Phoronix

If you are a newcomer to Linux you may not even have an idea what Ndiswrapper is even though it was very much used a number of years ago, but nevertheless, Ndiswrapper 1.60 has been released...

Valve's monthly Steam hardware/software survey data has been updated for April 2016...

For those looking to make better use of the Raspberry Pi's VPU, an LLVM compiler back-end has been published for it...

If you are looking for a low-cost LGA-1151 motherboard for an Intel Xeon E3 v5 CPU, the ASUS E3 PRO GAMING V5 is a sub-$150 ATX motherboard using Intel's C232 chipset while supporting USB 3.1, an M.2 slot, and other features normally reserved for the higher-end products.

The FreeBSD project issued their quarterly status report concerning the state of various projects happening for this BSD operating system. It was another busy three months for the FreeBSD crew!..

The Khronos Group announced the release this Monday morning of the OpenVX 1.1 specification for computer vision acceleration...

Broxton was to be Intel's 2016 Atom SoC platform for phones and tablets. Broxton was to be using 14nm Goldmont CPU cores and Skylake graphics, but now it's no more...

With Ubuntu's install images continuing to be oversized with pushing 1.4GB on recent releases, Ubuntu developer Steve Langasek has raised the new limit for Ubuntu desktop images to 2GB. Other Ubuntu flavors are also following in this move...

The Plasma Mobile stack being developed by KDE is almost one year old but they've now decided to shift their OS architecture a bit instead of relying directly upon Ubuntu Touch...

Eve is short for the Efficient Video Encoder and reportedly offers much better results than existing video encoders for Google's VP9 format...

For those not busy partying around the Maypole today, the Linux 4.6-rc6 kernel is now available as the latest weekly test candidate of the Linux 4.6 kernel...

Krzysztof Nowicki has announced the initial release of the Akonadi resource for supporting Microsoft's Exchange Web Services (EWS)...

If Audacity and Ardour aren't cutting it for your audio editing needs on Linux, there's another Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) option coming to Linux: Reaper...

It's been a while since last hearing anything about the DragonBox Pyra as an open-source gaming handheld system and successor to OpenPandora, but that changed this weekend with the launch of pre-orders for this Linux-powered device...

It's been a while since last having any major news to report out of the Mir camp for Ubuntu's alternative to Wayland...

There were many interesting open-source and Linux news stories delivered on Phoronix this month...

Vulkan 1.0.12 is the latest specification update to the official Vulkan documentation from The Khronos Group...

Open-source developers working on the Radeon Linux graphics driver stack remain hopeful that their massive "DAL" code-base will be ready for merging with Linux 4.7...

Here are some extra Linux distribution benchmarks for your viewing pleasure this weekend...

The first alpha release was made available this weekend of GhostBSD 10.3 Alpha 1, a desktop focused operating system built atop FreeBSD 10.3...

For those systemd haters that are out there, the beta of Devuan has been released as a spin of Debian Jessie that's free of systemd...

Matthias Clasen of Red Hat has written an update about changes to GNOME's GTK+ tool-kit for the 3.20 cycle but he also mentions some of the exciting work that's brewing for GNOME/GTK+ 3.22...

Mozilla has announced that for Firefox 48 their WebExtensions API is considered to be in a stable state. They encourage developers looking to develop browser add-ons to begin using this new API...

A day after Mozilla released the Firefox 47 Beta, Google has released their beta of the Chrome/Chromium 51 web-browser...

Wine 1.9.9 was released earlier today as the newest development release for this software to run Windows applications/games on Linux, OS X, and other operating systems...

Matthias Clasen announced the release today of GNOME 3.21.1 as the first development release in the road towards GNOME 3.22...

Sway, the i3-compatible tiling window manager for Wayland, is out with a new version...

Timothy Arceri of Collabora has been restoring work on an on-disk shader cache for Intel's open-source Mesa OpenGL driver that was originally started by some of the Intel OTC driver developers...

Raptor Engineering has published new information around their proposed high-performance Talos Secure Workstation that for around $3k is a high-end POWER8 motherboard...

Going along with the work written about yesterday of Igalia Posts Intel vertex_attrib_64bit Mesa Driver Patches, Close To OpenGL 4.1+, the latest ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 patches were published today for the Intel i965 Mesa driver...

Next week is UOS-1605: the latest Ubuntu Online Summit where planning will take place for Ubuntu 16.10, the Yakkety Yak release...

One of the many less advertised features of the Phoronix Test Suite is the ability to re-purpose any available test profile not as a performance metric but simply as part of a stress tool for hammering your hardware or software for deficiencies. The phoronix-test-suite stress-run tool can run any number of the test profiles concurrently and in a random pattern for a defined length of time for fully stressing your system...

The latest motherboard to receive mainline Coreboot support is the Siemens MC_BDX1...

The LLVM Foundation published its plans and budgets this week for 2016. There are a few interesting details when analyzing the information...

More relevant than the ARC PGU DRM driver that was merged this week is a DRM display driver for more common hardware: Allwinner SoCs. The Allwinner DRM driver has been accepted into DRM-Next for in turn landing with Linux 4.7...

For x86 Android users, patches are available for making use of Mesa's LLVMpipe driver in Gallium3D for cases where hardware drivers are not available. This support is reportedly good enough for running Android apps in the absence of proper OpenGL drivers...

For some end-of-month benchmarks and while having a number of graphics cards out prior to being let down by Tomb Raider's Linux benchmark, here is a fresh round of OpenGL tests while using the newest Mesa 11.3-devel code on RadeonSI with AMDGPU/Radeon DRM from Ubuntu 16.04 and then compared to various Kepler/Maxwell graphics cards with the newest NVIDIA Linux driver.

Jan Kurik has passed along word that the Fedora 24 Beta has been delayed and thus the final milestones are also pushed back...

Mesa release manager Emil Velikov has laid out plans to release the next version of Mesa in just over one month...

While the Intel Mesa driver remains at OpenGL 3.3 due to missing FP64 support, that code continues to be worked on by Igalia and Intel's OTC developers. Patches for a related extension, ARB_vertex_attrib_64bit, have also now been published that will clear Intel's Mesa driver requirements for OpenGL 4.1...

David Airlie has pulled the ARC PGU DRM driver into his DRM-Next tree for in turn landing with the Linux 4.7 kernel...

It turns out that Skylake's HD Graphics 510, HD Graphics 535, Iris Graphics 550, and Iris Graphics P555 were missing their open-source driver support from an important piece of the Linux graphics stack...

Running hot off this week's release of Firefox 46 is the beta release issued by Mozilla for Firefox 47...

The results just are in of the 2016 X.Org Foundation elections and the members have voted to become part of the SPI. The foundation thus is basically becoming dissolved to become part of Software in the Public Interest...

While waiting for today's release of Tomb Raider on Linux, for which I just posted various NVIDIA Tomb Raider benchmarks on Ubuntu, I was running some other OpenGL benchmarks...

With Feral Interactive releasing Tomb Raider for Linux, three years after the premiere of the Windows port, many have been wondering about the Linux performance particularly with regards to the graphics driver situation. Here are our initial benchmarks of Feral's port of Tomb Raider on Ubuntu Linux with using NVIDIA graphics. More tests to follow.

PulseAudio gained support for utilizing the Linux kernel's memfd as a transport mechanism as spearheaded by the systemd/KDBUS crew...

As a quick follow-up to this morning's news about Tomb Raider coming for Linux today, the game is now officially available...

Developers working on the Rust programming language today formally announced MIR, but it's not to be confused with Ubuntu's Mir display server...

Epic Games today announced the first preview release for the upcoming Unreal Engine 4.12...