Phoronix

With Fedora 22 being well past its change deadline and the final release just being a few weeks out, developers are beginning to look at planning their features/changes for Fedora 23...

While the Nouveau developers remain blocked by NVIDIA on bringing up accelerated support for the GeForce GTX 900 series, with the forthcoming Linux 4.1 kernel there is initial GeForce GTX 750 "Maxwell" accelerated support out-of-the-box...

While there's still more work to be done before advertising OpenGL 4.0~4.1 compliance, the Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D driver is now advertising support for GLSL 410 (4.10), the GL Shading Language version to match OpenGL 4.1...

While I've posted some new AMD OpenGL benchmarks on Ubuntu 15.04 since last week's release of the Vivid Vervet, the Radeon R9 290 wasn't tested since at that time this Hawaii graphics card was busy on other Phoronix test systems. However, due to the interest level in seeing some fresh Ubuntu 15.04 numbers for the Radeon R9 290 series, here's some numbers.

While there's hundreds of test profiles and test suites (a collection of pre-configured test profiles) available to the Phoronix Test Suite, here's some reasons why you should consider making/submitting a test profile for benchmarking of your own software or software that is of interest to you. The same reasons also apply mostly for why you should be benchmarking with the Phoronix Test Suite, OpenBenchmarking.org, and Phoromatic...

There's a new tech preview release out today for Vivaldi, the cross-platform, Chromium-powered web browser that's been generating a fair amount of interest since its release earlier this year...

One of the latest focuses of prolific free software developer Richard Hughes has been on fwupd, an open-source and easy way to update device firmware...

Kubuntu 15.04 provides a great experience of the new KDE stack but the version being shipped by this KDE spin of Ubuntu is Plasma 5.2 given that it was the latest available for last week's 15.04 Vivid Vervet release. For those wishing to try out KDE Plasma 5.3, it's now easy thanks to the packages landing in Kubuntu Backports...

Next week marks the initial Ubuntu Online Summit (UOS) for planning out the community+Canonical Ubuntu 15.10 release, the next major update to the popular Linux distribution due out in October...

It's KDE Plasma 5.3 day!..

While Fedora 21 ships with decent OpenCL support, if you're running the binary NVIDIA graphics driver on Fedora Linux and wishing to use CUDA-accelerated programs, it's a little bit easier today thanks to a new third-party package repository...

For those craving some more GCC 5 compiler benchmark numbers following last week's release of GCC 5.1, here's some new comparison numbers between GCC 4.9.2 stable and the near-final release candidate of GCC 5.1...

The latest work of Matthew Garrett is on further lowering the power consumption of modern x86 systems powered by Intel's Haswell and Broadwell processors...

QEMU 2.3 was officially released today as the latest major release for this important component to the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

It was this week three years ago when there was the big Steam Linux reveal when I was over at Valve HQ learning from Gabe Newell about their Steam Linux client plans, their ambitions for a Steam Linux distribution on consoles (now known as SteamOS), and much more...

The team behind Q4OS has released a new version of their Linux distribution based on Debian 8.0 "Jessie" and powered by the Trinity Desktop, a fork of KDE 3.5...

One of the big extensions of OpenGL 4.3 and also a requirement of OpenGL ES 3.1 is support for compute shaders. While the work isn't complete yet, Intel's open-source developers are making progress on GL_ARB_compute_shader support...

Right on time, Linus Torvalds has released the Linux 4.1-rc1 kernel...

While Linux 4.1 is bringing many new features and improvements, there's one addition that's noticeably absent...

With this weekend's release of Debian 8.0 "Jessie" cleared, it's now time for Debian developers to start thinking about Debian 9.0...

On Friday I posted the results showing Ubuntu 15.04 Offers Faster OpenGL For AMD Radeon GPUs On Open-Source. For those wishing to run with a slightly newer kernel and Mesa driver stack, here are fresh open-source AMD Radeon benchmark results with Linux 4.0 and Mesa 10.6-devel...

The Linux 4.1 kernel merge window has been open now for two weeks and will most likely be closed by Linus Torvalds this evening. For those curious about the Linux 4.1 features, here's a look at the newest additions to the mainline Linux kernel!..

Thanks to the new and much more powerful web server for Phoronix.com, if you've tried to access the site in the past few hours, there's proper HTTPS support...

For the past two years there has been an optional Gallium3D HUD to display various performance-related metrics as an overlay while running OpenGL applications with the Gallium3D drivers. With the latest Mesa Git code, the heads-up display can be a bit more customized...

The new Phoronix.com web server is speeding along this weekend after its deployment. Here's a look in the performance difference...

Ending out the major pull requests for the Linux 4.1 kernel merge window was the platform-drivers-x86 updates that were sent in on Saturday...

Google's Chromebook Pixel features a "Lightbar" that's a series of LEDs supporting multiple colors. Chrome OS apps are able to take advantage of the Lightbar for various purposes and coming for Linux 4.1 is support for the Chrome OS lightbar within the mainline kernel...

While the big ACPI and power management changes were sent in more than one week ago for the Linux 4.1 kernel, another batch of ACPI/PM work was sent in this weekend. One of these last-minute changes should end up significantly benefiting the performance of modern Intel Atom Bay/Cherry Trail SoCs...

As expected, Debian 8.0 "Jessie" was officially released today after being in development for two years...

If you're seeing this post, you're correctly accessing the new Phoronix.com web-server...

GCC 5 was formally released this week with under their new versioning scheme the initial stable release being GCC 5.1. GCC 6.0 is now in development as the next major release due out in about one year's time while the next GCC 5 point release will be GCC 5.2...

Another AMD motherboard has been ported to work under Coreboot...

One of the biggest additions to Mesa so far this year has been the introduction of NIR, the new intermediate representation designed to replace GLSL IR and designed by a bright student fresh out of high school...

It's been a while since last hearing anything out of the OpenMandriva camp, but today they've put out the first alpha release for their "Lx 3" release that's codenamed "Einsteinium." There's quite some interesting changes with this forthcoming update...

Systemd has eliminated shutdownd, one of the oldest components of this controversial init system, but its removal isn't because systemd is going on a diet...

Intel Haswell Linux users are greeted by relatively modest performance changes with Ubuntu 15.04 while those using AMD Radeon graphics cards on the open-source R600 and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers have much more to look forward to when upgrading to this week's release of Ubuntu 15.04. Here's some Ubuntu 14.10 vs. Ubuntu 15.04 OpenGL benchmarks for a range of AMD Radeon graphics cards.

It was just last month I wrote about there being more than 1,000 games on Steam for Linux/SteamOS. Recently, Steam crossed the 1,100 games milestone; over one hundred additions in just over one month!..

It's nearing the end of the Linux 4.1 kernel and Chris Mason has now sent in his pull request of Btrfs file-system updates for this next kernel update...

It was back in February that Microsoft open-sourced CoreCLR, the execution engine of the core .NET stack. Besides coming to Linux and other platforms, this MIT-licensed engine has now been ported and is working for FreeBSD...

While we sadly don't hear too much these days from Unigine on the Linux gaming front, their high-end 3D graphics engine remains Linux-compatible and they seem to be doing well off in the area of simulations and more. Unigine 2.0 has been out in preview form since last year and coming out today is the second beta...

Linus Torvalds still hasn't pulled the KDBUS code into the Linux 4.1 kernel and it's beginning to look like he won't honor this pull request for the current Linux development cycle...

For those wondering about the state of the Lima and Tamil graphics drivers for providing open-source, accelerated support to ARM Mali graphics processors, Luc Verhaegen has written a new blog post after being silent for a while...

It was just last month that our new, large-scale test farm was completed while already it's being expanded... Another 42U rack is being added to allow for more systems to go through rigorous benchmarking via the Phoronix Test Suite's Phoromatic...

Ubuntu 15.04 was just released and Canonical isn't wasting any time with starting to share their plans for Ubuntu 15.10 due out in October. This next release will feature a build that switches away from Debian packages (.deb) to using Snappy Personal...

The Qt Company has today announced the official release of Qt Creator 3.4, one of the best open-source IDEs for programmers and the de facto development environment for Qt applications...

Ubuntu 15.04 is out!..

Debian and other Linux distributions are running into issues with packaging up QtWebEngine, which is becoming a problem since more of the new KDE stack is becoming dependent upon this addition to Qt 5.4 that provides a web rendering engine based on Chromium...

Linux 4.1 will feature an updated Multiple Device (MD) driver to improve the RAID 5/6 potential for those relying upon Linux Software RAID...

Going back many months there's been work on adding ACPI support to ARM64/AArch64. That long journey may now be wrapping up with a pending pull request for landing full ACPI support for 64-bit ARM in Linux 4.1...

Dave Chinner has sent in his XFS file-system updates targeting the Linux 4.1 kernel...