Phoronix

For student developers looking to do some summer coding, the list of accepted organizations for Google's 2015 Summer of Code initiative has been published...

As of last night, the Ubuntu 15.04 Cloud daily ISOs have switched to booting with systemd by default rather than Upstart...

Our friends at Ubuntu PC vendor System76 yesterday revealed their Meerkat Ubuntu desktop system...

An exception is being sought to add Xfce 4.12 for Fedora 22 past the change submission deadline...

After receiving specifications on the talked about Ubuntu Tablet and then receiving pricing information on the Ubuntu Tablet, the start-up responsible for this tablet that seeks to launch one of the first mass Ubuntu Tablets has sent along some official photos of their design...

The "VEGA" state tracker to provide OpenVG API support to Gallium3D graphics drivers inside Mesa has been removed...

While the WebGL 2.0 specification hasn't been finalized yet, Mozilla is already hard at work on ensuring Firefox fully supports this next accelerated graphics standard for the web...

The latest excitement this week for Linux gamers is hardware vendor ZOTAC announcing today the Steam Machine SN970, their new living room PC powered by the Debian-based SteamOS...

It's been a week since Allwinner's most recent proof of violating of the (L)GPL license for FFmpeg and libVP6. In the week since, they haven't rectified the issue but today just slapped in a LICENSE file saying the non-existent code is LGPL...

Another interesting announcement at GDC2015 yesterday besides the new Vulkan API, the Source 2 Engine, Unity 5, and more was AMD's LiquidVR announcement...

After Valve announced their Steam Link streaming device, NVIDIA announced the Shield set-top box...

Besides announcing the Source 2 Engine, Valve used GDC2015 as an opportunity to announce Steam Link, a $49 (USD) device for streaming Steam content to any TV...

Valve has announced the Source 2 Engine this afternoon from the GDC2015 event taking place in San Francisco...

Gitorious, a once formidable competitor to GitHub in the early days of the Git revision control system for hosting open-source projects, has been acquired by GitLab...

Version 5.0 of the Unity Game Engine was released this morning at the Game Developers' Conference (GDC) in San Francisco...

Linus Torvalds released the Linux 4.0-rc2 kernel this morning rather than on Sunday night due to having a i915 DRM graphics issue with one of his Apple Mac Mini computers. Aside from fixing up one of Torvalds' old systems, the Linux 4.0-rc2 kernel is a relatively mundane release...

It's a go: Linux 3.19 is powering Ubuntu 15.04...

Emmanuele Bassi of GNOME has released version 1.21.6 of Clutter, the latest development version of this toolkit used by GNOME and other projects...

A few days after receiving the revised specifications for the "MJ Tech" Ubuntu Tablet, I've received their pricing information for this tablet that will hopefully ship later in the year...

BPF continues marching forward as a universal, in-kernel virtual machine for the Linux kernel. The Berkeley Packet Filter was originally designed for network packet filtering but has since been extended as eBPF to support other non-network subsystems via the bpf syscall. Here's some more details on this in-kernel virtual machine...

Hewlett Packard has patented the identification of a failed code change by automatically running a set of tests against the set of changes for indicating the regression...

While hearing "PowerVR" tend to make Linux users cringe over memories of past Linux driver issues with Imagination's binary blobs, Imagination is among the vendors now experimenting with the new Vulkan graphics API and SPIR-V IR. Imagination too has already put out one of the first demos using this new graphics API...

In continuation to the article this morning on Khronos announcing OpenCL 2.1, the Vulkan graphics API, and SPIR-V, a provisional specification on SPIR-V is now available for interested developers...

Today is a very exciting day for those into open standard graphics and compute APIs! While driver implementations aren't expected until later in 2015, the next-generation OpenGL standard is being announced as the Vulkan API, the provisional specification to OpenCL 2.1 is being released, and SPIR-V is set to make its debut as the IR for both Vulkan and OpenCL 2.1.

This month AMD is planning to finally make their Mantle graphics API more "open" by releasing a 450-page programming guide and API reference for Mantle...

The Unreal Engine 4 is now free to everyone along with all future Unreal Engine updates!..

Qt 5.5 looks like it will be another release that's going to be delivered slightly behind schedule...

The OpenBSD Foundation is supporting work to adapt at least one web browser's JIT engine to support OpenBSD's "Write Xor Execute" policy for system memory...

For users of KDE's Calligra open-source work application suite, improvements to ODF file format reading have landed...

Our new Linux benchmarking test farm that's much cleaner and more organized than the current implementation shown at LinuxBenchmarking.com is a step closer to reality. By the end of this week this new farm controlled by Phoromatic and powered by OpenBenchmarking.org and the Phoronix Test Suite should be powered up...

As a follow-up to last week's "Vulkan" trademark by the Khronos Group and mulling it over this weekend, I've now been able to confirm with two independent entities that Vulkan is indeed the next-gen graphics API designed as the successor to OpenGL for high performance 2D/3D graphics...

Last month there was a long overdue development update on Kdenlive, an open-source video editor associated with the KDE camp. Today comes more exciting news for anyone using this video editor on Linux...

Valve teamed up with hardware manufacturer HTC to produce the HTC Revive, a.k.a. the SteamVR Headset...

There is yet another small hobbyist, open-source code compiler to talk about this weekend. Hello 8cc...

I'm still working on any sort of possible confirmation from the Khronos Group and other OpenGL stakeholders whether Vulkan is the name of the next-generation OpenGL API, but alas, on the weekend and being just a few days before the announcement, nothing has been confirmed...

While recently modern Intel hardware is negatively talked about the most when it comes to needing binary blobs / binary-only microcode to work with the open-source Coreboot, other hardware can be problematic too...

This month on Phoronix the most popular news articles were about the Linux 4.0 kernel (formerly known as Linux 3.20) but also popular were LLVM-related stories, Raspberry Pi 2 news, and the usual Linux graphics coverage...

The first major feature release over Kodi 14, the media player / open-source HTPC software previously known as XBMC, is in development and its first development release is now available...

Xfce 4.12 has finally been released!..

The Khronos Group filed a trademark request earlier this month with the USPTO over the name Vulkan as it pertains to drawing 2D/3D graphics... Vulkan might be the name of the next-generation OpenGL specification due to be announced next week...

While Mozilla doesn't devote nearly as many resources to their Thunderbird email client as they do to Firefox and there isn't as many high-profile releases for this project in a while, Thunderbird adoption continues to climb...

With OpenBenchmarking.org having turned four years old a few days ago earlier this week I provided a look at the most popular/used benchmarks/tests on our open cloud service while in this article is a look at the most viewed test results...

While the first release candidate of the Linux 4.0 kernel is barely one week old, Intel's open-source graphics driver development team already has changes queued up for the next kernel cycle, Linux 4.1..

A new release of the PlayOnLinux graphical front-end to Wine is now available...

The release of Xfce 4.12 is hopefully being realized this weekend. The release hasn't taken place at the time of writing, but there's been commits to update translations as well as to add the new wallpaper of Xfce 4.12...

Just a few days after Mesa 10.5 RC2 was released, the third release candidate to Mesa 10.5 is now available for testing...

Back in December, Phoronix delivered the first article about An Ubuntu Tablet Inspired By The Ubuntu Edge Is Coming. From the company responsible for this tablet inspired by the failed Ubuntu Edge smartphone we have some new specifications of the tablet they plan to ship with Ubuntu...

While running a few days late, LLVM 3.6 was officially released today...

VLC 2.2 (codenamed "Weathermax") was released today as the latest version of the popular, multi-platform, open-source media player...

The latest solid-state drive being added to one of our Linux test farm systems is the Samsung 850 EVO. Prior to commissioning this drive in one of the systems, I ran some benchmarks against a few other solid-state drives while testing with the EXT4 file-system on Ubuntu Linux.