Phoronix

There are at least two exciting Linux/open-source birthdays to celebrate this week...

Intel's Beignet project for providing open-source OpenCL support for Intel HD/Iris Graphics hardware on Linux now has support for upcoming Kaby Lake processors...

For the first time ever, the FreeBSD DRM drivers match the code of what's found in the upstream Linux kernel Git. They started off trailing many releases behind the state of the upstream Linux kernel, but as of now the Intel DRM as the first driver has made it to be in sync with the current Linux 4.8 development code...

Helen Koike of Collabora has been one of the developers looking to optimize the performance of virtual NVMe devices, such as used by Google's Cloud Engine...

For those of you unfamiliar with it, MidnightBSD is a BSD (obviously) that focuses upon being a good desktop OS, similar to the goals of GhostBSD or PC-BSD. MidnightBSD 0.8 was released this week as the newest version of the operating system...

Version 1.7 of the Go programming language is now available...

Earlier this month I carried out some 4-disk Btrfs RAID benchmarks using four SATA 3.0 SSDs. Those tests were done using the Btrfs built-in RAID capabilities while today are some comparison tests against those numbers when using the Linux Software RAID setup via mdadm.

Using short PGP key IDs is proving to be insecure with real attacks having started this summer...

Eric Anholt of Broadcom has written a blog post detailing his past week of work on the open-source VC4 driver stack that benefits the Raspberry Pi...

Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers are back to working on SVM support for the Intel i915 DRM driver...

Present in the Linux 4.7 kernel and thus far in the Linux 4.8 development cycle has been a significant performance regression affecting the Radeon R9 290 and other select GPUs. This performance drop has been very noticeable and I've seen it since Linux 4.7-rc1 while finally an independent user went through the process of bisecting the kernel to find the problematic commit of this hefty performance drop...

There are two exciting bits of Mozilla Firefox news to pass along today: Winevine support on Linux out-of-the-box to handle Netflix and friends. Separately, WebP image support is being worked on...

There are several changes to KWin's OpenGL compositor support with the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.8 release...

Qt developers Laszlo Agocs and Andy Nchols have written a summary on The Qt Blog about the state of the Qt Quick 2 graphics stack for the upcoming Qt 5.8 release...

Running this weekend in Karlsruhe, Germany was the 2016 GUADEC conference -- GNOME's annual big event. It looked like it was another excellent event and the videos are now available...

It was just days ago that Wayland-Protocols 1.6 was released with the additions of XDG-Foreign and Idle-Inhibit. Arriving this Monday morning is Wayland-Protocols 1.7...

The second weekly test release of the Linux 4.8 kernel is now available...

Following last week's DragonFlyBSD 4.6 benchmarks I carried out a fresh comparison of FreeBSD 10.3 vs. FreeBSD 11.0 (Beta 4 at the time) along with the DragonFlyBSD results and a few of the popular Linux distributions. Here are those numbers.

OpenSK (Open Stream Kit) is a project driven by a Microsoft engineer that aims to be "a cross-platform low-level sound library inspired by the Vulkan API."..

For the past two years already there has been an effort going of building libweston, effectively punting much of the Weston code off into a library that can then be re-used by other Wayland compositors. Libweston provides most of the basic Wayland protocol components and other low-level functionality so it becomes easier for developers to build full-featured Wayland compositors. Now part of the family is Libweston-Desktop...

For those looking to make use of OpenGL from Python, the ModernGL project aims to provide better GL bindings for the language...

It's been a number of months since providing any glimpse at my power bill for the electrical cost of so much Linux benchmarking that happens constantly here for Phoronix, OpenBenchmarking.org, LinuxBenchmarking.com, etc. From reader requests, here's a look at how the power use is looking this summer after trying to make some optimizations a few months back...

Earlier this week the deferred flushes change landed in Radeon Gallium3D code for reportedly offering 23%+ performance improvements in BioShock Infinite as one example. I've tested out BioShock Infinite and other changes to confirm the performance differences...

The long-awaited OpenMandriva Lx 3.0 release finally happened this morning for this Mandriva (and long ago, Mandrake) derived Linux distribution...

Besides the Free Software Foundation issuing their first-ever annual report this week, The Document Foundation has come out this week as well with their 2015 annual report...

Fedora developers have been working to come up with a schedule for Fedora 26 to succeed the November release of Fedora 25...

Way Cooler is another project to add to the list of interesting Wayland compositors / window managers from the futuristic NEMO-UX to Swap to many others...

Development on KDE Plasma 5.8 continues to move along with the feature freeze for it being next month. Plasma 5.8 when released in October is going to be the first Long-Term Support (LTS) release of Plasma 5...

Lubuntu-Next images are being prepared that shift this Ubuntu derivative from using the lightweight LXDE desktop to using the newer LXQt desktop...

It has been less than one week since the Linux 4.8-rc1 release and already Intel OTC developers have sent in their first batch of updates to DRM-Next for in turn landing with Linux 4.9...

The Phoronix.com server changed on 13 August. If you are still seeing this web page, you likely need to flush your DNS otherwise your ISP may be slow in propagating the new DNS information...

Richard Jones at Red Hat has been working on bringing up RISC-V processor architecture support for Fedora...

A new version of the Wayland Protocols is now available...

Red Hat is looking to hire two individuals for testing of laptops and tracking down any shortcomings in their support as it pertains to Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux...

For fans of the Ardour digital audio workstation software, version 5.0 of this popular open-source audio software is now available...

For those that may be interested in the Clear Linux distribution for improved performance or other innovative functionality, the third "Clear Linux Highlights" newsletter has been published to share more of the recent changes to this Linux distribution out of the Intel Open-Source Technology Center...

Google appears to be working on a new operating system that's written from scratch and appears to be target both phones and PCs, among other form factors...

I hadn't realized until now that it's the Free Software Foundation's first time issuing an annual report since it was formed thirty years ago...

HP Enterprise has announced it's acquiring SGI, formerly known as Silicon Graphics...

The merge window for Linux 4.8 closed this past weekend and while our feature overview covers all the exciting changes there is some functionality we wish would be in this kernel -- or existing functionality to otherwise be changed / improved upon -- that unfortunately is not...

So much for Secure Boot being so secure... After a mistake by Microsoft, the "golden key" is now out in the wild...

Earlier this week I published some Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux OpenGL benchmarks showing how the native gaming performance is different between the competing platforms. Ubuntu Linux lost nearly all of those results with the Intel Mesa driver to Windows 10. In this article are those previous benchmarks plus now having Intel Clear Linux benchmarks added in the mix. Months ago in previous tests we've found Clear Linux to have faster Linux graphics performance than other distributions.

The open-source VIA/Chrome Linux graphics driver stack may not have an up-to-date DRM/KMS driver or working Mesa/Gallium3D driver, but the lone community developer left working on this code has continued to improve the DDX driver over the past few months...

Yesterday I published early open-source benchmarks of the Radeon RX 470 while today is a full 18-way graphics card comparison including the newly-launched Radeon RX 460 and Radeon RX 470 graphics cards alongside the RX 480 Polaris graphics card. All of the AMD graphics cards tested for this article were running the very latest open-source driver stack on the Linux 4.8 kernel and Mesa 12.1-dev Git.

During the early days of kernel mode-setting (KMS) one of the frequently talked about future improvements that could be made as a result of it were improved error messages (like Windows BSODs) in the case of problems and other improvements on that front. While patches have emerged from time to time, it still seems like functionality that's still less than fulfilled compared to the original talked about goals. Patches this week have been revived for DRM panic handling...

The latest feature to land in the GIMP 2.9 development code for the much anticipated GIMP 2.10 milestone is support for WebP image files...

Continuing Wayland release manager Bryce Harrington at Samsung has laid out plans for shipping Wayland/Weston 1.12 in just over one month...

The patches written about last week for using unflushed fences for deferred flushes has now landed within the Radeon Gallium3D code. Performance win!..

The previously talked about KDE Kirigami UI framework has now experienced its first public release...

When Microsoft and Canonical brought Bash and Ubuntu's user-space to Windows 10 earlier this year I ran some preliminary benchmarks of Ubuntu on Windows 10 versus a native Ubuntu installation on the same hardware. Now that this "Windows Subsystem for Linux" is part of the recent Windows 10 Anniversary Update, I've carried out some fresh benchmarks of Ubuntu running atop Windows 10 compared to Ubuntu running bare metal.