Phoronix

Back in 2013 the Jailhouse Hypervisor was announced as a partitioning hypervisor that's lighter-weight than KVM. Last year saw the release of Jailhouse 0.1 and finally coming out today is the next update: Jailhouse 0.5...

While Linux distributions like Fedora and Mageia have adopted predictable/persistent network interface names, Ubuntu has not. However, that is looking to change and it might also be the case for upstream Debian...

Intel's Open-Source Technology Center continues to hire new developers for working on their Linux graphics stack. Back in 2013, Intel had 20~30 full-time Linux graphics driver developers and since then that number has only risen...

Per the latest World Wine News (WWN), USB support for Wine is being discussed yet again but as of right now it's not clear if any new work will materialize as a result of the latest discussions...

The Khronos Group today announced the official release of the SYCL 1.2 specification. SYCL is the Khronos Group's single-source heterogeneous programming language that serves as an abstraction layer for utilizing OpenCL while writing standard C++ code...

Intel as of late seems quite set on seeing OpenGL ES 3.1 becoming a reality for Mesa in the near-term...

In our routine compiler benchmarks looking at LLVM/Clang vs. GCC, the performance has certainly gotten tight over the years but one of the areas where there's still been a large difference are in workloads that can make use of OpenMP for multi-threading. Fortunately, Clang has finally finished up its OpenMP 3.1 support...

A Red Hat developer mentioned to us at Phoronix that they're seeing "drastically improved battery life" in some cases with the Linux 4.1 kernel to the extent that it's up to 2~4 hours of extra battery life with the kernel upgrade to Git. I've since started some fresh Linux laptop battery tests.

Linus Torvalds just announced the release of the Linux 4.1-rc3 kernel, which he's called the "Mother's Day Sunday release" for those celebrating this holiday...

This is a guest post by Tom Li, a Phoronix reader wishing to share his views on the increasing problems of free/open-source software public mailing lists being flooded with spam and other garbage. There are some extreme situations where there can be "flooding attacks" of list subscribers receiving thousands of mailing list messages per day from attackers. Tom is hoping the open-source community can come up with better solutions to fend off this problem...

While there isn't much to see yet out of the current Ubuntu 15.10 "Wily Werewolf" state compared to the recent Ubuntu 15.04 release, the daily ISOs have now begun for Ubuntu Wily...

With Canonical having hosted the Ubuntu Online Summit this past week to lay out and plan early details of Ubuntu 15.10, here's a recap of our Phoronix coverage over the past week for their next major update due to ship in October...

A Phoronix reader recently asked whether Fedora developers have yet enabled F2FS file-system support within their packaged kernel. While I didn't mention it before, yes, they ended up enabling support for the Flash-Friendly File-System...

Earlier this month we wrote about DragonFlyBSD having experimental Broadwell graphics support and now this updated DRM driver code has landed in the BSD distribution. Besides supporting the new Intel Broadwell HD/Iris Graphics, there's also a number of other new features...

Julien Cristau of Debian has released updated versions of some of the older X.Org DDX drivers...

As an update to the post last night about the Phoronix Forums going through a major upgrade, the forums should be running though more tweaks and alterations are still ongoing this weekend...

For early adopters of Fedora 22 that have been missing out on the packages provided by the third-party RPM Fusion repository, they have started rolling out their support for this next Fedora Linux release...

KDE Frameworks 5.10 was released on Friday as the latest add-on libraries complementing Qt within the KDE world...

The Phoronix Forums were just upgraded.....

While I found Fedora 21 to be the best release yet from Fedora (Core) and Fedora 22 is looking to be even better, there's still blemishes as with any Linux distribution...

Martin Gräßlin just shared that with the forthcoming KDE Plasma 5.4 update, KWin will serve as a proper Wayland compositor!..

For over one year we've been looking forward to Crytek bringing CryENGINE to Linux with an OpenGL renderer. That was announced back at GDC 2014 and we haven't heard much lately, but finally there's an update and the Linux support is expected soon...

Months after working on direct state access support in Mesa, Fredrik Höglund of KDE has finished off this OpenGL 4.5 feature for core Mesa...

Mir, Canonical's display server for Unity 8 that's currently in use by Ubuntu Touch, is now under development for its next major version...

Musl has long aimed at being a lightweight, simple, free, and correct libc library. However, hindering its adoption has been out-of-tree patches required against GCC for supporting the Musl C library. Fortunately, Musl support has now been merged into GCC...

Back when the GNOME 2 desktop was forked in 2011 as the MATE Desktop Environment, there were polarized views from the Linux community how this fork of GNOME2 could survive and what sort of future it would have. Four years later, MATE is still being maintained, there's distributions shipping with MATE as the default desktop, and the project is managing to stay relevant...

While Snappy packaging on Ubuntu is only a few months old, it's generating a lot of interest and will eventually replace .deb packages on Ubuntu. One of the interesting features to be worked on going forward for Snappy is deduplication support...

Another one of the interesting discussions this week at the Ubuntu Online Summit was with regards to plans for merging off of Python 2 and providing Python 3 by default over the next year, in time for the long-term support release of Ubuntu 16.04...

With Kodi 15 coming along, the OpenELEC team has released their first beta of the next version of their multimedia focused Linux distribution...

While Ubuntu 15.04 marked the point of switching from Upstart to systemd, Ubuntu Linux doesn't currently make use of all systemd functionality, such as networkd. However, at least for networkd, that soon could be changing...

The Lubuntu derivative of Ubuntu that traditionally has been powered by the LXDE desktop environment is in the process of transitioning to LXQt...

The third beta to VirtualBox 5.0 is now available. VirtualBox 5.0 is a big step forward to Oracle's virtualization software and adds PV support to Windows/Linux guests, XHCI controller support for USB 3.0 devices, bi-directional drag-and-drop to guests, and more...

With GCC 5 the C compiler changed its default to C11/GNU11 and now for the next version, GCC 6, C++11 might become the default C++ language compiler target...

The first beta of GhostBSD 10.1, the desktop-focused distribution using the FreeBSD kernel with MATE Desktop Environment, is now available...

While there was a small delay, Wayland/Weston 1.8 Alpha is now available...

Besides all the other Ubuntu 15.10 chatter happening this week, which is heavily centered around Unity 8 / Ubuntu Convergence and Snappy topics, there was also talk of "Ubuntu Benchmarking Workloads" in the Ubuntu Cloud track...

For Ubuntu Touch/Phone users interested in seeing Upstart go out on their device in favor of systemd, progress is being made by Canonical on the switch...

Macaw-Movies is the latest KDE incubator project, which is focused on providing movie organization/management features to open-source fans...

Valve today pushed out the SteamOS 159 update into the Alchemist repository today, which matches the recent changes to the Alchemist Beta repository. This update isn't too exciting as it's mostly stable fixes, branding updates, etc, but the NVIDIA Linux driver update does remove the support for pre-Fermi graphics cards...

Now that the Linux 4.1 kernel is starting to stabilize, I just started some Radeon DRM open-source graphics tests from this new kernel. So far I did some preliminary tests with the AMD Radeon R9 290 graphics card...

It shouldn't come as much of a surprise, but Ubuntu 15.10 will be using the GCC 5 compiler by default...

In continuation of this morning's Ubuntu 15.10 UOS session about plans for Unity 8 on the Ubuntu desktop, that was followed by a demo of the current Unity 8 desktop experience -- including some experimental code shown by Canonical developers...

Discussed this morning during the second day of the Ubuntu Online Summit for Ubuntu 15.10 was "Unity 8 as the default desktop." Unity 7 will remain the default for Ubuntu 15.10, but a lot of progress is expected this Wily Werewolf cycle...

It's been a while since last running any extensive Amazon EC2 cloud benchmarks. However, in trying out the latest releases of a few distributions, I ran some quick cloud benchmarks yesterday...

In January of 2014 there was ARB_viewport_array added to the Intel Mesa driver, an extension needed for OpenGL 4.1 compliance, but at the time it was only enabled for Ivy Bridge graphics hardware and newer. Intel has now extended that support back to Sandy Bridge...

The latest Ubuntu-related announcement this week is the debut of Xubuntu Core...

Revealed today during this first full day of the Ubuntu Online Summit for Ubuntu 15.10 were some of the roadmap items and features coming soon for the Ubuntu Phone...

Thanks to work by Samuel Pitoiset, NVIDIA's hardware performance counters of their recent GPU generations are now being exposed through the open-source Nouveau Linux graphics driver...

While there's work on getting a Snappy version of Ubuntu's Desktop-Nex in time for the Ubuntu 15.10 release in October, Debian based packages of Ubuntu Linux will continue to be offered for the foreseeable future...

This week marks one year since Linux Game Publishing vanished from the Internet...