Phoronix

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

It was eleven years ago today I founded Phoronix.com to focus on Linux hardware reviews at a time when not only graphics cards were an issue but most PC peripherals were still troublesome to use outside of Windows. Today also marks seven years since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 for leading open-source Linux benchmarking...

Phoronix Test Suite 5.8 was released today as the latest quarterly update to Phoronix Media's open-source, cross-platform benchmarking and automated testing software. Beyond offering a significant number of new features, the Phoronix Test Suite 5.8 release commemorates seven years since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 and eleven years since the start of Phoronix.com in what's evolved to become the largest Linux hardware destination on the Internet.

Sorvig Morten of The Qt Company has announced that the cross-platform high-DPI support for the Qt tool-kit has entered a tech preview state...

PlayOnLinux developers have shared that PlayOnLinux 5 development has begun and it will be a complete rewrite of this software used by Linux gamers. Rather than being written in Python, it will now be based in Java...

Last year Imagination launched a MIPS development board that went on sale at the end of last year. In not seeing any significant benchmarks or performance coverage from this MIPS Creator CI20 over the past few months, I finally got around to buying one of these MIPS development boards from Imagination Technology. While the CI20 seemed promising at first, so far I'm very unhappy with this board and it's been even less stable than the Imagination PowerVR drivers on Linux going back to the Poulsbo days.

Paul Frields, the manager of Fedora Engineering and former Fedora Project Leader, has written a blog post today about how "PulseAudio is still awesome." While this common Linux sound server has a bit of a bad reputation, he wanted to share how great it's been doing and working out for his needs...

Valve has announced today that pre-orders have started for the Steam Controller, Steam Link, and select Steam Machines...

Version 3.0 of the Open Computer Vision library is now available. The release announcement reads, "With a great pleasure and great relief OpenCV team finally announces OpenCV 3.0 gold release, the most functional and the fastest OpenCV ever. And yet it’s very stable too – all the thousands of tests that we created during the project + many new tests pass successfully on Windows, Linux and Mac, x64 and ARM."..

Earlier this week I was pondering the state of HP's "The Machine" and Linux++ with the Linux++ software platform supposed to come in June of 2015. Not much information has been heard on these experimental projects, but now there's some new information coming out...

The upcoming Linux 4.1 kernel release will be supported for the long-haul by the Linux Foundation's LTSI project...

Besides DragonFlyBSD's Intel graphics support moving forward with porting of i915 DRM code from newer versions of the Linux kernel over to the DragonFlyBSD kernel, there's also been new activity on the Radeon front...

While it should come as no surprise, Alex Deucher of AMD tonight submitted the AMDGPU kernel driver code for pulling into DRM-Next so that it can land for the Linux 4.2 kernel merge window...

While KDBUS tried to be included for Linux 4.1, it was ultimately rejected for this current Linux kernel development cycle. However, it looks like developers might be gearing up to try to push it into the Linux 4.2 kernel...

While libinput 0.16 was recently released, Libinput 0.17.0 has been released just a few days later to fix some outstanding issues...

The latest controversy coming out of the systemd camp is an announcement this week that they're effectively deprecating their FreeDesktop.org-based infrastructure and looking to setup their workflow around GitHub...

For curiosity sake and as part of a more interesting article coming later this week in celebrating 11 years of Phoronix with its birthday on Friday, here are a range of CPU benchmarks on 45 different Linux systems with quite a range of hardware from low-power Intel Atoms and many AMD APUs to dual socket Opterons and Xeons. There's also a mix from laptops to nettops to desktops and servers.

Back in March I wrote about Red Hat working on a VirtIO GPU DRM/KMS driver. This new DRM kernel driver to benefit their virtualization setups is now looking at being added to the Linux 4.2 kernel...

The KDE crew has announced the release of KDE Applications 15.04.2 today, which is a monthly bug-fix update for the KDE Applications 15.04 stack...

AMD launched Carrizo today from Computex Taipei and with the rollout they've unveiled the rest of the details on the new A-Series APU design...

Wayland 1.8 along with the adjoining Weston compositor update were released over the night by Bryce Harrington of Samsung...

Microsoft announced today they will begin contributing to the OpenSSH project, as well as enabling PowerShell to be a native SSH client. In the Windows world it has been traditional to use a program such as PuTTY to remotely manage Unix boxes from Windows clients, but no more...

Announced today are the Fedora 22 releases for alternative architectures of POWER and IBM Z systems...

Samuel Pitoiset today unveiled his long sought after patches for implementing NVIDIA's PerfKit performance utility as a Gallium3D state tracker for use by the open-source Linux graphics drivers...

AMD is finally out with a big Catalyst Linux driver update!..

David Malcom, the developer at Red Hat who has been spearheading the work on libgccjit, is making some progress on speeding up this embeddedable JIT compiler for the GNU Compiler Collection...

The latest version of Google's Chrome/Chromium web-browser is now in beta for its upcoming v44 release...

Last year for the 10th Phoronix birthday I did a 60+ GPU comparison with the open-source drivers and a 30-way graphics card comparison with the binary AMD/NVIDIA Linux drivers. With Phoronix turning eleven this week, I did another large graphics card comparison under Linux... The results today aren't as large as last year, but represent most of the latest-generation AMD and NVIDIA hardware while running Ubuntu 15.04. With more games coming to Linux, there's new titles covered in this year's massive comparison including Civilization: Beyond Earth, Metro 2033 Redux, and many others.

Last month Steam Linux usage dropped below 1.0% during April, which was the lowest point we've seen it in some time with the monthly OS average attributing Linux to a 1.0~1.6% average. However, the May numbers are out and the Steam Linux usage has declined even further...

Intel has announced that they will be abandoning their traditional Thunderbolt connector with the upcoming Thunderbolt 3 specification. Instead, this high transfer speed technology will use a USB Type-C connector...

The second point release to Qt 5.4 is now available with various fixes and minor improvements...

While Cinnamon 2.6 was tagged a few weeks back, this morning it's finally being officially announced by the Linux Mint team...

Tom Stellard, the AMD employee organizing the X.Org Developers' Conference 2015, has announced new details regarding the event...

The plans for Libinput 1.0 haven't yielded fruit yet, but libinput 0.16 is out this afternoon as the latest version of this input library used both by Wayland and X11 (and potentially Mir moving forward)...

Back in 2014 HP made waves over announcing work on "The Machine" that will be a much more efficient computer design than the status quo and that there'd be a new Linux++ / Carbon operating system. Last year they said in "June 2015" they expected to have out Linux++ for emulating the new hardware design...

Since last week I've been testing the Intel Compute Stick, the quad-core Atom Z3735F Atom powered PC that's a little bigger than the size of an HDMI connector. In this article are some benchmarks of this $150 quad-core + 32GB eMMC + 2GB RAM tiny computer in a variety of benchmarks comparing it to other low-power x86 and ARMv7 hardware.

Valve has shipped a DLC to Dota 2 that appears to be the Source 2 Engine version of the game...

Version 2.6 of the PyPy JIT-compiler-based interpreter for Python has been released. With PyPy 2.6 there's some Python compatibility improvements along with Numpy improvements and preliminary support for a new lightweight stats profiler...

Beginning next week the BQ Aquaris E5 pre-loaded with Ubuntu Phone will become available in Europe...

Fedora 23 might be featuring some new ISO spins of the Linux distribution, including one with the Cinnamon Desktop and a "Netizen" spin focused on "Internet citizenship and citizen engagement."..

Following in the foot steps of Wine 1.7.44, the newest development version of Wine-Staging is now also available...

While for weeks we've already been writing about the forthcoming Linux 4.2 development cycle, including the Intel DRM kernel improvements, Daniel Vetter of Intel OTC has provided a nice overview of what's coming to Linux 4.2 for Intel graphics...

Microsoft announced this morning that Windows 10 will be officially released on 29 July. I'm excited! Only to run benchmarks and see how the performance compares to various Linux distributions.....

The Linux 4.1 kernel is now one step closer to being released: Linux 4.1-rc6 was just announced...

This month on Phoronix there were 227 original news stories and 13 featured length articles / Linux hardware reviews. Here's a look at what was exciting Phoronix readers the most this month...

NVIDIA unveiled the GeForce GTX 980 Ti today in gearing up for Computex Taipei. The GTX 980 Ti is NVIDIA's new flagship gaming GPU, which will set you back $649.99 USD...

While Mesa 10.7 just recently entered development, the Git code is often benchmarked on Phoronix, and with not having delivered any Intel Broadwell Linux graphics tests in some time, here's the latest numbers as of this weekend...

Following FFmpeg in supporting NVENC for NVIDIA's GPU-based video encoding on Linux systems, the forked Libav project has now written up their own NVENC support for H.264 and H.265/HEVC...

The Linux 4.2 kernel cycle that will soon officially commence will be adding support for the EFI System Resource Table (ESRT) in order to allow the updating of UEFI/BIOS on modern systems from the Linux desktop...

For at least some Intel Bay Trail systems, the Linux 4.0 and Linux 4.1 kernels bring measurable performance improvements as shown by this latest round of Phoronix kernel benchmarking.