Phoronix

It's GNOME 3.20 release day...

With tiling the basement server room this month, I took the opportunity to build a new desk that's capable of easily handling six monitors while allowing for a better layout and more organization than before. Here are some details on building a butcher block wooden computer desk.

Red Hat has become the first open-source focused company to have two billion dollars in annual revenue...

AMD's HuskyBoard still isn't shipping even though it was originally supposed to launch last year as a developer board powered by their ARMv8-based Opteron SoC. While the LeMaker Cello is moving forward as an ARM developer board using the Opteron A1100, 96Boards recently updated their web-site with new Enterprise Edition (EE) board details...

The game that Feral Interactive has been teasing about on Twitter in recent weeks turns out to be the game many were looking forward to, Tomb Raider 2013...

Thanks to AMD having released their new GPU-PRO "hybrid" Linux driver a few days ago, there is now Vulkan API support for Radeon GPU owners on Linux. This new AMD Linux driver holds much potential and the closed-source bits are now limited to user-space, among other benefits covered in dozens of Phoronix articles over recent months. With having this new driver in hand plus NVIDIA promoting their Vulkan support to the 364 Linux driver series, it's a great time for some benchmarking. Here are OpenGL and Vulkan atop Ubuntu 16.04 Linux for both AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

With GNOME 3.20 on final approach for landing tomorrow, 23 March, here's a recap of some of the exciting changes and new features of this six-month update to the GNOME stack...

The Btrfs file-system updates for Linux 4.6 are not particularly exciting this round...

Shortly after the massive RadeonSI GL4 shader image work that landed yesterday, another OpenGL 4.3 extension was enabled in Mesa Git for all Gallium3D drivers...

KDE Plasma 5.6 has been officially released this morning...

For those relying upon the Samba open-source project as a SMB/CIFS implementation for being able to interact with file and print services from Microsoft Windows systems, Samba 4.4.0 is now available...

WebKitGTK+ 2.12 is all ready for this week's GNOME 3.20 release...

Rumors have been flying today that Apple is in advanced talks to buy out Imagination Technologies...

KDE's Kdenlive non-linear video editor was added to KDE Applications 15.08 and since then it's continued to advance in step with the four-month updates to the stack...

We are a little more than half-way through the Linux 4.6 kernel merge window so here's a quick look at the new changes and features that have made it into the code-base for this next major kernel release...

Snapcraft, Ubuntu's build and packaging tool for Snappy packages, has seen a new major release...

GTK+ 3.20 was released on Monday as the toolkit empowering the GNOME 3.20 desktop release this week...

CodeWeavers got their Wine-based CrossOver software running on Android, but before getting too excited, it's x86 Android...

Following NVIDIA publishing a new Linux driver that supports Wayland and Mir alongside X11, a NVIDIA engineer followed through and posted patches of the EGL support changes needed by Wayland's Weston compositor to support the new driver...

There are some notable improvements that landed today in RadeonSI Gallium3D for AMD GCN graphics processors...

As the first major release since Apple open-sourced the Swift programming language and began providing Linux support, Swift 2.2 is now available...

The Wine-Staging 1.9.6 release adds an experimental Vulkan wrapper for running Vulkan Windows binaries on Linux...

As some more exciting news to Linux gamers besides NVIDIA releasing a Wayland/Mir-supportive driver and mainline Vulkan support is the release of PAYDAY 2 for Linux...

Tuxera has published a new stable version of their NTFS read-write driver for Linux...

There hasn't been much to report on regarding Edubuntu, the education spin of Ubuntu, in quite some time. Edubuntu had moved to doing only LTS releases every two years, but now it's been confirmed they will not be able to make an Edubuntu 16.04 LTS release to succeed Edubuntu 14.04...

NVIDIA's 364 Linux driver series is now available and it's pretty darn exciting!..

While still working on some AMD vs. NVIDIA Vulkan Linux driver benchmarks using AMD's new hybrid driver with Vulkan support, for your viewing pleasure this morning are some benchmarks comparing the new AMD GPU-PRO driver with its binary OpenGL driver against the pure open-source driver stack with the Ubuntu 16.04 AMDGPU driver and RadeonSI Gallium3D from Mesa 11.2 + LLVM 3.8.

The super exciting DRM subsystem updates for Linux 4.6 have been mailed in and it's one of the most exciting open-source DRM display/graphics driver updates in recent releases...

Linus Torvalds has honored the request to land the "objtool" stack frame validation support for the Linux 4.6 kernel...

Many XFS file-system changes can be found in the upcoming Linux 4.6 kernel release...

The ARM SoC updates were mailed out on Sunday afternoon for the Linux 4.6 kernel and it provides mainline support for thirteen new SoCs!..

Intel MPX memory protection aims to safeguard against buffer overflows in programs assuming you have a supported processor and software stack. Over at Intel's Open-Source Technology Center they published a guide this week on making use of Intel MPX under Linux...

The USB changes were made known this week for the Linux 4.6 kernel cycle...

While F2FS still doesn't seem to have been utilized yet by any large, wide-scale deployments as the flash file-system of choice, this Linux file-system continues to mature...

Several Phoronix readers have been writing in recently about Redox OS, a new project aiming to be a "next-gen" operating system...

New firmware blobs have been updated in linux-firmware Git this morning for Skylake affecting both audio and graphics...

Blender 2.77 was released this weekend as the newest version of this wildly popular, cross-platform, open-source 3D animation program...

Here is another big feature coming for the Linux 4.6 kernel...

New wireless hardware support and other networking improvements will be present in the Linux 4.6 kernel...

On Friday night to much surprise, AMD published the beta version of their new hybrid Linux driver stack with Vulkan support alongside OpenCL, OpenGL, and VDPAU support. Here's some more details from my initial testing of this new driver that AMD is currently calling the Radeon Software AMD GPU-PRO Beta Driver for Linux.

Upstream GCC developer Jan Hubička has written about his experience compiling LibreOffice with GCC6 -- while also making use of Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) -- and comparing various criteria against that of other GCC and LLVM/Clang compiler versions...

There are a number of input driver improvements en route for the Linux 4.6 kernel...

The inaugural release of UbuntuBSD is now available, which the developers have codenamed "Escape From SystemD", and pairs the Ubuntu userspace with the FreeBSD kernel...

The Vulkan support code is beginning to appear for those leveraging the Unreal Engine 4...

For the majority of you reading this relying upon Serial ATA (SATA) drives, the upcoming Linux 4.6 kernel will support runtime power management of the AHCI host controller for saving more power on your system when idling...

Debian's annual conference, DebConf, is taking place in July this year in Cape Town, South Africa. Valve is among the sponsors for this year's Debian conference...

Just one week after the initial public release of Gneural Network to provide a GNU project for programmable neural networks, version 0.5 has been made available and it's a big release...

Well, AMD has just sent out a pleasant surprise before the weekend: an initial AMD Hybrid Linux driver build! It's AMDGPU-based providing OpenGL and Vulkan support on the new stack!..

This week we showed how the new AMDGPU driver stack is performing on Ubuntu 16.04 and that the recent generations of Radeon graphics cards are commonly seeing 80~90% the performance of Catalyst. However, it's important to keep in mind that aside from Catalyst being more buggy than the proprietary NVIDIA driver, the NVIDIA binary driver also tends to be more performant. So for putting the Ubuntu 16.04 open-source Radeon numbers into perspective, here are results putting them against the GeForce Kepler and Maxwell graphics cards.

Wine 1.9.6 was released this morning as the latest bi-weekly development release of Wine...