Phoronix

The release schedule for the upcoming KDE Applications 16.04 bundle has been firmed up...

It has been quite a while since last having any Wine-Staging release to talk about, but nothing has stopped and simply was due to the project not having the time for putting out release notes. Wine-Staging continues to ride off upstream Wine while adding in over one hundred experimental patches for testing.'..

With the Linux 4.5 kernel bringing PCI Express link speed changes and other alterations to the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver, here are benchmarks comparing this unofficial open-source NVIDIA Linux driver on Linux 4.4 and Linux 4.5-rc3 compared to the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver.

For those that haven't heard yet, Opera Software ASA has received a buy out offer led by a Chinese tech group for buying the browser maker for $1.2 billion USD...

A greater number of Android smartphone/tablet vendors are said to be eyeing Ubuntu Phone for new devices later this year...

While for years there has been ongoing work to build the Linux kernel with Clang, in 2015 there wasn't much progress to report and the mainline LLVM Clang compiler still can't build the mainline Linux kernel tree successfully. What's going on?..

Valve released a rather interesting Steam client beta update yesterday with a number of improvements...

The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 5.1 for Linux, Windows, and OS X...

For users of the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed distribution, there has been a major rework of YaST taking place...

Google engineers have open-sourced today a new suite of libraries and tools relating to OpenGL called ION...

The Firefox 46 web browser release will bring smoother scrolling via Asynchronous Panning and Zooming (APZ)...

The first release candidate is out for Wayland 1.10 and its reference Weston compositor...

With the latest code push today on OpenBenchmarking.org has been one of the most sought after features of making it easier to find the best graphics card for your favorite game, the optimal processor for your computational tasks, and other workloads measured via our open-source, cross-platform benchmarking software...

Patches published by Google developers today for LLVM/Clang confirm that the company has at least one in-house processor of its own...

The NVIDIA 361.28 Linux driver was released a short time ago as the newest stable release in the NVIDIA 361 driver series...

For the longest time, when bringing up Wayland a recurring question was "what about network transparency?!" Well, Samsung's Derek Foreman has today published the set of Wayland patches for providing Wayland network traparency by pushing the Wayland protocol over TCP/IP...

Coming three and a half years after the release of XCOM: Enemy Unknown (EU), and two and a half years after the release of Enemy Within (EW), Firaxis welcomes back The Commanders of the world with a bit of a slap in the face: you lost the war.

While all routine Phoronix readers should be well aware of the fact that there still isn't any open-source accelerated support for the GTX 900 "Maxwell" graphics cards yet as the Nouveau developers are blocked on waiting signed firmware from NVIDIA, the GTX 750 series does have some basic support as the original Maxwell GPUs. Here is a look at using this unofficial open-source driver on a GTX 750 with the Linux 4.5 kernel and Mesa 11.2-devel...

A new release of the Raspberry Pi's Debian-based "Raspbian" Linux distribution is now available. This release based off Debian Jessie adds in experimental support for the Pi's new open-source, OpenGL Linux graphics driver stack!..

Dell is moving forward with offering natively UEFI firmware flashing from the Linux desktop...

Well this comes as bit of a surprise... Our friends at Amazon have announced Lumberyard, a new AAA game engine they have been developing that's free and with the source code being public...

If you want to try out Wayland from a Live DVD/USB device, RebeccaBlackOS has seen a new release and ships the very latest Wayland/Weston components as well as for the high-profile software making use of Wayland...

The VC4 DRM kernel open-source driver for providing display support on Raspberry Pi devices is in the process of getting runtime power management and GPU reset capabilities...

As a quick PSA, while you may be wanting to try out DRI3 support with the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver as it is capable of enhancing the performance, so far my latest attempts have been marred by rendering issues...

Red Hat's Adam Jackson today announced the release of X.Org Server 1.18.1 as the first point release building off last year's X.Org Server 1.18 debut...

With the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA still not enabling the experimental AMDGPU PowerPlay or CIK (Sea Islands / GCN 1.1) support in their kernel builds (although they basically are both off by default at runtime), here is my spin of the newly-released Linux 4.5-rc3 kernel with these features turned on...

It has been a while since hearing much anything about HP's "The Machine" computing architecture and its associated Linux++ project, but that changed this past week...

While I'm in the middle of a big Nouveau Linux 4.4 vs. Nouveau Linux 4.5 vs. NVIDIA proprietary driver comparison with multiple NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards, I just wanted to pass along a bit of good, non-performance news about Nouveau on Linux 4.5...

The latest feature added to the popular Vim text editor is asynchronous processing...

Topi Pohjolainen of Intel posted a set of 23 patches today for providing compression of single-sampled color surfaces / lossless compression within the Intel Mesa driver for Skylake "Gen9" and newer...

As part of the GPUOpen initiative that AMD launched last month is an introduction to the Heterogeneous Compute Compiler (HCC) for writing code to take advantage of AMD's new LLVM-based compiler for offloading the work to the GPU...

In just less than two weeks The Khronos Group will be hosting a "special webinar" about Vulkan...

Last week I brought up the Talos Secure Workstation as a $3100 USD system that's fully free and open down to the firmware and with an open-source friendly processor design while being high performance. Since then, I've had access to test out the hardware making up this POWER8-powered system to see how fast a fully-open system can be. Here is more information on the proposed Talos Workstation along with a few early Linux benchmarks.

David Airlie has been putting out some ARB_arrays_of_arrays patches this weekend for Mesa that implement this OpenGL 4.3 extension for all Gallium3D drivers supporting GLSL 1.30...

Karol Herbst has published a set of patches for implementing PMU engine counters, which will be needed for supporting dynamic re-clocking with newer GPUs...

Linux.Conf.Au 2016 ran last week from 1 to 5 February in Geelong, Australia. If you weren't able to go to this annual Linux conference down under, the videos from all of the presentations have now been uploaded...

The team working on the Unvanquished open-source first person shooter released their 48th monthly alpha release on Sunday night. At least it's looking like a beta release is getting closer...

With the UI freeze being imminent for GNOME 3.20, we will soon have a good idea for how this desktop environment update due out next month will look. To get started, here's a look at the Nautilus 3.20 file manager changes for this six-month GNOME update...

You have more than likely read about the atomic push by DRM/KMS drivers over the past few years. If you still are craving to learn more about it, here's the perfect opportunity...

Linus Torvalds has found better things to do than watching Super Bowl 50 by releasing the RC3 for the Linux 4.5 kernel...

With yesterday's NVIDIA GeForce GT 710 Linux testing was just the start of our tests for this sub-$50 USD graphics card powered by a cut-down Kepler GPU. Yesterday's article just included some basic NVIDIA binary driver tests while today's article includes Nouveau performance figures...

Alongside FOSDEM, the Czech events like this week's DevConf.cz, one of the interesting and longstanding German Linux events that pairs open-source/Linux with beer is the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage that's happening next month...

With the upcoming Linux 4.5 kernel, the process of manually re-clocking your NVIDIA graphics card using the open-source NVIDIA driver is slightly different compared to previous kernels...

Happening the past few days in Brno, Czech Republic has been the Red Hat sponsored DevConf.cz developers conference. For those that missed it and the live streaming, the videos are available to watch on YouTube...

A few days ago I posted a number of LLVM Clang optimization level benchmarks using the latest code for the upcoming Clang 3.8 release. Those tests went from -O0 to -O3 -march=native, but many Phoronix readers wanted -Ofast so here are those results too...

One of the most frequent topics I'm emailed about is any brand recommendations among NVIDIA and AMD AIB partners for graphics cards. For Linux users, is there a particular brand preference for graphics cards?..

Alex Goins of NVIDIA has spent the past several months working on PRIME synchronization support to fix tearing when using this NVIDIA-popular multi-GPU method. The latest patches were published this week...

Samuel Pitoiset has published a set of twelve patches for implementing compute shaders support within the Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D driver for the GeForce 400/500 "Fermi" graphics processors...

At the end of January NVIDIA rolled out the GeForce GT 710. This isn't some shiny new low-end Maxwell card, but rather from the Kepler lineage and retails for under $50 USD as a discrete solution to compete with integrated Intel and AMD graphics. Here are some initial benchmarks of a passively-cooled ASUS GeForce GT 710 under Linux.

For those that haven't heard yet, MaruOS is a new open-source project that seeks to provide users with a Debian-based desktop environment when connecting your Android smart-phone to an external display...