Phoronix

Version 1.4.0 of libvpx was finally released today by Google developers. This new release is codenamed the "Indian Runner Duck."..

The beta of Rust 1.0 was released ahead of Easter weekend and all libraries/language features planned for the v1.0 milestone have been marked as stable...

While Linux users tend to prefer open-source hardware drivers out of philosophical beliefs or just making an easier out-of-the-box Linux experience, Valve and other early Vulkan stakeholders have yet another reason to appreciate open-source drivers as it allowed them to jump-start porting of the Source 2 Engine over to the new graphics API much faster and easier than if they were relying on a closed-source Vulkan driver. Here's the story that LunarG has exclusively shared with Phoronix about their process of bringing up Vulkan with open-source.

Wine 1.7.40 was released this morning and besides closing over two dozen bugs, there's a handful of new features...

A Microsoft Technical Fellow has publicly stated that it's "definitely possible" that all or parts of Windows could be open-sourced to better compete with Linux and the like...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 was released in March and since then all of the RHEL derivatives have been busy testing and pushing out their updates. The Scientific Linux development community is close to getting out their SL7.1 release but they're hoping for some last-minute testing...

For X.Org members that haven't yet voted in this year's particularly important elections, there's just a few days to cast your ballot...

Paul Frields, the manager of the Fedora Engineering team at Red Hat, has written an interesting blog post about the future of Fedora. In particular, how Fedora is currently assembled and how that will likely change over the next few releases...

A patch series that's been baking for a while by Laércio de Sousa provides Xephyr input hot-plugging and other changes needed to allow for single-GPU multi-seat support...

The "Etnaviv" DRM driver is now under review as an open-source, reverse-engineered graphics driver for the Vivante GPU found by some ARM SoCs...

The first development snapshot of Phoronix Test Suite 5.8 "Belev" is now available, coming just one week after the release of Phoronix Test Suite 5.6...

Microsoft announced their Visual Studio 2015 line-up this week, but why is it important for Linux users/developers?..

With the latest Git code for Mesa 10.6 development, the Raspberry Pi VC4 Gallium3D driver has switched to using the NIR intermediate representation...

There's already been a fair amount of code building up for the DRM graphics subsystem for the Linux 4.1 kernel and a new feature was just committed to Git last night...

The openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling-release distribution has already been using systemd for some time, but they've kept to using syslog for system messaging logging. However, that's going to change as Tumbleweed integrates systemd's journal...

Version 4.4 of the popular phpMyAdmin MySQL database administration software is now available...

Valve's monthly hardware/software survey is out for the data collected in March and provides an interesting look at the current Linux gaming market-share...

With Kodi 14.2 now having been released, Kodi 15 Alpha 2 is now available for those wishing to live on the bleeding-edge Kodi/XBMC multimedia experience...

Oracle engineers have done an April Fool's Day release of the first development version of VirtualBox 5.0...

This month's release of Ubuntu 15.04 will feature some Go language support improvements that are coming about at the last minute in the Ubuntu Vivid archive...

Towards the end of last year a development version of a big new version of SuperTuxKart was released that brought a new OpenGL 3.1+ graphics engine and other improvements. The new SuperTuxKart game looks great (especially for being an open-source game) and is now closer to being officially released with now having an RC version out...

Blender 2.74 was released yesterday as the newest version of this leading open-source 3D/modeling software...

The first release candidate to Qt Creator 3.4 is now available...

Allwinner has been taking a lot of heat lately for violating open-source licenses with their Linux binary blob components. They then got caught obfuscating their code to try to hide their usage of open-source code, shifted around their licenses, and has continued jerking around the open-source community...

It's been five years since the Phoronix visit to Chernobyl, the nuclear disaster site in Ukraine...

March was a terrific month for Phoronix readers with the Khronos Group unveiling SPIR-V and Vulkan, BioShock Infinite was finally released for Linux gamers, and there were numerous other highlights...

There's a concentrated plan now to try to release Debian 8.0 "Jessie" by the end of April...

Before ending out March, here's some new OpenGL Linux benchmarks comparing the closed-source Catalyst 15.3 Beta driver against the Linux 4.0 development kernel with Mesa 10.6 Git for the freshest open-source graphics driver code.

Mozilla is today releasing Firefox 37.0 and with this open-source web-browser update comes many changes...

The OpenIndiana crew responsible for this community-based OpenSolaris-derived operating system using the Illumos kernel is out with their first update in quite some time...

Following last week's release of GNOME 3.16, the initial builds of the GNOME SDK Runtime are now available for those wishing to experiment with their new fully-sandboxed Linux app tech and other new app runtime abilities...

Daniel Vetter of Intel today sent in more code for DRM-Next that in turn will be merged for the Linux 4.1 kernel. It was also signaled that the initial hardware enablement of the graphics processor on Intel's upcoming "Braxton" SoC might happen for this next version of the Linux kernel...

KDE developers have been porting their Plasma 5 + KDE Frameworks 5 stack over to Wayland, but at this point it's not nearly as mature as the GNOME Wayland support. As such, KDE developers have to fend off questions from time-to-time why they don't "just integrate QtCompositor" or the Weston library for speeding up their efforts...

Added to the latest LLVM Clang compiler code is driver support for Google's Native Client SDK...

The PC-BSD developers responsible for their new Lumina desktop environment have released a new version of their custom interface...

The alpha release of Fedora 22 was released a few weeks ago for the primary CPU architectures while finally coming out today is the F22 Alpha for 64-bit ARM and PowerPC architectures...

Various Phoronix readers have written in this weekend and commented in the forums and elsewhere that systemd developers forked the Linux kernel. This is not the case...

As some recent non-performance testing of the AMD and NVIDIA graphics drivers on Linux, I checked in to see how well the various Linux desktop environments were working these days in multi-monitor setups. With the latest AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards and drivers, I tried out Unity, GNOME Shell, Xfce, and (attempted) KDE Plasma 5 on Ubuntu 15.04 to check out the latest experience.

Queued up in Git for the next version of PulseAudio, v7.0, is the enabling of LFE remixing by default after some upstream work was done by Canonical developers working on Ubuntu...

Canonical developers have been hard at work on the next version of their Mir Display Server for Ubuntu Touch 15.04...

BlackArch v2015.03.29 has been released for those interested in this flavor of Arch Linux...

While these days there's more than 1,000 Linux games on Steam, just three years ago in their early Source Engine porting process they were barely able to get good frame-rates...

Version 2.1 of the Audacity open-source audio editor/recorder has been released...

Linus Torvalds has done his usual Sunday development release to the Linux kernel...

In continuation of this morning's article about Turning A Basement Into A Big Linux Server Room that detailed my month-long process of building out the new Linux automated benchmark server room, here's details on the software deployment side...

Linux 4.0 should be officially released within the next few weeks. In anticipation of its April debut, here's a look at some of the big features for this next version of the Linux kernel...

This week I posted about my new server room, where there's Linux benchmarks constantly happening on the Linux kernel and other open-source code via the Phoronix Test Suite and Phoromatic. With many Phoronix readers having been interested in the basement makeover I did to turn a ugly, boring basement into a clean server room, here's more details and pictures on the month-long renovation along with various tips and product recommendations from the experience. This server room is now almost up to 50 systems and is complete with a drink bar and projector. There's plenty of pictures and details for those hoping to build their own personal basement server room, including a few tips for increasing the wife acceptance factor of the big project.

While Mesa is talked about as being able to be built for Google's Android operating system to run these open-source graphics drivers on Android devices with OpenGL ES support, in reality there's a lot left to be desired...

There hasn't been too much to report on lately with regard to Wayland/Weston 1.8 development, but with this next release, the reference Weston compositor's terminal will now have a minimize menu item...

As a PSA, this weekend I began playing around with a CDN and distributed DNS for speeding up the page load times on Phoronix...