Phoronix

It's been four years and two weeks since Mark Shuttleworth expressed his goal of "200 million users of Ubuntu in 4 years." While Ubuntu's presence has continued to increase over the past four years, it doesn't look like that goal has been realized yet or will be by the end of the calendar year...

Microsoft has today announced they've open-sourced the important WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) code that now targets .NET Core...

S3TC remains the most common form of texture compression relied upon by video game developers and others, but it remains a legal mess for open-source graphics drivers. ETC2 texture compression isn't faced by legal issues but was only mandated by OpenGL ES 3.0 / OpenGL 4.3, which makes it less well adopted. Meanwhile, in looking forward to the future, ASTC is the royalty-free next-gen texture compression solution that's backed by the Khronos Group. Intel's forthcoming Skylake hardware will make ASTC a much more widespread reality...

Today marks twenty years since the first release of the Qt tool-kit. It's been an interesting twenty years so far going through the hands of Trolltech, Nokia, Digia, and the now spin-off The Qt Company...

Another HTTPS vulnerability has started to make its rounds earlier this morning. Dubbed Logjam by its researchers, the vulnerability stems from the US's encryption export mandate back in the 1990s. This particular vulnerability, in the transport-layer security layer protocol, breaks the Diffie-Hellman perfect forward-secrecy. Susceptibility to the vulnerability is depended on servers and clients supporting the DHE_EXPORT encryption scheme, or using a key less-than-or-equal to 1024 bits...

LibreOffice 5.0 is the next version of this popular, cross-platform, open-source office suite and not LibreOffice 4.5 as was originally planned. LibreOffice 5.0 has now been branched in Git with the trunk development now focusing on LibreOffice 5.1...

Among other OpenGL 4.x extensions, one of the more recent additions to OpenGL being tackled by open-source developers is ARB_shader_storage_buffer_object...

Besides Intel DRM updates landing today in DRM-Next for eventual merging into the Linux 4.2 kernel, AMD landed some changes to their HSA kernel driver named AMDKFD...

It appears that the current Linux 4.0.x kernel is plagued by an EXT4 file-system corruption issue. If there's any positive note out of the situation, it seems to mostly affect EXT4 Linux RAID users...

Last month we heard libdvdcss and ZFS should soon appear in Debian GNU/Linux, but now it doesn't appear that easy... It could end up taking a while longer for the ZFS file-system and the libdvdcss support for DVD playback on Debian to appear within the official repositories...

Following this morning's branching of Mesa 10.6 and pushing Git master to Mesa 10.7, the Mesa 10.6 Release Candidate 1 is now available...

The Linux Mint crew has tagged the release of the Cinnamon 2.6 desktop environment...

Google pushed Chrome 43 into the stable channel today...

With the Linux 4.1 kernel coming together nicely I've begun my testing (separate from all the fully-automated Git testing done each day via the LinuxBenchmarking.com systems) of this new kernel under a variety of different workloads, stressing different systems, and focusing on the changes in the major subsystems. One of the systems this week has been running some fresh Btrfs RAID Linux file-system benchmarks. From an eight-disk server I've started this Btrfs RAID testing as some fresh numbers since my Btrfs RAID tests from a few months back on an older server.

As planned, Mesa 10.6 has been branched and due to lacking OpenGL 4.0 / OpenGL ES 3.1 support, the version will not be bumped to Mesa 11.0. This also now makes Mesa 10.7 officially under development...

David Airlie has pulled Intel's latest batch of changes into DRM-Next that they've been queuing up for merging into the Linux 4.2 kernel...

Back in April Intel enabled the NIR IR by default within their Mesa driver but initially only for fragment shaders. Intel has now enabled NIR usage by default for vertex shaders within their i965 DRI driver...

NVIDIA introduced yesterday their first beta driver in the new 352 Linux / Solaris / FreeBSD graphics driver series...

Linus Torvalds released the Linux 4.1-rc4 kernel a short time ago, which is coming a day later than Torvalds' usual tradition of releasing new kernel versions on Sunday afternoons...

Today's post by the new Phoronix intern is looking at the state of various new (and experimental) features within Mozilla's Firefox web-browser. Covered in this article is the Electrolysis e10s multi-process model, Encrypted Media Extensions, Media Source Extensions, Skia, off-main thread compositing, and sandboxing.

Wine 1.7.43 was released on Friday and following it this weekend was the latest Wine-Staging update that re-bases atop the latest upstream Wine while carrying extra, experimental features like DXVA2, CUDA 7, and various other features...

The RandR components are updated for version 1.5.0 to take advantage of new functionality in the X.Org Server...

PC-BSD 10.1.2 was released today as the latest quarterly update to the FreeBSD-derived operating system...

GNOME 3.18 is under heavy development and already thus far this cycle we've seen GTK+ do away with Windows XP support and integrate other toolkit improvements along with other work like in-progress file manager improvements. Here's more of the GNOME 3.18 work items to get excited about...

Nearly one month ago AMD published the open-source code to their new "AMDGPU" kernel driver and the necessary user-space driver changes too. That code is continuing to mature for the Linux 4.2 kernel and for supporting the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver that code is continuing to be polished...

For users of the Freedreno Gallium3D driver for having unofficial open-source Qualcomm graphics support, the Adreno 306 is the latest graphics processor now supported...

Ubuntu enthusiasts in Europe have been able to buy the first Ubuntu phone for some time now, the BQ Aquaris, while starting now Chinese developers are able to buy the second official Ubuntu phone: the Meizu Ubuntu MX4...

For DragonFlyBSD users out there, the swap device with the latest Git kernel can now be encrypted...

As of this weekend, openSUSE Tumbleweed is now defaulting to the KDE Plasma 5.3 experience alongside the KDE Applications 15.04.1 packages...

While Oculus Rift has seen Linux support up to now, the Facebook-owned VR company has now suspended Linux and OS X development to better focus on Windows...

The release candidate for the upcoming Wayland 1.8 is now available...

With the latest Mesa patch series by Chih-Wei Huang of Android-x86, the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver is to be enabled...

The next major KDE Applications update, v15.08, is planned for release on 19 August...

Rust 1.0 has been officially released!..

Wine 1.7.43 was released this morning as the newest development version of Wine...

With the open-source OpenCL news this week about Beignet working on OpenCL 2.0 support and Intel Cherryview now supporting OpenCL, I decided to see how the open-source OpenCL support is shaping up for the soon-to-be-released Fedora 22...

Spec Ops: The Line is the latest Steam on Linux title, however, not everyone will be happy with the Linux port of this third-person shooter...

The beta of Qt 5.5 has finally been released...

In complementing this morning's early Fedora 22 Workstation benchmarks, here's some numbers in looking at Fedora 22's GNOME Shell 3.16 desktop under an X.Org Server as well as Wayland...

Most often when talking of new OpenGL 4 extensions in Mesa it tends to be regarding the Intel Mesa driver given they're the company investing the most into the Linux graphics stack, followed by the Radeon and Noveau drivers. However, this week in Mesa is some love to the fallback/debugging software rasterizers...

For those curious how the performance of Fedora 22 is shaking out, here's some early benchmarks comparing the Fedora Workstation 21 and Fedora Workstation 22 (with all updates as of the final freeze) in various workloads...

One of the newest modules added to Qt Labs is QtGamepad, a module inspired in part by the W3's HTML5 Gamepad API...

A new release of the GNU Guix functional package manager is now available...

KDBUS, the new in-kernel IPC mechanism modeled after D-Bus, wasn't accepted for Linux 4.1. Since the end of the Linux 4.1 merge window, the debate over KDBUS continued, but in the past two weeks the discussion settled down...

LLVM's Clang compiler now has support for ARM's v8.1a architecture revision of 64-bit ARM...

While Wayland 1.8 is coming along, along with the Weston 1.8 update, it looks like the libweston functionality will be staved off for another release...

With Mesa 10.6 due to be released in early June, our usual performance comparisons of this new Mesa 3D version will come. To get our latest round of Mesa open-source graphics driver benchmarking kicked off, here are benchmarks of Intel's Iris Graphics when comparing Mesa 10.5 and 10.6 Git atop Ubuntu 15.04.

The last planned point release in the GNOME 3.16 series is now available...

Just this morning the major VENOM security vulnerability was made public while a few hours later, a kernel developer has gone public with four "remote packet of death" vulnerabilities affecting a mainline Linux kernel WLAN driver...

While writing this morning about Intel Cherryview support being added to Beignet, I also noticed Intel developers have been quietly fleshing out OpenCL 2.0 support for Linux...