Phoronix

Alex Deucher sent out twelve new patches just minutes ago for the AMDGPU DRM driver. The AMDGPU driver was merged for Linux 4.2 while these patches provide new features/functionality and thus will not be merged until Linux 4.3...

Back in 2013 we heard Intel had 20~30 full-time developers on their Linux graphics driver team. Since then, they've only been hiring more developers. Based on email activity at least, here's a new number...

It's been a while since last reporting on Unvanquished (mostly because it seems their RSS feed is broken), but they've continued moving along with their open-source game and Daemon engine. This first person shooter is now up to its 41st monthly alpha release...

A Kodi developer has started working on integrating Google's Chrome Embedded Framework (CEF) browser layout/rendering engine into Kodi. If successful in embedding this Chromium code into the Kodi HTPC software, new doors could be opened up and it would open up a lot of new possibilities...

As in past years, it's that time again to run another audience survey on Phoronix.com. The survey should take just a few minutes to complete and will be entered to win a $500 Amazon.com gift card...

Canonical is back to working on the Launchpad.net code, their website that pairs code hosting with bug tacking, translations, blueprints, and more...

Yesterday's Catalyst 15.7 for Linux driver update turned out to be a fairly nice driver update. Tests are still running but the new features and performance improvements are certainly welcome...

We heard another big OpenSSL vulnerability would be announced soon and today it's been made public: OpenSSL's latest "high" severity security vulnerability...

After being in public test form the past few months, VirtualBox 5.0 was officially released this morning...

Bugzilla 5.0 was released this week as their "most exciting new version of Bugzilla in our history" and "our best release ever" after being in development for more than two years...

On the heels of the fresh open-source AMD Linux driver tests with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2, here are some numbers for these Steam Linux games on the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) graphics driver...

Microsoft has become OpenBSD's first-ever "Gold" contributor with sending this BSD operating system project somewhere between $25k and $50k USD...

The Catalyst 15.7 Linux graphics driver was just released, one day longer than anticipated...

America's Army: Proving Grounds may receive a port to Linux/SteamOS...

AMD announced the FirePro S9170 this morning as the first server graphics card with 32GB of memory for high performance compute...

I'm in the process of running open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D tests on the new MSI Radeon R7 370 4G graphics card. That initial Linux review of the AMD Radeon R7 370 with the open-source driver will be published later this week (still waiting on an updated Catalyst driver for those proprietary driver tests). However, as an excerpt of the Gallium3D testing, here are results from some AMD graphics cards with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2...

Neil Trevett, the President of the Khronos Group, did an interview recently about the Vulkan API as the future of graphics programming...

The First beta of Qt Creator 3.5 Beta 1 is now available. This Qt-focused integrated development environment drops BlackBerry 10 support over having no maintainer while separately bringing improvements/fixes for Android and more...

Iago Toral of consulting firm Igalia has been working on ARB_shader_storage_buffer object support in Mesa the past few months. This extension is needed for OpenGL 4.3 and is a buffer that allows for bidirectional communication between the CPU and GPU space and perform random access reads/writes and atomic operations on variables within the buffer objects...

While Debian has preferred the Libav fork of FFmpeg, after reviewing the situation, the Debian Multimedia Maintainers team has decided to switch back to FFmpeg...

Ubuntu 15.10, the Wily Werewolf, will closely follow Debian in its GCC 5 compiler upgrade and libstdc++6 ABI updates. They hope to have everything settled for Ubuntu 15.10 to avoid any big tool-chain changes during the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS cycle...

One of the big things we've been looking forward to with SPIR-V is the to/from LLVM IR pass in order to open up the possibilities for this new industry-standard intermediate representation to be used by Vulkan and OpenCL. Some code will soon be opened up, but it's not the end game...

Mesa release manager Emil Velikov published a set of patches recently in what he's working on for render-node-only OpenCL and other code clean-ups...

Over on the Chromium Blog is a new posting about the work Google is doing on a new JavaScript compiler for V8 in Chrome, codenamed TurboFan...

Plans have been laid for making GCC 5 the default compiler in Debian Unstable by month's end. With the move to GCC5 comes libstdc++6 ABI breakage...

With the recently released ZFS On Linux 0.6.4.2 there is added support for the Linux 4.1 kernel. After carrying out the recent 6-way file-system comparison on Linux 4.1 I decided to run some fresh tests of this popular, out-of-tree file-system.

It's expected that today AMD will be releasing an updated Catalyst (v15.20) Linux graphics driver. Aside from Radeon Rx 300/Fury graphics card support, what do you hope is part of this new driver series?..

While more and more Linux distributions are making it easy from their installers to setup an encrypted root file-system, there's very few that go to the lengths of allowing an easy setup of an encrypted /boot partition...

OwnCloud, the AGPLv3-licensed cloud software similar to Dropbox, has made it up to version 8.1...

NVIDIA announced from the International Machine Learning Society (ICML) conference the release candidate for CUDA 7.5...

AMD yesterday issued a warning over their second quarter guidance that they expect them to come in below expectations. Things aren't looking good with their stock price being down by another 16% so far this morning...

Gummiboot, the lightweight UEFI boot manager that's been around for a few years, is now dead...

Times don't appear good at Finnish phone maker Jolla that hoped to rise from the fall of Nokia's MeeGo attempts. Jolla went public today with a focus shift at the company and they'll now be spinning off their device business...

The shocker of the day is that aside from an independent (non-NVIDIA) open-source developer working on Nouveau SPIR-V support is that there's an actual NVIDIA employee working towards CUDA compute support atop the open-source Nouveau graphics driver...

With KDBUS not being called as a Linux 4.2 feature but rather being diverted with a focus on Linux 4.3, it's continuing to receive a great deal of code churn. Today it received a "big set of updates" for this controversial in-kernel IPC mechanism...

Firefox developers are revisiting at how they build their web browser and how they can better utilize modern web technologies and in the process move away from XUL/XBL within their Gecko Engine...

Fedora developer Kevin Fenzi has shared his experiences with testing the latest GNOME 3.18 development release, v3.17.3, on Wayland with Fedora Rawhide...

For those that follow me on Twitter know I've started testing the MSI Radeon R7 370 4G graphics card as one of the new models launched by AMD last month. For this new (non-Fiji) graphics card, using the open-source graphics driver is the only choice on Linux right now...

If you're a Linux enthusiast that's a habitual upgrader of the Linux kernel, you may want to hold off a few days on trying out the Linux 4.2 development kernel. For several systems, I've seen nothing but kernel panics the past few days when riding the mainline Linux kernel Git...

Following rolling out the brand new Phoronix site to everyone on Saturday, some minor modifications were just pushed to the site this morning in seeking to address feedback from Phoronix readers...

While there is already an Intel Vulkan Linux graphics driver developed by Valve and LunarG that will be open-sourced as soon as the Vulkan specification is officially out, we haven't heard much about the other open-source Linux graphics drivers trying to get a jump start on Vulkan / SPIR-V support...

The latest patch-set that Microsoft is proposing for the mainline Linux kernel is Hyper-V VM Sockets (Hvsock) that is a byte-stream based communication mechanism for Windows 10 and later for communication between hosts and VM guests...

For those running KDE on a systemd-based Linux system, the KDE Control Module for controlling this init system and its options has been updated...

As mentioned in this week's LLVM Weekly, the initial WebAssembly back-end was committed to the mainline LLVM code-base but it is not yet functional...

At the end of last week the first beta of Firefox 40 was released, now that Firefox 39 shipped. With Firefox 40 comes some exciting changes for Linux users...

Peter Hutterer released version 0.19 of Libinput, the input handling library relied upon by Wayland compositors and optionally by the X.Org Server via the specialized xf86-input-libinput driver...

Now that I seem to have found a workaround for my Core i7 5775C Broadwell Linux issue that resulted in very frequent kernel panics, it's off to the benchmark races. Here are some preliminary Linux benchmark figures for this first socketed Intel Broadwell LGA-1150 desktop CPU with Iris 6200 graphics...

It's been five months since I quit using Ubuntu Linux on my main production system and switched over to Fedora Workstation. Looking back, it was a fantastic decision...

Right on schedule Linus Torvalds declared the first release candidate to the Linux 4.2 kernel...

On Friday I mentioned I was running into stability issues on Linux with the Core i7 5775C, Intel's new socketed, high-end Broadwell processor with Iris 6200 graphics. The issue was quite perplexing, but I seem to have finally figured out a workaround for this problem that seems to be plaguing other early i7-5775C Linux users too...