Phoronix

Fedora 22 is now under its final freeze with planned availability before month's end. I've been running Fedora 22 on various development systems and in the benchmarking farm at Phoronix to great success.

Intel's been working on open-source Linux support for Cherryview for more than one year while finally one of the last pieces of the hardware enablement puzzle has landed: OpenCL support for Cherryview...

The latest high-profile security vulnerability affecting open-source software and impacting mass amounts of systems worldwide is dubbed VENOM...

Qt 5.5 has been running behind schedule for some time while now The Qt Company is trying to get it back on track and to officially ship Qt 5.5 by the end of next month...

NVIDIA announced the release yesterday of the 346.72 driver, which is their latest binary Linux update in the long-lived 346 branch...

DNF 1.0 was released this week ahead of the Fedora 22 debut later this month where it will replace Yum by default as the package manager. In my testing of DNF on Fedora 22 and earlier releases, it's worked out quite well, but there's one issue that still nags me about Dandified Yum...

The Flash-Friendly File-System is moving forward with its plans for implementing file-system level encryption support...

I've found out from various people in the know that AMD has assembled a "tiger team" to tackle outstanding Catalyst driver issues. This tiger team isn't Linux specific, but Linux driver issues will be fully evaluated and tackled by this new group of driver specialists...

Today marks the final freeze for Fedora 22 with plans to officially release this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution update later in May...

Foresight Linux was a great distribution back in the day for showcasing the latest GNOME components, but after a decade of work, the project is shutting down...

It's been a few weeks since the last development release of Phoronix Test Suite 5.8 while out this afternoon is Phoronix Test Suite 5.8 Milestone 3...

This summer on Phoronix we'll be welcoming Eric Griffith to the team, a student from the California University of Pennsylvania. Eric will be an intern at Phoronix via his journalism program at the university. Eric has already written about his new laptop with Linux and he'll be writing many more Linux/open-source articles on Phoronix over the next few months. Please join me in welcoming him to his summer internship. He's prepared a few remarks to get started...

AMD has gone back and managed to provide open-source Linux users with support for the VCE 1.0 video encode engine...

Mozilla Firefox 38 is being officially released today and with this open-source web browser update comes new functionality...

One of the latest commits to the xorg-server that's seen relatively few commits this development cycle is support for smooth scrolling with XWayland...

The current plan is to branch Mesa 10.6 from Git master on Friday, which would put the official 10.6.0 release in early June...

The day is coming where DNF is replacing Yum as the default package manager on Fedora Linux. DNF 1.0 was just released today to mark the point of stability and it being ready to take over Yum's responsibilities with the upcoming Fedora 22 release...

Axel Davy has added support to Mesa's EGL code for supporting DRM Render-Nodes and with that supporting DRI_PRIME when using Wayland...

With the transformation of a basement into a large Linux server room (50+ computers), I previously wrote about the sub-$50 4U ATX server case and 2U micro-ATX server case commonly used for housing the many Linux systems in this lab running continuous performance benchmarks. For the EATX systems, here's the server chassis I've gone with and experienced great results out of this EATX/SSI rackmount chassis that can be found online for as little as $80 USD.

Back in 2013 the Jailhouse Hypervisor was announced as a partitioning hypervisor that's lighter-weight than KVM. Last year saw the release of Jailhouse 0.1 and finally coming out today is the next update: Jailhouse 0.5...

While Linux distributions like Fedora and Mageia have adopted predictable/persistent network interface names, Ubuntu has not. However, that is looking to change and it might also be the case for upstream Debian...

Intel's Open-Source Technology Center continues to hire new developers for working on their Linux graphics stack. Back in 2013, Intel had 20~30 full-time Linux graphics driver developers and since then that number has only risen...

Per the latest World Wine News (WWN), USB support for Wine is being discussed yet again but as of right now it's not clear if any new work will materialize as a result of the latest discussions...

The Khronos Group today announced the official release of the SYCL 1.2 specification. SYCL is the Khronos Group's single-source heterogeneous programming language that serves as an abstraction layer for utilizing OpenCL while writing standard C++ code...

Intel as of late seems quite set on seeing OpenGL ES 3.1 becoming a reality for Mesa in the near-term...

In our routine compiler benchmarks looking at LLVM/Clang vs. GCC, the performance has certainly gotten tight over the years but one of the areas where there's still been a large difference are in workloads that can make use of OpenMP for multi-threading. Fortunately, Clang has finally finished up its OpenMP 3.1 support...

A Red Hat developer mentioned to us at Phoronix that they're seeing "drastically improved battery life" in some cases with the Linux 4.1 kernel to the extent that it's up to 2~4 hours of extra battery life with the kernel upgrade to Git. I've since started some fresh Linux laptop battery tests.

Linus Torvalds just announced the release of the Linux 4.1-rc3 kernel, which he's called the "Mother's Day Sunday release" for those celebrating this holiday...

This is a guest post by Tom Li, a Phoronix reader wishing to share his views on the increasing problems of free/open-source software public mailing lists being flooded with spam and other garbage. There are some extreme situations where there can be "flooding attacks" of list subscribers receiving thousands of mailing list messages per day from attackers. Tom is hoping the open-source community can come up with better solutions to fend off this problem...

While there isn't much to see yet out of the current Ubuntu 15.10 "Wily Werewolf" state compared to the recent Ubuntu 15.04 release, the daily ISOs have now begun for Ubuntu Wily...

With Canonical having hosted the Ubuntu Online Summit this past week to lay out and plan early details of Ubuntu 15.10, here's a recap of our Phoronix coverage over the past week for their next major update due to ship in October...

A Phoronix reader recently asked whether Fedora developers have yet enabled F2FS file-system support within their packaged kernel. While I didn't mention it before, yes, they ended up enabling support for the Flash-Friendly File-System...

Earlier this month we wrote about DragonFlyBSD having experimental Broadwell graphics support and now this updated DRM driver code has landed in the BSD distribution. Besides supporting the new Intel Broadwell HD/Iris Graphics, there's also a number of other new features...

Julien Cristau of Debian has released updated versions of some of the older X.Org DDX drivers...

As an update to the post last night about the Phoronix Forums going through a major upgrade, the forums should be running though more tweaks and alterations are still ongoing this weekend...

For early adopters of Fedora 22 that have been missing out on the packages provided by the third-party RPM Fusion repository, they have started rolling out their support for this next Fedora Linux release...

KDE Frameworks 5.10 was released on Friday as the latest add-on libraries complementing Qt within the KDE world...

The Phoronix Forums were just upgraded.....

While I found Fedora 21 to be the best release yet from Fedora (Core) and Fedora 22 is looking to be even better, there's still blemishes as with any Linux distribution...

Martin Gräßlin just shared that with the forthcoming KDE Plasma 5.4 update, KWin will serve as a proper Wayland compositor!..

For over one year we've been looking forward to Crytek bringing CryENGINE to Linux with an OpenGL renderer. That was announced back at GDC 2014 and we haven't heard much lately, but finally there's an update and the Linux support is expected soon...

Months after working on direct state access support in Mesa, Fredrik Höglund of KDE has finished off this OpenGL 4.5 feature for core Mesa...

Mir, Canonical's display server for Unity 8 that's currently in use by Ubuntu Touch, is now under development for its next major version...

Musl has long aimed at being a lightweight, simple, free, and correct libc library. However, hindering its adoption has been out-of-tree patches required against GCC for supporting the Musl C library. Fortunately, Musl support has now been merged into GCC...

Back when the GNOME 2 desktop was forked in 2011 as the MATE Desktop Environment, there were polarized views from the Linux community how this fork of GNOME2 could survive and what sort of future it would have. Four years later, MATE is still being maintained, there's distributions shipping with MATE as the default desktop, and the project is managing to stay relevant...

While Snappy packaging on Ubuntu is only a few months old, it's generating a lot of interest and will eventually replace .deb packages on Ubuntu. One of the interesting features to be worked on going forward for Snappy is deduplication support...

Another one of the interesting discussions this week at the Ubuntu Online Summit was with regards to plans for merging off of Python 2 and providing Python 3 by default over the next year, in time for the long-term support release of Ubuntu 16.04...

With Kodi 15 coming along, the OpenELEC team has released their first beta of the next version of their multimedia focused Linux distribution...

While Ubuntu 15.04 marked the point of switching from Upstart to systemd, Ubuntu Linux doesn't currently make use of all systemd functionality, such as networkd. However, at least for networkd, that soon could be changing...

The Lubuntu derivative of Ubuntu that traditionally has been powered by the LXDE desktop environment is in the process of transitioning to LXQt...