AMD A10-7870K Linux tests.

For those into database benchmarking, the SQLite and PostgreSQL test profiles were updated this week. A Redis benchmark was also added...

Earlier this week I wrote about the BPF back-end seeking a promotion in LLVM to officially become a first-class back-end. The feedback was positive and now for LLVM 3.7 the BPF back-end is official...

Version 2.7 of the FFmpeg open-source multimedia project was tagged today...

Making some rounds on the Internet today is CopperSpice, a fork of Qt 4.8 from two years ago that's starting to take shape as a nice C++ GUI library for developers...

Following patches from last month, within mainline Mesa Git for Mesa 10.7-devel is support for enabling the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver when being built for Android...

The Facebook team working on the HHVM project for being a faster PHP interpreter and powering their Hack language have just come out of a two-week, open-source performance lockdown. Over the past two weeks they focused on making strides to make HHVM's compelling performance even better...

It's now easier to build Coreboot with the LLVM Clang compiler rather than GCC...

Will Cooke of Canonical shared this morning that they have got the first Snappy build of Ubuntu Desktop Next built for i386...

Besides Phoronix celebrating its 11th birthday, last week Intel's SNA 2D acceleration architecture had its birthday and turned four years old. While the xf86-video-intel 3.0 DDX driver release is to make SNA the default for 2D acceleration over UXA, there's still no signs of this release happening...

Last week we found out Ubuntu was coming to the BQ Aquaris E5 smartphone and this morning the pre-orders have started rolling in...

Matthew Dillon's latest addition to DragonFlyBSD will help those that build out the full kernel themselves: parallelized kernel module builds. This change for developers allows the the kernel build process to be multiple times faster when doing a full kernel build...

When it comes to taking advantage of the Linux kernel's (e)BPF in-kernel virtual machine, LLVM has served as the compiler of choice for targeting this virtual machine..

Last week Fedy, formally Fedora Utils, quietly released version 4.0.1. Fedy, for those not in-the-know, is a graphical program for configuring and installing third-party applications and repositories on the Fedora desktop. Using Fedy, software like Adobe Flash, Android Studio, libdvdcss, Google Chrome, multimedia codecs, Steam, Skype, and the Oracle JRE are only a click away...

Besides announcing OS X El Capitan, Apple announced today from their WWDC event that their Swift programming language will be open-sourced and they intend to support it on Linux too...

This is just a reminder that as of today, June 8th 2015, it is the last day for any changes to be submitted to aur.archlinux.org and for them to be kept. Any and all changes going forward should be made to aur4.archlinux.org. Any changes that occur to aur.archlinux.org after today will be LOST...

With Apple's WWDC event this week, they've revealed OS X 10.11 as being codenamed El Capitan. Here's some details about Apple's OS that will be competing this year with the likes of Windows 10, Fedora 23, and Ubuntu 15.10...

With Phoronix having turned 11 years old last week, there's been several interesting articles looking at the historical performance of Linux, large GPU/driver comparisons, etc. Today is arguably the most interesting birthday article yet. I dug out an old Intel Socket 478 system with the i875p Canterwood chipset and Pentium 4 and Celeron CPUs that still manage to power up. I compared the Linux performance of this 11+ year old system to a variety of today's x86 and ARM systems. Beyond looking at the raw performance, the performance-per-Watt was also measured to make for a very interesting look at how CPU performance has evolved over the past decade.

Rob Clark has sent in his feature updates for Freedreno's MSM DRM driver that will target the Linux 4.2 kernel...

Earlier this year Dell released their XPS 13 laptop with an Intel Broadwell processor and all-around looks like a great developer laptop. Back when the hardware first appeared, the Linux support wasn't in great shape. Dell is now shipping the XPS13 2015 model with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS preloaded, but sadly, there's still some issues with the initial pre-install...

For years the BFQ I/O scheduler has been trying to get in the mainline kernel and it looks like they have an action plan for getting accepted upstream...

Another Sunday, another Linux kernel update. Linus Torvalds just tagged the Linux 4.1-rc7 kernel release...

The first stable point release to Debian 8 "Jessie" is now available...

Samuel Pitoiset has continued on his quest of implementing NVIDIA hardware counters support and exposing it to user-space within the Nouveau open-source driver stack...

The reference Wayland Live CD with various Wayland software components enabled has been updated against Wayland/Weston 1.8 and other new code...

Another ~6 months down, another Fedora release. While Fedora 23 looks to be an interesting release over all -- with some initial changes coming to Anaconda, and some changes coming to the upgrade process -- this release was more low-key for most of Fedora-land. Workstation saw updates to notifications and general theme'ing improvements, Gnome Software got AppData integration to bring the Software Center closer to an app-store experience. Of course Gnome Boxes and Gnome Builder were included as well, allowing for more out-of-the-box developer improvements in the realm of Virutalization and IDE's, respectively. But there weren't any ground breaking features across the board -- no swapping of the init system, no BTRFS, no Wayland by default, although GDM is running the Login Screen through Wayland.

Here's some new GCC compiler benchmarks on Linux x86_64 for your viewing pleasure this weekend...

AMD KERNCZ is a new generation name for an AMD chipset / FCH (Fusion Controller Hub)...

Emil Velikov announced the release this morning of Mesa 10.5.7...

Besides presenting a lot of new kernel features and functionality, the upcoming Linux 4.1 kernel release is potentially very exciting if you're an owner of certain classes of Intel hardware that offer better performance under this new kernel -- and in some cases, better battery life. Here's some tests from yet another system I found exhibiting some promising results from this new 2015 summer kernel version.

With work on porting the Linux Intel and Radeon DRM/KMS drivers progressing, within DragonFlyBSD Git they've made the first "hacky steps" for making their system console work with the KMS drivers...

The Linux 4.2 kernel will make the CFQ I/O scheduler default to its IOPS mode when on solid-state drives, which should boost performance...

There's good news for both Mesa users and developers when needing to workaround OpenGL bugs / buggy applications and games...

The Linux 4.2 kernel will bring to mainline two prominent new Direct Rendering Manager drivers...

In addition to the Steam Linux news this week that the Steam Controller and Steam Machines is up for pre-order and the Steam Linux usage has dropped to an all-time low, I noticed the Linux game count is well past 1,200 titles...

Intel's upcoming Skylake and Broxton hardware will require some binary-only firmware blobs by the i915 DRM kernel graphics driver...

This week besides readying the Phoronix Test Suite 5.8.0 release and the various benchmark articles in commemoration of Phoronix turning eleven years old (and PTS turning 7), I've also been working on adding some new tests. One of the new test profiles available for automated benchmarking is stress-ng...

An intern from Qualcomm's Innovation Center has been designing a heterogeneous execution engine for LLVM that he's hoping to eventually upstream within the LLVM project...

Support for two in-development Rockchip motherboard designs have been added to Coreboot for possible use in Chrome OS devices...

The FreeBSD release engineering team has laid out plans for the next FreeBSD 10 release...

There's a few more features being talked about this week for inclusion into Fedora 23...

In celebrating 11 years since starting Phoronix to cover the Linux hardware scene, here's some fresh benchmarks of the open-source Intel / AMD / NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers. Various GPUs were tested atop Ubuntu when moving to Git with the Linux 4.1 kernel, Mesa 10.7-devel, and LLVM 3.7 SVN.

For anyone that didn't get a chance yesterday to look at the Steam Machines up for pre-ordering, these SteamOS loaded devices all come with Intel CPUs and NVIDIA GeForce graphics...

A Phoronix reader has pointed out that a regression has slipped into the Mesa 10.5.5 point release that negatively affects users of dual-GPU laptop owners with NVIDIA Optimus technology that are using the open-source "Primus" code for running OpenGL games on the alternate graphics processor...

With Phoronix turning eleven years old today, here's a look back at the most popular open-source and Linux news since 2004!..