Phoronix

Mozilla has announced that for Firefox 48 their WebExtensions API is considered to be in a stable state. They encourage developers looking to develop browser add-ons to begin using this new API...

A day after Mozilla released the Firefox 47 Beta, Google has released their beta of the Chrome/Chromium 51 web-browser...

Wine 1.9.9 was released earlier today as the newest development release for this software to run Windows applications/games on Linux, OS X, and other operating systems...

Matthias Clasen announced the release today of GNOME 3.21.1 as the first development release in the road towards GNOME 3.22...

Sway, the i3-compatible tiling window manager for Wayland, is out with a new version...

Timothy Arceri of Collabora has been restoring work on an on-disk shader cache for Intel's open-source Mesa OpenGL driver that was originally started by some of the Intel OTC driver developers...

Raptor Engineering has published new information around their proposed high-performance Talos Secure Workstation that for around $3k is a high-end POWER8 motherboard...

Going along with the work written about yesterday of Igalia Posts Intel vertex_attrib_64bit Mesa Driver Patches, Close To OpenGL 4.1+, the latest ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 patches were published today for the Intel i965 Mesa driver...

Next week is UOS-1605: the latest Ubuntu Online Summit where planning will take place for Ubuntu 16.10, the Yakkety Yak release...

One of the many less advertised features of the Phoronix Test Suite is the ability to re-purpose any available test profile not as a performance metric but simply as part of a stress tool for hammering your hardware or software for deficiencies. The phoronix-test-suite stress-run tool can run any number of the test profiles concurrently and in a random pattern for a defined length of time for fully stressing your system...

The latest motherboard to receive mainline Coreboot support is the Siemens MC_BDX1...

The LLVM Foundation published its plans and budgets this week for 2016. There are a few interesting details when analyzing the information...

More relevant than the ARC PGU DRM driver that was merged this week is a DRM display driver for more common hardware: Allwinner SoCs. The Allwinner DRM driver has been accepted into DRM-Next for in turn landing with Linux 4.7...

For x86 Android users, patches are available for making use of Mesa's LLVMpipe driver in Gallium3D for cases where hardware drivers are not available. This support is reportedly good enough for running Android apps in the absence of proper OpenGL drivers...

For some end-of-month benchmarks and while having a number of graphics cards out prior to being let down by Tomb Raider's Linux benchmark, here is a fresh round of OpenGL tests while using the newest Mesa 11.3-devel code on RadeonSI with AMDGPU/Radeon DRM from Ubuntu 16.04 and then compared to various Kepler/Maxwell graphics cards with the newest NVIDIA Linux driver.

Jan Kurik has passed along word that the Fedora 24 Beta has been delayed and thus the final milestones are also pushed back...

Mesa release manager Emil Velikov has laid out plans to release the next version of Mesa in just over one month...

While the Intel Mesa driver remains at OpenGL 3.3 due to missing FP64 support, that code continues to be worked on by Igalia and Intel's OTC developers. Patches for a related extension, ARB_vertex_attrib_64bit, have also now been published that will clear Intel's Mesa driver requirements for OpenGL 4.1...

David Airlie has pulled the ARC PGU DRM driver into his DRM-Next tree for in turn landing with the Linux 4.7 kernel...

It turns out that Skylake's HD Graphics 510, HD Graphics 535, Iris Graphics 550, and Iris Graphics P555 were missing their open-source driver support from an important piece of the Linux graphics stack...

Running hot off this week's release of Firefox 46 is the beta release issued by Mozilla for Firefox 47...

The results just are in of the 2016 X.Org Foundation elections and the members have voted to become part of the SPI. The foundation thus is basically becoming dissolved to become part of Software in the Public Interest...

While waiting for today's release of Tomb Raider on Linux, for which I just posted various NVIDIA Tomb Raider benchmarks on Ubuntu, I was running some other OpenGL benchmarks...

With Feral Interactive releasing Tomb Raider for Linux, three years after the premiere of the Windows port, many have been wondering about the Linux performance particularly with regards to the graphics driver situation. Here are our initial benchmarks of Feral's port of Tomb Raider on Ubuntu Linux with using NVIDIA graphics. More tests to follow.

PulseAudio gained support for utilizing the Linux kernel's memfd as a transport mechanism as spearheaded by the systemd/KDBUS crew...

As a quick follow-up to this morning's news about Tomb Raider coming for Linux today, the game is now officially available...

Developers working on the Rust programming language today formally announced MIR, but it's not to be confused with Ubuntu's Mir display server...

Epic Games today announced the first preview release for the upcoming Unreal Engine 4.12...

As most Phoronix readers will certainly recall, Microsoft bought out Xamarin, the company co-founded by Miguel de Icaza and focused around Mono technologies, and last month announced they would open-source the Xamarin SDK. Microsoft is making good on their word this week...

While checking on various Linux game benchmarks this morning, I noticed Warsow 2.1 was quietly released at the end of March without much attention. Warsow continues to be a multi-platform, GPL-licensed first-person shooter game powered by the Qfusion engine, a very distant derivative of the Quake II engine...

Jakub Jelinek of Red Hat today announced the official release of the big GCC 6.1 compiler update!..

It's been a while since last having anything to report on with the OpenMandriva Linux distribution, but they wrote in today with news about adding Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) support...

The developers behind KDE's flagship digital painting and animation program have this morning announced the Krita 3.0 Beta...

Feral Interactive has let the cat out of the bag: Tomb Raider is shipping for Linux today!..

Well, today seems to be the day for x86 CPU vendors to push out memory security related features for the Linux kernel... After Intel posted the Secure Guard Extensions driver for Linux, AMD has come out with a patch-set for "Secure Memory Encryption" (SME) that looks like it will be a hardware feature of Zen...

Bryce Harrington has laid out plans for shipping the next major version of Wayland (v1.11) around the end of May and of course joined by Weston 1.11...

Intel is finally offering up a kernel driver it's seeking to mainline for providing support for Secure Guard Extensions (SGX)...

It's an exciting day for users of Nouveau, the open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics stack, assuming you have a GK104 or GK110 GPU...

With having some new Corsair USB 3.0 Flash Voyager flash drives around, I decided to run some fresh Linux file-system benchmarks on them to see how various file-systems are performing on low-cost USB flash drives.

One week after releasing Ubuntu 16.10 "Xenial Xerus" as the newest Long-Term Support release by Canonical, Ubuntu 16.10 is now officially in development...

Version 1.10 of the Nginx high-performance web server was released this morning...

For the past week has been a somewhat active mailing list thread about the Qt Project being misrepresented on The Qt Company's qt.io web-site...

LibreELEC, the recent fork of OpenELEC by a number of the developers for that project building an OS around XBMC/Kodi, has issued their v7.0 release...

Intel quietly announced last week the publishing of the complete source code around the firmware / real-time operating system for the Arduino 101 and Genuino 101 boards...

Stephan Mueller has published his second version of the in-development patches of the Linux Random Number Generator (LRNG) that seeks to provide a new, drop-in replacement for Linux's /dev/random implementation...

If you aren't excited by today's Firefox 46 release with GTK3 support but happen to be a fan of the up-and-coming, multi-platform Vivaldi web-browser, there is a new release on that front too...

One of the less talked about GNU projects is GNU remotecontrol. GNU's Remotecontrol project is about being a web-based interface to IP-enabled thermostats and similar building automation devices, but is primarily about IP-enabled thermostats...

Now that the Radeon Open Compute platform reached v1.0, if you are wanting to try out this ROCm platform with a Volcanic Islands GPU here is a guide...

Firefox 46 won't be formally announced until the morning, but in usual fashion the source and various platform binaries have appeared this evening. Firefox 46 is another significant update from the folks at Mozilla...

At the end of March was the announcement about Ubuntu's user-space coming to Windows 10 via the Windows Subsystem for Linux implemented in the Windows kernel. There's a new Microsoft blog post explaining more of the inner-workings of WSL...