Phoronix

Today's post by the new Phoronix intern is looking at the state of various new (and experimental) features within Mozilla's Firefox web-browser. Covered in this article is the Electrolysis e10s multi-process model, Encrypted Media Extensions, Media Source Extensions, Skia, off-main thread compositing, and sandboxing.

Wine 1.7.43 was released on Friday and following it this weekend was the latest Wine-Staging update that re-bases atop the latest upstream Wine while carrying extra, experimental features like DXVA2, CUDA 7, and various other features...

The RandR components are updated for version 1.5.0 to take advantage of new functionality in the X.Org Server...

PC-BSD 10.1.2 was released today as the latest quarterly update to the FreeBSD-derived operating system...

GNOME 3.18 is under heavy development and already thus far this cycle we've seen GTK+ do away with Windows XP support and integrate other toolkit improvements along with other work like in-progress file manager improvements. Here's more of the GNOME 3.18 work items to get excited about...

Nearly one month ago AMD published the open-source code to their new "AMDGPU" kernel driver and the necessary user-space driver changes too. That code is continuing to mature for the Linux 4.2 kernel and for supporting the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver that code is continuing to be polished...

For users of the Freedreno Gallium3D driver for having unofficial open-source Qualcomm graphics support, the Adreno 306 is the latest graphics processor now supported...

Ubuntu enthusiasts in Europe have been able to buy the first Ubuntu phone for some time now, the BQ Aquaris, while starting now Chinese developers are able to buy the second official Ubuntu phone: the Meizu Ubuntu MX4...

For DragonFlyBSD users out there, the swap device with the latest Git kernel can now be encrypted...

As of this weekend, openSUSE Tumbleweed is now defaulting to the KDE Plasma 5.3 experience alongside the KDE Applications 15.04.1 packages...

While Oculus Rift has seen Linux support up to now, the Facebook-owned VR company has now suspended Linux and OS X development to better focus on Windows...

The release candidate for the upcoming Wayland 1.8 is now available...

With the latest Mesa patch series by Chih-Wei Huang of Android-x86, the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver is to be enabled...

The next major KDE Applications update, v15.08, is planned for release on 19 August...

Rust 1.0 has been officially released!..

Wine 1.7.43 was released this morning as the newest development version of Wine...

With the open-source OpenCL news this week about Beignet working on OpenCL 2.0 support and Intel Cherryview now supporting OpenCL, I decided to see how the open-source OpenCL support is shaping up for the soon-to-be-released Fedora 22...

Spec Ops: The Line is the latest Steam on Linux title, however, not everyone will be happy with the Linux port of this third-person shooter...

The beta of Qt 5.5 has finally been released...

In complementing this morning's early Fedora 22 Workstation benchmarks, here's some numbers in looking at Fedora 22's GNOME Shell 3.16 desktop under an X.Org Server as well as Wayland...

Most often when talking of new OpenGL 4 extensions in Mesa it tends to be regarding the Intel Mesa driver given they're the company investing the most into the Linux graphics stack, followed by the Radeon and Noveau drivers. However, this week in Mesa is some love to the fallback/debugging software rasterizers...

For those curious how the performance of Fedora 22 is shaking out, here's some early benchmarks comparing the Fedora Workstation 21 and Fedora Workstation 22 (with all updates as of the final freeze) in various workloads...

One of the newest modules added to Qt Labs is QtGamepad, a module inspired in part by the W3's HTML5 Gamepad API...

A new release of the GNU Guix functional package manager is now available...

KDBUS, the new in-kernel IPC mechanism modeled after D-Bus, wasn't accepted for Linux 4.1. Since the end of the Linux 4.1 merge window, the debate over KDBUS continued, but in the past two weeks the discussion settled down...

LLVM's Clang compiler now has support for ARM's v8.1a architecture revision of 64-bit ARM...

While Wayland 1.8 is coming along, along with the Weston 1.8 update, it looks like the libweston functionality will be staved off for another release...

With Mesa 10.6 due to be released in early June, our usual performance comparisons of this new Mesa 3D version will come. To get our latest round of Mesa open-source graphics driver benchmarking kicked off, here are benchmarks of Intel's Iris Graphics when comparing Mesa 10.5 and 10.6 Git atop Ubuntu 15.04.

The last planned point release in the GNOME 3.16 series is now available...

Just this morning the major VENOM security vulnerability was made public while a few hours later, a kernel developer has gone public with four "remote packet of death" vulnerabilities affecting a mainline Linux kernel WLAN driver...

While writing this morning about Intel Cherryview support being added to Beignet, I also noticed Intel developers have been quietly fleshing out OpenCL 2.0 support for Linux...

Fedora 22 is now under its final freeze with planned availability before month's end. I've been running Fedora 22 on various development systems and in the benchmarking farm at Phoronix to great success.

Intel's been working on open-source Linux support for Cherryview for more than one year while finally one of the last pieces of the hardware enablement puzzle has landed: OpenCL support for Cherryview...

The latest high-profile security vulnerability affecting open-source software and impacting mass amounts of systems worldwide is dubbed VENOM...

Qt 5.5 has been running behind schedule for some time while now The Qt Company is trying to get it back on track and to officially ship Qt 5.5 by the end of next month...

NVIDIA announced the release yesterday of the 346.72 driver, which is their latest binary Linux update in the long-lived 346 branch...

DNF 1.0 was released this week ahead of the Fedora 22 debut later this month where it will replace Yum by default as the package manager. In my testing of DNF on Fedora 22 and earlier releases, it's worked out quite well, but there's one issue that still nags me about Dandified Yum...

The Flash-Friendly File-System is moving forward with its plans for implementing file-system level encryption support...

I've found out from various people in the know that AMD has assembled a "tiger team" to tackle outstanding Catalyst driver issues. This tiger team isn't Linux specific, but Linux driver issues will be fully evaluated and tackled by this new group of driver specialists...

Today marks the final freeze for Fedora 22 with plans to officially release this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution update later in May...

Foresight Linux was a great distribution back in the day for showcasing the latest GNOME components, but after a decade of work, the project is shutting down...

It's been a few weeks since the last development release of Phoronix Test Suite 5.8 while out this afternoon is Phoronix Test Suite 5.8 Milestone 3...

This summer on Phoronix we'll be welcoming Eric Griffith to the team, a student from the California University of Pennsylvania. Eric will be an intern at Phoronix via his journalism program at the university. Eric has already written about his new laptop with Linux and he'll be writing many more Linux/open-source articles on Phoronix over the next few months. Please join me in welcoming him to his summer internship. He's prepared a few remarks to get started...

AMD has gone back and managed to provide open-source Linux users with support for the VCE 1.0 video encode engine...

Mozilla Firefox 38 is being officially released today and with this open-source web browser update comes new functionality...

One of the latest commits to the xorg-server that's seen relatively few commits this development cycle is support for smooth scrolling with XWayland...

The current plan is to branch Mesa 10.6 from Git master on Friday, which would put the official 10.6.0 release in early June...

The day is coming where DNF is replacing Yum as the default package manager on Fedora Linux. DNF 1.0 was just released today to mark the point of stability and it being ready to take over Yum's responsibilities with the upcoming Fedora 22 release...

Axel Davy has added support to Mesa's EGL code for supporting DRM Render-Nodes and with that supporting DRI_PRIME when using Wayland...

With the transformation of a basement into a large Linux server room (50+ computers), I previously wrote about the sub-$50 4U ATX server case and 2U micro-ATX server case commonly used for housing the many Linux systems in this lab running continuous performance benchmarks. For the EATX systems, here's the server chassis I've gone with and experienced great results out of this EATX/SSI rackmount chassis that can be found online for as little as $80 USD.