Phoronix

Allwinner has yet to clarify their license position on their media codec code or fully open up their encode/decode library for that matter when it's fairly clear they're violating the GPL and recently they've been trying to cover it up by obfuscating their binaries...

The HDMI CEC (Consumer Electronics Control) framework for the Linux kernel has been revived after being stalled in development for quite some time...

For student developers wishing to get involved with upstream open-source projects this summer and to be paid $5500 USD by Google for the work, there's one week left to apply to participate in this year's Google Summer of Code. Here's some of the most exciting project ideas I've seen thus far...

While this winter brought many exciting milestones for Linux and open-source fans, there's also some milestones/features hoped for this winter that haven't yet come to fruition...

It's been over three years since the last major Open64 compiler update and development of Open64 seems more or less over. This open-source compiler with a long history vanished from the web this week and some question whether its website will even return...

With winter now officially over in the Northern Hemisphere, here's a look back at the most popular Linux news and milestones for this past winter...

This week's release of BioShock Infinite for Linux reinforces the common recommendation by Linux game developers that those seeking the best support and performance should use the proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver. Here's an initial look at the BioShock Infinite performance on Ubuntu between AMD and NVIDIA graphics.

The newest bi-weekly development release of Wine is now available for testing to kick off spring...

While NVIDIA is working towards Vulkan and SPIR-V support, they aren't done optimizing for OpenGL as OpenGL will still be in use for years to come and there's many titles still seeking better performance. With the newest NVIDIA drivers, there's now NV_command_list support for further lowering the OpenGL overhead within the NVIDIA binary blob...

While Mesa still doesn't officially support the OpenGL 4.0 specification, the Direct State Access (DSA) extension of OpenGL 4.5 has been worked on quite a bit so far and the Mesa implementation is nearly done...

Sirius is an open-source, end-to-end Intelligent Personal Assistant (IPA) service. Sirius is able to recognize speech or imagery and return the results in natural language...

GCC 5 is almost in shape to be released with the latest status update on this big GNU compiler update showing a significant drop in the number of high-priority bugs...

Next week is when the X.Org Foundation plans to finally start their Board of Directors elections along with having the X.Org members vote to decide whether they should become part of SPI Inc...

This week BioShock Infinite was finally released for Linux and thanks to this AAA game having good support for automated Linux benchmarking, I've been running some tests over the past two days. In this article is a look at the AMD Catalyst Linux performance for BioShock Infinite while another article in the next few days will compare the graphics card results to the NVIDIA GeForce line-up on Ubuntu, once completed.

For users of the Kodi/XBMC software, the 14.2 Release Candidate is now available for testing...

CodeWeavers announced today the release of CrossOver 14.1, the latest version of their Wine-based program for running Windows applications/games on OS X and Linux systems...

The latest open-sourcing at Microsoft is the opening up of MSBuild, the Microsoft Build Engine that serves as the build platform for .NET and Visual Studio...

The latest OpenSSL security vulnerabilities were made public today with four CVEs being addressed...

Intel is planning to enable the NIR intermediate representation by default within their open-source Mesa Linux graphics driver...

A patch series published earlier this month enables the GL_AMD_performance_monitor OpenGL performance profiling extension for the major Gallium3D drivers...

Intel previously committed an H.265 / HEVC video decoding API to the video acceleration VA-API interface. The Intel VA-API developers have now complemented that by adding a HEVC encode API to this open-source GPU-based video acceleration library...

Allwinner is pushing their way to the top of the list of companies hated by the open-source community.....

The first alpha release of GhostBSD 10.1 is now available, which is based on PC-BSD and FreeBSD. This BSD operating system also desires to deliver a first-rate desktop experience while setting it apart is the use of the GNOME2-forked MATE desktop environment by default...

Yesterday BioShock Infinite was finally released for Linux as the latest high-quality game being ported over from Windows. Judging from the comments, this is going to be one of the more popular Linux games for the time being. The good news is I've adapted the game for serving as our latest Linux gaming benchmark...

GXUI is a new cross-platform user interface library developed at Google for their Go programming language...

Frederic Peters on the behalf of the GNOME release team announced the GNOME 3.15.92 release today, which serves as the release candidate ahead of the GNOME 3.16 official release at month's end...

While there's the OPW (now known as Outreachy) and other initiatives to try to encourage women and other less represented groups to participate in open-source communities, the Fedora Project is attempting to take things a step further by pursuing a Diversity Advisor...

With Ubuntu 15.04 now shipping X.Org Server 1.17, I've run some 2D performance tests comparing the performance of this newest Ubuntu version when using the open-source Radeon graphics driver -- both with the EXA and GLAMOR acceleration methods -- compared to the new Catalyst Linux driver beta.

QEMU 2.3 is nearing its release and on Tuesday the first release candidate (2.3.0-rc0) was released in encouraging testing for this important piece of the Linux virtualization stack...

AsiaBSDCon 2015 happened last week in Tokyo, Japan. Besides learning about OpenBSD's custom-built HTTP/web server, there was also a presentation entitled "OpenBSD Sucks" by one of the OpenBSD developers...

OpenSSH 6.8 was released this morning and with this version a lot of their internal code was refactored to make OpenSSH more library-like...

Carsten Munk of the Mer Project and Chief Research Engineer of Jolla has raised some concerns about the Linux kernel used by the BQ Aquaris E4.5 smart-phone running Ubuntu Touch. The kernel appears to have module source-code marked as confidential and other markings that would not comply with the GPLv2 license of the Linux kernel...

Since the beginning of the year CUDA 7 has been out in development form while this week from GTC 2015 NVIDIA has officially launched CUDA 7.0...

Most Linux distributions now use Plymouth as their graphical boot system / splash screen that leverages DRM/KMS kernel support. While many Linux distributions rely on Plymouth, there hasn't been a formal release in the better part of a year -- until yesterday...

The Ubuntu Release Team has sent out the reminder today that Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" will not be supported any longer after the end of next month...

Besides NVIDIA announcing yesterday the $999 GeForce GTX TITAN X graphics card that will soon be reviewed under Linux on Phoronix, NVIDIA also announced the Digits DevBox: a $15,000 USD Linux-powered system...

The Linux Mint crew has released the first release candidates of Linux Mint Debian Edition 2 "Betsy" with the Cinnamon and MATE desktop spins...

GNOME Shell 3.15.92 was released today and among other minor enhancements it improves the GNOME classic theme...

NVIDIA officially announced the GeForce GTX Titan X $1000 USD graphics card today to kick off their 2015 GPU Technology Conference...

BioShock Infinite is now available to Linux gamers... assuming you're okay with using the binary AMD and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers...

While we're still waiting for AMD to release their new GPU kernel driver for supporting the existing R9 285 "Tonga" graphics card and their next-gen graphics cards coming out later this year, on the CPU side the AMD Linux developers have already started shipping patches to support their next-gen CPU architecture not expected for release until 2016~2017. Tux, meet the AMD Zen architecture...

The ColorHug ALS is an ambient light sensor developed by Richard Hughes to dynamically control the brightness of laptop panels -- for laptops that don't have a built-in light sensor for said purpose...

Security researcher Ilja van Sprundel previously characterized the X.Org security scene as being a disaster. This researcher at IOActive has previously reported a large number of X.Org security issues and today is yet another advisory thanks to Ilja...

With the upcoming release of OpenBSD 5.7 in May, nginx is being removed from the OpenBSD base package set in favor of using OpenBSD's own, home-grown web-server by default...

Digia / The Qt Company has finally managed to get Qt 5.5 into a shape for branching and as a result the alpha version is now available for early testing...

The HSA Foundation yesterday announced the official v1.0 release of their Heterogeneous System Architecture specification...

A Samsung developer has landed the latest addition to the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL): Emile...

While DRI3 has been talked about for the better part of three years, today it's finally now supported by the mainline xf86-video-ati Radeon DDX driver...

Matthias Clasen has released the latest GTK+ 3.15 development release that's near final and about ready to be named GTK+ 3.16...

For any students reading Phoronix interested in contributing to open-source projects, it's time to apply for Google's Summer of Code 2015 (GSoC 2015) where you can be financed to work on major free software initiatives over the summer holiday...