Phoronix

Phoronix.com is turning eleven years old next week! Help plan some exciting content for the Phoronix birthday. Last year was a 60+ graphics card comparison under Linux with open-source drivers, but how can this year be even better?..

Earlier this week a huge fiasco began over the Ubuntu Community Council removing Jonathan Riddell from any leadership position relating to Ubuntu for one year. The Kubuntu Community Council came out in support of Jonathan as have many others from the community, but today the Ubuntu Community Council issued a lengthy statement where they re-affirm they will be sticking by their original decision...

Earlier this month I posted some Btrfs RAID 0/1 benchmarks on Linux 4.1 as a prelude to some larger Btrfs RAID benchmarks. Today the rest of those results are available with using five disks and testing Btrfs on this newest version of the Linux kernel while testing the RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10 levels.

Over the last couple weeks there has been an "Anaconda Wishlist" thread occurring on Fedora's desktop mailing list. The thread, and the associated Workstation Working Group meeting, are directed at the future of the Fedora Anaconda Installer...

It turns out, Wayland's code license may have been slightly incorrect all these years and doesn't comply with the FSF / open-source definition...

This week's GNOME 3.18 development update for the Mutter window manager brought X11 / Wayland clipboard interoperation so that the clipboard contents can be shared across Wayland and X11/X.Org clients. With the latest Git code, there's now drag-and-drop interoperation...

Wine 1.7.44 is out this morning to end out the month of May for the Wine development community...

The fifth development release of Phoronix Test Suite 5.8 is now available for testing ahead of next week's planned official release of Phoronix Test Suite 5.8-Belev...

Alex Deucher of AMD has filed his main pull request today for the Radeon DRM driver updates to be integrated in the upcoming Linux 4.2 kernel...

Developers working on the open-source Exynos DRM driver for supporting the display block found on Samsung's Exynos ARM SoCs are up to their 9th version of patches for providing atomic mode-setting support...

This month's Ubuntu Phone Update sent over-the-air is bringing a number of new features and improvements for Ubuntu smartphone users over the next few days...

Fedup right now is the command for handling in-place Fedora upgrades from release-to-release and it's been around since Fedora 17. However, with the Fedora 23 release due out in late 2015, that utility will likely be replaced with a new version to handle upgrading to new releases...

Google officially unveiled Android M today from their I/O 2015 conference today...

Today AMD posted a new video entitled "It's Coming..." to tease their upcoming graphics processor launch...

Dell's latest forray with Ubuntu Linux is recommending users on Twitter try out the open-source operating system...

The Intel Compute Stick has begun shipping, a tiny device that plugs into any HDMI TV or monitor and turns it into a fully-functioning computer. This low-power PC ships with Windows 8.1 or Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, though at the moment the Windows version is first to market with the Ubuntu Compute Stick not widely shipping until June. I have an Intel Compute Stick at Phoronix for testing...

To no surprise, this morning AMD officially announced the AMD A10-7870K "Godavari" as the new high-end APU...

Yesterday I ran some fresh tests of Intel Ivy Bridge on the latest Mesa Git code to see if the performance has changed much recently for the slightly-older generation of Intel HD Graphics. Today I've done some similar tests in kernel-space with the Linux 4.1 kernel...

The release of the Genode OS 15.05 Operating System Framework is now available and it's quite a sizable release...

Debian 8.1 is planned for release on next Saturday...

Canonical will be kicking off June by making some announcements with their partners for new Ubuntu Phones in Europe...

Last year was news about Russia wanting to design its own processors to be less reliant upon Intel and AMD. The initial "Baikal" processor was expected to be based on ARMv8 but it turns out now that it's a MIPS design...

Most often these days when running Intel Linux graphics tests at Phoronix it's with Haswell, Broadwell, or Bay Trail hardware. However, in being curious if there's any performance improvements for slightly older hardware with Mesa 10.6 or Mesa 10.7-devel Git, I've run some fresh Ivy Bridge numbers...

A test build of Blender 2.75 was released this past week and it will be of interest to a lot of open-source designers and artists...

GNOME's Mutter window manager was updated to v3.17.2 today as the latest development version in the road to GNOME 3.18...

Wayland 1.7.93 and Weston 1.7.93 are now available, a.k.a. the second release candidates to Wayland 1.8...

Hans Wennborg of Google has laid out plans for releasing LLVM 3.7 at the end of August...

Intel developers in particular have been trying to wrap-up OpenGL ES 3.1 support within Mesa. That work is getting closer to finally being realized...

Yesterday data access to LinuxBenchmarking.com was opened, the public results viewer to the immense amount of test data -- primarily the Linux kernel, LLVM Clang, and GCC -- collected on a daily basis within the new server room. Here's some numbers behind it...

The first point release to the LLVM 3.6 compiler stack is now available...

The longtime leader of Kubuntu, Jonathan Riddell, appears to be out of any leadership position relating to Ubuntu for at least twelve months. This decision has caused some to criticize the Ubuntu Community Council for their decision made in relative private -- a decision that was also backed by Mark Shuttleworth...

While there hasn't been much interest in Mandriva in a few years with derivatives like OpenMandriva and Mageia taking much of the spotlight, Mandriva as a company is now being liquidated...

Today's Fedora 22 day!..

Red Hat is letting another one of their developers focus on improvements to Nouveau, the open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver...

A few days ago the Scribus team quietly tagged Scribus 1.5.0 in SVN. This release is a preview / testing release, but it provides an interest look at the next stable release: 1.6.0. No release date or schedule is known for 1.6.0. For those uninformed, Scribus is an open-source desktop publishing suite...

While many Linux desktops using the open-source Mesa graphics drivers are shipping with OpenGL ES 1.x/2.x support, this mobile/embedded version of OpenGL isn't enabled by default within Mesa...

While Qt 5 has so many compelling advantages over Qt4, for those still running the older version of the Norwegian toolkit, version 4.8.7 of Qt4 is now available and it ships with tons of changes...

While Mesa still is only officially at OpenGL 3.3 compliance, a lot of OpenGL 4.x extensions continue to be worked on by open-source developers interested in advancing the free software graphics drivers...

Version 1.5.0 of the Xfce4-Power-Manager was released today...

For a few months now I've been talking about the LinuxBenchmarking.com initiative to provide daily benchmark results of the latest development Git/SVN code for various open-source projects in a fully-automated manner... Among the projects being tracked have been the Linux kernel, GCC, LLVM Clang, etc. There's dozens of systems at Phoronix Media in "the basement server room" doing nothing but running these upstream benchmarks day in and day out. The data flow is now open at LinuxBenchmarking.com.

Earlier this year CompuLab announced the Fitlet PC as a tiny, fanless, Linux-friendly PC. The Fitlets are finally starting to ship at scale and recently I received one of the AMD-powered Fitlets that's preloaded with Linux Mint. Here's a quick look at the Fitlet...

AMD is among the companies working on adding a reader/writer for SPIR-V within LLVM...

While Linux 4.1-rc4 was late, the fifth release candidate to the Linux 4.1 kernel is back out to being on Torvalds' usual Sunday release schedule...

There's numerous recent features to talk about this weekend for those interested in tracking Linux system performance, monitoring upstream projects for performance regressions, and carrying out other similar work using open-source software on Linux / BSD / OS X / Solaris.

With the basement conversion into a big Linux server room where there's 50~60 systems running daily at full load while running our many open-source benchmarks, cooling has been a challenge with now experiencing summer temperatures. I've already resorted to retro-fitting in extra powered ventilation ducts to keep pushing fresh air into the server room. That did some help, but also of aid is upgrading the cooling systems on some of the more powerful systems rather than using the stock heatsinks and fans. For helping out the cooling situation, Noctua sent out a while ago the NH-U12DX i4 and NF-F12.

The latest Mesa 10.5 point release, Mesa 10.5.6, is now available...

NVIDIA has been working out plans for their graphics driver to support Mir and Wayland. As part of that, besides their recent EGL support, they've been tackling kernel mode-setting...

An EXT4 file-system corruption problem was uncovered with Linux 4.0 that turned out to be an MD RAID0 issue with the Linux kernel in the latest stable series. This RAID corruption issue has now been fixed in the latest kernel Git code...

Mesa 10.6 is up to a release candidate state and should be officially released in early June. If you're not up to speed on this quarterly update to the open-source user-space graphics drivers, here's an overview of the new features for Mesa 10.6...

Since last year Canonical has been developing the new LXD hypervisor. As implied by the name, LXD is derived from the success of LXC...