Phoronix

Given the recent releases of FreeBSD 10.2 and NetBSD 7.0, plus the H2'2015 Linux distribution updates rolling around, I've just started work on a new BSD vs. Linux operating system performance comparison...

AMD sent in a batch of fixes for the AMDGPU kernel driver today for Linux 4.3. One notable change with this AMDGPU DRM driver update is that it marks the Iceland/Topaz graphics processor support as experimental so it's no longer enabled by default until the support has been better vetted...

The GNOME2-forked MATE-Desktop has tagged version 1.11.0 as their newest milestone...

Enlightenment DR 0.20 Alpha has been released as the first step towards E20 with one year having passed since E19...

While the Enlightenment developers were quick to implement Wayland support as an alternative to X11, with this week's v0.9.12 Enlightenment release it drops the Wayland support. However, this is just temporary and isn't much of a big deal...

The Intel China developers have released the newest point release of Beignet for open-source OpenCL acceleration on Linux for Intel HD/Iris Graphics hardware...

While this year's Google Summer of Code has long passed, the KDE development community is now once again starting the Season of KDE 2015 as an initiative to get new developers involved with KDE projects...

With the upcoming releases of the Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web-browsers is support for the W3C Subresource Integrity (SRI) specification...

Sarah Sharp stepped down as a Linux kernel developer this week over what she feels is bad and toxic behavior on the Linux kernel mailing list with a lack of respect and colorful language. Her announcement sparked a lot of people to come out with polarized views and Matthew Garrett also ended up stepping away from making mainline kernel contributions. Well known kernel developer James Bottomley has now published a blog post expressing different views...

NetBSD 7.0 was quietly released at the end of September...

While the Internet has been buzzing recently about the new FLIF image format, libjpeg-turbo developers released a new version of their JPEG library...

Last week I posted some initial Kingston HyperX Predator M.2 SSD Linux benchmarks. Since those results, which were rather disappointing when factoring in the cost of this solid-state storage, I've run some more tests. While the performance has improved with a newer Skylake Linux system, the results are still not as great as advertised and I'm just returning the darn drive.

SUSE Labs is looking to hire another Linux graphics developer to be involved with Linux kernel and user-space driver development, including both X.Org and Wayland...

Daniel Vetter sent in a fresh intel-drm-next pull request today for landing more changes into DRM-Next as preparations for the Linux 4.4 kernel...

Lennart Poettering released systemd 227 a few minutes ago with what he describes as "lot's of new awesomeness, and many bugfixes!"..

Since this summer we've known that Canonical developers have been looking at Vulkan in regards to supporting this forthcoming graphics API by Unity 8 and Mir. Since then we've seen work done in Mir to support renderers other than OpenGL with this Ubuntu display server. As another sign of working towards Vulkan, more of Mir's OpenGL code continues to be re-factored...

Following the Krita 3.0 porting work to Qt5 and KF5, Calligra Words is benefiting from the porting of shared code by Krita that they too now can be a "pure" Qt5 tool-kit plus KDE Frameworks 5 application...

Earlier this week I posted a number of openSUSE Leap benchmarks of their different kernels: debug, default, desktop, and vanilla. Here's some follow-up tests with more results from comparing the openSUSE 42.1 Leap Beta kernel builds...

If you're fortunate enough to have a powerful 64-bit ARM board, Xen virtualization support is now available via CentOS ARM64 packages...

For anyone dependent upon PHP's PEAR extensions, version 1.10 of PEAR is now available ahead of next month's planned PHP 7 release...

In the past year or so there's been a lot to talk about when it comes to eBPF in the Linux kernel as an in-kernel virtual machine. The latest functionality being worked on is supporting eBPF for unprivileged users...

The latest monthly point release to the Unvanquished open-source first person shooter was released yesterday...

While upstream Android 6.0 is available as "Marshmallow", in the Android-x86 world they just reached their 5.1-RC1 milestone which is also their first release candidate to date based on Android Lollipop...

Perl 6 was unveiled last night in San Francisco by Larry Wall...

Timothy Arceri is the independent developer that started out doing some crowd-funded Mesa OpenGL extension development that was successful so he did a second crowd-funding campaign to do more Mesa feature work. That second extension, ARB_arrays_of_arrays, finally appears nearly complete so he's decided to work on another extension...

While the ZFS file-system isn't supported by the mainline Linux kernel due to the Oracle-owned file-system being under the GPL-incompatible CDDL license, Canonical is making plans to offer ZFS on Ubuntu in some standard way...

The latest monthly point release to Plasma 5.4 is now available...

It's been just over six months since I completed construction on the large 60+ system server room where a ton of Linux benchmarking takes place just not for Phoronix.com but also the new LinuxBenchmarking.com daily performance tracking initiative and testing and development around our Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org software. Here's a look back, a few recommendations to reiterate for those aspiring to turn their cellar into a server farm, and a few things I'd do differently next time around.

A day after Sarah Sharp formally announced she's stepping away from Linux kernel development due to the arguably toxic community, well known kernel developer Matthew Garrett announced he too is planning to cease his personal contributions to the upstream Linux kernel...

Valve has updated SteamOS Brewmaster to use Debian 8.2 and with that also comes a Linux kernel update...

A month out from the launch of PHP 7, Rogue Wave Software has announced they've acquired Zend Technologies, the main company behind PHP for the enterprise...

While there's just a handful of names that Phoronix readers are familiar with when it comes to AMD's open-source Linux driver developers and those from AMD who communicate with the community in our forums, it turns out there are many more developers at AMD becoming involved as part of their new AMDGPU driver stack...

OpenGL Compute Shader support appears about ready for the open-source Intel i965 Mesa DRI driver!..

The latest feature proposed for Fedora 24 and should almost certainly be approved is the landing of NetworkManager 1.2...

The OpenGL EXT_polygon_offset_clamp extension has been supported in mainline Mesa for the Intel i965 Mesa DRI driver for some time while now this extension is supported for older Intel Gen 4/5 hardware...

While we're still waiting on HP to shed any more details or release their Linux++ operating system initiative, today they have made public OpenSwitch: an open-source network operating system...

Quick note for anyone who has a vested interest in LLVM/Clang on Windows or in Windows XP: LLVM has ended its support...

While it's 2015, a serial port benchmark was just added to the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org...

Last week I posted the benchmarks of a six-way Linux distribution comparison that included Fedora, openSUSE, Manjaro, Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint Linux. One of the test requests that came out of it was posting some follow-up benchmarks of the different openSUSE Linux kernel options. In this article are benchmarks of openSUSE's four main kernel flavors.

Since early 2014 we've seen Wine running on Android and now it looks like before the end of the year CodeWeavers will release a version of CrossOver for Android along with publishing the associated Wine patches...

While Sarah Sharp had been a longtime Linux kernel develoepr and encouraged females to get involved with Linux kernel development, she is stopping any further contributions to the upstream kernel...

While there is already LibreOffice Online as a cloud-based version of the open-source office suite, there's a new, separate effort underway for getting LibreOffice in web browsers...

Tom Stellard of AMD has once again stepped up to maintain stable point releases of the LLVM compiler stack. He's laid out his plans now for doing minor updates to LLVM 3.7...

The first public beta has been released for the Linux (and OS X) build of Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power...

Within the latest development code of GNOME's key GLib library leading up to GNOME 3.20 is Unicode 8.0 support...

A new update to OpenIndiana is available, the operating system powered by Illumos that's derived from what was the OpenSolaris code-base prior to it being killed by Oracle. OpenIndiana 2015.10 "Hipster" is the name of this new release.

Linus Torvalds has tagged the Linux 4.3-rc4 kernel a few minutes ago in Git. Besides bug-fixing, this new kernel update adds a post-merge-window feature of a new and more secure string copy function for developers to utilize in the future...

Substance Designer is a node-based texturing tool and is quite advanced software. Up to now Allegorithmic's Substance software has just been available for Windows and OS X, but now it's being ported to Linux...

Back in March was a patch enabling next-generation AMD Zen processor support for GCC and now it looks like this patch is ready to be added to the GNU Compiler Collect's trunk code-base for GCC 6...

Building off Friday's release of Wine 1.7.52 is now Wine-Staging 1.7.52 with a few more updates added in...