Phoronix

It was announced today via WWN 402 that last week's Wine 1.7.55 is the last development freeze with now going into a code freeze for version 1.8...

It's already been a surprising year with Microsoft's many open-source/Linux-related announcements and 2015 isn't even over yet! There's another interesting announcement today...

Now that Linux 4.4-rc1 was released this weekend as the first development release towards Linux 4.4 with its many new features, I'm onto benchmarking it at Phoronix for articles looking at the Nouveau Kepler re-clocking changes, Radeon/Intel graphics performance too, file-system tests, and more...

Following Monday's NVIDIA Jetson TX1 performance overview one of the first follow-up tests I wanted to carry out was to see how the performance would evolve if using a newer compiler than what's shipped in Ubuntu 14.04. This current long-term support release ships GCC 4.8 while out since then was GCC 4.9 and now GCC 5.2.1 with GCC 6 coming in just a few months.

NVIDIA yesterday released the 358.13 Linux graphics driver as the newest mainline driver. This week, however, they've also updated their legacy drivers for X.Org Server 1.18...

David Herrmann has announced the release of systemd 228...

Just days after writing about GPUCC as Google's open-source CUDA compiler built atop LLVM and how to compile CUDA code with LLVM, more improvements have landed...

The NVIDIA 358.13 Linux graphics driver was released today as the latest bug-fix version since the new-feature 358.09 beta driver...

Last weekend I ran benchmarks looking at the performance of the AMDGPU DRM driver with the new PowerPlay patches for providing proper power management support for Tonga and Fiji graphics cards. In today's article is a larger comparison when running this latest Radeon and AMDGPU DRM driver code to see how these newer AMD GPUs compare to existing, well-supported Radeon graphics cards.

A few improvements for handling Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3 (DRI3) have landed in Mesa's Git code-base...

Jonas Ã…dahl announced the formation this morning of the Wayland-Protocols Git repository that will march to its own beat, separate of Wayland/Weston releases...

After a half-year of development, I'm ecstatic to announce this morning the release of Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 (codenamed "Hammerfest"). Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 is by far the most significant release ever done of our open-source, cross-platform automated benchmarking software and framework since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 seven years ago.

Asked via @Phoronix on Twitter this weekend was whether you're using the open or closed-source graphics drivers...

For those that haven't been paying attention to SPIR-V as the new intermediate representation that makes up OpenCL 2.1+ and Vulkan, here's various details about this newest Khronos Group specification you may not be familiar with now that Khronos formally released OpenCL 2.1 and SPIR-V 1.0....

Bhushan Shah has shared the recent work he's been doing on KDE's KWin to have proper screenlocker integration on Wayland...

Early this morning I wrote a brief article about AMD working on an LLVM-based Heterogeneous Compute Compiler and since then more details have come to light...

The Khronos Group has formally released the OpenCL 2.1 and SPIR-V 1.0 specifications coinciding with this year's SuperComputing conference in Austin...

While last week we were able to write about the NVIDIA Jetson TX1 development board, at that time we weren't able to share any benchmarks or hands-on experience with this ARM board powered by NVIDIA's Tegra X1 SoC. The embargo on that has now expired and as such this morning there are a lot of benchmarks to share with you. There are many benchmarks looking at different areas of the Jetson TX1 including power consumption and thermal. For kicks I've also done some comparisons against the Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 as well as other ARM hardware like the now defunct Calxeda ARM server and Raspberry Pi 2.

High-end PC maker Falcon Northwest has decided against rolling out any Steam Machines this year powered by Valve's Debian-based SteamOS, due to problems with the operating system...

AMD has been open-sourcing several components of their Linux HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) stack for the past several months including the AMDKFD kernel driver and HSAKMT run-time. In cooperation with SUSE, they also hope to have HSA accelerator support in GCC 6. Besides the GCC support, AMD is apparently planning to publish a Heterogeneous Compute Compiler...

Last month I wrote about how Google has been working on CUDA compiler optimizations in LLVM and they were claiming to achieve results where their open-source compiler work was generating better code than NVIDIA's own NVCC compiler. More details are now available...

Linus Torvalds announced today the first release candidate for Linux 4.4...

For those with FFmpeg present on their system, Mozilla developers have finally enabled FFmpeg support to be used by default...

If all goes according to plan, the Linux 4.4 kernel merge window will end today with the release of the 4.4-rc1 kernel. As all of the major subsystem updates have already landed for Linux 4.4, here's my usual look at the highlights for this kernel cycle.

Developers behind Kodi (formerly XBMC) announced the release this morning of Jarvis Beta 1...

Con Kolivas has released the BFS scheduler v0.465 with support for the Linux 4.3 kernel...

As some extra benchmarks to toss out there this weekend are some Clang 3.8 SVN compiler benchmarks when trying out different optimization levels...

In addition to adding some new OpenCL / CUDA tests this week to the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org, Caffe was added too as a deep learning benchmark...

Just one week after Mesa Git received Nouveau NVC0 compute support, the NV50 Gallium3D driver for pre-Fermi GPUs has also received basic compute support...

Just ahead of the Super Computing SC15 conference beginning tomorrow in Austin, the OpenMP 4.5 specification has been finalized...

With the Linux 4.3 Git tree at around 20.6 million lines of code, documentation, and utilities, I was curious to see whether the Linux 4.4 merge window was heavy enough to bump it over 21 million lines.....

With PHP 7.0 RC7 being the final development version of PHP 7, which is expected to be officially release at the end of the month, I've carried out some fresh benchmarks of PHP using our in-house benchmarking software. Compared in this latest PHP 7 benchmarking comparison is PHP 5.5 as packaged on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and then comparing fresh builds of PHP 5.6.15 and PHP 7.0.0 RC7. On the HHVM side was using Facebook's HHVM 3.10.1 release as packaged for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

The KDE community has announced the release of Frameworks 5.16.0 as more than 60 add-on libraries to Qt...

After months of continually trying out different methods of cheap yet effective cooling for the 60+ systems running daily Linux benchmarks, I'm finally happy with now having been one week of the room maintaining an ambient temperature of 68~72F (20~22C)...

Various kernel changes were mainlined in the Linux 4.4 development code for Google Chrome hardware...

The first release candidate is out today for QEMU v2.5 and it comes with exciting changes...

LLVM developers have decided to enable a new vectorizer option by default that has the potential to boost performance, but the performance benefits aren't immediately clear...

With the Linux 4.4 kernel the Lenovo Yoga 3 laptop owners out there will finally have support for using their ESC key...

The US Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration has teamed up with NVIDIA's PGI compiler division to create an open-source Fortran compiler atop LLVM...

Yesterday AMD finally posted power management support for the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver when it comes to supported discrete graphics cards like Tonga and Fiji. I've been testing these PowerPlay Linux patches since yesterday to great success. In this article are results from a Radeon R9 285 and Radeon R9 Fury when testing these kernel patches along with the latest Mesa 11.1-devel Git drivers.

Wine 1.7.55 was released this morning with some exciting changes...

Added to Coreboot this week was CC6 support to provide greater power-savings for current-generation AMD processors...

Since GCC 5 there has been support for Intel Memory Protection Extensions (MPX) in the compiler, but it's been disabled by default. That's now changing...

The X.Org Foundation Board of Directors decided at yesterday's bi-weekly board meeting to go ahead with a plan to host XDC2016 in Helsinki, Finland...

Football Manager 2016 was released today by SEGA. Compared to the past where the Linux port came after the fact, Football Manager 2016 has seen a same-day release for Windows, OS X, and SteamOS/Linux...

Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 "Hammerfest" is ready for release next week and as such being put out tonight is the final development build...

Matthias Clasen announced the release today of GNOME 3.18.2 while all feature development continues to be around the GNOME 3.19 series culminating with GNOME 3.20...

Today marks one year since Microsoft announced they would be working on open-sourcing the server-side .NET and also making .NET run on Linux and OS X. Since then, it's been one heck of a year for Microsoft on Linux...

With AMD having published PowerPlay support for AMDGPU I've been busy today running tests on this new power management code that finally allows Tonga and Fiji GPUs to operate at their full-speed when using the open-source Linux graphics driver...

KitWare announced the release today of the CMake 3.4 build system...