Phoronix

If all goes according to plan, the Linux 4.4 kernel merge window will end today with the release of the 4.4-rc1 kernel. As all of the major subsystem updates have already landed for Linux 4.4, here's my usual look at the highlights for this kernel cycle.

Developers behind Kodi (formerly XBMC) announced the release this morning of Jarvis Beta 1...

Con Kolivas has released the BFS scheduler v0.465 with support for the Linux 4.3 kernel...

As some extra benchmarks to toss out there this weekend are some Clang 3.8 SVN compiler benchmarks when trying out different optimization levels...

In addition to adding some new OpenCL / CUDA tests this week to the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org, Caffe was added too as a deep learning benchmark...

Just one week after Mesa Git received Nouveau NVC0 compute support, the NV50 Gallium3D driver for pre-Fermi GPUs has also received basic compute support...

Just ahead of the Super Computing SC15 conference beginning tomorrow in Austin, the OpenMP 4.5 specification has been finalized...

With the Linux 4.3 Git tree at around 20.6 million lines of code, documentation, and utilities, I was curious to see whether the Linux 4.4 merge window was heavy enough to bump it over 21 million lines.....

With PHP 7.0 RC7 being the final development version of PHP 7, which is expected to be officially release at the end of the month, I've carried out some fresh benchmarks of PHP using our in-house benchmarking software. Compared in this latest PHP 7 benchmarking comparison is PHP 5.5 as packaged on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and then comparing fresh builds of PHP 5.6.15 and PHP 7.0.0 RC7. On the HHVM side was using Facebook's HHVM 3.10.1 release as packaged for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

The KDE community has announced the release of Frameworks 5.16.0 as more than 60 add-on libraries to Qt...

After months of continually trying out different methods of cheap yet effective cooling for the 60+ systems running daily Linux benchmarks, I'm finally happy with now having been one week of the room maintaining an ambient temperature of 68~72F (20~22C)...

Various kernel changes were mainlined in the Linux 4.4 development code for Google Chrome hardware...

The first release candidate is out today for QEMU v2.5 and it comes with exciting changes...

LLVM developers have decided to enable a new vectorizer option by default that has the potential to boost performance, but the performance benefits aren't immediately clear...

With the Linux 4.4 kernel the Lenovo Yoga 3 laptop owners out there will finally have support for using their ESC key...

The US Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration has teamed up with NVIDIA's PGI compiler division to create an open-source Fortran compiler atop LLVM...

Yesterday AMD finally posted power management support for the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver when it comes to supported discrete graphics cards like Tonga and Fiji. I've been testing these PowerPlay Linux patches since yesterday to great success. In this article are results from a Radeon R9 285 and Radeon R9 Fury when testing these kernel patches along with the latest Mesa 11.1-devel Git drivers.

Wine 1.7.55 was released this morning with some exciting changes...

Added to Coreboot this week was CC6 support to provide greater power-savings for current-generation AMD processors...

Since GCC 5 there has been support for Intel Memory Protection Extensions (MPX) in the compiler, but it's been disabled by default. That's now changing...

The X.Org Foundation Board of Directors decided at yesterday's bi-weekly board meeting to go ahead with a plan to host XDC2016 in Helsinki, Finland...

Football Manager 2016 was released today by SEGA. Compared to the past where the Linux port came after the fact, Football Manager 2016 has seen a same-day release for Windows, OS X, and SteamOS/Linux...

Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 "Hammerfest" is ready for release next week and as such being put out tonight is the final development build...

Matthias Clasen announced the release today of GNOME 3.18.2 while all feature development continues to be around the GNOME 3.19 series culminating with GNOME 3.20...

Today marks one year since Microsoft announced they would be working on open-sourcing the server-side .NET and also making .NET run on Linux and OS X. Since then, it's been one heck of a year for Microsoft on Linux...

With AMD having published PowerPlay support for AMDGPU I've been busy today running tests on this new power management code that finally allows Tonga and Fiji GPUs to operate at their full-speed when using the open-source Linux graphics driver...

KitWare announced the release today of the CMake 3.4 build system...

While the level of performance out of the Raspberry Pi devices have had me less than interested, I decided to finally pick up a Raspberry Pi 2 anyways for some benchmarking and testing of the VC4 DRM+Gallium3D driver stack...

Here's the third installment of our Windows vs. Linux OpenGL benchmarking this week... This is a look at how the AMD Catalyst closed-source driver on Windows compares to AMD's latest open-source driver code on Linux.

While the highly anticipated PHP 7 release was supposed to happen today, it hasn't as instead it's been replaced by another release candidate...

Kubuntu is moving on in the absence of Jonathan Riddell who left the project and his longtime role as the release manager...

Dave Chinner has now sent in the XFS file-system updates for the Linux 4.4 kernel...

AMD has finally published patches for providing preliminary PowerPlay support for the AMDGPU DRM driver, which will eventually replace the current DPM (Dynamic Power Management) support for Volcanic Islands hardware. This PowerPlay support comes with compatibility for Tonga, Fiji, and the rest of the VI line-up!..

KDE's Sebastian Kügler has been blogging about KDE Plasma on Wayland lately and some of the ongoing work. Today he shared some interesting performance numbers...

Mozilla this week released Firefox OS 2.5 as well as a Firefox OS 2.5 Developer Preview that can be downloaded to Android devices...

Michel Dänzer has released the xf86-video-ati 7.6.0 DDX driver as a long overdue update to AMD's X.Org driver for pre-AMDGPU hardware...

The open-source Nouveau Gallium3D drivers have tacked on support for another OpenGL 4.4 extension...

LunarG, the consulting company built around open-source graphics driver work that's long been involved within Mesa/Gallium3D, has announced they've split into two...

With having just added some new OpenCL/CUDA benchmarks to the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org, I took this opportunity to run a variety of OpenCL/CUDA GPGPU tests on a wide-range of NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

Last month Qualcomm announced they made big advancements with its server ecosystem by showing off a Server Development Platform with a 24-core ARMv8 SoC. This work is now being followed close behind with open-source enablement patches...

For PostgreSQL users, the next 9.6 release should be particularly exciting as the parallel sequential scan / parallel query support has been committed...

For a number of months now there's been several NVIDIA developers working on improving the open-source Nouveau driver particularly around the Tegra series...

Epic Games has officially released Unreal Engine 4.10 today, which includes 53 improvements done by the community on GitHub along with a lot of other exciting in-house improvements...

All of the videos from this year's LLVM Developers' Meeting in California are now available online...

Coreboot developers are taking to their Git tree and dropping support for old motherboards and chipsets...

If you have been wondering how to compile CUDA C/C++ code with LLVM rather than NVIDIA's nvcc compiler, an official guide has been written...

It's usually not worth mentioning Kconfig changes for each new Linux kernel release, but this time around there is actually new functionality to point out...

Mesa 11.0.5 was released this morning as the newest stable version of this critical open-source user-space 3D graphics library...

Libvpx 1.5.0 was released yesterday as the newest version of Google's VP9 encoder/decoder...

There are a couple new OpenCL/CUDA tests now present via the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org...