Phoronix

OpenBSD developers are celebrating May Day by releasing OpenBSD 5.7, as previously planned...

With the month coming to an end, here's a look at the most popular open-source and Linux-related news stories over the past 30 days... This month on Phoronix there were 261 original news stories written by your's truly covering the interesting Linux / free software happenings...

Earlier this month I wrote about plans being drafted for Mozilla to deprecate non-secure HTTP support moving forward. Those plans have been firmed up and they announced their intent to phase out non-secure HTTP support...

One month ago I detailed the construction process of building a new server room in my basement where Linux performance tests are constantly being done and it's up to about 50 systems running down there. While initially there weren't any thermal concerns, now that it's getting warmer here in the midwest of the United States, temperatures are quickly rising... Here's the steps I did to add some power venting to the basement and already it's sharply dropped the temperatures in this server farm...

Junio Hamano has ended out the month by releasing Git 2.4.0, the latest feature update to the popular distributed version control system...

Valve Software today released the OpenVR SDK, an API and runtime that allows accessing virtual reality hardware from multiple vendors without requiring the applications be specifically targeting that platform...

Now that KDE Plasma 5.3 was released this week, KDE developers are starting to plan out and work on the new material intended for KDE Plasma 5.4...

Outreachy, the program formerly known as GNOME OPW, has announced their selected participants who will be engaging with various open-source projects over the next few months...

With Btrfs recently landing RAID 5/6 improvements and other enhancements, I've been working on some fresh Btrfs RAID benchmarks using the Linux 4.0 kernel...

In the latest of the frequent updates to SteamVR, Valve has added 64-bit Linux support...

Marek Olšák has implemented support for the EGL sync extensions within Gallium3D...

Verison 0.7 of Ubuntu Make has been released, the software formerly known as the Ubuntu Developer Tools Center...

Next week Epic Games is expected to ship the first preview version of Unreal Engine 4.8, which will come with SteamVR support...

For those curious about the many hardware components powering "the basement server room" with continuous open-source and Linux benchmarking, here's a list of the key components that have made it thus far...

Besides being powered by more powerful server hardware, also delivering faster response times to Phoronix and OpenBenchmarking.org is thanks to MariaDB...

The latest Mesa/Gallium3D driver work by AMD's Marek Olšák is on working out create_context_robustness work for the Gallium3D drivers...

Following the article earlier this week about HTTPS for Phoronix.com, I'm happy to share that I'm pledging to continuing to make the HTTPS support for all Phoronix readers...

With this weekend's release of Debian 8.0 Jessie there wasn't an adjoining Debian GNU/Hurd release, but today that release has come out...

Daniel Phillips has worked out faster fsync support within Tux3, the promising open-source file-system that continues to be developed outside of the mainline kernel...

Following the big news just now that Microsoft released their new Visual Studio IDE for Linux, I downloaded it and tried out on Fedora 21...

At Microsoft's BUILD Conference today they released Visual Studio Code, a new IDE for developing web and cloud applications. Most interestingly, Visual Studio Code is natively running on Linux!..

Yesterday I posted some benchmark results showing the AMD Radeon R9 290 graphics card on Ubuntu 15.04 and comparing the Catalyst driver to the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver as found on this new Linux distribution release. The previous article focused on the OpenGL performance while today's article is looking squarely at the 2D performance.

This month's release of GCC 5 brought OpenMP 4.0 support -- including the initial offloading support -- while GCC developers now are already at work on OpenMP 4.1 support...

The first GNOME GTK+ tool-kit update is now out there for the GNOME 3.17 development series that will culminate with the release of GNOME 3.18 in September...

For those still using the Opera web-browser on Linux, version 29 was released yesterday with new features...

For users of "Gallium3D Nine", the state tracker providing Direct3D 9 API support within Mesa, there's a number of fixes that were pushed into Git this morning...

The Bodhi Linux distribution has forked the Enlightenment project from its E17 release...

Going back to the earlier days of LLVM has been the DragonEgg plug-in. DragonEgg is a GCC plug-in that implements LLVM's optimizers and code generators within GCC. With Clang becoming suitable for day-to-day use on large production workloads and GCC also improving, the benefits of DragonEgg have greatly diminished...

Another OpenGL 4 extension is nearing completion within the open-source Mesa software library. The extension t his time is ARB_shader_image_load_store, which is needed for OpenGL 4.2 compliance...

With Fedora 22 being well past its change deadline and the final release just being a few weeks out, developers are beginning to look at planning their features/changes for Fedora 23...

While the Nouveau developers remain blocked by NVIDIA on bringing up accelerated support for the GeForce GTX 900 series, with the forthcoming Linux 4.1 kernel there is initial GeForce GTX 750 "Maxwell" accelerated support out-of-the-box...

While there's still more work to be done before advertising OpenGL 4.0~4.1 compliance, the Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D driver is now advertising support for GLSL 410 (4.10), the GL Shading Language version to match OpenGL 4.1...

While I've posted some new AMD OpenGL benchmarks on Ubuntu 15.04 since last week's release of the Vivid Vervet, the Radeon R9 290 wasn't tested since at that time this Hawaii graphics card was busy on other Phoronix test systems. However, due to the interest level in seeing some fresh Ubuntu 15.04 numbers for the Radeon R9 290 series, here's some numbers.

While there's hundreds of test profiles and test suites (a collection of pre-configured test profiles) available to the Phoronix Test Suite, here's some reasons why you should consider making/submitting a test profile for benchmarking of your own software or software that is of interest to you. The same reasons also apply mostly for why you should be benchmarking with the Phoronix Test Suite, OpenBenchmarking.org, and Phoromatic...

There's a new tech preview release out today for Vivaldi, the cross-platform, Chromium-powered web browser that's been generating a fair amount of interest since its release earlier this year...

One of the latest focuses of prolific free software developer Richard Hughes has been on fwupd, an open-source and easy way to update device firmware...

Kubuntu 15.04 provides a great experience of the new KDE stack but the version being shipped by this KDE spin of Ubuntu is Plasma 5.2 given that it was the latest available for last week's 15.04 Vivid Vervet release. For those wishing to try out KDE Plasma 5.3, it's now easy thanks to the packages landing in Kubuntu Backports...

Next week marks the initial Ubuntu Online Summit (UOS) for planning out the community+Canonical Ubuntu 15.10 release, the next major update to the popular Linux distribution due out in October...

It's KDE Plasma 5.3 day!..

While Fedora 21 ships with decent OpenCL support, if you're running the binary NVIDIA graphics driver on Fedora Linux and wishing to use CUDA-accelerated programs, it's a little bit easier today thanks to a new third-party package repository...

For those craving some more GCC 5 compiler benchmark numbers following last week's release of GCC 5.1, here's some new comparison numbers between GCC 4.9.2 stable and the near-final release candidate of GCC 5.1...

The latest work of Matthew Garrett is on further lowering the power consumption of modern x86 systems powered by Intel's Haswell and Broadwell processors...

QEMU 2.3 was officially released today as the latest major release for this important component to the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

It was this week three years ago when there was the big Steam Linux reveal when I was over at Valve HQ learning from Gabe Newell about their Steam Linux client plans, their ambitions for a Steam Linux distribution on consoles (now known as SteamOS), and much more...

The team behind Q4OS has released a new version of their Linux distribution based on Debian 8.0 "Jessie" and powered by the Trinity Desktop, a fork of KDE 3.5...

One of the big extensions of OpenGL 4.3 and also a requirement of OpenGL ES 3.1 is support for compute shaders. While the work isn't complete yet, Intel's open-source developers are making progress on GL_ARB_compute_shader support...

Right on time, Linus Torvalds has released the Linux 4.1-rc1 kernel...

While Linux 4.1 is bringing many new features and improvements, there's one addition that's noticeably absent...

With this weekend's release of Debian 8.0 "Jessie" cleared, it's now time for Debian developers to start thinking about Debian 9.0...

On Friday I posted the results showing Ubuntu 15.04 Offers Faster OpenGL For AMD Radeon GPUs On Open-Source. For those wishing to run with a slightly newer kernel and Mesa driver stack, here are fresh open-source AMD Radeon benchmark results with Linux 4.0 and Mesa 10.6-devel...