Phoronix

With this week having looked at the state of Ubuntu 15.10 and Fedora 23 on a brand new Intel Xeon E3 v5 "Skylake" system, next up for testing was CentOS 7 1511...

KDE Applications 15.12 was officially released today as the last major KDE component update for 2015...

At the time of writing, the most popular laptop on Amazon.com in the US is the Toshiba Satellite C55-C5241 followed by the ASUS F555LA-AB31. If you are in the market for a new, sub-$500 laptop this holiday season, here are my findings when testing both of these popular laptops under Ubuntu Linux.

For the past few months a developer at Samsung has been working on VA-API support for the Nouveau Gallium3D driver. Those patches today are up to their fifth revision...

Going back many years, SELinux would receive much criticism over slowing down the system's performance and causing an assortment of other problems. In the early days of Fedora it would often be wise to disable Security Enhanced Linux, but in the past few years it's been in good shape. With modern hardware, is there much of a performance impact in keeping SELinux enabled?..

The Unity 3D folks have released some updated WebGL benchmark results for showing what web browsers are doing the best for accelerated graphics...

While many Linux distributions are in the process of stopping to support the KDE Plasma 4 desktop, FreeBSD isn't yet ready to make the move to the "KDE 5" packages...

While the LLVM Clang compiler has been working on ARMv8.1 support since earlier this year, the developers focusing on GCC have been working on it still but the first bits have been committed to trunk this morning...

As of earlier this month in Mesa Git is finally OpenGL 4.0 and 4.1 support for the Radeon R600g driver for pre-GCN hardware, albeit the subset capable of advertising GL4 compliance is right now just Cypress and Cayman. I took this opportunity to run some fresh Mesa Git benchmarks on an AMD Cayman GPU and a third run when enabling DRI3...

The PostgreSQL 9.5 release change-log was recently updated in Git to reflect all of the latest changes for this next version of this database server due out in 2016...

Tails, the privacy-minded Live USB/DVD/SD Linux distribution, released version 1.8 on Tuesday...

Intel's Jordan Justen has sent out the Mesa patches that would enable OpenGL ES 3.1 support by default for "Gen 8" graphics hardware and newer...

Here are some fresh tests of Fedora 23 with the GCC 5.3.1 compiler when running a series of benchmarks after the binaries were compiled each time with an assortment of optimization levels...

A few days ago I wrote about building an Intel Skylake Xeon E3 v5 "Skylake" system and my experiences under Ubuntu. Here's a few notes about this Xeon E3 1245 v5 system when trying Fedora 23 Linux, along with some comparative performance benchmarks...

Mozilla Firefox 43.0 is now officially available, but the GTK3 tool-kit support isn't enabled by default in the official Linux binaries...

With Greg Kroah-Hartman being done with maintaining the Linux 4.2 kernel, Canonical's Kernel Team has stepped up to provide maintenance...

The first development milestone release of Phoronix Test Suite 6.2-Gamvik is now available for testing on all supported platforms...

With ReactOS 0.4 RC1 having been finally released, I decided to spend a few minutes this morning trying out this open-source operating system that's still striving for binary compatibility with Windows programs and drivers.

Emil Velikov has just released Mesa 11.1!..

Collabora today announced the release of Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) in cooperation with ownCloud...

AMD this morning is lifting an embargo on GPUOpen, a new effort for embracing open-source with their Linux drivers...

The latest feature to be added to the GTK+ tool-kit in the path towards GNOME 3.20 is a new concept called Gadgets...

Canonical's David Henningsson wrote a blog post today explaining why it's taken until this year for Linux to properly support 2.1 speaker systems (two speakers and a subwoofer) with ALSA and PulseAudio...

ReactOS, the open-source operating system aiming for binary compatibility with Windows programs and drivers, is finally closer to its next big release: v0.4...

While Linux 4.5 is set to receive the DRM changes for supporting open-source 3D on the Raspberry Pi and in user-space those bits are settling down in the VC4 Gallium3D driver, the game isn't over and there still is more work ahead before this open-source Raspberry Pi 3D stack will replace the closed-source RPi 3D driver...

Just two weeks after the release of Enlightenment 0.20 is now its first point release...

With the upcoming Linux 4.5 kernel cycle there's going to be open-source 3D acceleration for the Raspberry Pi via the VC4 DRM driver that was originally added for Linux 4.4..

It's been a while since last having anything to report on about DRM driver changes for Samsung's Exynos ARM SoCs, but that's changed in preparation for Linux 4.5...

Rob Clark submitted his MSM-Next DRM driver changes today in preparation for the Linux 4.5 kernel cycle...

CentOS 7 1511 is now available as the project's third release derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7...

While Firefox 43.0 won't be officially released until tomorrow, you can already find this exciting open-source web browser update available via their mirrors...

For those curious about how Intel's laptop/ultrabook CPUs have evolved over the past few generations and whether it's worthwhile upgrading from one generation to the next, here's a fresh Linux laptop comparison with seven different laptops being tested on Ubuntu 15.10 x86_64 and comparing these laptops from Sandy Bridge to Broadwell on a variety of workloads while also doing some performance-per-Watt measurements.

It's been a while since last having anything to report on with Haiku OS, the BeOS inspired open-source operating system. One minor advancement to mention today is they have just landed optional GCC5 compiler support packages...

Version 0.9 of AppStream is now available. As a refresher, AppStream is a FreeDesktop.org specification backed by multiple major Linux distributions as a cross-distribution effort of standardizing Linux component metadata...

Intel Broxton hardware now has open-source OpenCL compute support via the Open-Source Technology Center's Beignet project...

Hans Wennborg has laid out plans to officially release LLVM 3.8 in February...

Linus Torvalds has just tagged the fifth weekly release candidate for the Linux 4.4 kernel...

Yesterday's article titled Are Open-Source Games and Community Game Engines Fading Away? continues to be one of the most-discussed threads in the forums this weekend...

Now that Xeon Skylake processors are becoming easier to find at major Internet retailers along with supported motherboards, here are the parts I used for assembling an Intel Xeon E3 1245 v5 Skylake system if you are interested in doing a similar Linux workstation build. While my complete Xeon E3 1245 v5 Linux review will come shortly, enclosed are also some initial Ubuntu benchmarks as well.

It's been just one week since the last beta update of Kodi 16 but its development steam is sticking to the "release early, release often" and this morning shipped beta #4...

As a lot of people were interested in my basement server room remodel earlier this year for Linux benchmarking (and the sixth month redux) as well as subsequent updates about a very high performance fan for air cooling the systems during the cooler seasons, here's another quick update...

As another year comes to a close, it's getting time for all of our annual recaps. For those curious what the most popular Linux stories so far have been in 2015, here's a look...

This past week my main router I've been using for the past three years failed on me (the ASUS RT-AC66U) so I quickly set out to replace this router with a superior model that can better suit my needs today. The router I ended up going for was the expensive ASUS RT-AC88U, but so far it's working out very well...

If you are thinking of buying a low-capacity, affordable solid-state drive (SSD) as a stocking stuffer this holiday season or just looking for a new SSD without breaking the bank, here are benchmarks from eight different low-cost solid-state drives done on Ubuntu Linux with the EXT4 file-system.

The fourth weekly release candidate to Wine 1.8 is now available...

If Intel OTC developer Rodrigo Vivi has his way, the power-saving PSR functionality may finally be enabled by default for the Intel DRM graphics driver...

Is it just me or are open-source games faltering? While open-source, community-based games really aren't mainstream and really never took off, it seems these days there's a lack of good open-source games more so than in past years as well as diminishing open-source game engine projects...

While it's becoming increasingly harder to find VIA x86 hardware out in the wild and it's been a long while since last writing anything about VIA x86 Linux support, an independent developer is hoping to revive the OpenChrome VIA kernel mode-setting driver and ideally wants to see it mainlined in the Linux kernel...

If you are building a new system around an Intel Xeon Skylake processor that features integrated graphics, you may have some out-of-the-box issues with current stable Linux distributions...

Intel has already queued up a lot of DRM graphics driver changes for Linux 4.5 and now they've sent out a DRM-Next pull request for another serving of updates for this next kernel cycle...