Phoronix

A few days after receiving the revised specifications for the "MJ Tech" Ubuntu Tablet, I've received their pricing information for this tablet that will hopefully ship later in the year...

BPF continues marching forward as a universal, in-kernel virtual machine for the Linux kernel. The Berkeley Packet Filter was originally designed for network packet filtering but has since been extended as eBPF to support other non-network subsystems via the bpf syscall. Here's some more details on this in-kernel virtual machine...

Hewlett Packard has patented the identification of a failed code change by automatically running a set of tests against the set of changes for indicating the regression...

While hearing "PowerVR" tend to make Linux users cringe over memories of past Linux driver issues with Imagination's binary blobs, Imagination is among the vendors now experimenting with the new Vulkan graphics API and SPIR-V IR. Imagination too has already put out one of the first demos using this new graphics API...

In continuation to the article this morning on Khronos announcing OpenCL 2.1, the Vulkan graphics API, and SPIR-V, a provisional specification on SPIR-V is now available for interested developers...

Today is a very exciting day for those into open standard graphics and compute APIs! While driver implementations aren't expected until later in 2015, the next-generation OpenGL standard is being announced as the Vulkan API, the provisional specification to OpenCL 2.1 is being released, and SPIR-V is set to make its debut as the IR for both Vulkan and OpenCL 2.1.

This month AMD is planning to finally make their Mantle graphics API more "open" by releasing a 450-page programming guide and API reference for Mantle...

The Unreal Engine 4 is now free to everyone along with all future Unreal Engine updates!..

Qt 5.5 looks like it will be another release that's going to be delivered slightly behind schedule...

The OpenBSD Foundation is supporting work to adapt at least one web browser's JIT engine to support OpenBSD's "Write Xor Execute" policy for system memory...

For users of KDE's Calligra open-source work application suite, improvements to ODF file format reading have landed...

Our new Linux benchmarking test farm that's much cleaner and more organized than the current implementation shown at LinuxBenchmarking.com is a step closer to reality. By the end of this week this new farm controlled by Phoromatic and powered by OpenBenchmarking.org and the Phoronix Test Suite should be powered up...

As a follow-up to last week's "Vulkan" trademark by the Khronos Group and mulling it over this weekend, I've now been able to confirm with two independent entities that Vulkan is indeed the next-gen graphics API designed as the successor to OpenGL for high performance 2D/3D graphics...

Last month there was a long overdue development update on Kdenlive, an open-source video editor associated with the KDE camp. Today comes more exciting news for anyone using this video editor on Linux...

Valve teamed up with hardware manufacturer HTC to produce the HTC Revive, a.k.a. the SteamVR Headset...

There is yet another small hobbyist, open-source code compiler to talk about this weekend. Hello 8cc...

I'm still working on any sort of possible confirmation from the Khronos Group and other OpenGL stakeholders whether Vulkan is the name of the next-generation OpenGL API, but alas, on the weekend and being just a few days before the announcement, nothing has been confirmed...

While recently modern Intel hardware is negatively talked about the most when it comes to needing binary blobs / binary-only microcode to work with the open-source Coreboot, other hardware can be problematic too...

This month on Phoronix the most popular news articles were about the Linux 4.0 kernel (formerly known as Linux 3.20) but also popular were LLVM-related stories, Raspberry Pi 2 news, and the usual Linux graphics coverage...

The first major feature release over Kodi 14, the media player / open-source HTPC software previously known as XBMC, is in development and its first development release is now available...

Xfce 4.12 has finally been released!..

The Khronos Group filed a trademark request earlier this month with the USPTO over the name Vulkan as it pertains to drawing 2D/3D graphics... Vulkan might be the name of the next-generation OpenGL specification due to be announced next week...

While Mozilla doesn't devote nearly as many resources to their Thunderbird email client as they do to Firefox and there isn't as many high-profile releases for this project in a while, Thunderbird adoption continues to climb...

With OpenBenchmarking.org having turned four years old a few days ago earlier this week I provided a look at the most popular/used benchmarks/tests on our open cloud service while in this article is a look at the most viewed test results...

While the first release candidate of the Linux 4.0 kernel is barely one week old, Intel's open-source graphics driver development team already has changes queued up for the next kernel cycle, Linux 4.1..

A new release of the PlayOnLinux graphical front-end to Wine is now available...

The release of Xfce 4.12 is hopefully being realized this weekend. The release hasn't taken place at the time of writing, but there's been commits to update translations as well as to add the new wallpaper of Xfce 4.12...

Just a few days after Mesa 10.5 RC2 was released, the third release candidate to Mesa 10.5 is now available for testing...

Back in December, Phoronix delivered the first article about An Ubuntu Tablet Inspired By The Ubuntu Edge Is Coming. From the company responsible for this tablet inspired by the failed Ubuntu Edge smartphone we have some new specifications of the tablet they plan to ship with Ubuntu...

While running a few days late, LLVM 3.6 was officially released today...

VLC 2.2 (codenamed "Weathermax") was released today as the latest version of the popular, multi-platform, open-source media player...

The latest solid-state drive being added to one of our Linux test farm systems is the Samsung 850 EVO. Prior to commissioning this drive in one of the systems, I ran some benchmarks against a few other solid-state drives while testing with the EXT4 file-system on Ubuntu Linux.

Rich Lander of Microsoft has posted an update concerning the open-sourcing of Microsoft's .NET core and how they're looking to do feature work more in the open and with the community's involvement...

If all goes according to plan, Xfce 4.12 will be officially released this weekend. Here's a look at some of the most prominent changes for this long overdue update to Xfce...

A new video is out showing the latest work on Ubuntu's Unity 8 interface and the convergence user experience across phones, tablets, and desktop PCs...

Here's another quick update on the process of building out the new open-source benchmarking server farm... The construction of the room is going along nicely and I'm currently evaluating a few different server chassis and racks/cabinets...

For Ubuntu Linux users who haven't tried the Vivid Verbet Beta 1 release yet, you'll be pleased to know that Ubuntu 15.04 is riding off Mesa 10.5 for having the latest open-source graphics drivers...

It's been more than a half year since the last ALSA release for improving Linux sound while out today is v1.0.29 of the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture...

The Ubuntu derivatives opting-in to doing beta releases put out their first beta today. With this 15.04 Beta 1 milestone, Ubuntu MATE has been made an official derivative...

A Coreboot developer has confirmed fears over Purism Librem laptops not really being free nor really bringing much to the table compared to other Linux laptop vendors...

LLVM 3.6 and Clang 3.6 are due to be released any day now and with this new version of the increasingly-used BSD-licensed compiler infrastructure stack are many improvements and new features to benefit the vast majority of users...

With OpenBenchmarking.org having turned four years old this month, here's a look at the most used test profiles over the past four years...

With Fedora 22 having entered its alpha freeze this week along with the software string freeze and change checkpoint deadline, here's a recap of some of the towering features of this six-month update to Fedora 21 and the second release under the Fedora.Next strategy...

Some of Google's compiler developers will be working on upstream improvements to LLVM for better supporting Profile Guided Optimizations...

Krita 2.9 was released today and it's this open-source graphics program's biggest release yet. Krita 2.9 represents over eight months of work and with this release comes many new features...

The original RISC OS open-source operating system now supports the new second-generation Raspberry Pi 2 development board with BCM2836 SoC...

Thanks to recent work done by systemd developers Kay Sievers and David Herrmann on Gummiboot, there's a UEFI boot-loader stub for starting a Linux kernel with an initial RAM disk (initrd) and kernel command line that are all embedded within the executable...

The first beta of the Unigine 2.0 engine for simulation programs and games is now available...

With the Kubuntu 15.04 release due out in April it's using the Plasma 5 desktop by default. This morning I tried out the latest daily ISO snapshot of Kubuntu 15.04 to see how this bleeding-edge KDE Linux desktop experience is panning out. Simply put, Kubuntu and the latest KDE experience is doing quite well.

One of the early additions past the recent Wayland 1.7 release to the Weston reference compositor is a surface-shooting API to be used for debugging...