Phoronix

Linus Torvalds announced the availability just moments ago of the Linux 4.5-rc7 weekly kernel test release...

One of the lesser known distributions requested for testing as part of our upcoming 10+ Linux distribution performance comparison was KaOS. KaOS is a Linux distribution built from scratch but does make use of Arch's Pacman...

Yesterday's Raspberry Pi 3 Benchmarks vs. Eight Other ARM Linux Boards was quite interesting while today I have a complementary data point: the Raspberry Pi 3 compared to the ODROID-C2. The ODROID-C2 costs just a few dollars more ($40 USD) while having a faster SoC and other advantages.

For those preferring a physical book for learning new APIs, the official Vulkan programming guide book is now 25% off...

It's been a while since last reporting on Void Linux, an original, rolling-release Linux distribution while this weekend I fired it up for some testing. This is one of the few Linux distributions that has dropped systemd and OpenSSL...

In continuation of yesterday's Raspberry Pi 3 Benchmarks vs. Eight Other ARM Linux Boards, here are a few more details about the Raspberry Pi 3's thermal performance...

Besides the exciting Intel DRM-Next improvements talked about this weekend, Freedreno's MSM DRM driver for Qualcomm SoCs has gained some new capabilities for the upcoming Linux 4.6 cycle...

While Ubuntu-based distributions have Project Neon and OpenSUSE have launched their own initiative for providing a bleeding-edge KDE stack, Fedora users through the use of Copr repositories are able to access newer KDE software...

Blender 2.77 is set to be released soon as the next feature release of this open-source 3D modeling program while 2.77 RC2 is the current development release...

ReactOS, the project aiming for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows (Server 2003), now has Btrfs file-system support...

Thanks in part to The Khronos Group hosting the Vulkan specification on GitHub and being more open about the development process of the Vulkan graphics API, version 1.0.5 is now available...

On Friday my Raspberry Pi 3 arrived for benchmarking. For our first benchmarks of this Cortex-A53 64-bit ARM $35 development board is a comparison against eight other ARMv7 and ARMv8 development boards running their official Linux distributions while carrying out a range of benchmarks. Here are those raw performance results along with a performance-per-dollar comparison for additional insight into this low-cost ARM development board.

It's been a while since last hearing anything major out of the Avidemux free software video editor project. However, available this weekend is the Avidemux 2.6.12 release...

The folks at Collabora have released version 5.0 of Collabora Office, their downstream distribution of LibreOffice...

FreeBSD 10.3-RC1 was released today as the newest development milestone leading up to FreeBSD 10.3 that should be officially released later this month...

Mesa has inched a tiny bit closer to supporting OpenGL 4.4 thanks to work done by Collabora's Timothy Arceri...

Intel's Daniel Vetter on Friday sent in another batch of DRM-Next changes for the upcoming Linux 4.6 kernel cycle. This pull does contain some interesting open-source graphics changes for this Intel DRM driver...

There's not yet any word on the next major release of Oracle's VM VirtualBox software, but at least now available is a new maintenance update...

Among the features not putting Wayland at feature parity with X11/X.Org is screensaver inhibition. You know, when you're watching a movie or gaming and don't want the screensaver to interrupt the experience? It's now being worked on for Wayland's reference compositor...

While many developers worked very hard in trying to make GNOME 3.20 default to using Wayland rather than an X.Org Server for Fedora 24, this isn't going to happen...

Going back a few years have been an aim by Ubuntu developers to remove Python 2 from their ISOs in favor of Python 3. While some other distributions have made good on their transition to Python 3, the Ubuntu desktop ISO still has been held back in keeping Python 2...

I'm in the middle of working on a large Linux distribution performance comparison that is similar to January's A 10-Way Linux Distribution Battle To Kick Off 2016. This time around though there's more interesting hardware and will likely do more than ten Linux distributions in this comparison...

Wine 1.9.5 was released today and it's a rather exciting bi-weekly update to the Wine stack...

Engineers at Intel's Open-Source Technology Center have implemented native, one-copy texture uploads for Chrome/Chromium OS when using Intel graphics processors...

Epic Games' Tim Sweeny has written a lengthy op-ed coming out against Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform (UWP) effort that would close up the Windows gaming ecosystem as "a closed platform-within-a-platform into Windows 10."..

The sources are now available for download of the Qt 5.7 alpha release...

The PRIME synchronization patches being contributed to the open-source Linux graphics stack by NVIDIA is now up to its fourth revision...

Prolific GNOME developer Matthias Clasen has announced the release of the GNOME 3.20 Beta 2 (v3.19.91) Milestone...

For those interested in the performance of Fedora Linux, here are some recent curiosity-driven benchmarks I completed this week...

It isn't often we hear much these days about Plymouth, the modern Linux boot splash screen that's now almost universally used by Linux distributions, given that the project is rather mature. However, for those utilizing modern HiDPI displays, the latest Plymouth code should work out better...

With the Raspberry Pi 3 64-bit ARM $35 development board that launched earlier this week, there is working open-source kernel code for this new board powered by the Broadcom BCM2837 and it's looking like it hopefully won't be too long before the support is mainlined...

The Debian release team has decided that the freeze for 9.0 "Stretch" will be slightly delayed...

While the open-source Intel Mesa Linux graphics driver yet doesn't expose OpenGL 4.0 compliance for missing out on FP64 support, as written earlier this week, that code is about ready for its review and could land in Mesa soon. Once that's out of the way, Intel's Mesa driver is stomping very close to OpenGL 4.3 compliance and another GL 4.3 extension was enabled today...

Last week I posted various LLVM Clang and GCC compiler benchmarks using packages available on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and with the testing from a Xeon Skylake system. Today are some complementary tests when benchmarking GCC 5.3.1 and LLVM Clang 3.8 while testing each compiler with a variety of different optimization levels.

A technical marketing representative of AMD / Radeon Technologies Group is participating in a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" today where he's been answering a few Linux questions...

For those running Fedora 23, the Linux 4.4 kernel has been pushed down as a stable update for the operating system...

Just ahead of this month's GNOME 3.20 release is now the Mutter 3.19.91 development release...

Last summer we reported on America's Army being ported to Linux and that it was trailing the renewed Mac OS X port. Today is some new information on America's Army coming to Linux...

With the Plasma 5.6 beta out the door, the KDE development community has today announced the formation of a Distribution Outreach Program...

For those wondering whether the open-source VC4 graphics driver stack would work out-of-the-box on the new Raspberry Pi 3.....

Last month was word of Android-x86 joining the company behind Remix OS, an Android-based OS designed for PCs and laptops. Out now is the Remix OS Beta that's leveraging the Android-x86 project...

With LLVM Clang 3.7 came full support for OpenMP 3.1 at long last but with OpenMP 4.5 being the latest spec, Intel and others involved with the Clang OpenMP initiative haven't let up and continue working towards supporting the latest OpenMP 4.x interfaces...

The latest feature addition ahead of the upcoming release of NetworkManager 1.2 is proper DHCPv6 support for IPv6 users...

The Vulkan 1.0 specification is less than one month old and NVIDIA has already released their third Linux driver beta. Meanwhile, sadly, AMD hasn't made public their proprietary Vulkan Linux driver...

Intel's OpenSWR high-performance software rasterizer that's an alternative to LLVMpipe has landed in mainline Mesa...

The KDE community has banded together to release the Plasma 5.6 beta today...

With Clear Linux continuing to outperform other Linux distributions on Intel hardware, I was curious to see how the Intel OTC Linux distribution was performing when trying it with one of the new Xeon CPUs at our disposal for testing...

AMD's Marek Olšák sent out a set of 26 patches this morning for preparing the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver to have interoperability support between OpenGL and HSA/OpenCL...

For your viewing pleasure to get our March 2016 Linux benchmarking started is a Linux 4.1 through Linux 4.5 kernel benchmark comparison when testing with a 4GHz Intel Xeon E3 v5 Skylake CPU and using a RadeonSI-supported graphics card and SSD for storage.

The latest fruits of AMD's GPUOpen initiative is the open-sourcing of a beta of AMDOVX...