Phoronix

Dave Jones, a former Linux kernel engineer at Red Hat, is effectively suspending the future public development of his Trinity system call fuzzer...

For those that missed it, Oracle quietly released the first beta of Solaris 11.3 earlier this week...

Building on top of Friday's release of Wine 1.7.47 is a new Wine-Staging release that tacks on a couple extra features...

When I sent the Fedora 22 KDE Review off to Michael I did it with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. It wasn't because I didn't like KDE, or hadn't been enjoying Fedora, far from it. In fact, I started to transition my T450s over to Arch Linux but quickly decided against that, as I enjoyed the level of convenience that Fedora brings to me for many things.

A major update is out to TigerVNC, the popular, open-source VNC software...

It's been one week now since making the new Phoronix site public. So far things seem to be running well...

If you have been interested in an Intel NUC as a 4-inch, low-power computer, the Braswell-based NUC5CPYH is finally in-stock and shipping at major Internet retailers...

You'll need to pull down the latest X.Org DDX drivers when it comes time to running X.Org Server Git or what will become X.Org Server 1.18...

The latest stable release of Mesa 10.6 is now available and it comes with a plethora of fixes...

The second release candidate to Kodi 15.0 "Isengard" is now available. Since Kodi 14.2 there have now been about 1,080 code changes so far towards this next major release...

A few days ago Beamdog announced Siege Of Dragonspear, an expansion pack for Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition...

After earlier this week looking at whether the open-source NVIDIA driver is fast enough for Steam Linux gaming, here are some benchmark results that compare the performance of the latest Nouveau Gallium3D driver code against the latest NVIDIA binary Linux graphics driver.

The first beta of the upcoming FreeBSD 10.2 release is now available. Besides the generic FreeBSD 10.2-BETA1 spins for x86, x86_64, IA64, PowerPC, PowerPC 64-bit, and SPARC 64-bit, there are also ARMv6 spins for the Beaglebone, CuBox-Hummingboard, RaspberryPi B, and Wandboard...

Last month the BQ Aquaris E5 Ubuntu Phone was launched in Europe. While the hardware may not be the best out there and the Ubuntu Phone software stack is still maturing, early reviews seem fairly positive...

For those relying on the Freedreno Gallium3D driver for open-source Qualcomm Adreno graphics support, there are more improvements in Git...

As a quick follow-up to America's Army looking at SteamOS/Linux support from earlier this week, it turns out the developers are indeed exploring a Linux client and server...

Version 5.12 of the KDE Frameworks were released this morning as the complementary set of add-on libraries to Qt5...

As part of the other Linux graphics tests running this week, here are the results of eight different graphics cards -- from both NVIDIA and AMD -- being tested on the latest open-source Linux graphics drivers under a variety of OpenGL Linux games. The software stack making up this round of testing was the Linux 4.1.1 kernel and Mesa 10.7-devel atop Ubuntu 15.04.

Wine 1.7.47 was just released as the newest bi-weekly development version of this popular open-source project to run Windows programs on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems...

The latest "news tip" is from a Phoronix reader who expressed "concerns" that at least one NSA security analyst is going through the code for KDBUS, the systemd-backed in-kernel IPC mechanism that's planning for integration in Linux 4.3...

I'm in the midst of a new large open-source and (separately) closed-source NVIDIA/AMD Linux graphics card comparison on the latest drivers as part of an upcoming Radeon R7 370 Linux review and to be followed by R9 Fury Linux benchmarks. However, for those interested in the Catalyst 15.7 benchmarks on Linux, I ran some quick tests with a Radeon R9 285 and R9 290...

The High Performance File-System (HPFS) that was originally designed for the OS/2 operating system now has SSD TRIM support for its Linux kernel support while reading/writing from these old partitions...

For those interested, it's becoming possible to play with Ubuntu's Snappy next-generation package manager from a personal desktop...

Earlier today I wrote about how Intel has a lot of Linux graphics developers (likely 30~50) and is by far the company with the most active developers working on the open-source graphics stack. Here's some other numbers as part of the mailing list parsing for the other active companies, including NVIDIA, AMD, and Samsung...

QEMU 2.4.0-rc0 was just tagged in Git. As usual, this update to an important piece to the open-source Linux virtualization stack will come with many new features when it officially ships later this summer...

Alex Deucher sent out twelve new patches just minutes ago for the AMDGPU DRM driver. The AMDGPU driver was merged for Linux 4.2 while these patches provide new features/functionality and thus will not be merged until Linux 4.3...

Back in 2013 we heard Intel had 20~30 full-time developers on their Linux graphics driver team. Since then, they've only been hiring more developers. Based on email activity at least, here's a new number...

It's been a while since last reporting on Unvanquished (mostly because it seems their RSS feed is broken), but they've continued moving along with their open-source game and Daemon engine. This first person shooter is now up to its 41st monthly alpha release...

A Kodi developer has started working on integrating Google's Chrome Embedded Framework (CEF) browser layout/rendering engine into Kodi. If successful in embedding this Chromium code into the Kodi HTPC software, new doors could be opened up and it would open up a lot of new possibilities...

As in past years, it's that time again to run another audience survey on Phoronix.com. The survey should take just a few minutes to complete and will be entered to win a $500 Amazon.com gift card...

Canonical is back to working on the Launchpad.net code, their website that pairs code hosting with bug tacking, translations, blueprints, and more...

Yesterday's Catalyst 15.7 for Linux driver update turned out to be a fairly nice driver update. Tests are still running but the new features and performance improvements are certainly welcome...

We heard another big OpenSSL vulnerability would be announced soon and today it's been made public: OpenSSL's latest "high" severity security vulnerability...

After being in public test form the past few months, VirtualBox 5.0 was officially released this morning...

Bugzilla 5.0 was released this week as their "most exciting new version of Bugzilla in our history" and "our best release ever" after being in development for more than two years...

On the heels of the fresh open-source AMD Linux driver tests with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2, here are some numbers for these Steam Linux games on the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) graphics driver...

Microsoft has become OpenBSD's first-ever "Gold" contributor with sending this BSD operating system project somewhere between $25k and $50k USD...

The Catalyst 15.7 Linux graphics driver was just released, one day longer than anticipated...

America's Army: Proving Grounds may receive a port to Linux/SteamOS...

AMD announced the FirePro S9170 this morning as the first server graphics card with 32GB of memory for high performance compute...

I'm in the process of running open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D tests on the new MSI Radeon R7 370 4G graphics card. That initial Linux review of the AMD Radeon R7 370 with the open-source driver will be published later this week (still waiting on an updated Catalyst driver for those proprietary driver tests). However, as an excerpt of the Gallium3D testing, here are results from some AMD graphics cards with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2...

Neil Trevett, the President of the Khronos Group, did an interview recently about the Vulkan API as the future of graphics programming...

The First beta of Qt Creator 3.5 Beta 1 is now available. This Qt-focused integrated development environment drops BlackBerry 10 support over having no maintainer while separately bringing improvements/fixes for Android and more...

Iago Toral of consulting firm Igalia has been working on ARB_shader_storage_buffer object support in Mesa the past few months. This extension is needed for OpenGL 4.3 and is a buffer that allows for bidirectional communication between the CPU and GPU space and perform random access reads/writes and atomic operations on variables within the buffer objects...

While Debian has preferred the Libav fork of FFmpeg, after reviewing the situation, the Debian Multimedia Maintainers team has decided to switch back to FFmpeg...

Ubuntu 15.10, the Wily Werewolf, will closely follow Debian in its GCC 5 compiler upgrade and libstdc++6 ABI updates. They hope to have everything settled for Ubuntu 15.10 to avoid any big tool-chain changes during the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS cycle...

One of the big things we've been looking forward to with SPIR-V is the to/from LLVM IR pass in order to open up the possibilities for this new industry-standard intermediate representation to be used by Vulkan and OpenCL. Some code will soon be opened up, but it's not the end game...

Mesa release manager Emil Velikov published a set of patches recently in what he's working on for render-node-only OpenCL and other code clean-ups...

Over on the Chromium Blog is a new posting about the work Google is doing on a new JavaScript compiler for V8 in Chrome, codenamed TurboFan...

Plans have been laid for making GCC 5 the default compiler in Debian Unstable by month's end. With the move to GCC5 comes libstdc++6 ABI breakage...