The Facebook team working on the HHVM project for being a faster PHP interpreter and powering their Hack language have just come out of a two-week, open-source performance lockdown. Over the past two weeks they focused on making strides to make HHVM's compelling performance even better...
Besides Phoronix celebrating its 11th birthday, last week Intel's SNA 2D acceleration architecture had its birthday and turned four years old. While the xf86-video-intel 3.0 DDX driver release is to make SNA the default for 2D acceleration over UXA, there's still no signs of this release happening...
Matthew Dillon's latest addition to DragonFlyBSD will help those that build out the full kernel themselves: parallelized kernel module builds. This change for developers allows the the kernel build process to be multiple times faster when doing a full kernel build...
When it comes to taking advantage of the Linux kernel's (e)BPF in-kernel virtual machine, LLVM has served as the compiler of choice for targeting this virtual machine..
Last week Fedy, formally Fedora Utils, quietly released version 4.0.1. Fedy, for those not in-the-know, is a graphical program for configuring and installing third-party applications and repositories on the Fedora desktop. Using Fedy, software like Adobe Flash, Android Studio, libdvdcss, Google Chrome, multimedia codecs, Steam, Skype, and the Oracle JRE are only a click away...
Besides announcing OS X El Capitan, Apple announced today from their WWDC event that their Swift programming language will be open-sourced and they intend to support it on Linux too...
This is just a reminder that as of today, June 8th 2015, it is the last day for any changes to be submitted to aur.archlinux.org and for them to be kept. Any and all changes going forward should be made to aur4.archlinux.org. Any changes that occur to aur.archlinux.org after today will be LOST...
With Apple's WWDC event this week, they've revealed OS X 10.11 as being codenamed El Capitan. Here's some details about Apple's OS that will be competing this year with the likes of Windows 10, Fedora 23, and Ubuntu 15.10...
With Phoronix having turned 11 years old last week, there's been several interesting articles looking at the historical performance of Linux, large GPU/driver comparisons, etc. Today is arguably the most interesting birthday article yet. I dug out an old Intel Socket 478 system with the i875p Canterwood chipset and Pentium 4 and Celeron CPUs that still manage to power up. I compared the Linux performance of this 11+ year old system to a variety of today's x86 and ARM systems. Beyond looking at the raw performance, the performance-per-Watt was also measured to make for a very interesting look at how CPU performance has evolved over the past decade.
Earlier this year Dell released their XPS 13 laptop with an Intel Broadwell processor and all-around looks like a great developer laptop. Back when the hardware first appeared, the Linux support wasn't in great shape. Dell is now shipping the XPS13 2015 model with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS preloaded, but sadly, there's still some issues with the initial pre-install...
For years the BFQ I/O scheduler has been trying to get in the mainline kernel and it looks like they have an action plan for getting accepted upstream...
Samuel Pitoiset has continued on his quest of implementing NVIDIA hardware counters support and exposing it to user-space within the Nouveau open-source driver stack...
Another ~6 months down, another Fedora release. While Fedora 23 looks to be an interesting release over all -- with some initial changes coming to Anaconda, and some changes coming to the upgrade process -- this release was more low-key for most of Fedora-land. Workstation saw updates to notifications and general theme'ing improvements, Gnome Software got AppData integration to bring the Software Center closer to an app-store experience. Of course Gnome Boxes and Gnome Builder were included as well, allowing for more out-of-the-box developer improvements in the realm of Virutalization and IDE's, respectively. But there weren't any ground breaking features across the board -- no swapping of the init system, no BTRFS, no Wayland by default, although GDM is running the Login Screen through Wayland.
Besides presenting a lot of new kernel features and functionality, the upcoming Linux 4.1 kernel release is potentially very exciting if you're an owner of certain classes of Intel hardware that offer better performance under this new kernel -- and in some cases, better battery life. Here's some tests from yet another system I found exhibiting some promising results from this new 2015 summer kernel version.
With work on porting the Linux Intel and Radeon DRM/KMS drivers progressing, within DragonFlyBSD Git they've made the first "hacky steps" for making their system console work with the KMS drivers...
In addition to the Steam Linux news this week that the Steam Controller and Steam Machines is up for pre-order and the Steam Linux usage has dropped to an all-time low, I noticed the Linux game count is well past 1,200 titles...
This week besides readying the Phoronix Test Suite 5.8.0 release and the various benchmark articles in commemoration of Phoronix turning eleven years old (and PTS turning 7), I've also been working on adding some new tests. One of the new test profiles available for automated benchmarking is stress-ng...
An intern from Qualcomm's Innovation Center has been designing a heterogeneous execution engine for LLVM that he's hoping to eventually upstream within the LLVM project...
In celebrating 11 years since starting Phoronix to cover the Linux hardware scene, here's some fresh benchmarks of the open-source Intel / AMD / NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers. Various GPUs were tested atop Ubuntu when moving to Git with the Linux 4.1 kernel, Mesa 10.7-devel, and LLVM 3.7 SVN.
For anyone that didn't get a chance yesterday to look at the Steam Machines up for pre-ordering, these SteamOS loaded devices all come with Intel CPUs and NVIDIA GeForce graphics...
A Phoronix reader has pointed out that a regression has slipped into the Mesa 10.5.5 point release that negatively affects users of dual-GPU laptop owners with NVIDIA Optimus technology that are using the open-source "Primus" code for running OpenGL games on the alternate graphics processor...
It was eleven years ago today I founded Phoronix.com to focus on Linux hardware reviews at a time when not only graphics cards were an issue but most PC peripherals were still troublesome to use outside of Windows. Today also marks seven years since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 for leading open-source Linux benchmarking...
Phoronix Test Suite 5.8 was released today as the latest quarterly update to Phoronix Media's open-source, cross-platform benchmarking and automated testing software. Beyond offering a significant number of new features, the Phoronix Test Suite 5.8 release commemorates seven years since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 and eleven years since the start of Phoronix.com in what's evolved to become the largest Linux hardware destination on the Internet.
PlayOnLinux developers have shared that PlayOnLinux 5 development has begun and it will be a complete rewrite of this software used by Linux gamers. Rather than being written in Python, it will now be based in Java...
Last year Imagination launched a MIPS development board that went on sale at the end of last year. In not seeing any significant benchmarks or performance coverage from this MIPS Creator CI20 over the past few months, I finally got around to buying one of these MIPS development boards from Imagination Technology. While the CI20 seemed promising at first, so far I'm very unhappy with this board and it's been even less stable than the Imagination PowerVR drivers on Linux going back to the Poulsbo days.
Paul Frields, the manager of Fedora Engineering and former Fedora Project Leader, has written a blog post today about how "PulseAudio is still awesome." While this common Linux sound server has a bit of a bad reputation, he wanted to share how great it's been doing and working out for his needs...
Version 3.0 of the Open Computer Vision library is now available. The release announcement reads, "With a great pleasure and great relief OpenCV team finally announces OpenCV 3.0 gold release, the most functional and the fastest OpenCV ever. And yet it’s very stable too – all the thousands of tests that we created during the project + many new tests pass successfully on Windows, Linux and Mac, x64 and ARM."..
Earlier this week I was pondering the state of HP's "The Machine" and Linux++ with the Linux++ software platform supposed to come in June of 2015. Not much information has been heard on these experimental projects, but now there's some new information coming out...
Besides DragonFlyBSD's Intel graphics support moving forward with porting of i915 DRM code from newer versions of the Linux kernel over to the DragonFlyBSD kernel, there's also been new activity on the Radeon front...
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