Phoronix

Coming soon is the HHVM 3.6 release for making PHP even faster and Facebook's Hack derivative even better, but further out into 2015 are even more exciting improvements...

Support for the GL_AMD_pinned_memory OpenGL extension has landed within Mesa and is implemented for the R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers. This patch series also lands the Userptr support for the open-source AMD graphics drivers on the user-space side...

With the next kernel -- regardless of whether it be known as Linux 3.20 or Linux 4.0 -- it will contain support for new ARM platforms...

The candidates running for the open seats for the X.Org Foundation Board if Directors has been released...

When the cross-platform Vivaldi web browser was announced last month it came with same-day Linux binaries, but initially was limited to 64-bit-only. The Vivaldi browser developers have now decided to support 32-bit Linux too...

A few weeks ago I wrote how systemd developers were planning to add Gummiboot as a UEFI boot manager to systemd. Now, following the just-released systemd 219, they've gone ahead and added their initial code for providing systemd with a EFI boot manager...

The GNOME-aligned open-source crew working on sandboxing Linux applications has made progress and they do have their first application sandboxed...

Version 3.0 of Bodhi Linux is now available, the distribution based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS that features a customized Enlightenment E19 desktop...

The first beta of version 14.2 "Helix" of the software formerly known as XBMC is now available...

With the upcoming GNOME 3.16 release and its GTK+ 3.16 tool-kit there is native OpenGL support and a new GTKGLArea widget...

Version 2.0 of the Frugalware Linux distribution is now available, the operating system originally inspired by Slackware that since moved on to being an independent distribution using Pacman...

Lennart Poettering announced the release of systemd 219 today and it comes with a very large number of new features and changes...

Last week we were first to relay the Coreboot discussion about how Intel Boot Guard in modern PCs is preventing alternative UEFI/BIOS from being used and others have since carried the story too. Matthew Garrett, a name well known to those following UEFI / Secure Boot Linux support, has blogged about his views on Boot Guard...

Earlier this month a GDC 2015 session was listed for showing off "glNext", the next-generation OpenGL. This major advancement for a cross-platform, multi-purpose graphics API is going to be presented by Valve, Epic Games, Unity, and the Khronos Group, among others. Besides the GDC session for glNext, on the same day they'll be having a separate event about this new API...

How could Linux get more game ports and users? An Ubuntu developer is suggesting that Canonical and Red Hat finance the ports...

OpenMW, the project attempting to make an open-source engine re-implementation of Elderscrols III: Morrowind, is switching out their rendering engine...

Earlier this month we wrote how CrunchBang Linux was winding down with its lead developer halting development of this Debian-based distribution. However, there's new developers now forming the CrunchBang++ project...

Linus Torvalds has yet to reveal whether Linux 3.20 will be re-branded as Linux 4.0, but it seems the community at least really wants this version bump to happen...

The most recent pull request for the already very exciting Linux 3.20 / 4.0 kernel is the DRM graphics driver changes, which of course excite us a lot. This DRM pull request is another fairly heavy pull request with a number of end-user features for the popular open-source graphics drivers...

Last week after wondering the state of OpenShot 2.0, there was a long overdue update on OpenShot, a promising open-source video editor that hasn't seen a major release in years. Today there's an update to share on Kdenlive, the open-source KDE video editor...

Nearly one month ago I bought the third-generation Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon as one of the first laptops/ultrabooks shipping with a high-end Broadwell processor. I've been running Linux on the system since receiving it, including the past ~3 weeks as my main production system, and I remain very happy with this purchase.

At the beginning of this month I wrote how I switched back to Fedora Linux on my main system to replace Ubuntu and also wrote about changes I made when installing Fedora 21 on my main system, a new ThinkPad ultrabook with Broadwell processor. There's three small things that annoy me the most though about using GNOME 3.x...

Yesterday I ran some benchmarks from the new Core i3 Broadwell NUC to see how the latest Mesa Git affects the OpenGL performance for the Core i3 5010U chip with HD Graphics 5500. Today I'm complementing that testing to see if the latest Linux kernel Git makes any difference for this low-end, low-power Broadwell chip...

The latest pull requests sent in for the Linux 3.20 kernel are the various subsystems maintained by Greg Kroah-Hartman. The changes for the USB drivers, char/misc, driver core, staging, and TTY/serial aren't too jaw-dropping, but for staging at least is the usual heavy churn between kernel cycles...

For anyone that in the past decade has looked for an embedded firewall/network operating system to build your own router or network device has likely encountered m0n0wall. While m0n0wall has been popular over the years and is powered by FreeBSD, the lead developer of m0n0wall has tossed in the towel after twelve years in development...

The KDE community has done a Valentine's weekend release of KDE Frameworks 5.7.0, the newest version of the add-on libraries used by KDE applications, KDE Plasma 5, and a growing number of other projects like LXQt...

For those still relying upon the Reiser4 file-system and haven't migrated off to ZFS On Linux or Btrfs, the out-of-tree Reiser4 kernel code has been updated for compatibility with the Linux 3.18 kernel...

The third development milestone release of the open-source, cross-platform Phoronix Test Suite 5.6 benchmarking software is now available...

While we don't yet know whether the next kernel version is Linux 3.20 or Linux 4.0, what we do know is that this next Linux kernel revision will contain a lot of exciting updates...

With Mesa 10.5 recently having been branched and Mesa 10.6 now officially under development, I ran some quick comparison benchmarks today to see how the latest Mesa 10.4 stable series is comparing to Mesa 10.6-devel Git for an Intel Core i3 "Broadwell" NUC with HD Graphics 5500...

Version 0.11 of the Mir Display Server was released this week for Ubuntu...

While we're only in the middle of the Linux 3.20 kernel, for what might still be called Linux 4.0, Intel already has updated DRM driver code for testing that will not be merged until Linux 3.21 (or what might also be known as Linux 4.1)...

While the X.Org Foundation is voting on joining SPI and the SPI already represents a range of open-source projects from PostgreSQL to Debian, this organization is being criticized this week over how they negatively interacted with the Elementary OS project...

Wayland 1.7.0 along with the reference Weston 1.7 compositor were released in the early hours of the morning as a great Valentine's Day gift to open-source users wishing to run the next-generation Linux display stack. The Wayland/Weston 1.7 release continues polishing up the stack as an alternative to the security-ridden X.Org Server...

The third beta to the much delayed Mageia 5 is now available for some Valentine's weekend testing...

Yesterday I wrote about it being a long time since the last update on OpenShot, a popular non-linear open-source video editing application that hasn't seen a major release in years, while today (coincidentally?) there's some big improvements to share...

The PC-BSD camp has started spinning development images of FreeBSD/PC-BSD 11.0 in the present 11.0-CURRENT state that is still far out from being officially released...

Beginning next week there's going to be a new member of AMD's developer relationship group that manages the ties between the graphics driver developers and game developers. This new employee is an experienced Linux developer and will focus on Linux/OpenGL cooperation...

Beyond the big set of AMD Radeon changes for Linux 3.20, Alex Deucher of AMD mailed in some important Radeon DRM driver fixes today that are a big deal for some R9 290 "Hawaii" users of the open-source driver...

It's been ten years since last testing any Transcend products, back in the days of DDR2 memory and 1GB flash drives. However, that changed when recently picking up a Transcend SSD370 256GB solid-state drive.

Linus Torvalds is still deciding when to bump the kernel version to Linux 4.0...

The developers working on the Linux versions of Metro Last Light Redux and Metro 2033 Redux have released a long-awaited new patch release...

The third release candidate of LLVM 3.6 is available for some Friday the 13th testing...

Paolo Bonzini has sent in the KVM pull request for the Linux 3.20 kernel and it includes some interesting changes and features for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

F2FS remains a very promising open-source file-system for targeting flash-based storage on Linux, though for Linux 3.20 the changes aren't too exciting...

Nearly one year after the release of PulseAudio 5.0, the release of PulseAudio 6.0 is finally here with many changes...

For those that have been having problems using Gallium3D VDPAU recently, this video decoding should be fixed up in the latest Mesa 10.6-devel Git code and it will also be back-ported for Mesa 10.5...

DevConf.cz 2015 took place last week in Brno, Czech Republic as the annual Red Hat / Fedora focused open-source Linux event. For those interested, the videos of the sessions are up online...

It's been almost two and a half years since the last official release to the open-source OpenShot video editing software. OpenShot 2.0 has been talked about for much of this time but this major update to the once very promising non-linear video editor has yet to materialize...

While Fedora 22 isn't being released for several more months, so far it's running quite well...