Phoronix

If you're not interested in Virtual Programming's Linux release yesterday of the eON-powered DiRT Showdown racing game, just wait until next week when Feral Interactive is expected to release Company of Heroes 2...

While at one point it looked like Kdenlive had a dark future, things turned around. This non-linear video editor was ported to Qt5 / KF5 and is added to KDE Applications 15.08...

Yesterday marked the release of DiRT Showdown for Linux as ported over by Virtual Programming using their eON technology. With being able to use it as an automated, reproducible benchmark, I spent most of the day and into the night working on some initial AMD Radeon vs. NVIDIA GeForce graphics card benchmarks using this DiRT game that's finally available to Linux/SteamOS gamers, three years after it was released for Windows. This initial comparison is a 14-way Linux gaming graphics card comparison.

The Dattobd driver was open-sourced earlier this month by Datto Inc. The Datto Block Driver is for taking block-level snapshots and incremental backups...

Andi Kleen of Intel announced today the release of Simple-PT, a simple Processor Trace implementation for Linux...

Prominent GNOME and Fedora developer Christian Schaller has published an open letter to the Apache Software Foundation and Apache OpenOffice teams asking them to redirect OpenOffice.org to the LibreOffice web-site...

Sway is an open-source tiling window manager that supports Wayland and is fully-compatible with the i3 configuration files...

Google has begun committing open-source code to the libvpx repository for supporting their next-generation VP10 video format...

There are many graphics card tests imminent for DiRT Showdown, the latest high profile game ported to Linux. These AMD and NVIDIA graphics card results should be particularly interesting considering DiRT Showdown is a port to Linux using Virtual Programm's controversial eON layer...

Bryce Harrington has announced the first alpha releases today for the upcoming Wayland 1.9 and Weston 1.9 releases...

As of today there are now 1,400 games listed on Steam that have compatibility for Linux / SteamOS...

Google revealed today the full name of Android M... Marshmallow...

DiRT Showdown is now available today on Steam for Linux. Before getting too excited for another racing game on Linux, this is a game port done by Virtual Programming...

My benchmarking entertainment this weekend, besides getting to benchmark with a sledgehammer, was testing out Btrfs RAID 0/1/5/6/10 arrays across a set of four USB 3.0 flash drives.

With Mesa 11.0 coming in September, which is bringing OpenGL 4.0~4.2 support and initial AMDGPU and Fiji support, it's been a busy past few months for Mesa developers...

Intel has published some documentation concerning the compute architecture for the Intel Skylake "Gen9" hardware...

Valve engineers have decided that they will not support system suspend/resume on SteamOS... Why? Because it's poor under Linux...

The PNY CS1211 120GB solid-state drive retails for under $60 USD and is one of this memory company's value SSD lines.

Besides Rob Clark being busy implementing GLES/GL 3 in Freedreno Gallium3D, over in kernel-space he has a slew of new improvements to land in its MSM DRM driver for Linux 4.3...

The Linux 4.2-rc7 kernel is now available, but it's undecided yet if Linux 4.2 will be officially released next week...

For users of Kodi 15 "Isengard", it's now time to upgrade to the 15.1 maintenance release...

Earlier this year I wrote about protecting our Linux test farm with the Nest Protect. While I own ten of these "high tech smoke detectors" and initially recommended, I no longer trust them after a long night...

If you want to see how your own Linux system(s) compare to the Intel Core i5 6600K "Skylake" processor, here are some standalone benchmarks...

As some Freedreno driver news this weekend besides Qualcomm publishing some register documentation is word that OpenGL ES 3.0 is now working for the Freedreno Gallium3D driver on Adreno A3xx/4xx hardware...

Earlier today I wrote about the Intel Core i5 6600K "Skylake" running fine on Ubuntu Linux compared to the issues encountered when running the i7-5775C Broadwell processor. This Intel Skylake CPU is running fine so far on Linux but there is a minor workaround that many users will experience if upgrading to a Skylake processor in the next few months...

Are the ARM SoC vendors deciding to become more open? Besides NVIDIA contributing to the open-source Nouveau driver for Tegra K1+ hardware and making improvements in that area, Qualcomm started contributing to the Freedreno / MSM driver project last year, which is the reverse-engineered, community-based driver for Adreno graphics hardware. Qualcomm has now taken a significant step forward and actually released some register documentation!..

While Debian 9.0 "Stretch" won't come until 2017, just one month after Debian Installer Stretch Alpha 1 is now the second alpha release for the Debian Installer component to this next major release...

As a quick update to Intel Core i5 6600K Skylake CPU Arrives: What Linux Tests Would You Like To See?, this brand new processor is playing nicely on Ubuntu Linux...

It's been a while since last running any Intel P-State / CPUfreq scaling governor benchmarks on Phoronix. With a premium subscriber expressing interest in seeing a fresh comparison, here are some new numbers when running an Intel Core i7 Haswell CPU with NVIDIA GeForce graphics on Ubuntu 15.04 with the Linux 3.19 kernel and testing the different scaling drivers and governors.

Following the SIGGRAPH story earlier this week about Unity working on DirectX 12 and Apple Metal support, but not Vulkan, there was -- as usual -- a colorful selection of comments in our forums about this situation. Of course, many theorized that Apple must be paying Unity to support Metal, Unity doesn't care about the desktop, and other alternate reasons why Unity isn't yet supporting Vulkan...

Some Ubuntu developers are currently looking at poor performance of the Ubuntu Phone, particularly when it comes to stuttering or a poor user experience in certain cases...

While the RadeonSI and Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D drivers are now at OpenGL 4.1 compliance, the open-source Intel Mesa driver remains stuck at OpenGL 3.3. Blocking the Intel driver from OpenGL 4.0 compliance is FP64 and tessellation shader sub-routine. While work is underway on both extensions -- plus ARB_vertex_attrib_64bit for OpenGL 4.1 -- it looks like the FP64 support may not be too far out...

The GNOME desktop environment turns eighteen years old today!..

While there is the new proprietary graphics driver PPA for Ubuntu Linux users to grab the latest NVIDIA (and eventually, AMD) binary blobs, for Fedora users there is this separate third-party repository to easily install the newest NVIDIA proprietary drivers...

Earlier this month I wrote about glibc 2.22 and its new features being ready for release and today that version has been officially put out the door...

As anticipated, FreeBSD 10.2 is now officially available...

If visiting LinuxBenchmarking.com to view the daily performance benchmark tracker results on the Linux kernel, GCC, LLVM Clang, or Mesa and opting to view the results for a very long duration, you may have noticed some results were slow to appear or the page would time-out before hand. I've now landed some improvements into the Phoronix Test Suite's rendering code that should dramatically speed-up the process...

As Michael mentioned earlier today this is my last day as the Phoronix Summer 2015 Intern...

The Rust Programming Language Blog has a new post by two of the team members about what the 1.0 release meant in hindsight three months later and what the team will be focusing on in looking forward to 2016...

A few days ago Loki, the community manager for Re-Logic, the gaming studio behind the popular sandbox game Terraria, announced the release of Terraria 1.3.0.8, which both made the OS X and Linux versions of the game public, as well as ensuring compatibility between the OS X, Linux, and Windows clients...

It's been a while since last benchmarking any Linux file-systems on a USB 3.0 flash drive to see how the performance compares, given that F2FS and friends are being optimized for flash storage. However, off the Linux 4.2 kernel for kicks I've run some benchmarks on a 16GB USB flash drive the EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and F2FS file-systems.

Just after writing this morning about libdrm 2.4.63 being released and that it's needed for the AMDGPU Mesa support to land, the code indeed is now in mainline! There's the mainline support going into Mesa 11.0 for supporting the hardware via the AMDGPU DRM driver -- Tonga, Carrizo, Fiji, and future new hardware. There's also now HEVC video decode support on capable hardware via the VDPAU state tracker and other improvements related to this AMDGPU code push...

With Wayland 1.9 coming next month and the feature freeze being imminent, the Linux DMA-BUF support for Wayland was pushed out this morning!..

Marek Olšák of AMD this morning announced libdrm 2.4.63 as the newest version of this DRM Library that interfaces between the Linux kernel DRM drivers and the user-space DDX and Mesa components, among other user-space graphics code...

All good things must come to an end and today is our 2015 summer intern, Eric Griffith, last day writing on Phoronix...

Jerome Glisse at Red Hat continues to working on his patches for Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) for the Linux kernel...

Experienced OpenGL/WebGL developer Sascha Willems has shared his views on the next-generation, low-level Vulkan graphics API from the perspective of a hobbyist developer...

VIA Embedded has rolled out a new ruggedized PC for in-vehicle computing and other applications. This rugged PC is powered by a long forgot about VIA Eden quad-core processor...

Out now ahead of the Plasma 5.4 release later this month is KDE Frameworks 5.13.0...

After writing last month about The Insane Power Use Of Benchmarking Linux Every Day as part of looking at the electrical use of our Linux benchmarking farm powering Phoronix, LinuxBenchmarking.com, etc. Here's this month's numbers...