Phoronix

For those that don't know or may have forgot, Gallium3D has a Heads-Up Display (HUD) for showing various driver metrics while running OpenGL games/applications. If you're an SVGA VMware user, there's some new HUD queries available...

There's a lengthy article out that goes through the innards of systemd's architecture...

The first update to GNOME 3.18 was released yesterday...

Samuel Pitoiset has published a new set of sixteen patches for improving the MP counters support for NVIDIA GeForce GTX 400/500 "Fermi" graphics processors...

While the latest Linux kernel has Intel P-State driver support for CPU frequency scaling being done by this Intel-specific driver rather than the common ACPI CPUFreq driver, for some common tests -- especially Linux gaming -- the latest-generation Intel CPUs perform noticeably better using the CPUFreq driver. Here are some CPUFreq vs. P-State drivers when testing the available scaling governors.

Canonical developers released Mir 0.17.0 yesterday in time for the final freeze of Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf...

While there's been a draft specification of OpenMP 4.1 out for public review since July and compiler developers have already been implementing OpenMP 4.1 support, this next version of the API for parallel programming is now going to be called OpenMP 4.5...

With Wine 1.8 working towards release in the near future, version 1.7.53 of Wine was released this morning...

Red Hat announced this morning they are acquiring Ansible, Inc, a leader of IT automation solutions...

Imagination Technologies is going to host a series of online classes/webinars to teach those interested more about the Vulkan API...

Thomas Pfeiffer has been working on the Human Inteface Guidelines (HIG) for KDE applications on phones/tablets...

Ubuntu 15.10 "Wily Werewolf" is now under its final freeze for being officially released next week...

If you'd like to propose a location in Europe to host the X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC) next year and are willing to organize the event, the X.Org Foundation wants to hear from you...

While it's still likely to be a few weeks before the Linux 4.3 kernel is officially released, there's already changes building up for landing in the Linux 4.4 merge window. Here's a very early look at some of the new functionality to expect for Linux 4.4...

As the first point release since the July debut of Qt 5.5 is now Qt 5.5.1...

Version 3.18.1 of GNOME's Mutter window and compositing manager was released today for the GNOME 3.18.1 point release...

PHP developers have today released PHP 7.0 RC5 as the second to the last release candidate for the major PHP 7.0 release due out next month...

KDE contributor Björn Ruberg has written a blog post that he says isn't aimed as a rant but rather expressing concerns about the quality of the current KDE desktop (Plasma 5 + KDE Frameworks 5) and the issues he's experienced when running "KDE 5" on Fedora 22...

With Skylake's retail availability improving, we're starting to see more of the Skylake processors in stock besides just the i5-6600K and i7-6700K. One of the other processors now widely available is the Core i5 6500, which is a step down from the Core i5 6600K, but retails at just $199 USD -- making it an attractive offer for many building new PCs and trying to stick to a decent budget. I've been testing out an i5-6500 under Ubuntu Linux and so far this processor with HD Graphics 530 is running well and offers compelling CPU performance relative to older Intel hardware as well as AMD's APU/CPU competition.

The release candidate has arrived for openSUSE 42.1 "Leap" in anticipation of the distribution's official debut in early November...

While most Phoronix readers should be well aware of the bug reporting procedures for Mesa drivers, Ian Romanick of Intel has written a lengthy blog post about the process of writing a "good" bug report for the open-source graphics drivers...

A pull request has just been sent in that in turn will target Linux 4.4 for offering on-demand device probing for helping platforms using Device Tree / OpenFirmware...

Two years after starting work on the Arrays of Arrays support via crowd-funding, Timothy Arceri pushed a bulk of the work into mainline Mesa...

AMD's Alex Deucher sent in the first pull request today for DRM-Next for kernel graphics driver updates that in turn will target the Linux 4.4 kernel...

The Core i5 6500 is an Intel Skylake CPU that's priced at $199 USD and has begun hitting retail channels. I ended up buying one for Linux benchmarking and have out my initial full Linux comparison and review tomorrow while in the article today are some early performance metrics...

Fedora developers have been discussing whether the Wine-powered PlayOnLinux open-source software can be packaged for the distribution...

This summer I wrote about some issues I had with the Core i7 5775C on Linux where under Ubuntu 15.04 the experience was unstable but this socketed Broadwell was running great on Fedora 22. Fortunately, the Ubuntu experience for the i7-5775C with Iris Graphics is much better under the upcoming Ubuntu 15.10 "Wily Werewolf" release.

Epic Games announced the release today of Unreal Engine 4.10 Preview 1 for those wishing to play early with this update to the advanced Unreal Engine 4 game engine...

SQLite 3.9.0 was released today as a significant step forward for this widely-used, self-contained database engine...

Besides Oracle Linux, OpenSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server were among the first tier-one Linux distributions really backing the Btrfs file-system. SUSE has liked Btrfs for years and at last week's LinuxCon Europe 2015 in Dublin there was a presentation on their use of Btrfs with handling system rollbacks...

Thanks to the weather getting cooler, our power use from the constant open-source Linux benchmarking at Phoronix has dropped slightly over the past month, while it's still well above 2,000 kWh and about four times as high as last year...

As of Tuesday, Fedora 23 entered its final freeze in anticipation of its release later this month...

It was just last month that legendary CPU designer Jim Keller left AMD and now the company is taking another blow with another high level departure. This time they're losing a corporate fellow and the former president of the HSA Foundation...

A Phoronix reader recently asked about adding perf profiling to PTS for helping to better identify performance problems within the Linux kernel. As it was easy to do and further shows how easy and extensible the Phoronix Test Suite can be, I added such a module today. Here's some more details on how -- whenever running any benchmark -- via the Phoronix Test Suite you can very trivially expose all of the performance event counts on a universal per-test basis.

Recently there were a number of requests about testing the latest state of Liquorix, the self-prcolaimed "better distro kernel" that is an optimized version of the Linux kernel with extra patches that makes it optimal for desktop, multimedia, and gaming workloads. Here's some fresh Liquorix vs. mainline Linux kernel performance benchmarks...

Open-source support is still being worked on for GPU switching with pre-Retina Apple MacBook computers...

Samsung is just one of many companies that has grown increasingly fond of the LLVM compiler infrastructure and Clang C/C++ front-end. Clang is in fact the default compiler for native applications on their Tizen platform, but they have a whole list of reasons why they like this compiler...

Wayland has been ported to DragonFlyBSD along with its Weston compositor!..

Alexandre Courbot, a developer at NVIDIA who has been working on the Tegra open-source graphics support a lot for Nouveau, presented last week at LinuxCon Europe 2015...

Last month I wrote about an experimental Nouveau code branch that offered better GDDR5 Kepler re-clocking support. For some, this branch allows Nouveau users to finally fully re-clock their GeForce GTX 600/700 series graphics cards. Those patches are now being offered up for mainline Nouveau...

The Wasteland 2 Director's Cut was released today in the Americas and will be out worldwide later this week. This Director's Cut edition is a free upgrade for current Wasteland 2 owners and upgrades the game engine to Unity 5...

AMD has enabled VCE video encoding support in the R600 Gallium3D driver for the older Trinity and Richland APUs...

The Xen Project has announced version 4.6 of their software this morning, which they describe as the most punctual and highest quality release yet...

While the LLVM community tends to be very respectful to one another and I'm having a hard time thinking of when things have ever gotten out of hand in their mailing list discussions, they are now pursuing a Community Code of Conduct...

With an Ubuntu Long Term Support release coming up in just a half-year, the discussion has been re-ignited again about whether Firefox should remain the default web-browser for the platform...

While Ubuntu 15.10 has Mesa 11.0 and it provides OpenGL 4 support for the Nouveau driver, it doesn't for RadeonSI. The issue is that in Ubuntu 15.10 is still an older version of LLVM that in the AMDGPU LLVM back-end lacks the needed support for OpenGL 4.0/4.1 compliance. Fortunately, a PPA has been updated for Ubuntu Wily with said support...

Landing tonight within Mesa Git master is ARB_gpu_shader5 support in the Radeon R600g driver...

A Google Summer of Code student who worked on GTK+ and Nautilus has managed to overhaul the search feature of GNOME's file manager...

Ben Skeggs at Red Hat has started queuing up the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver patches that are being aimed for the Linux 4.4 kernel...

It's been a while since last running any BSD vs. Linux benchmarks, so I've started some fresh comparisons using the latest releases of various BSDs and Linux distributions. First up, as for what's completed so far, is using the FreeBSD-based PC-BSD 10.2 compared to Ubuntu 15.04 stable and the latest development release of Ubuntu 15.10.