Phoronix

If visiting LinuxBenchmarking.com to view the daily performance benchmark tracker results on the Linux kernel, GCC, LLVM Clang, or Mesa and opting to view the results for a very long duration, you may have noticed some results were slow to appear or the page would time-out before hand. I've now landed some improvements into the Phoronix Test Suite's rendering code that should dramatically speed-up the process...

As Michael mentioned earlier today this is my last day as the Phoronix Summer 2015 Intern...

The Rust Programming Language Blog has a new post by two of the team members about what the 1.0 release meant in hindsight three months later and what the team will be focusing on in looking forward to 2016...

A few days ago Loki, the community manager for Re-Logic, the gaming studio behind the popular sandbox game Terraria, announced the release of Terraria 1.3.0.8, which both made the OS X and Linux versions of the game public, as well as ensuring compatibility between the OS X, Linux, and Windows clients...

It's been a while since last benchmarking any Linux file-systems on a USB 3.0 flash drive to see how the performance compares, given that F2FS and friends are being optimized for flash storage. However, off the Linux 4.2 kernel for kicks I've run some benchmarks on a 16GB USB flash drive the EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and F2FS file-systems.

Just after writing this morning about libdrm 2.4.63 being released and that it's needed for the AMDGPU Mesa support to land, the code indeed is now in mainline! There's the mainline support going into Mesa 11.0 for supporting the hardware via the AMDGPU DRM driver -- Tonga, Carrizo, Fiji, and future new hardware. There's also now HEVC video decode support on capable hardware via the VDPAU state tracker and other improvements related to this AMDGPU code push...

With Wayland 1.9 coming next month and the feature freeze being imminent, the Linux DMA-BUF support for Wayland was pushed out this morning!..

Marek Olšák of AMD this morning announced libdrm 2.4.63 as the newest version of this DRM Library that interfaces between the Linux kernel DRM drivers and the user-space DDX and Mesa components, among other user-space graphics code...

All good things must come to an end and today is our 2015 summer intern, Eric Griffith, last day writing on Phoronix...

Jerome Glisse at Red Hat continues to working on his patches for Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) for the Linux kernel...

Experienced OpenGL/WebGL developer Sascha Willems has shared his views on the next-generation, low-level Vulkan graphics API from the perspective of a hobbyist developer...

VIA Embedded has rolled out a new ruggedized PC for in-vehicle computing and other applications. This rugged PC is powered by a long forgot about VIA Eden quad-core processor...

Out now ahead of the Plasma 5.4 release later this month is KDE Frameworks 5.13.0...

After writing last month about The Insane Power Use Of Benchmarking Linux Every Day as part of looking at the electrical use of our Linux benchmarking farm powering Phoronix, LinuxBenchmarking.com, etc. Here's this month's numbers...

In routinely needing more storage devices for our dozens of automated Linux benchmarking systems powering LinuxBenchmarking.com and the rest at Phoronix Media, when recently seeing a deal on a Transcend TS256GSSD370S 256GB SATA3 SSD for $70 USD I decided to try it out.

Just hours after writing about the Raspberry Pi firmware driver being under review for possible inclusion into Linux 4.3, Eric Anholt has posted some stripped down versions of his VC4 DRM driver for review...

VMware's vmwgfx virtual Linux graphics stack for supporting 2D/3D acceleration within guest VMs running their virtualization software will finally allow for OpenGL 3.x support...

The Khronos Group's BoF at SIGGRAPH 2015 is now over with no major surprises...

During today's Khronos SIGGRAPH 2015 BoFs it was asked when WebGL 2 is expected to officially ship...

The Vulkan / SPIR-V / OpenGL talks during the live-streamed Khronos SIGGRAPH '15 BoFs just started...

I now have my hands on an Intel Core i5 6600K "Skylake" processor for Linux benchmarking!..

A proposal is out to release Wayland 1.9 and the Weston 1.9 compositor before the end of September...

The Raspberry Pi crew is looking to add a firmware driver for their hardware to the Linux 4.3 kernel...

For those not doing so right now, there's a live-stream of the Khronos birds of a feather sessions happening this afternoon from SIGGRAPH 2015 in Los Angeles...

Canonical's Alberto Milone has patched their Catalyst/fglrx driver so that it will now work under the Linux 4.2 kernel on Ubuntu...

A Phoronix reader pointed out that as of last week there's been some ARM Libreboot love for allowing this binary blob free downstream of Coreboot to work on the ASUS C201...

FreeBSD 10.2 is going to be released on time. The -RELEASE process has begun...

The Ubuntu Kernel Team is still preparing to land Linux 4.2 within Ubuntu 15.10 "Wily Werewolf" for its release in October...

Fedora's Flock conference started today with a keynote by Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller. Miller's keynote was about the state of the Fedora Project...

Following yesterday's article about Ubuntu developers wanting to make it easier to run the newest proprietary NVIDIA drivers, a new PPA has been established...

For the past few weeks I've been extensively testing the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti on Linux and it's been a rather pleasant experience. Compared to the troubles with the R9 Fury on Catalyst Linux, the GTX 980 Ti has been a pleasant experience and yielding terrific results, assuming you're okay with using NVIDIA's proprietary driver.

Aras Pranckevičius of Unity Technologies presented this week at SIGGRAPH 2015 on porting the popular Unity Engine to new APIs. While Aras has dealt with Vulkan/glNext, Unity is still monitoring the Vulkan situation and isn't yet committing to supporting it in the near-term within its game engine...

Hans Wennborg has announced the second release candidate for the upcoming LLVM 3.7 release...

The days of the patent-riddled S3TC texture compression algorithm may finally be limited for new software...

Facebook has just hired yet another well known Linux kernel engineer that previously worked for years at Red Hat before having a brief stint at another company earlier this year... The code monkey is now at Facebook beginning next month...

The Mesa 11.0 code-base will be branched next week from Git master in order to release the version as stable in mid-September...

KDE Applications 15.12 will be presenting a new screenshot utility that's completely rewritten and replacing the original KSnapshot...

QEMU 2.4 was released today as the newest version of this open-source component that's key to the Linux virtualization stack...

With Cisco not liking the patent situation around H.265 nor Google's VP9 video codec, they are spinning their own royalty-free video codec...

It was just earlier today that OpenGL 4.2 was completed for core Mesa and already there's patches for tackling another OpenGL 4.3 extension...

There are some Fedora packagers/developers working towards potentially getting Google's open-source version of the Chrome web-browser, Chromium, added into Fedora...

Tomorrow during the Khronos Vulkan BoF at SIGGRAPH, LunarG will be publicly announcing LunarXchange, a support portal for getting started in Vulkan development that was made possible by Valve's sponsorship of this Linux-focused graphics consulting firm...

Jorge Castro of Canonical has started coordinating some work around providing newer upstream NVIDIA proprietary graphics drivers for users, primarily Ubuntu gamers...

For Firefox users that didn't hear yet: Firefox 40 is now available! Firefox 40 is huge for Linux users thanks to it landing the off-main-thread compositing support by default...

While all of the initial Steam Machines use Intel CPUs with NVIDIA graphics, a portable Steam Machine gaming device that hopes to ship next year and run SteamOS will be using AMD graphics...

Building off Friday's release of Wine 1.7.49 is a new Wine-Staging update and it comes with an interesting experimental program to better integrate Wine apps with the GTK3 Linux desktop...

Complementing VOGL and APITrace for Linux OpenGL debugging is now the NVIDIA Linux Graphics Debugger...

It's just been a few weeks since OpenSUSE Leap M1 while the next milestone is planned for release in early September. The geckos are making good progress on this major update to the non-rolling version of openSUSE...

OpenSSH 7.0 has been released, the latest major update to the OpenBSD-led project that provides a widely-used SSH 2.0 implementation...

Canonical has open-sourced their Ubuntu One file syncing code, the biggest piece of their failed Ubuntu One service...