Phoronix

Last year I wrote about a major performance breakthrough discovered for Intel's Linux graphics driver. That small but important patch for benefiting Intel Haswell graphics performance will be found with the upcoming Linux 4.0 kernel release...

Beyond posting their OpenCL 2.1 technical overview session to YouTube, the Khronos Group has now uploaded their Vulkan and SPIR-V question and answer session too for those wishing to learn more about this new graphics API and graphics/compute intermediate representation...

Foreign LINUX is a new open-source project serving as a dynamic binary translator and Linux system call interface emulator. Foreign LINUX is designed to allow unmodified Linux binaries to run on Windows without any system changes or special drivers...

For full OpenMP support in LLVM/Clang that's hoped for Clang 3.7 after some OpenMP pragmas made it in for LLVM Clang 3.6. It looks like the 3.7 release will indeed deliver better OMP support with more functionality having been implemented in recent days...

While there's 1000+ Steam games on Linux and the Linux desktop experience improving greatly with GNOME 3.14/3.16 and KDE Plasma 5, for Windows users not everyone feels the Linux desktop is ready...

LunarG, the company that's been doing a lot of consulting work for Valve on optimizing Linux graphics drivers, is also the company that Valve paid to develop the Intel Vulkan Linux graphics driver. LunarG has been doing Linux graphics driver development for years with Mesa/Gallium3D and was formed by some of the same former Tungsten Graphics staff. Here's some more information on their Vulkan and SPIR-V adventures...

When recently covering how Kubuntu 15.04 is turning out quite well and a nice way to enjoy the latest KDE Plasma 5 experience, several Phoronix readers had commented about the "ugly" wallpaper. Well, now here's your chance to improve the situation...

For what it's worth, it seems the GTK+ 3.x support for LibreOffice is finally becoming "usable" thanks to a Red Hat developer...

For those wishing to learn more about the OpenCL 2.1 specification unveiled last week by The Khronos Group at GDC15 alongside Vulkan and SPIR-V, their presentation is now public...

Time sure seems to fly by: OpenGL 4.0 turned five years old today. The sad part is that Mesa still doesn't fully implement the GL 4.0 specification...

Facebook developers announced the release today of HHVM 3.6.0, the HipHop Virtual Machine that's at the heart of their Hack programming language and also serving as a popular PHP alternate implementation thanks to its high performance...

Google has finally unveiled a new Chromebook Pixel! This high-end Chromebook starts at $999 USD and packs an Intel Core "Broadwell" processor with a HiDPI screen and up to 12 hours of battery life...

Early adopters of Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet can now use AMD's new Catalyst 15.3 Beta driver that's been packaged for Ubuntu and uploaded to the Vivid repository prior to its release on AMD.com...

Google is going to be open-sourcing SageTV, the proprietary DVR/HTPC software Google acquired back in 2011...

The fifth development release of Phoronix Test Suite 5.6 is now available for testing prior to officially releasing Phoronix Test Suite 5.6.0 in the days ahead...

Last week during Valve's SteamOS / Linux game sale that happened during the Game Developers' Conference, a number of new Linux games were confirmed. We now know who is working on porting some of these new titles over to Linux...

There's now more than one thousand native games available via Steam for Linux / SteamOS...

Next week is NVIDIA's annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC) taking place in San Jose, California...

The official wallpaper of the upcoming Ubuntu 15.04 release was announced this morning...

In light of the GNOME Nuntius announcement for delivering Android notifications to the GNOME desktop via Bluetooth, several Phoronix readers have pointed out that last week the KDE Connector project received a Bluetooth back-end...

The ninth and latest round of GNOME's Outreach Program for Women (OPW) came to an end yesterday...

Just as planned the alpha release of Fedora 22 is now available...

The latest BSD operating system now supporting the Raspberry Pi 2 is NetBSD...

The latest development code of Ubuntu's Mir display server now supports multiple displays when using the Ubuntu Phone/Touch Android base...

It looks like in the next two weeks AMD will finally be releasing an updated Catalyst/fglrx graphics driver for Linux users...

A few days ago it appeared Google began requiring new versions of the Linux kernel for Chrome/Chromium but now that it appears Google intends to continue supporting older versions of the Linux kernel but they've been hitting a bug...

NVIDIA announced today the release of VDPAU version 1.0 with support for HEVC / H.265 video decoding...

A Phoronix reader pointed out this weekend the Nyuzi Processor, an GPL/LGPL-licensed design that's inspired by Intel's failed Larrabee graphics processor design. The Nyuzi Processor is fully open-source with its Verilog, documentation, tests, compiler/tools, etc...

This weekend I spent some time testing the latest Fedora 22 test candidate ahead of tomorrow's Fedora 22 Alpha release. Overall the experience was very good and I'm very excited for the official Fedora 22 release in May. I felt Fedora 21 was the best release yet and switched to running it on my most critical production system while now Fedora 22 is set to beat out its previous release.

KDBUS didn't make it for Linux 4.0 but version four of the KDBUS patches were posted today for review, which gives out hope we could see this in-kernel IPC interface based on D-Bus merged for Linux 4.1...

Last year following Debian's decision to choose systemd as its init manager and then the init coupling vote, there ended up being three resignations from Debian's Technical Committee: Colin Watson, Ian Jackson, and Russ Allbery. Those vacant seats have now been appointed by the existing TC members...

It seems at the earliest is a possible release of Debian 8.0 "Jessie" in April...

Covered last year on Phoronix was LibWSM: Wayland Security Modules For Better Wayland Security. The Wayland Security Module library was presented last year at XDC2014 as a way of bettering the Wayland compositor security. While back then it was talked about as a possibility, a Tizen developer has been working on the WSM code to make it a working reality...

Taiwanese SoC manufacturer MediaTek is said to be licensing AMD graphics technology for use in future high-end ARM SoC designs...

Last week I covered the new GNOME project of Nuntius, an effort to send tablet/smart-phone Android notifications to the GNOME desktop. There was a fair amount of interest in Nuntius, including many forum goers asking why they didn't use KDE-Connect, among other questions. Those questions have now been addressed...

Libinput v0.12 was released over the night by Peter Hutterer as the last planned release of this input handling library to break the API/ABI. Libinput is on its path to version 1.0 for providing input handling on Wayland-based systems, X.Org (via the xf86-input-libinput driver), and other environments wishing to standardize their input handling...

Released this past week was Chrome OS 41 and besides having improved WiFi stability, updates to the guest mode wallpaper, and other changes, some Chrome OS devices have been updated to Google's new "Freon" graphics stack. Freon further removes X11 dependencies from Google's world and will yield performance improvements in the future. Freon isn't based directly on Wayland nor Mir...

There's still a lot of work ahead in finishing up the new server room / test farm, but some of the systems have been restored in the new rackmount environment and proceeding with their daily (and in some cases per-commit) open-source Linux benchmarking in a fully-automated and standardized fashion...

Linus Torvalds put out the Linux 4.0-rc3 release a short time ago as an "entirely normal" update for this stage of the kernel's release process of Linux 4.0...

With the Linux 4.0 kernel getting into shape here are some early benchmarks of three AMD Radeon graphics cards when comparing the Linux 4.0 Git performance to that of the Linux 3.19 stable kernel.

How do you think the community-based game engine projects like ioquake3 will evolve now that Unreal Engine 4, Source 2 Engine, and Unity 5 are "free" for use by game developers?..

Ravi is a new open-source project that's an experimental dialect/derivative of Lua using LLVM for JIT compilation...

This past week as part of Epic Games making UE4 free to developers they managed to get NVIDIA to let them open up some of the PhysX source code as PhysX is depended upon by Unreal Engine 4 for physics handling. NVIDIA this past week ultimately opened up their entire PhysX SDK to everyone...

Those using the bleeding-edge version of Google's Chrome/Chromium web-browser are discovering you need to be using a relatively new version of the Linux kernel to avoid issues...

Following Friday's release of Wine 1.7.38 is the new Wine-Staging build based upon this release but with various experimental functionality added in. As usual, this Wine-Staging update is another exciting feature release...

There's yet another conversation taking place within the GCC camp about modularizing the GNU Compiler Collection...

It's been several weeks since last publishing any Mesa/LLVM Git benchmarks with AMD Radeon graphics cards so for this weekend article are some fresh OpenGL graphics performance tests when running with Mesa 10.6-devel Git and LLVM 3.7 SVN atop the stable Linux 3.19 kernel.

FFmpeg 2.6 is available this weekend and the new release brings a large number of new features...

Intel has published a patch-set adding support for Intel's Trace Hub to the Linux kernel for carrying out full system debugging...

A Gentoo developer has raised concerns over bad licensing and attribution by ChromiumOS and CoreOS for their copies of Gentoo ebuilds...