Phoronix

Git 2.5.0 was officially released this afternoon...

The FreeBSD project made much progress during this past quarter (Q2'2015) on many fronts from working on FreeBSD 10.2 to landing new work in FreeBSD 11.0-CURRENT for improving their Linux binary emulation layer...

Earlier this month I posted a few benchmarks of one of the cheapest, sub-$40 SSDs under Ubuntu Linux. In needing another solid-state drive for one of the systems in the test lab that's focused on tracking other areas of the Linux kernel's performance on a daily basis, I went searching for another low-cost solution. This latest SSD purchase was the Silicon Power 120GB S60, which retails for about $50 USD.

Google today rolled out the first beta of Chrome 45, their next major web browser version...

With Mesa quickly finishing up OpenGL 4.0~4.2 support and even some OpenGL 4.5 extensions, more Steam Linux games are becoming playable on the open-source drivers...

Last month it was reported that OUYA was being acquired by Razer and now the gaming peripheral manufacturer finally confirmed today they did indeed buy this flopped Android game console...

Back in May was the big "VENOM" security vulnerability affect QEMU whereby VM security could be escaped through QEMU's virtual floppy disk drive. In June was a PCNET controller buffer overflow allowing a guest to escape to have host access. Today there's a similar security vulnerability going public about its virtual CD-ROM drive...

Ubuntu MATE developer Martin Wimpress announced this weekend that they'll be removing the Ubuntu Software Center from their default install of Ubuntu MATE 15.10...

For KDE fans interested in the Akademy conference that started on Saturday in A Coruña, Galicia, Spain, there are a lot of daily reports coming out of the event...

Sliding under the radar last week was Microsoft releasing the source code to its debug engine for the GNU GDB and LLVM's LLDB Debugger...

While Debian supports many CPU architectures, it's working to remove support for the Sun/Oracle SPARC architecture. As of this weekend, Debian has dropped SPARC from their unstable, experimental, and jessie-updates archives...

HarfBuzz, the FreeDesktop.org font/text shaping library that's used by Pango, Qt, Firefox, Chromium, LibreOffice, and others, has reached version 1.0...

Linus Torvalds announced the release today of the Linux 4.2-rc4 kernel, the fourth weekly snapshot of the in-development Linux 4.2...

Emil Velikov announced the release of Mesa 10.6.3 this morning, though of course most Phoronix readers are eaglerly awaiting the release of Mesa 10.7/11.0 with initial OpenGL 4 support...

This week I posted the results of a 15-way graphics card comparison on Ubuntu Linux with AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards while running the very latest proprietary drivers. Those tests were focused on 4K resolution testing in order to stress the latest-generation AMD/NVIDIA GPUs. However, if you want to see 1080p numbers, here are some benchmark-friendly results...

This weekend at the 2015 Akademy conference in A Coruña, Galicia, Spain, KDE Plasma Mobile was announced. There's been a flow of new Plasma Mobile details and reference images being put out this weekend and we're starting to learn more about its proposed software stack, including its usage of Wayland...

The FFmpeg project and its forked Libav have added support for new video decoders based on libmfx, technology from the Intel Media SDK...

One of the latest Direct Rendering Manager drivers in development for the mainline Linux kernel is the Freescale DCU driver...

Those controlling their network devices under Linux with NetworkManager will now be able to configure their Wake-on-LAN options for Ethernet connections...

While it's been several months since the Purism Librem crowd-funding campaing got underway for producing "the first high-end laptop in the world that ships without mystery software in the kernel, operating system, or any software applications," the Librem 15 still relies upon a proprietary BIOS and there's still no easy fix...

A new version is out of Lighttpd, the lightweight, performance-oriented web server. Like the stance of other web servers and browsers, SSL 3.0 support is being disabled by default...

Reviews of the Ubuntu Phone this week by general tech slights have largely expressed disappointment over the current Ubuntu Phone stack while being years in the making...

The latest OpenGL 4+ activity in Mesa this week is a Saturday commit landing another OpenGL 4.5 extension for AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for GCN graphics processors...

The latest ARM platform that NetBSD has been ported to is the NVIDIA Jetson TK1...

With the Linux 4.2 kernel settling down nicely and AMD developers having already sent in a few round of fixes for their new AMDGPU kernel DRM driver, I've started testing out this new kernel driver -- plus the new xf86-video-amdgpu DDX and the associated new Mesa/LibDRM code -- that is providing the open-source accelerated graphics support for Tonga and all new/future GPUs like Carrizo and Fiji.

Libreboot, the downstream of Coreboot that strips out all binary blobs / microcode / firmware, has added experimental support for a new ThinkPad laptop...

Last month I wrote about trying to benchmark the MIPS Creator CI20, a low-cost MIPS development board from Imagination Technologies, but sadly those plans were thwarted by stability issues. Fortunately, it was just a faulty board and the replacement board has been running without any faults.

A new patent pool is forming that wants 0.5% of the gross revenue for H.265 videos from content owners and distributors...

Following up from this morning's post about KDE Announces Plasma Mobile For Fully-Free Software For Mobile Devices, here are some more details...

Back in 2011 we were talking about Cradle as the latest Unigine Engine game and it was expected to launch in 2012 with Linux support. Three years later, this game has finally launched on Steam with Linux support...

The release candidate for FreeBSD 10.2 is now available...

At KDE's Akademy event today, the KDE camp has just lifted the embargo on Plasma Mobile...

It's been a very exciting month so far for Linux and open-source enthusiasts, but I'm hearing that at least one really exciting announcement may still make it out in the next week...

As of this commit yesterday, by Mike Hommey, Firefox nightly builds are now being built with PLATFORM_DEFAULT_TOOLKIT set to cairo-gtk3! It would appear, according to the commit tag, that mainline Firefox will be built with GTK+3 for Firefox 42. Firefox 42 is expected to be released this November...

Following a slight delay, the first milestone release of openSUSE 42.1 "Leap" is now available for testing...

Earlier this week I finished up a 15-way AMD/NVIDIA graphics card comparison on Linux with the very latest proprietary Linux drivers. That earlier article focused on the OpenGL performance and simply put the Catalyst performance on the tested Radeon hardware was abysmal compared to NVIDIA's Linux driver performance. However, there is one area where the Catalyst Linux driver really excels at performance and routinely beats out the green competition.

Daniel Vetter of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has sent in many Intel DRM driver changes to be queued up in DRM-Next for the Linux 4.3 kernel...

This week Mesa development is very exciting with OpenGL 4.0~4.1 support being reached and the open-source hardware drivers now just filling in their gaps. Intel's Mesa i965 DRI driver is getting ready to declare OpenGL 4.0 compliance...

Just two weeks after PHP 7 decided to go into beta, the second beta release is now available for testing...

One week after tagging LLVM 3.7-RC1, Hans Wennborg of Google announced its formal release on Thursday...

Version 3.3 of the CMake open-source, cross-platform build system is now available...

The news today of OpenGL 4 finally being accomplished in Mesa/Gallium3D is quite ironic and memorable as this day five years ago was when the R600 Gallium3D driver reached the milestone of being able to run glxgears on AMD hardware...

GNOME 3.17.4 is now available as the latest development release towards the September debut of GNOME 3.18...

With my Intel Core i7 5775C Linux review having gone out earlier this week, out of curiosity one of the other follow-up tests I wanted to run was comparing the performance and efficiency to an old Pentium 4 and Celeron Socket 478 CPU from the NetBurst era.

The next openSUSE release is scheduled to come in November and developers are still working on putting out the first development milestone release...

The GNOME 3 Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) are turning a year old and are in the process of being updated...

Five years after the OpenGL 4.0 specification was introduced, the open-source Mesa 3D project has finally moved on to supporting the necessary extensions, the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver even exposes OpenGL 4.1 support this morning, and OpenGL 4.2 patches are pending.

Alongside this morning's release of GNOME Shell 3.17.4 is the release of GNOME's Mutter 3.17.4...

Work on wldbg was announced this week, a tool for debugging applications running on Wayland...

GNOME Shell 3.17.4 is now available, but it's not the most exciting development release of recent times.....