Phoronix

The latest monthly point release to Plasma 5.4 is now available...

It's been just over six months since I completed construction on the large 60+ system server room where a ton of Linux benchmarking takes place just not for Phoronix.com but also the new LinuxBenchmarking.com daily performance tracking initiative and testing and development around our Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org software. Here's a look back, a few recommendations to reiterate for those aspiring to turn their cellar into a server farm, and a few things I'd do differently next time around.

A day after Sarah Sharp formally announced she's stepping away from Linux kernel development due to the arguably toxic community, well known kernel developer Matthew Garrett announced he too is planning to cease his personal contributions to the upstream Linux kernel...

Valve has updated SteamOS Brewmaster to use Debian 8.2 and with that also comes a Linux kernel update...

A month out from the launch of PHP 7, Rogue Wave Software has announced they've acquired Zend Technologies, the main company behind PHP for the enterprise...

While there's just a handful of names that Phoronix readers are familiar with when it comes to AMD's open-source Linux driver developers and those from AMD who communicate with the community in our forums, it turns out there are many more developers at AMD becoming involved as part of their new AMDGPU driver stack...

OpenGL Compute Shader support appears about ready for the open-source Intel i965 Mesa DRI driver!..

The latest feature proposed for Fedora 24 and should almost certainly be approved is the landing of NetworkManager 1.2...

The OpenGL EXT_polygon_offset_clamp extension has been supported in mainline Mesa for the Intel i965 Mesa DRI driver for some time while now this extension is supported for older Intel Gen 4/5 hardware...

While we're still waiting on HP to shed any more details or release their Linux++ operating system initiative, today they have made public OpenSwitch: an open-source network operating system...

Quick note for anyone who has a vested interest in LLVM/Clang on Windows or in Windows XP: LLVM has ended its support...

While it's 2015, a serial port benchmark was just added to the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org...

Last week I posted the benchmarks of a six-way Linux distribution comparison that included Fedora, openSUSE, Manjaro, Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint Linux. One of the test requests that came out of it was posting some follow-up benchmarks of the different openSUSE Linux kernel options. In this article are benchmarks of openSUSE's four main kernel flavors.

Since early 2014 we've seen Wine running on Android and now it looks like before the end of the year CodeWeavers will release a version of CrossOver for Android along with publishing the associated Wine patches...

While Sarah Sharp had been a longtime Linux kernel develoepr and encouraged females to get involved with Linux kernel development, she is stopping any further contributions to the upstream kernel...

While there is already LibreOffice Online as a cloud-based version of the open-source office suite, there's a new, separate effort underway for getting LibreOffice in web browsers...

Tom Stellard of AMD has once again stepped up to maintain stable point releases of the LLVM compiler stack. He's laid out his plans now for doing minor updates to LLVM 3.7...

The first public beta has been released for the Linux (and OS X) build of Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power...

Within the latest development code of GNOME's key GLib library leading up to GNOME 3.20 is Unicode 8.0 support...

A new update to OpenIndiana is available, the operating system powered by Illumos that's derived from what was the OpenSolaris code-base prior to it being killed by Oracle. OpenIndiana 2015.10 "Hipster" is the name of this new release.

Linus Torvalds has tagged the Linux 4.3-rc4 kernel a few minutes ago in Git. Besides bug-fixing, this new kernel update adds a post-merge-window feature of a new and more secure string copy function for developers to utilize in the future...

Substance Designer is a node-based texturing tool and is quite advanced software. Up to now Allegorithmic's Substance software has just been available for Windows and OS X, but now it's being ported to Linux...

Back in March was a patch enabling next-generation AMD Zen processor support for GCC and now it looks like this patch is ready to be added to the GNU Compiler Collect's trunk code-base for GCC 6...

Building off Friday's release of Wine 1.7.52 is now Wine-Staging 1.7.52 with a few more updates added in...

It's been three years since the release of MPlayer 1.1 while surprisingly this weekend MPlayer 1.2 was released...

As of a change yesterday to Intel's i965 Mesa driver, the Vec4 back-end is unconditionally using NIR rather than GLSL IR with the option being removed...

Kubuntu 15.10 "Wily Werewolf" is being released later this month and it will feature the very latest KDE Plasma 5.4 point release...

One of the big items still in the works as part of AMD's unified Linux driver strategy is that the Catalyst proprietary driver will be isolated to user-space and make use of the AMDGPU kernel DRM driver. Being publicly now in development in a few code branches are changes to the AMD DRM code for beginning to suit more of it to Catalyst's driver design...

Since August I've been delivering various Linux benchmarks of the Core i5 6600K "Skylake" processor, but unfortunately don't have access yet to a i7-6700K Linux box. Fortunately, thanks to the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software and the OpenBenchmarking.org collaborative cloud component, there are already numerous result files...

Emil Velikov announced Mesa 10.6.9 today as the newest point release for the aging Mesa 10.6 series...

The third alpha release of the Kodi 16 HTPC open-source software is now available for testing with long-press support...

If you are looking for an open-frame, four-post rack cabinet that's the perfect size for some home server/media equipment and doesn't run floor-to-ceiling, the StarTech.com 25U 4POSTRACK25U is a great fit. After having had great success with my 48U StarTech.com racks, I turned to the 25U rack for something smaller that can fit and look more normal outside of the server room.

Oracle announced the release today of VirtualBox 5.0.6, the newest version of their virtualization platform...

FLIF is short for the Free Lossless Image Format and is the newest open-source (GPLv3) attempt at being a better image for the web than JPEG, PNG, WebP, etc...

While most Phoronix readers are familiar with Linux system providers System76 and ZaReason, less of you probably are familiar with eRacks even though they've been building open-source systems since the late 90's...

It's been one month since the last Wine development release, but Wine 1.7.52 was just tagged and made available today...

While Valve's Steam Controller isn't expected to formally launch until 10 November, at least some of those who pre-ordered this gaming controller early are now reportedly set to receive their device any day now...

AMD hasn't gotten lucky financially speaking in quite a while and their latest measure to fend off further losses is by getting rid of another 5% of its staff, or about 500 people based on their current head count of just under 10,000 employees left...

While more games continue to be ported over to Linux and offered on Steam, the overall Linux gaming market-share remains under 1%...

For those wondering about the state of GNOME, their annual report is now available...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has today approved a release schedule for Fedora 24...

While last quarter was exciting for Linux users as was all of the open-source activity last month, this final quarter of 2015 is looking to be even more exciting for Linux enthusiasts...

There was a lot of interesting open-source and Linux news during September!..

Yesterday I published the results of a 6-way Linux distribution performance comparison but not part of that original article were any Gentoo Linux results. However, with Calculate Linux 15 having been released yesterday and is a well known Gentoo derivative, I decided to run some extra benchmarks...

Systemd 227 hasn't been released yet but it appears that it will be coming out quite soon. Here's a look at some of the changes...

It's been a while since last having anything to report on Xoreos, but this week they're out with a new release. For those out of the loop, Xoreos is an open-source re-implementation of BioWare's proprietary Aurora Engine. With Xoreos the aim is to make it possible to power Neverwinter Nights and similar games off this GPLv3+ engine while still relying upon the game's assets...

NixOS, the "purely functional Linux distribution" built around the Nix package manager, is out with a new release...

Earlier this month was an inquiry to upstream LLVM developers about including an Atmel AVR back-end in the mainline repository, which up to now has been developed out of tree. LLVM developers are now discussing this back-end and it's looking like it may be added once reviewed...

Apple released OS X 10.11 "El Capitan" today as a free update for Apple computer owners. Are you interested in some fresh OS X vs. Linux benchmarks?..

Honoring the latest round of Phoronix Premium reader requests is a fresh six-way Linux distribution comparison. Tested were Manjaro 15.09 and Linux Mint 17.2 and then the latest development versions of Fedora 23, openSUSE 42.1 Leap, Debian Stretch Testing, and Ubuntu 15.10.