Phoronix

Gummiboot, the lightweight UEFI boot manager that's been around for a few years, is now dead...

Times don't appear good at Finnish phone maker Jolla that hoped to rise from the fall of Nokia's MeeGo attempts. Jolla went public today with a focus shift at the company and they'll now be spinning off their device business...

The shocker of the day is that aside from an independent (non-NVIDIA) open-source developer working on Nouveau SPIR-V support is that there's an actual NVIDIA employee working towards CUDA compute support atop the open-source Nouveau graphics driver...

With KDBUS not being called as a Linux 4.2 feature but rather being diverted with a focus on Linux 4.3, it's continuing to receive a great deal of code churn. Today it received a "big set of updates" for this controversial in-kernel IPC mechanism...

Firefox developers are revisiting at how they build their web browser and how they can better utilize modern web technologies and in the process move away from XUL/XBL within their Gecko Engine...

Fedora developer Kevin Fenzi has shared his experiences with testing the latest GNOME 3.18 development release, v3.17.3, on Wayland with Fedora Rawhide...

For those that follow me on Twitter know I've started testing the MSI Radeon R7 370 4G graphics card as one of the new models launched by AMD last month. For this new (non-Fiji) graphics card, using the open-source graphics driver is the only choice on Linux right now...

If you're a Linux enthusiast that's a habitual upgrader of the Linux kernel, you may want to hold off a few days on trying out the Linux 4.2 development kernel. For several systems, I've seen nothing but kernel panics the past few days when riding the mainline Linux kernel Git...

Following rolling out the brand new Phoronix site to everyone on Saturday, some minor modifications were just pushed to the site this morning in seeking to address feedback from Phoronix readers...

While there is already an Intel Vulkan Linux graphics driver developed by Valve and LunarG that will be open-sourced as soon as the Vulkan specification is officially out, we haven't heard much about the other open-source Linux graphics drivers trying to get a jump start on Vulkan / SPIR-V support...

The latest patch-set that Microsoft is proposing for the mainline Linux kernel is Hyper-V VM Sockets (Hvsock) that is a byte-stream based communication mechanism for Windows 10 and later for communication between hosts and VM guests...

For those running KDE on a systemd-based Linux system, the KDE Control Module for controlling this init system and its options has been updated...

As mentioned in this week's LLVM Weekly, the initial WebAssembly back-end was committed to the mainline LLVM code-base but it is not yet functional...

At the end of last week the first beta of Firefox 40 was released, now that Firefox 39 shipped. With Firefox 40 comes some exciting changes for Linux users...

Peter Hutterer released version 0.19 of Libinput, the input handling library relied upon by Wayland compositors and optionally by the X.Org Server via the specialized xf86-input-libinput driver...

Now that I seem to have found a workaround for my Core i7 5775C Broadwell Linux issue that resulted in very frequent kernel panics, it's off to the benchmark races. Here are some preliminary Linux benchmark figures for this first socketed Intel Broadwell LGA-1150 desktop CPU with Iris 6200 graphics...

It's been five months since I quit using Ubuntu Linux on my main production system and switched over to Fedora Workstation. Looking back, it was a fantastic decision...

Right on schedule Linus Torvalds declared the first release candidate to the Linux 4.2 kernel...

On Friday I mentioned I was running into stability issues on Linux with the Core i7 5775C, Intel's new socketed, high-end Broadwell processor with Iris 6200 graphics. The issue was quite perplexing, but I seem to have finally figured out a workaround for this problem that seems to be plaguing other early i7-5775C Linux users too...

If all goes according to plan, the Linux 4.2 kernel merge window will close this afternoon followed by the immediate release of the Linux 4.2-rc1 test version. With all major pull requests having already been submitted for Linux 4.2, here's an overview of the exciting new features and changed functionality to look forward to with this kernel version to officially debut later this summer!

For the past four years in systemd there's been a Udev accelerometer helper for exposing the device orientation as a property. With the upcoming systemd 222 release, that will change and instead users taking advantage of device orientation information should switch to iio-sensor-proxy 1.0+...

For developers that may be experienced with advanced C/C++ programming, dealing with graphics drivers is a very different beast, and thus for individuals wanting to get involved there are often lots of questions simply about how to get started...

A few more input driver updates were mailed in this morning for the Linux 4.2 kernel. This second input update for this next kernel version has better Xbox Wireless Controller support thanks to a patch from Valve...

One of the later pull requests for the Linux 4.2 kernel merge window is a big rework to the NTB (Non-Transparent Bridge) core code...

A few days ago Amazon revealed a project that they had been working on over the last few months: s2n. s2n is a new, open source, implementation of the TLS protocol...

Torque 3D 3.7 was released last week as the new version of this advanced game engine that's been open-source for the past three years...

Rob Clark has shared a new blog post today about "happy (gpu) independence day" with his work on the open-source Freedreno driver for freeing Qualcomm Linux users of the Adreno binary blob...

For those in the US not busy celebrating Independence Day, come check out the brand new, completely redesigned Phoronix.com site. This new site is in beta but is publicly available and should yield a much better experience, particularly for smartphone and tablet readers...

There's been various one-time password features in the works for OpenLDAP -- the popular open-source implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol -- in various code-bases while now within their mainline Git tree they have time-based one-time password (TOTP) support...

While the Linux 4.2 kernel merge window isn't even over yet, Intel developers already have new code ready for testing that will be merged eventually for Linux 4.3...

In working toward GNOME 3.17.4 later this month, the next version of the GTK+ tool-kit will receive a number of file chooser improvements and other work...

Emil Velikov rolled out Mesa 10.5.9 this morning as the last planned release of the Mesa 10.5 series...

A few days ago I received the Intel Core i7 5775C for Linux testing, one of the first Broadwell desktop/socketed chips featuring Iris 6200 graphics. In the days since, I've been trying to test it under Linux...

The third release candidate is available today for the long overdue VirtualBox 5.0...

An annoying setting of Ubuntu's GRUB configuration is going to be finally addressed in Ubuntu 15.10 and will be addressed in current Ubuntu releases via a stable release update...

Firefox 39.0 is available this morning before the 4th of July weekend holiday in the US...

As a fork of pfSense, the OPNsense project that's a FreeBSD-based open-source firewall distribution did its first production-ready release this week...

Canonical confirmed today that the Intel Compute Stick preloaded with Ubuntu will go on sale next week at $110...

The first release candidate for Kodi 15 has arrived...

With the Linux 4.1 kernel having recently been released, I decided to conduct a fresh round of file-system comparisons on this new kernel using a solid-state drive. The file-systems tested in this article were the in-tree EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, F2FS, ReiserFS, and NILFS2 file-systems while a follow-up article will take a look at the out-of-tree contenders like Reiser4 and ZFS atop Linux 4.1.

At this week's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee they evaluated the latest batch of proposed features for Fedora 23...

GNOME Shell and Mutter didn't see new 3.17.3 releases for last week's GNOME 3.17.3 development release, but today they've released the new package versions...

Ubuntu MATE, the spin of Ubuntu that ships with the popular fork of the GNOME 2 desktop environment, has announced a hardware partnership in shipping their distribution pre-loaded on a "free software friendly and 100% blobless Linux driver" PC...

Now being half-way through the year, here's a look back at the most popular open-source/Linux news so far this year. There's been a lot of interesting events and releases happening so far in 2015 with Phoronix having published 1,577 original news stories (an average of nine per day) and 98 Linux hardware reviews / featured-length articles...

Yet another exciting change coming with Linux 4.2 is the start of scalability improvements for FUSE, the implementation allowing for File-Systems in User-Space...

With the start of a new month comes Valve's Steam Survey results for hardware/software information of their gaming customers. Sadly, this is yet another month with the Linux usage continuing to erode...

The huge release of the open-source Blender v2.75 3D modeling software is now available for all supported platforms...

While the Linux 4.2 kernel merge window isn't yet over, AMD developers already have amassed a collection of fixes for the Radeon and AMDGPU DRM drivers following the big DRM pull...

Hot off the release of KDE Plasma 5.3.2, the KDE development community has announced the release of Applications 15.04.3...

Last month for the Phoronix 11th birthday we ran Benchmarks Of 45 Linux Systems From Atoms, Athlons and Phenoms To Xeons. This week in celebrating 200,000 benchmark results in our LinuxBenchmarking.com test lab, I ran another large comparison against the latest spectrum of hardware/software in the automated performance test lab...