Phoronix

The latest version of the Mesa DRM library (libdrm) is now available and it's a fairly important release...

Version 16.09 of NixOS is now available, the Linux distribution focused on being a "purely functional distribution" and built atop the Nix package manager...

Ingo Molnar was prompt as usual in submitting his various pull requests for the opening of the Linux 4.9 merge window, including the scheduler changes...

The x86/platform updates for the Linux 4.9 kernel that entered development on Sunday is bringing initial support for the Mellanox systems platform...

In the months ahead the Linux kernel should start receiving the work out of the "make-wifi-fast" initiative for improving WiFi reliability and performance...

NetBeans 8.2 was released today as the newest version of the Java-focused integrated development environment currently developed by Oracle but still pursuing to become an Apache project...

With the forthcoming Linux 4.9 kernel, x86_64 builds will support CONFIG_VMAP_STACK where kernel stacks are allocated with vmalloc_node for greater security...

Version 2.0 of the DNF package manager is now available in release candidate form as a major update to this Yum successor. Meanwhile, DNF-Plugins-Core reached version 1.0 for testing...

The EFI material is one of the early pull requests for the Linux 4.9 kernel and its bringing a new driver via EFI_TEST...

The past few kernel releases there's been a redesign of CPUFreq and P-State code for being able to make use of the kernel's scheduler utilization data by these CPU frequency scaling drivers. That work also led to the introduction of the Schedutil governor. Work along this line has continued for Linux 4.9...

Hot off the release of the official upstream Linux 4.8 kernel, the GNU Linux-libre 4.8-gnu kernel is now available as the deblobbed code that strips out support for loading non-free firmware and other references to non-free kernel support...

The Linux 4.8 kernel is now officially available...

If all goes according to plan, the Linux 4.8 kernel will be officially released this afternoon by Linus Torvalds...

Beginning next year, Mesa developers so far appear favorable to moving towards a date-based versioning concept...

While September was very exciting for Linux users, October is looking to be even more exciting with several open-source/Linux milestones expected before month's end...

We have already covered some of the interesting talks from this year's systemd conference including how to use it for application sandboxing, a new wireless daemon coming to replace wpa_supplicant, and BUS1 is on the way. But saving the best for last in another presentation to watch this weekend for those interested in systemd: Lennart Poettering's state of the union address for systemd and a look ahead to 2017 features...

The start of a new month means the ritual of looking at the latest Steam survey data. September 2016 brought a small increase to the number of Linux gamers...

This week word of Mozilla's "Project Mortar" surfaced, which aims to explore the possibility of bringing the PDFium library and Pepper API based Flash plugin into Firefox. This project is being led by various Mozilla engineers...

Wine 1.9.20 is now available as the latest bi-weekly development release of this cross-platform program to run Windows programs/games on other operating systems...

The past few months we've written a few times about the Dolphin Emulator working on a Vulkan back-end. Dolphin is an open-source project providing cross-platform emulation for Nintendo's GameCube and Wii games. That back-end has now been merged to the mainline code-base...

Another one of the interesting systemd.conf 2016 presentations in Berlin was a talk by Djalal Harouni of EndoCode for using systemd to carry out application sandboxing...

During past Khronos press briefings about OpenGL/Vulkan and in other communications, while Vulkan is the organization's big graphics API focus, it was implied during these conversations that OpenGL would continue to march to its own beat and evolve as needed. While OpenGL continues to be significantly used by cross-platform graphics application/game developers, it turns out there might not be a new official version for a long time - if ever...

Some of the exciting news this week was Unity releasing their Vulkan renderer in preview form and this initial debut did contain Linux support. There are now some unofficial Unity demos built for Linux with the Vulkan renderer enabled...

September was another busy month and here's a look at the most popular articles on Phoronix for the month of my 267 original news items and 17 featured Linux reviews/articles...

In addition to the BUS1 presentation, also exciting from the systemd.conf 2016 conference is a thorough walkthrough of a new wireless daemon for Linux being developed by Intel's Open-Source Technology Center...

BUS1 has been in development as an in-kernel IPC mechanism building off the failed KDBUS project. An "RFC" will soon be sent out to Linux kernel developers about BUS1 and the subject will be discussed at next month's Kernel Summit...

While Linux 4.9 will not officially open for development until next week, the DRM-Next code is ready to roll with all major feature work having been committed by the different open-source Direct Rendering Manager drivers. In this article is some preliminary testing of this DRM-Next code as of 29 September when testing various AMD GPUs with the Radeon and AMDGPU DRM drivers.

Purism, the startup behind the Librem laptops with a focus on free software and user privacy/freedom, still has their minds set on coming up with a GNU/Linux smartphone...

Fedora 25 should have good support for the open-source Vulkan Linux drivers (particularly if it lands the next Mesa release) while Fedora 24 users can now more easily play with the latest Mesa Git RADV and Intel ANV Vulkan drivers via a new repository...

Blender 2.78 is now officially released to end out September for this open-source, cross-platform 3D/animation program...

The final Ubuntu 16.10 Beta for "Yakkety Yak" was released this week and we found its performance doesn't differ much from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (with the exception of the newer graphics stack) while here are some results comparing it to other modern Linux distributions...

Sean Harmer of KDAB is organizing work around some upcoming "major Qt 3D features" for the open-source toolkit...

This week marks three years since Valve publicly announced Steam Machines, SteamOS, and the Steam Controller...

Peter Hutterer has announced the release of a new version of xf86-input-libinput, the X.Org DDX driver that makes use of libinput for input handling on the X.Org Server...

Following the mailing list talk over the past two days about doing the next Mesa release, plans are being discussed for releasing at the end of October and it might have just got a whole lot more exciting...

Yesterday I published some macOS 10.2 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS benchmarks from a Mac Mini and MacBook Air systems. For those curious if BSDs can outperform macOS Sierra on Apple hardware, I tested the MacBook Air with FreeBSD 11.0 compared to the Linux and macOS results on that Core i5 system. Here are those results.

Budgie-Remix, the unofficial Ubuntu spin making use of the Budgie Desktop, has released its 16.10 Beta 2 milestone following this week's Yakkety Yak Beta 2 release...

Nmap 7.30 is now available as the project's latest stable release after a long run of beta versions incorporating new features into this open-source network mapper...

Rust 1.12 has been released as the newest version of this popular programming language with a focus on "fast, reliable, productive: pick three."..

Building off Phoronix Test Suite 6.6 that was officially released earlier this month, shipping today is the first and only planned point release to the 6.6-Loppa series...

A few days ago I posted my first Core i7 6800K benchmarks under Ubuntu Linux compared to various other CPUs. Out of requests from some premium members, here are some straight-forward memory clocking tests of the i7-6800K on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with the Linux 4.8 kernel. Tests were done from dual-channel DDR4 up through quad-channel DDR4 at DDR4-3000MHz.

Seven years after Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II launched on Windows, the game is rolling out today to Linux along with Chaos Rising and Retribution...

Unity today rolled out their first public preview of their Vulkan renderer for this popular cross-platform game engine...

The PostgreSQL 9.6 database server is now officially released as the project's latest feature release...

Marek Olšák is looking at using the jemalloc memory allocator for faster GLSL compilation and ultimately could redirect all malloc/calloc/realloc/free calls in Mesa to using jemalloc...

Given yesterday's Ubuntu 16.10 final beta release ahead of the official "Yakkety Yak" debut in two weeks, I decided to run some benchmarks of Ubuntu 16.10 compared to Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS on the same system plus also throwing in the Intel Clear Linux distribution given it tends to be one of the most performant...

AMD developer Marek Olšák initiated the discussion about calling for the next Mesa release to succeed version 12.0. Regardless, it's looking like it will be another release off their three-month cadence...

SDL 2.0 point releases have ranged from being a few months apart to as much as two years apart. Fortunately, SDL 2.0.5 is now being put together for release just nine months after SDL 2.0.4...

Landing over night in Mesa Git is support for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver with the ARB_query_buffer_object extension. Now on Mesa Git that means there is just one extension away before this AMD GCN OpenGL driver supports the 4.4 specification...

If you have been put off from ordering a Steam Controller for your SteamOS/Linux gaming system due to the $50 USD price-tag, it's been marked down to $35...