Phoronix

The Linux 4.1 kernel merge window has been open now for two weeks and will most likely be closed by Linus Torvalds this evening. For those curious about the Linux 4.1 features, here's a look at the newest additions to the mainline Linux kernel!..

Thanks to the new and much more powerful web server for Phoronix.com, if you've tried to access the site in the past few hours, there's proper HTTPS support...

For the past two years there has been an optional Gallium3D HUD to display various performance-related metrics as an overlay while running OpenGL applications with the Gallium3D drivers. With the latest Mesa Git code, the heads-up display can be a bit more customized...

The new Phoronix.com web server is speeding along this weekend after its deployment. Here's a look in the performance difference...

Ending out the major pull requests for the Linux 4.1 kernel merge window was the platform-drivers-x86 updates that were sent in on Saturday...

Google's Chromebook Pixel features a "Lightbar" that's a series of LEDs supporting multiple colors. Chrome OS apps are able to take advantage of the Lightbar for various purposes and coming for Linux 4.1 is support for the Chrome OS lightbar within the mainline kernel...

While the big ACPI and power management changes were sent in more than one week ago for the Linux 4.1 kernel, another batch of ACPI/PM work was sent in this weekend. One of these last-minute changes should end up significantly benefiting the performance of modern Intel Atom Bay/Cherry Trail SoCs...

As expected, Debian 8.0 "Jessie" was officially released today after being in development for two years...

If you're seeing this post, you're correctly accessing the new Phoronix.com web-server...

GCC 5 was formally released this week with under their new versioning scheme the initial stable release being GCC 5.1. GCC 6.0 is now in development as the next major release due out in about one year's time while the next GCC 5 point release will be GCC 5.2...

Another AMD motherboard has been ported to work under Coreboot...

One of the biggest additions to Mesa so far this year has been the introduction of NIR, the new intermediate representation designed to replace GLSL IR and designed by a bright student fresh out of high school...

It's been a while since last hearing anything out of the OpenMandriva camp, but today they've put out the first alpha release for their "Lx 3" release that's codenamed "Einsteinium." There's quite some interesting changes with this forthcoming update...

Systemd has eliminated shutdownd, one of the oldest components of this controversial init system, but its removal isn't because systemd is going on a diet...

Intel Haswell Linux users are greeted by relatively modest performance changes with Ubuntu 15.04 while those using AMD Radeon graphics cards on the open-source R600 and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers have much more to look forward to when upgrading to this week's release of Ubuntu 15.04. Here's some Ubuntu 14.10 vs. Ubuntu 15.04 OpenGL benchmarks for a range of AMD Radeon graphics cards.

It was just last month I wrote about there being more than 1,000 games on Steam for Linux/SteamOS. Recently, Steam crossed the 1,100 games milestone; over one hundred additions in just over one month!..

It's nearing the end of the Linux 4.1 kernel and Chris Mason has now sent in his pull request of Btrfs file-system updates for this next kernel update...

It was back in February that Microsoft open-sourced CoreCLR, the execution engine of the core .NET stack. Besides coming to Linux and other platforms, this MIT-licensed engine has now been ported and is working for FreeBSD...

While we sadly don't hear too much these days from Unigine on the Linux gaming front, their high-end 3D graphics engine remains Linux-compatible and they seem to be doing well off in the area of simulations and more. Unigine 2.0 has been out in preview form since last year and coming out today is the second beta...

Linus Torvalds still hasn't pulled the KDBUS code into the Linux 4.1 kernel and it's beginning to look like he won't honor this pull request for the current Linux development cycle...

For those wondering about the state of the Lima and Tamil graphics drivers for providing open-source, accelerated support to ARM Mali graphics processors, Luc Verhaegen has written a new blog post after being silent for a while...

It was just last month that our new, large-scale test farm was completed while already it's being expanded... Another 42U rack is being added to allow for more systems to go through rigorous benchmarking via the Phoronix Test Suite's Phoromatic...

Ubuntu 15.04 was just released and Canonical isn't wasting any time with starting to share their plans for Ubuntu 15.10 due out in October. This next release will feature a build that switches away from Debian packages (.deb) to using Snappy Personal...

The Qt Company has today announced the official release of Qt Creator 3.4, one of the best open-source IDEs for programmers and the de facto development environment for Qt applications...

Ubuntu 15.04 is out!..

Debian and other Linux distributions are running into issues with packaging up QtWebEngine, which is becoming a problem since more of the new KDE stack is becoming dependent upon this addition to Qt 5.4 that provides a web rendering engine based on Chromium...

Linux 4.1 will feature an updated Multiple Device (MD) driver to improve the RAID 5/6 potential for those relying upon Linux Software RAID...

Going back many months there's been work on adding ACPI support to ARM64/AArch64. That long journey may now be wrapping up with a pending pull request for landing full ACPI support for 64-bit ARM in Linux 4.1...

Dave Chinner has sent in his XFS file-system updates targeting the Linux 4.1 kernel...

Peter Hutterer has announced the release of xf86-input-libinput, the X.Org driver for making use of the libinput library under X11 environments...

Steve McIntyre has relayed that the Debian camp is "Ready for Jessie!" and that the debian-cd team is happy with the state of the debian-installer and related packages for the Debian 8.0 Jessie release...

As a quick follow-up to yesterday's article about a new TearFree option for the Radeon X.Org driver as the latest effort to eliminate tearing, that feature is now in Git...

While we know Intel Broadwell performance is much faster on Ubuntu 15.04 than Ubuntu 14.10, with this week's release of Ubuntu Vivd Vervet, here's some fresh results looking to see how the Intel Haswell graphics performance has evolved over the past six months. For the many Intel Haswell owners out there, you'll be pleased that the performance has overall improved.

There's yet more to talk about with regard to the Linux 4.1 kernel and some of the latest patches queued up for merging are the numerous ARM improvements...

The popular GIMP image editing program continues in its quest of being ported to GTK3, but it's still not clear when it will be finished and merged to mainline...

The latest pull request worth talking about for the in-development Linux 4.1 kernel are the input driver changes...

Those behind the GNU Compiler Collection have announced this morning the official release of GCC 5.1, the first major release of GCC 5...

While GNOME 3.16 was just released last month, changes coming ahead for GNOME 3.18 and particularly GTK+ 3.18 are quite exciting...

While the xf86-video-intel X.Org DDX driver has yet to reach version 3.0 even though the 3.0 development series is going on two years old, Intel open-source developers are continuing to spend time on the universal xf86-video-modesetting driver...

Coming about three weeks after the initial Phoronix Test Suite 5.8 milestone release is the second development build for our open-source, cross-platform benchmarking software...

My favorite computer desk of the past decade, and arguably my favorite ever, is back on sale and costing less than $100. In the past few years I've bought at least eight of them according to my transaction history and I continue to be very pleased by their quality and price...

While much of the media attention as of late when it comes to Ubuntu Linux has been about their mobile endeavors, they are continuing to innovate on other fronts as well and with this week's release of Ubuntu 15.04 is the initial work on LXD for those interested in containers...

For whatever reason, there's Google developers working on CUDA improvements within the LLVM/Clang compiler...

With the newest OpenGL 3.1+ game now updated on OpenBenchmarking.org, prepare yourself for a new flow of graphics tests from this GPLv3-licensed game. Feel free to run this test profile too, in order to see how your system compares against other Linux gamers...

In trying to reduce/eliminate visible tearing on the screen, the xf86-video-ati driver is preparing to introduce a new TearFree X.Org option...

With the release of Ubuntu 15.04 coming this week I've been busy running some fresh comparison benchmarks between the "Vivd Vervet" and former versions of Ubuntu Linux. For Intel HD Graphics users, in this article are two quick results showing how the performance of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2 has improved on the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver over the past six months between Ubuntu 14.10 and 15.04...

For those not too busy discussing and digging through the new open-source AMDGPU kernel driver that was published yesterday, out today are some new patches for AMDKFD, the HSA Linux kernel driver...

Version 1.8.0 of the Nginx open-source web server is now available...

For those running Linux on Apple MacBook Pro laptops that have both Intel HD Graphics and a discrete NVIDIA GPU, there's new patches underway for proper GPU switching support...

The beta of Fedora 22 is now available for testing and evaluating of its many new features ahead of the official Fedora 22 debut in May...