Phoronix

After writing this morning about Mono bringing Vulkan bindings to C# / .NET, a Phoronix reader pointed out that Vulkan bindings for Java are also now available...

For C# developers wishing to take advantage of The Khronos Group's new Vulkan high-performance graphics API, bindings are forthcoming via the Mono crew...

Just two days after OpenBenchmarking.org turned five years old, there are two exciting milestones reached today...

While Firefox, WebKit, and other browsers / layout engines have supported APNG (Animated PNGs) for some time in hopes of finally unseating GIFs for being a modern animated image file format, it doesn't look like that will happen with Google's Chrome/Chromium being among the few still resisting support for that file format...

Spring RTS 101.0 has been released with performance improvements, bug fixes, and new features...

While not much of a surprise since leaks began coming at the end of last week, but the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B has been announced with immediate availability. The Raspberry Pi 3 is ARM64!..

Transmission 2.90 was released today as the newest version of this popular open-source Bit Torrent client...

With it being trivial to deploy new benchmark test cases with the Phoronix Test Suite and it being fully-automated, the latest results of our Xeon E3 v5 Skylake CPUs are some GCC reference benchmarks with various optimization levels to see the impact on the performance of the generated binaries as well as build time...

There's even more progress now to report on with LibreOffice's GTK3 tool-kit support...

Another year, another simulation game from S.C.S Software. I should preface this article by saying I am not usually a fan of simulation game-- whether they be truck, plane, bus, or anything else. That being said... I might be a convert after this...

Linus Torvalds just did an early Sunday morning release of the sixth weekly release candidate for the Linux 4.5 kernel...

After the tests this weekend of Intel Hyper Threading and core scaling with the new Intel Xeon E3 "Skylake" processor, I proceeded to do some Turbo Boost benchmarking...

Back in January we covered the launch of the CompuLab Airtop as one of the coolest Linux-friendly PCs ever for entusiasts. This radically designed PC is arriving next week at Phoronix for testing so we'll be able to share more about its design and performance...

The third beta of the upcoming FreeBSD 10.3 is now available for testing...

As some extra benchmarks following this week's 9-Way Intel Xeon E3 v5 Skylake Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux, some Phoronix Premium readers wanted to see how well Hyper Threading worked for these latest-generation Xeon E3 processors and the core scaling efficiency of Skylake...

Last week was the news about openSUSE making it easier to try out the very latest KDE packages. They've now upped that up a notch by making it easier to try out the KDE on Wayland experience using their Linux distribution...

Samuel Pitoiset continues carrying out compute miracles for the open-source Nouveau NVIDIA Linux graphics driver stack...

Junio Hamano released Git 2.8 Release Candidate 0 on Friday for showcasing the newest features and improvements for this distributed version control system...

Here is one more item that can be crossed off the list of what needs to happen for Fedora 24 to use Wayland by default...

OpenBenchmarking.org officially turns five years old today! It was this day back in 2011 that OpenBenchmarking.org was officially announced from the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) in conjunction with Phoronix Test Suite 3.0-Iveland...

As of late there's been an increasing effort to get OpenGL ES 3.2 working for Mesa. Overnight, another OpenGL ES 3.2 extension was put in place...

When getting access to an assortment of new Intel Xeon E3 "Skylake" processors one of the first testing thoughts that came to mind were some fresh GCC vs. Clang benchmarks. So using the $600+ Xeon E3-1280 v5 processor running up to 4.0GHz, I carried out a comparison of the GCC and Clang compilers using the packaged versions being offered by Ubuntu 16.04, the Xenial Xerus.

The Khronos Group has updated the public Vulkan 1.0 specification...

Yesterday I published the interesting and extensive tests around a 9-way Intel Xeon E3 v5 Skylake processor comparison plus a few extra AMD/Intel CPUs for reference. For some Friday benchmarking fun, that comparison has been extended to a total of a 39 system Linux CPU comparison of AMD/Intel hardware!..

A rather large DRM fixes pull request landed tonight in hoping to address graphics driver issues with Intel's latest-generation Skylake hardware...

With having the Core i7 5775C system out of the server racks when carrying out this week's six-way Linux distribution comparison, I carried out some additional tests of the high-performance Intel Iris Pro 6200 Graphics. This article is to serve as some fresh Iris Pro 6200 Graphics tests on Linux when upgrading to Linux 4.5, Mesa 11.3-devel Git, and switching to DRI3 rendering.

Opt-in flavors of Ubuntu have today issued their first beta of the "Xenial Xerus" release...

The Software Freedom Conservancy has opined today that Canonical's inclusion of the ZFS file-system module into their Linux kernel for Ubuntu 16.04 is a violation of the GPL...

For those looking at upgrading a server or workstation to an Intel Xeon E3 v5 "Skylake" processor, here is a nine-way benchmark comparison of these processors compared to older Haswell Xeons as well as an AMD FX processor for reference. The benchmarks today were done under Ubuntu Linux and besides looking at raw performance we also have test results for the CPU thermal performance, system power consumption, performance-per-Watt, and performance-per-dollar metrics with a total of 14 AMD/Intel processors.

While LLVM/Clang 3.8 was supposed to be released last week, its release got delayed but it looks like it should finally ship in the next few days...

While it doesn't yet support OpenCL 2.0/2.1, Intel Open Source Technology Center's Beignet doesn't really get the attention it deserves and sadly isn't shipping out-of-the-box on most Linux distributions...

LibreOffice has continued receiving more GTK3 improvements and this week was no different with this open-source office suite now having better support for GNOME's toolkit...

Mozilla platform engineer Chris Lord is trying to make the case for developers to put greater focus on making Mozilla's Gecko layout engine more embed-able friendly so that it can be more easily deployed for new use-cases...

For those interested in the state of various open-source desktop programs on Wayland, there is a nice read about the compatibility with these modern Linux programs...

Microsoft has announced today they are acquiring Xamarin, the company backed by Mono developers including Miguel de Icaza, GNOME's founder...

Fedora's DNF package manager that succeeded Yum officially in Fedora 22 is going to go through a phase of being rewritten in C...

Calamares 2.0 was released today as the newest major release of this distribution-independent, open-source installer framework...

While the open-source Doom 3 community hasn't been too vibrant since id Tech had open-sourced the Doom 3 code (id Tech 4) back in 2011, one of the more vibrant open-source D3 projects is looking at adding Vulkan renderer support to the engine...

NVIDIA developer Alexandre Courbot who has been liaising with the open-source Nouveau driver developers over providing GeForce GTX 900 "Maxwell" series support has sent out a revised patch series for the "Secure Boot" support...

As it's been a month since our last large Linux distribution comparison (a 10-way Linux distribution battle), here are some fresh benchmarks of six Linux distributions to see how their out-of-the-box performance compares. From a Core i7 Broadwell system, the updated versions of Clear Linux, Fedora 23, CentOS 7, openSUSE 42.1, Ubuntu 15.10, and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS were compared.

Version 7.11 of the GNU Debugger (GDB) was released this morning...

The Qt Company has finally announced the release of the Qt 5.6 release candidate...

Canonical has announced they are making a 64-bit ARM developer environment based on Ubuntu Core and will use the DragonBoard 410c as its reference platform...

ARM only announced the Cortex-A32 ARMv8 32-bit processor yesterday but already they've gone ahead and landed the support inside the GNU Compiler Collection...

The Ubuntu Design Team has put out a fresh blog post detailing some of their latest work on the visual design of convergent apps and have included plenty of screenshots / mock-ups...

To date most of the XDG-App talk for application sandboxing has been within the GNOME camp, but it's great to see a KDE developer is now looking at supporting this important technology outside of the GNOME space...

One week after being first out the gate with a Vulkan driver for x86 Linux, NVIDIA has released an updated Vulkan graphics driver for Linux and Windows with a few more changes...

Canonical developers have put out version 0.20 of Mir in time for the next OTA update for Ubuntu Phones...

Just last week NVIDIA finally released the signed firmware files for the GTX 900 "Maxwell" GPUs to finally allow open-source 3D driver support on these latest-generation processors. Those firmware blobs are now living in linux-firmware.git so that they can be easily distributed...

While poking around OpenBenchmarking.org this afternoon I noticed an interesting collection of benchmark results for anyone interested in high-end Linux disk setups...