Phoronix

With having a new Apple Mac Mini in our testing labs this week, I ran some basic benchmarks comparing Mac OS X 10.10.2 to Ubuntu 15.04 to Fedora 21 in a few different configurations.

With Q1'2015 quickly coming to an end, here's a look at the Mesa Git activity for the past few months...

The GTK3 port of LibreOffice is finally taking shape and gaining new functionality...

The Vulkan, SPIR-V, and OpenCL 2.1 slides from last week's GPU Tech Conference are now online...

For those interested in PHP 7, it's now easier to try out the development version of the next-generation PHP on Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux based operating systems...

Last week we relayed the article by Carsten Munk of Jolla about the kernel of the BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Phone being a mess. Since then, it looks like BQ and Ubuntu developers have taken to cleaning up the kernel source tree...

While Allwinner has been caught violating the (L)GPL and resulted in obfuscating their code and playing around with their advertised licenses, now this ARM vendor is taking things a step further...

Eric Anholt has called on the first pull request for the X.Org Server 1.18 merge window to improve the GLAMOR 2D acceleration code...

NVIDIA just released their first beta Linux graphics driver in their new, short-lived 349.xx driver series...

As some more exciting open-source benchmarking news this week besides the release of Phoronix Test Suite 5.6 and The New Place Where Linux And Other Open-Source Code Is Constantly Being Benchmarked (a.k.a. the new ~50 system upstream Linux benchmarking test farm complete with a bar), the barrier to entry for benchmarking Ubuntu in the Cloud is now even lower. It's becoming rather trivial to run Ubuntu Cloud benchmarks...

Last week NVIDIA released the GeForce GTX TITAN X, their latest $999+ USD graphics card. This new graphics card packs 12GB of GDDR5 video memory and the Maxwell-based GPU is capable of 7 TFLOPS of single-precision compute power. Now it's time for some Linux benchmarks of this new high-end graphics card at Phoronix...

Matthias Clasen just sent out the official release announcement for GNOME 3.16 a few minutes ago. Based upon my testing of the GNOME 3.16 development packages thus far, I'm very confident in calling it their best desktop release yet!..

Collabora and IceWarp are collaborating to create LibreOffice On-Line, a scalable, cloud-hostable version of LibreOffice for the web...

It's close to 50 Linux systems initially in the new automated test farm that are doing nothing but benchmarking day-in and day-out of upstream, open-source code! I've spent over the past month and hundreds of hours building the new server room and after a lot of work, it's now back to being fully operational and churning out tons of Linux code being rigorously tested throughout the day in looking for performance regressions and other issues. Here's a look at the new environment: an open-source test farm that has a command-center-like screen and a bar.

Some Radeon DRM changes have already been queued for Linux 4.1 and now the AMDKFD HSA driver has its initial -next pull request for this next version of the Linux kernel...

Since last year the NVIDIA Linux binary graphics driver has exposed the NVENC API for GPU-based video encode support. FFmpeg has supported NVENC for offloading the encode job to newer NVIDIA graphics processors and now they've extended that code to support H.265 encoding on the GPU...

More of Direct State Access from OpenGL 4.5 is now working within mainline Mesa!..

With this month's release of the Catalyst 15.3 Beta for Windows, FreeSync Technology support was added. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like any Linux support is imminent...

Following last week's QEMU 2.3-rc0 release, out today is 2.3-RC1 with over 100 changes in the past few days...

Red Hat has published a new KMS driver for the VirtIO GPU used within their Linux virtualization stack...

Announced today on the Linux kernel mailing list was the Library Operating System (LibOS) for Linux...

Last week BioShock: Infinite was finally released for Steam on Linux. Following the premiere of that game for Linux, posted were the AMD Catalyst Linux results for this game followed by a preview of the AMD vs. NVIDIA graphics card results. For those curious about the performance of this game for a broader graphics card selection, here's the BioShock: Infinite results from eighteen different graphics cards while running this new Linux game.

For making its desktop more accessible to users, GNOME 3.16 has improvements when it comes to its high contrast theme with the shell and toolkit both having received accessibility improvements this cycle...

Phoronix Test Suite 5.6 was released today as the quarterly update to Phoronix Media's open-source, cross-platform benchmarking and automated testing software.

A change made to systemd yesterday is working on the stateless Linux systems feature...

Version 5.6 of the Phoronix Test Suite is being released this morning...

The Epiphany open-source web-browser has benefited from a number of changes ahead of tomorrow's GNOME 3.16 release...

Pixar has made a free, non-commercial version of its RenderMan software available to the public...

Libinput 0.13 was released today as one of the final steps before Libinput 1.0...

The final v3.16.0 releases of the GNOME Shell and Mutter window manager are available this Monday afternoon...

Martin Gräßlin has shared some of his recently-landed work for the KWin 5.3 development cycle as it largely pertains to Wayland...

The BPF In-Kernel Virtual Machine will likely see new functionality with the next Linux kernel release cycle, Linux 4.1...

The Linux 4.1 kernel will feature support for Radeon DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport so that this open-source AMD Linux graphics driver can work with the latest high resolution DP displays and modern laptop docking stations...

Another GNOME 3.16 package christened this morning for Wednesday's release is WebKitGTK+ 2.8.0...

The X.Org Foundation elections have finally got underway after being delayed to vote on new directors as well as having the X.Org members decide whether the foundation should dissolve its 501(c)3 status and become a sub-project of the SPI Inc...

It's GNOME 3.16 week! Matthias Clasen checked in the important GTK+ 3.16.0 package prior to the deadline tonight...

GNU Nano 2.4.0 was released this morning as the first stable update to this open-source CLI text editor in a number of years...

Linus Torvalds released the weekly release candidate to the Linux 4.0 kernel last night...

Version 1.5 of the open-source, cross-platform Red Eclipse first person shooter was released this weekend. Red Eclipse, which in turn is based on the Cube Engien 2, has seen some significant updates with this being the first major update in about two years...

Following Friday's release of Wine 1.7.39, Wine-Staging 1.7.39 was released this Sunday with hundreds of extra patches on top of Wine...

A new Apple Mac Mini happened to arrive at Phoronix that sports Intel Iris Graphics. It's now time to start benchmarking this Apple system with Intel Core i5 processor and run some comparative tests against Linux...

A patch published on Sunday for the new AMDKFD HSA kernel driver adds support for using more than one graphics card/driver...

With the recent BioShock Infinite Linux benchmark results and the big Metro Redux graphics card comparison on Linux, a fair number of Linux gamers have been bringing it up in the forums with their hypothesis that NVIDIA's Linux gaming performance wins is due to their driver supporting OpenGL threaded optimizations. Well, that's not always the case, as shown in this article with a __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS comparison in many Linux games with different GeForce hardware.

For those thinking about potentially running a Linux system with a combination of SSD and HDD so that the solid-state drive would be able to act as a performance cache for commonly used data, BCache and LVM-cache/dmcache are two of the commonly used solutions...

AMD issued two job postings this past week for hiring more open-source Linux graphics driver developers...

The 2015 X.Org Elections are finally getting started tomorrow after being delayed and running close on time for responding to SPI's resolution. Just in time for the elections to start, the revised foundation by-laws have been published that shift the focus of what the X.Org Foundation is about...

While in the process of benchmarking BioShock Infinite on Linux with AMD and NVIDIA hardware given the Linux release of the title this week, I also took this opportunity to run a 22-way graphics card comparison of Metro Last Light Redux and Metro 2033 Redux on the latest AMD and NVIDIA graphics drivers atop Ubuntu 15.04. Here's those results.

While Google Chromebooks up to this point have tended to be ARM-based along with some using low-power Atom x86 SoCs, it appears Imagination Technologies is working towards some MIPS design wins for these Internet-focused devices. Imagination has been working on MIPS improvements within Coreboot as a ChromeOS partner...

Timothy Arceri has moved on to working towards finishing up work on the ARB_arrays_of_arrays extension as needed by OpenGL 4.3...

Mozilla announced the updated release this week of their NSS (Network Security Services) libraries...