Phoronix

Matt Fleming at Intel sent out the set of patches he intends to submit as the queue of EFI changes for what will become the Linux 4.7 kernel. He noted of this queue, "this is probably the biggest EFI pull ever sent, and there quite a few different topics covered."..

The Free Software Foundation today announced their evaluations of major code repository-hosting services per the standards of the GNU Ethical Criteria for Code Repositories...

GNOME's Epiphany web-browser has done its first development release in the GNOME 3.21 series, which is culminating with the GNOME 3.22 release this September...

Following the early look yesterday at Cinnamon 3.0 when tagged in Git, the Linux Mint crew today officially announced the Cinnamon 3.0 desktop release...

The OBS Studio open-source software for screencasting and recording is now available as a major update...

While originally Canonical was planning for Vulkan support in Mir by Ubuntu 16.04, that didn't pan out and the support for Vulkan continues to slip...

The first tagged development milestone of Phoronix Test Suite 6.4-Hasvik is now available for testing...

Tom Stellard of AMD has laid out his release plans for shipping the first point release to LLVM 3.8 this summer...

Linus Torvalds announced the release of the Linux 4.6-rc5 kernel a brief time ago...

The GNOME3-forked Cinnamon Desktop is ready for its 3.0 milestone...

Fedora developers appear to be among those analyzing Intel's Clear Linux distribution for the performance optimizations made...

I just realized this morning it's been four years since I was out at Valve HQ learning the early, exclusive details about their Steam Linux plans (and what would become SteamOS and Steam Machines) from Gabe Newell and their Linux cabal...

In continuation of yesterday's article about the Radeon vs. Modesetting X.Org DDX drivers when tested from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, here are the 2D performance benchmark results for those interested when it comes down to the xf86-video-ati's EXA acceleration versus its GLAMOR option as well as the only 2D acceleration offered by xf86-video-modesetting via GLAMOR...

In seeking to address the bug fallout from the major Kodi 16 release that happened back in February, the Kodi 16.1 point release is now available...

If you are a member of the X.Org Foundation and haven't voted already in this year's board elections, you darn well better put it on your TODO list this Sunday as the voting process is ending soon...

For those using the popular, multi-platform open-source FileZilla FTP client, a new major release is available...

One of the most recurring requests this week from Phoronix readers were for doing some ZFS file-system tests on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Here are some basic results using a single SSD.

Following the quick DRI2 vs. DRI3 rendering tests with Radeon on R600g, I also did tests on the same system of the xf86-video-ati vs. xf86-video-modesetting DDX drivers...

QEMU 2.6-RC3 was released this week and QEMU 2.6.0 should be officially released at the beginning of May. Here's a look at some of the new features coming to this important piece of the Linux open-source virtualization stack...

There's another weekly point release of the Vulkan high performance graphics API...

Google announced this week the participating student projects for this year's Summer of Code...

The NVIDIA 364.19 Linux graphics driver was released today as the first stable release in the NVIDIA 364 driver series...

The Linux Foundation was hosting their "Vault" Linux storage and file-system conference the past two days in Raleigh, North Carolina...

OpenIndiana 2016.04 has been released as the newest version of this operating system based on Illumos and originally derived from OpenSolaris...

My NICs appear to enjoy sleeping in with the mornings being particularly brutal on the network hardware...

While some distributions like Fedora have opted to enable DRI3 by default with their (mostly Intel) X.Org driver packages, Ubuntu 16.04 didn't pursue such behavior. But that just means with an easy xorg.conf tweak you can generally get better performance unless you happen to hit one of the few remaining DRI3-related issues...

Fedora Linux has moved towards demoting 32-bit images and Fedora Cloud was the first official flavor of Fedora Linux that will no longer be spinning 32-bit install images post F23...

Matthew Garrett has taken time away from working on his new SATA power management patches for the Linux kernel to share his thoughts on Ubuntu's Snap packaging format and its security...

On top of many other new features and various improvements to GCC 6 is also maturing OpenACC 2.0 support...

Mark Shuttleworth has posted a very short blog post where he seems to reveal the Ubuntu 16.10 codename...

Since the recent news about the Linux kernel being in worse shape than some people imagine, there's already been some downstream corrective action taking place. Clear Linux is one of the distributions already patching/tweaking their kernel for better scheduler performance but so far we haven't heard anything from the Ubuntu camp. Fortunately, there's been others working on their own solutions...

Ceph 10.2.0 "Jewel" was announced today as their latest long-term stable release. Notable about Ceph 10.2.0 is that CephFS has been declared stable and production ready...

For those running a Linux system powered by an AMD "Carrizo" APU, there's an updated firmware blob out today to benefit your UVD video decoding experience...

Libinput 1.3 has stepped closer to being released with today's RC2 release. Libinput 1.3 will further enhance input handling for Wayland, X.Org, and Mir powered systems...

Daniel Vetter of Intel OTC sent in another round of feature updates for DRM-Next to in turn premiere with Linux 4.7...

For those looking at making Python code execute even faster, PyPy 5.1 is now available as one of the alternative Python interpreters...

Firebird 3.0 was released this week as the newest version of this popular, open-source relational database system...

With today's release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Snappy package management is being more broadly supported across the Ubuntu ecosystem. This complementary packaging format to Debian packages for Ubuntu will allow third-party applications to be more easily updated. One of the other organizations already on board with using the Snap packaging format is Mozilla...

There are both Radeon/AMDGPU and Intel DRM driver fixes queued up for Linux Git this week and will find their way into Linux 4.6-rc5...

Ubuntu 16.04 "Xenial Xerus" has been released as the newest Long-Term Support distribution from Canonical...

The official release of NetworkManager 1.2 has finally happened...

The latest from AMD/RTG's GPUOpen initiative is the release of ROC 1.0...

Last week I published benchmarks showing Nouveau's "boost" patches offering much performance potential compared to the current state of the open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver but generally still not enough performance to compete with NVIDIA's proprietary Linux graphics driver. I've since carried out some fresh open-source AMD Linux results for reference to see how the NVIDIA vs. AMD GPU open-source speeds are comparing.

Those working on the KDE Neon initiative for making it more easy to consume the bleeding-edge KDE software have today announced their User Edition Tech Preview...

While Ubuntu 16.04 is being prepped for release, Fedora developers are preparing for their beta release of Fedora 24...

A day ahead of the launch of Ubuntu 16.04 as the sixth Long Term Support release, Canonical is talking about the new features for this release codenamed the Xenial Xerus...

Marek Olšák's latest big patch series has landed...

This week the Khronos Group released the provisional specification of OpenCL 2.2 and SPIR-V 1.1 while today from the Aviation Electronics Europe in Munich they announced the release of he OpenGL SC 2.0 specification...

Karol Herbst has sent out his latest set of 37 patches for trying to improve volting and clocking on NVIDIA GeForce 400 "Fermi" GPUs and newer...

AMD this afternoon announced CodeXL 2.0 as the newest version of their GPU debugger, CPU/GPU profiler, and static kernel analyzer. CodeXL 2.0 is a big leap forward and is now open-source!..