Phoronix

AMD KERNCZ is a new generation name for an AMD chipset / FCH (Fusion Controller Hub)...

Emil Velikov announced the release this morning of Mesa 10.5.7...

Besides presenting a lot of new kernel features and functionality, the upcoming Linux 4.1 kernel release is potentially very exciting if you're an owner of certain classes of Intel hardware that offer better performance under this new kernel -- and in some cases, better battery life. Here's some tests from yet another system I found exhibiting some promising results from this new 2015 summer kernel version.

With work on porting the Linux Intel and Radeon DRM/KMS drivers progressing, within DragonFlyBSD Git they've made the first "hacky steps" for making their system console work with the KMS drivers...

The Linux 4.2 kernel will make the CFQ I/O scheduler default to its IOPS mode when on solid-state drives, which should boost performance...

There's good news for both Mesa users and developers when needing to workaround OpenGL bugs / buggy applications and games...

The Linux 4.2 kernel will bring to mainline two prominent new Direct Rendering Manager drivers...

In addition to the Steam Linux news this week that the Steam Controller and Steam Machines is up for pre-order and the Steam Linux usage has dropped to an all-time low, I noticed the Linux game count is well past 1,200 titles...

Intel's upcoming Skylake and Broxton hardware will require some binary-only firmware blobs by the i915 DRM kernel graphics driver...

This week besides readying the Phoronix Test Suite 5.8.0 release and the various benchmark articles in commemoration of Phoronix turning eleven years old (and PTS turning 7), I've also been working on adding some new tests. One of the new test profiles available for automated benchmarking is stress-ng...

An intern from Qualcomm's Innovation Center has been designing a heterogeneous execution engine for LLVM that he's hoping to eventually upstream within the LLVM project...

Support for two in-development Rockchip motherboard designs have been added to Coreboot for possible use in Chrome OS devices...

The FreeBSD release engineering team has laid out plans for the next FreeBSD 10 release...

There's a few more features being talked about this week for inclusion into Fedora 23...

In celebrating 11 years since starting Phoronix to cover the Linux hardware scene, here's some fresh benchmarks of the open-source Intel / AMD / NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers. Various GPUs were tested atop Ubuntu when moving to Git with the Linux 4.1 kernel, Mesa 10.7-devel, and LLVM 3.7 SVN.

For anyone that didn't get a chance yesterday to look at the Steam Machines up for pre-ordering, these SteamOS loaded devices all come with Intel CPUs and NVIDIA GeForce graphics...

A Phoronix reader has pointed out that a regression has slipped into the Mesa 10.5.5 point release that negatively affects users of dual-GPU laptop owners with NVIDIA Optimus technology that are using the open-source "Primus" code for running OpenGL games on the alternate graphics processor...

With Phoronix turning eleven years old today, here's a look back at the most popular open-source and Linux news since 2004!..

It was eleven years ago today I founded Phoronix.com to focus on Linux hardware reviews at a time when not only graphics cards were an issue but most PC peripherals were still troublesome to use outside of Windows. Today also marks seven years since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 for leading open-source Linux benchmarking...

Phoronix Test Suite 5.8 was released today as the latest quarterly update to Phoronix Media's open-source, cross-platform benchmarking and automated testing software. Beyond offering a significant number of new features, the Phoronix Test Suite 5.8 release commemorates seven years since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 and eleven years since the start of Phoronix.com in what's evolved to become the largest Linux hardware destination on the Internet.

Sorvig Morten of The Qt Company has announced that the cross-platform high-DPI support for the Qt tool-kit has entered a tech preview state...

PlayOnLinux developers have shared that PlayOnLinux 5 development has begun and it will be a complete rewrite of this software used by Linux gamers. Rather than being written in Python, it will now be based in Java...

Last year Imagination launched a MIPS development board that went on sale at the end of last year. In not seeing any significant benchmarks or performance coverage from this MIPS Creator CI20 over the past few months, I finally got around to buying one of these MIPS development boards from Imagination Technology. While the CI20 seemed promising at first, so far I'm very unhappy with this board and it's been even less stable than the Imagination PowerVR drivers on Linux going back to the Poulsbo days.

Paul Frields, the manager of Fedora Engineering and former Fedora Project Leader, has written a blog post today about how "PulseAudio is still awesome." While this common Linux sound server has a bit of a bad reputation, he wanted to share how great it's been doing and working out for his needs...

Valve has announced today that pre-orders have started for the Steam Controller, Steam Link, and select Steam Machines...

Version 3.0 of the Open Computer Vision library is now available. The release announcement reads, "With a great pleasure and great relief OpenCV team finally announces OpenCV 3.0 gold release, the most functional and the fastest OpenCV ever. And yet it’s very stable too – all the thousands of tests that we created during the project + many new tests pass successfully on Windows, Linux and Mac, x64 and ARM."..

Earlier this week I was pondering the state of HP's "The Machine" and Linux++ with the Linux++ software platform supposed to come in June of 2015. Not much information has been heard on these experimental projects, but now there's some new information coming out...

The upcoming Linux 4.1 kernel release will be supported for the long-haul by the Linux Foundation's LTSI project...

Besides DragonFlyBSD's Intel graphics support moving forward with porting of i915 DRM code from newer versions of the Linux kernel over to the DragonFlyBSD kernel, there's also been new activity on the Radeon front...

While it should come as no surprise, Alex Deucher of AMD tonight submitted the AMDGPU kernel driver code for pulling into DRM-Next so that it can land for the Linux 4.2 kernel merge window...

While KDBUS tried to be included for Linux 4.1, it was ultimately rejected for this current Linux kernel development cycle. However, it looks like developers might be gearing up to try to push it into the Linux 4.2 kernel...

While libinput 0.16 was recently released, Libinput 0.17.0 has been released just a few days later to fix some outstanding issues...

The latest controversy coming out of the systemd camp is an announcement this week that they're effectively deprecating their FreeDesktop.org-based infrastructure and looking to setup their workflow around GitHub...

For curiosity sake and as part of a more interesting article coming later this week in celebrating 11 years of Phoronix with its birthday on Friday, here are a range of CPU benchmarks on 45 different Linux systems with quite a range of hardware from low-power Intel Atoms and many AMD APUs to dual socket Opterons and Xeons. There's also a mix from laptops to nettops to desktops and servers.

Back in March I wrote about Red Hat working on a VirtIO GPU DRM/KMS driver. This new DRM kernel driver to benefit their virtualization setups is now looking at being added to the Linux 4.2 kernel...

The KDE crew has announced the release of KDE Applications 15.04.2 today, which is a monthly bug-fix update for the KDE Applications 15.04 stack...

AMD launched Carrizo today from Computex Taipei and with the rollout they've unveiled the rest of the details on the new A-Series APU design...

Wayland 1.8 along with the adjoining Weston compositor update were released over the night by Bryce Harrington of Samsung...

Microsoft announced today they will begin contributing to the OpenSSH project, as well as enabling PowerShell to be a native SSH client. In the Windows world it has been traditional to use a program such as PuTTY to remotely manage Unix boxes from Windows clients, but no more...

Announced today are the Fedora 22 releases for alternative architectures of POWER and IBM Z systems...

Samuel Pitoiset today unveiled his long sought after patches for implementing NVIDIA's PerfKit performance utility as a Gallium3D state tracker for use by the open-source Linux graphics drivers...

AMD is finally out with a big Catalyst Linux driver update!..

David Malcom, the developer at Red Hat who has been spearheading the work on libgccjit, is making some progress on speeding up this embeddedable JIT compiler for the GNU Compiler Collection...

The latest version of Google's Chrome/Chromium web-browser is now in beta for its upcoming v44 release...

Last year for the 10th Phoronix birthday I did a 60+ GPU comparison with the open-source drivers and a 30-way graphics card comparison with the binary AMD/NVIDIA Linux drivers. With Phoronix turning eleven this week, I did another large graphics card comparison under Linux... The results today aren't as large as last year, but represent most of the latest-generation AMD and NVIDIA hardware while running Ubuntu 15.04. With more games coming to Linux, there's new titles covered in this year's massive comparison including Civilization: Beyond Earth, Metro 2033 Redux, and many others.

Last month Steam Linux usage dropped below 1.0% during April, which was the lowest point we've seen it in some time with the monthly OS average attributing Linux to a 1.0~1.6% average. However, the May numbers are out and the Steam Linux usage has declined even further...

Intel has announced that they will be abandoning their traditional Thunderbolt connector with the upcoming Thunderbolt 3 specification. Instead, this high transfer speed technology will use a USB Type-C connector...

The second point release to Qt 5.4 is now available with various fixes and minor improvements...

While Cinnamon 2.6 was tagged a few weeks back, this morning it's finally being officially announced by the Linux Mint team...

Tom Stellard, the AMD employee organizing the X.Org Developers' Conference 2015, has announced new details regarding the event...