Phoronix

Fedora 22 is shaping up quite well across the Fedora Workstation, Server, and Cloud offerings. Out of curiosity, this week I ran some initial comparison tests of Fedora Server 21 vs. Fedora Server 22...

The latest GNU Compiler Collection code now has proper optimization targeting/tuning support for the IBM z13...

While yesterday there was risk of Fedora 22 being delayed beyond next week, this next Fedora Linux release was cleared today for being released next Tuesday...

The first release candidate to OpenWRT 15.05, the "Chaos Calmer", is now available for testing...

As of this month, the mainline code for LLVM and Clang finally have complete OpenMP support (currently against the OMP 3.1 specification)...

Zapcc is the latest compiler I heard about this morning... Zapcc is based on LLVM's Clang C/C++ compiler but claims to be much faster than it...

Version 1.1 of the Godot Game Engine has been released. This open-source game engine update brings a new 2D engine and claims to be one of the most advanced 2D engines for cross-platform games...

Some Video Acceleration API updates are coming down the pipe...

Mark Shuttleworth is reportedly considering a move to make Canonical a public company...

RandR 1.5 was firmed up a few days ago for X.Org Server 1.18. The lead features to RandR 1.5 are monitor objects and tile support...

At today's Go/No-Go meeting it was decided that Fedora 22 Final is not ready for release. However, tomorrow that decision will be re-evaluated...

It's taken a while, but systemd 220 has been finally released...

Following yesterday's LibreOffice 5.0 branching in Git, the first beta for LibreOffice 5.0 is now available for testing...

While there's been work on supporting Apple Pages and Numbers files within LibreOffice, it seems this import support is finally getting squared away for those forced to having to deal with Apple's proprietary document formats...

For months now Allwinner has been violating the GPL and have attempted to cover it up by obfuscating their code and playing around with their licenses while jerking around the open-source community. At least today they've made a positive change in open-sourcing more of their "CedarX" code...

The Linux kernel continues advancing on many hardware fronts, among which is support for ACPI 6.0 and the kernel is making the new LIBND subsystem for non-volatile memory device support...

Fedora 22 is scheduled to be released next week but for that to happen there's still a number of blocker bugs that need to be addressed. The second release candidate of Fedora 22 Final is now available for those wishing to stress this major update of the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution...

A few days ago we reported on an EXT4 file-system corruption issue being discovered within the stable Linux 4.0 kernel series. The good news is the issue has been uncovered and a patch is available, but it could still be a few days before it starts getting sent out in stable updates...

For those that haven't seen/heard yet, the Ubuntu 15.10 release schedule has now been firmed up...

It's been four years and two weeks since Mark Shuttleworth expressed his goal of "200 million users of Ubuntu in 4 years." While Ubuntu's presence has continued to increase over the past four years, it doesn't look like that goal has been realized yet or will be by the end of the calendar year...

Microsoft has today announced they've open-sourced the important WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) code that now targets .NET Core...

S3TC remains the most common form of texture compression relied upon by video game developers and others, but it remains a legal mess for open-source graphics drivers. ETC2 texture compression isn't faced by legal issues but was only mandated by OpenGL ES 3.0 / OpenGL 4.3, which makes it less well adopted. Meanwhile, in looking forward to the future, ASTC is the royalty-free next-gen texture compression solution that's backed by the Khronos Group. Intel's forthcoming Skylake hardware will make ASTC a much more widespread reality...

Today marks twenty years since the first release of the Qt tool-kit. It's been an interesting twenty years so far going through the hands of Trolltech, Nokia, Digia, and the now spin-off The Qt Company...

Another HTTPS vulnerability has started to make its rounds earlier this morning. Dubbed Logjam by its researchers, the vulnerability stems from the US's encryption export mandate back in the 1990s. This particular vulnerability, in the transport-layer security layer protocol, breaks the Diffie-Hellman perfect forward-secrecy. Susceptibility to the vulnerability is depended on servers and clients supporting the DHE_EXPORT encryption scheme, or using a key less-than-or-equal to 1024 bits...

LibreOffice 5.0 is the next version of this popular, cross-platform, open-source office suite and not LibreOffice 4.5 as was originally planned. LibreOffice 5.0 has now been branched in Git with the trunk development now focusing on LibreOffice 5.1...

Among other OpenGL 4.x extensions, one of the more recent additions to OpenGL being tackled by open-source developers is ARB_shader_storage_buffer_object...

Besides Intel DRM updates landing today in DRM-Next for eventual merging into the Linux 4.2 kernel, AMD landed some changes to their HSA kernel driver named AMDKFD...

It appears that the current Linux 4.0.x kernel is plagued by an EXT4 file-system corruption issue. If there's any positive note out of the situation, it seems to mostly affect EXT4 Linux RAID users...

Last month we heard libdvdcss and ZFS should soon appear in Debian GNU/Linux, but now it doesn't appear that easy... It could end up taking a while longer for the ZFS file-system and the libdvdcss support for DVD playback on Debian to appear within the official repositories...

Following this morning's branching of Mesa 10.6 and pushing Git master to Mesa 10.7, the Mesa 10.6 Release Candidate 1 is now available...

The Linux Mint crew has tagged the release of the Cinnamon 2.6 desktop environment...

Google pushed Chrome 43 into the stable channel today...

With the Linux 4.1 kernel coming together nicely I've begun my testing (separate from all the fully-automated Git testing done each day via the LinuxBenchmarking.com systems) of this new kernel under a variety of different workloads, stressing different systems, and focusing on the changes in the major subsystems. One of the systems this week has been running some fresh Btrfs RAID Linux file-system benchmarks. From an eight-disk server I've started this Btrfs RAID testing as some fresh numbers since my Btrfs RAID tests from a few months back on an older server.

As planned, Mesa 10.6 has been branched and due to lacking OpenGL 4.0 / OpenGL ES 3.1 support, the version will not be bumped to Mesa 11.0. This also now makes Mesa 10.7 officially under development...

David Airlie has pulled Intel's latest batch of changes into DRM-Next that they've been queuing up for merging into the Linux 4.2 kernel...

Back in April Intel enabled the NIR IR by default within their Mesa driver but initially only for fragment shaders. Intel has now enabled NIR usage by default for vertex shaders within their i965 DRI driver...

NVIDIA introduced yesterday their first beta driver in the new 352 Linux / Solaris / FreeBSD graphics driver series...

Linus Torvalds released the Linux 4.1-rc4 kernel a short time ago, which is coming a day later than Torvalds' usual tradition of releasing new kernel versions on Sunday afternoons...

Today's post by the new Phoronix intern is looking at the state of various new (and experimental) features within Mozilla's Firefox web-browser. Covered in this article is the Electrolysis e10s multi-process model, Encrypted Media Extensions, Media Source Extensions, Skia, off-main thread compositing, and sandboxing.

Wine 1.7.43 was released on Friday and following it this weekend was the latest Wine-Staging update that re-bases atop the latest upstream Wine while carrying extra, experimental features like DXVA2, CUDA 7, and various other features...

The RandR components are updated for version 1.5.0 to take advantage of new functionality in the X.Org Server...

PC-BSD 10.1.2 was released today as the latest quarterly update to the FreeBSD-derived operating system...

GNOME 3.18 is under heavy development and already thus far this cycle we've seen GTK+ do away with Windows XP support and integrate other toolkit improvements along with other work like in-progress file manager improvements. Here's more of the GNOME 3.18 work items to get excited about...

Nearly one month ago AMD published the open-source code to their new "AMDGPU" kernel driver and the necessary user-space driver changes too. That code is continuing to mature for the Linux 4.2 kernel and for supporting the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver that code is continuing to be polished...

For users of the Freedreno Gallium3D driver for having unofficial open-source Qualcomm graphics support, the Adreno 306 is the latest graphics processor now supported...

Ubuntu enthusiasts in Europe have been able to buy the first Ubuntu phone for some time now, the BQ Aquaris, while starting now Chinese developers are able to buy the second official Ubuntu phone: the Meizu Ubuntu MX4...

For DragonFlyBSD users out there, the swap device with the latest Git kernel can now be encrypted...

As of this weekend, openSUSE Tumbleweed is now defaulting to the KDE Plasma 5.3 experience alongside the KDE Applications 15.04.1 packages...

While Oculus Rift has seen Linux support up to now, the Facebook-owned VR company has now suspended Linux and OS X development to better focus on Windows...

The release candidate for the upcoming Wayland 1.8 is now available...