Phoronix

Earlier this month a GDC 2015 session was listed for showing off "glNext", the next-generation OpenGL. This major advancement for a cross-platform, multi-purpose graphics API is going to be presented by Valve, Epic Games, Unity, and the Khronos Group, among others. Besides the GDC session for glNext, on the same day they'll be having a separate event about this new API...

How could Linux get more game ports and users? An Ubuntu developer is suggesting that Canonical and Red Hat finance the ports...

OpenMW, the project attempting to make an open-source engine re-implementation of Elderscrols III: Morrowind, is switching out their rendering engine...

Earlier this month we wrote how CrunchBang Linux was winding down with its lead developer halting development of this Debian-based distribution. However, there's new developers now forming the CrunchBang++ project...

Linus Torvalds has yet to reveal whether Linux 3.20 will be re-branded as Linux 4.0, but it seems the community at least really wants this version bump to happen...

The most recent pull request for the already very exciting Linux 3.20 / 4.0 kernel is the DRM graphics driver changes, which of course excite us a lot. This DRM pull request is another fairly heavy pull request with a number of end-user features for the popular open-source graphics drivers...

Last week after wondering the state of OpenShot 2.0, there was a long overdue update on OpenShot, a promising open-source video editor that hasn't seen a major release in years. Today there's an update to share on Kdenlive, the open-source KDE video editor...

Nearly one month ago I bought the third-generation Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon as one of the first laptops/ultrabooks shipping with a high-end Broadwell processor. I've been running Linux on the system since receiving it, including the past ~3 weeks as my main production system, and I remain very happy with this purchase.

At the beginning of this month I wrote how I switched back to Fedora Linux on my main system to replace Ubuntu and also wrote about changes I made when installing Fedora 21 on my main system, a new ThinkPad ultrabook with Broadwell processor. There's three small things that annoy me the most though about using GNOME 3.x...

Yesterday I ran some benchmarks from the new Core i3 Broadwell NUC to see how the latest Mesa Git affects the OpenGL performance for the Core i3 5010U chip with HD Graphics 5500. Today I'm complementing that testing to see if the latest Linux kernel Git makes any difference for this low-end, low-power Broadwell chip...

The latest pull requests sent in for the Linux 3.20 kernel are the various subsystems maintained by Greg Kroah-Hartman. The changes for the USB drivers, char/misc, driver core, staging, and TTY/serial aren't too jaw-dropping, but for staging at least is the usual heavy churn between kernel cycles...

For anyone that in the past decade has looked for an embedded firewall/network operating system to build your own router or network device has likely encountered m0n0wall. While m0n0wall has been popular over the years and is powered by FreeBSD, the lead developer of m0n0wall has tossed in the towel after twelve years in development...

The KDE community has done a Valentine's weekend release of KDE Frameworks 5.7.0, the newest version of the add-on libraries used by KDE applications, KDE Plasma 5, and a growing number of other projects like LXQt...

For those still relying upon the Reiser4 file-system and haven't migrated off to ZFS On Linux or Btrfs, the out-of-tree Reiser4 kernel code has been updated for compatibility with the Linux 3.18 kernel...

The third development milestone release of the open-source, cross-platform Phoronix Test Suite 5.6 benchmarking software is now available...

While we don't yet know whether the next kernel version is Linux 3.20 or Linux 4.0, what we do know is that this next Linux kernel revision will contain a lot of exciting updates...

With Mesa 10.5 recently having been branched and Mesa 10.6 now officially under development, I ran some quick comparison benchmarks today to see how the latest Mesa 10.4 stable series is comparing to Mesa 10.6-devel Git for an Intel Core i3 "Broadwell" NUC with HD Graphics 5500...

Version 0.11 of the Mir Display Server was released this week for Ubuntu...

While we're only in the middle of the Linux 3.20 kernel, for what might still be called Linux 4.0, Intel already has updated DRM driver code for testing that will not be merged until Linux 3.21 (or what might also be known as Linux 4.1)...

While the X.Org Foundation is voting on joining SPI and the SPI already represents a range of open-source projects from PostgreSQL to Debian, this organization is being criticized this week over how they negatively interacted with the Elementary OS project...

Wayland 1.7.0 along with the reference Weston 1.7 compositor were released in the early hours of the morning as a great Valentine's Day gift to open-source users wishing to run the next-generation Linux display stack. The Wayland/Weston 1.7 release continues polishing up the stack as an alternative to the security-ridden X.Org Server...

The third beta to the much delayed Mageia 5 is now available for some Valentine's weekend testing...

Yesterday I wrote about it being a long time since the last update on OpenShot, a popular non-linear open-source video editing application that hasn't seen a major release in years, while today (coincidentally?) there's some big improvements to share...

The PC-BSD camp has started spinning development images of FreeBSD/PC-BSD 11.0 in the present 11.0-CURRENT state that is still far out from being officially released...

Beginning next week there's going to be a new member of AMD's developer relationship group that manages the ties between the graphics driver developers and game developers. This new employee is an experienced Linux developer and will focus on Linux/OpenGL cooperation...

Beyond the big set of AMD Radeon changes for Linux 3.20, Alex Deucher of AMD mailed in some important Radeon DRM driver fixes today that are a big deal for some R9 290 "Hawaii" users of the open-source driver...

It's been ten years since last testing any Transcend products, back in the days of DDR2 memory and 1GB flash drives. However, that changed when recently picking up a Transcend SSD370 256GB solid-state drive.

Linus Torvalds is still deciding when to bump the kernel version to Linux 4.0...

The developers working on the Linux versions of Metro Last Light Redux and Metro 2033 Redux have released a long-awaited new patch release...

The third release candidate of LLVM 3.6 is available for some Friday the 13th testing...

Paolo Bonzini has sent in the KVM pull request for the Linux 3.20 kernel and it includes some interesting changes and features for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

F2FS remains a very promising open-source file-system for targeting flash-based storage on Linux, though for Linux 3.20 the changes aren't too exciting...

Nearly one year after the release of PulseAudio 5.0, the release of PulseAudio 6.0 is finally here with many changes...

For those that have been having problems using Gallium3D VDPAU recently, this video decoding should be fixed up in the latest Mesa 10.6-devel Git code and it will also be back-ported for Mesa 10.5...

DevConf.cz 2015 took place last week in Brno, Czech Republic as the annual Red Hat / Fedora focused open-source Linux event. For those interested, the videos of the sessions are up online...

It's been almost two and a half years since the last official release to the open-source OpenShot video editing software. OpenShot 2.0 has been talked about for much of this time but this major update to the once very promising non-linear video editor has yet to materialize...

While Fedora 22 isn't being released for several more months, so far it's running quite well...

The PowerPC architecture updates for the Linux 3.20 kernel, including some improvements for the Sony PlayStation 3 game console...

Days after branching Mesa 10.5, Emil Velikov went ahead today and put out the first release candidate for the upcoming Mesa 10.5...

Trusted Platform Module 2.0 (TPM 2.0) is to be supported by the Linux 3.20 kernel...

With GNOME 3.16 the developers are working hard at making their native Wayland support be rock-solid and reliable for day-to-day use for those wishing to abandon running their GNOME desktop on an X.Org Server. An important feature has finally landed for GTK+ applications in the Wayland world: the ability to minimize windows...

As usual, the next version of the Linux kernel will bring a number of prominent changes to Intel's open-source DRM graphics driver...

X.Org and Mesa developers have begun thinking about interesting projects for student developers to get involved in for this year's Google Summer of Code while prospective students should also begin to think about getting involved with X.Org/Mesa development...

Intel will begin shipping their first Skylake chips in the second half of this year...

Ubuntu Make, the software formerly known as Ubuntu Developer Tools Center, is out with a new release that adds more options and platforms for helping developers using Ubuntu Linux...

While Intel's official Mesa DRI driver has supported "Gen8" Broadwell graphics for many months, today the support for these latest-generation HD/Iris Graphics processors landed within the unofficial ILO Gallium3D driver...

For those that missed it, VESA published the Embedded DisplayPort 1.4a specification this week. This new version has VESA Display Stream Compression and will support laptop panels up to 8K...

Thanks to the open-source Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org, there's already many benchmarks of the new quad-core Raspberry Pi 2...

Marek Olšák has implemented support for the GL_AMD_pinned_memory extension within Mesa/Gallium3D and the R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers...

The sound changes for the Linux 3.20 kernel aren't too incredibly exciting but there's some improvements for HP laptops, support for some new audio hardware, and a variety of other changes...