Phoronix

KDE's KWin Made Lots Of Progress In 4.11

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:15:48 EDT

We have already known about KDE/KWin 4.11 bringing early Wayland support and other new features. We now have a better idea for the other features to be found with the KWin window manager in the upcoming KDE 4.11 release...

Ubuntu Announces Carrier Advisory Group

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:41:05 EDT

Canonical has announced today the Carrier Advisory Group for Ubuntu Touch/Phone...

Qt 5.1 Release Candidate 1 Has Arrived

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:36:58 EDT

At long last, Digia has put out the first release candidate of the Qt 5.1 tool-kit...

In-Fighting Continues Over Mir On Non-Unity Ubuntu

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:16:18 EDT

For those looking for the latest drama in the Ubuntu Linux land, the fighting over whether KDE and GNOME should support the Mir Display Server to complement the in-development Wayland support continues to be hotly discussed...

Subversion 1.8 Presents New Features

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:04:12 EDT

Version 1.8.0 of Apache's Subversion version control system has been released...

LLVM 3.3 Officially Released

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 00:17:41 EDT

After a two week hiatus, LLVM 3.3 has been officially released!..

LLVM/Clang Now Uses Loop Vectorizer At New Levels

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 16:37:51 EDT

The LLVM Loop Vectorizer is now being utilized by default at new optimization levels, in the name of faster performance...

Intel GPU Driver Tries To Rip Out FBDEV Support

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 16:18:35 EDT

Intel's Daniel Vetter is attempting for the Intel DRM graphics driver to remove support for its FBDEV frame-buffer layer with a new patch-set entitled "fbdev no more!", but will this finally usher in the killing of the Linux kernel's FBDEV subsystem?..

Coreboot Doing AMD USB 3.0, Q35 QEMU Emulation

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 16:07:56 EDT

In recent days there have been a number of interesting code commits made to the growing Google-backed Coreboot project...

Intel Haswell HD Graphics 4600 vs. AMD Radeon Graphics On Linux

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:18:57 EDT

Already published on Phoronix have been Intel HD Graphics 4600 benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux from the Intel Core i7 4770K "Haswell" processor and compared against previous generations of Intel HD Graphics. Being benchmarked today is the Intel HD Graphics 4600 on Linux compared against various AMD Radeon graphics cards using both the open and closed-source graphics drivers.

VP9 Codec Now Enabled By Default In Chrome

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 09:18:01 EDT

Google has just enabled their new, royalty-free VP9 video codec within their Chromium / Chrome web-browser...

openSUSE 13.1 M2 Plays On PulseAudio 4.0

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 19:46:54 EDT

In addition to Debian 7.1, another new Linux distribution release this weekend is openSUSE 13.1 Milestone 2. The openSUSE 13.1 M2 release contains many package updates and other changes over its predecessor...

Debian 7.1 Rounds In Some Bug-Fixes

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 19:38:40 EDT

Debian 7.1 has been released as a stable point release to Debian 7.0 Wheezy...

Min / Max FPS Comes To Test Results

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 17:25:05 EDT

With Phoronix Test Suite 4.8 "Sokndal", the minimum and maximum performance results are now being commonly displayed along side the rest of the results...

Google Pushes More Mesa / Gallium3D Patches

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 16:51:57 EDT

More Mesa / Gallium3D patches out of Google have come about this month for improving the open-source graphics stack...

The Phoronix Migration Is Fully Complete

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 16:34:25 EDT

After some rough hours, all of the Phoronix infrastructure should be located now within its new data center. If any problems are experienced in getting your dose of Phoronix, please contact us...

Phoronix Server Migration Complete

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 21:55:55 EDT

Tonight (15 June 21:00 CST) we are upgrading our server infrastructure and moving the Phoronix web properties to a new data center...

Linux 3.10-rc6 Kernel Brings In More Fixes

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 18:25:31 EDT

Linus Torvalds has released the Linux 3.10-rc6 kernel on Saturday afternoon. While there's still some time ahead before the official Linux 3.10 kernel release, the rate of change appears to be slowing...

Intel Haswell-Based Apple MacBook Air, HD 5000 Benchmarks

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 14:50:35 EDT

Earlier this week at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, the refreshed MacBook Air laptops were released and based upon Intel's new Haswell processors. The brand new 11-inch Apple MacBook Air with the beautiful Core i5 Haswell CPU and Intel HD Graphics 5000 GPU is already within the Phoronix labs and being benchmarked...

Optimized Binaries Provide Great Benefits For Intel Haswell

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 13:33:10 EDT

Utilizing the core-avx2 CPU optimizations offered by the GCC 4.8 compiler can provide real benefits for the Intel Core i7 4770K processor and other new "Haswell" CPUs. For some computational workloads, the new Haswell instruction set extensions can offer tremendous speed-ups compared to what's offered by the previous-generation Ivy Bridge CPUs.

QFusion Game Engine Advanced With New Features

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 12:09:03 EDT

QFusion is the game engine that's derived from the Quake 2 code-base but has advanced a great deal and presently powers the popular open-source Warsow first person shooter. Since Warsow 1.0, the QFusion engine has advanced a great deal and the code has now been released...

Mir Still Causing Concerns By Ubuntu Derivatives

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 18:04:45 EDT

With Canonical's planned adoption of their in-house Mir Display Server over the next year rather than using an X.Org Server or Wayland, derivatives such as KDE-based Kubuntu continue to fear the change and what exactly the options will be...

Wine 1.6 Release Candidate 2 Is Out There

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 15:12:54 EDT

The second release candidate of Wine 1.6 is now available...

Gallium3D LLVMpipe Benchmarks From Intel Haswell

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 14:10:55 EDT

Being published this afternoon are benchmarks of the Gallium3D LLVMpipe software driver compared to Intel HD 4600 graphics on Mesa 9.2 Git when using an Intel Core i7 4770K. While this Intel "Haswell" CPU is faster than previous generations, it's still obviously best not relying upon LLVMpipe...

X.Org XDC2013 Announced For X, Wayland, Mesa

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 14:04:51 EDT

The X.Org Foundation has finally announced the details concerning the 2013 X.Org Developers' Conference...

KDE 4.11 Beta Released, Works On Wayland

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 13:03:36 EDT

The first beta of the forthcoming KDE 4.11 Software Compilation is now available. KDE 4.11 features greater use of Qt Quick in Plasma Workspaces, KWin supports creating OpenGL 3.1 Core contexts, and KWin is beginning to work on Wayland...

Intel Gallium3D Driver Now Supports GLSL 1.40

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 12:39:55 EDT

The "Ilo" open-source driver that provides unofficial Intel Gallium3D graphics support for Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge graphics cores on Linux now is advertising GLSL 1.40 compliance. The GL Shading Language update comes after landing UBO and TBO support...

Buffer Synchronization Comes To DMA-BUF

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 05:04:41 EDT

In recent days, Samsung has been posting kernel patches pertaining to buffer synchronization support of the DMA-BUF buffer sharing mechanism...

RHEL 7 Linux To Use GNOME 3 Classic Mode

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 21:40:07 EDT

For those not out in Boston this week for the 2013 Red Hat Summit, new details on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0 have emerged...

Reasons For Losing Motivation In Wayland

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:57:32 EDT

While many are super excited about Wayland and the thought of X11 finally going away in the coming years, some who have been enthusiastic about Wayland/Weston are starting to lose interest. Here's the reasons by one Wayland enthusiast for losing motivation in the project...

GStreamer SDK Now Supported On Apple iOS

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:00:00 EDT

Fluendo and Collabora are jointly announcing today that the GStreamer SDK is coming to iOS! Thanks to the work done by the two companies, iOS apps can now leverage the GStreamer framework for their multimedia needs. This is in addition to GStreamer already working on Android and all major desktop platforms...

Ubuntu Still Looks To Chromium Default Browser

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 10:39:51 EDT

Ubuntu developers are still likely to be switching from Mozilla Firefox as the Linux distribution's default web-browser to now using Google's open-source Chromium platform...

Features Baking For KDE 4.11

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 10:13:05 EDT

The KDE 4.11 Beta is due out anytime now and so with that here's a look at some of the features you can expect from this major KDE4 update...

Native Port Of Dear Esther Now Available

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 10:01:38 EDT

The native port of Dear Esther, a unique game powered by the Source Engine, is now available to Linux gamers...

Updated Nouveau Graphics Driver Released

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 09:55:16 EDT

It's been a while since the last Nouveau DDX driver update, but xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.8 was released this morning. This updated Nouveau X.Org driver comes with nearly two dozen changes...

KDE 4.11 Beta Brings KWin Wayland Back-End

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 23:03:11 EDT

With this week's release of KDE 4.11 Beta 1, the KWin window manager now has an experimental Wayland back-end...

EnhanceIO, Bcache & DM-Cache Benchmarked

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 11:21:21 EDT

Three different Linux disk caching methods for the Linux kernel were compared: EnhanceIO, Bcache, and DM-Cache. But which of these disk caching methods is the fastest when mixing SSDs and HDDs? Here's some results...

NVIDIA Issues CUDA 5.5 RC: Better Debugging, Etc

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 11:07:02 EDT

For those registered developers with NVIDIA Corp, the company has released their first release candidate of the forthcoming CUDA 5.5 platform...

11-Way Linux, BSD Platform Comparison

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 01:38:52 EDT

Building upon last month's eight-way Linux vs. BSD operating system comparison, out today is an expanded 11-way OS showdown. The new OS test results available are for the Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution, Debian GNU/Linux, and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. The other competitors include PC-BSD, DragonFlyBSD, CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Mageia, and openSUSE.

FLAC 1.3 Released, First Update In A Long Time

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 23:03:57 EDT

The FLAC lossless audio codec has experienced its first major update in the better part of a decade. FLAC 1.3.0 is also the first release under Xiph.Org maintainership and comes with many new features...

Unigine Shows Off New Technology Demo

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 16:51:27 EDT

Unigine Corp, the creators of the visually-amazing Unigine Engine and is supported by all major desktop and mobile platforms, has released a trailer for a new technology demo...

Looking Forward To The Linux 3.11 Kernel

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 14:55:08 EDT

While the Linux 3.10 kernel hasn't even been released yet and won't be out for a couple weeks -- and it boasts a great number of new features and functionality -- the Linux 3.11 kernel will be even better. Here's what we know so far...

SNA Acceleration Works Great For Intel Core i7 Haswell

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 10:11:25 EDT

To complement the Intel Haswell Linux OpenGL benchmarks that we have been publishing on Phoronix for the past week, up today are some Intel Linux 2D performance benchmarks of Haswell with the Intel Core i7 4770K CPU. The 2D performance is comparing Intel's default UXA accelerated code-paths against the experimental SNA acceleration back-end.

Canonical Working On Mir's Performance, Mir On Mir

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 08:39:56 EDT

This past week Canonical developers made a little more progress on their Mir Display Server stack and the next-generation Unity desktop interface...

Debian 7.0 GNU/Linux vs. GNU/kFreeBSD Benchmarks

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 03:17:53 EDT

Up this morning are benchmarks comparing the performance of Debian GNU/Linux 7.0 to Debian GNU/kFreeBSD 7.0, the version of the Debian operating system that ships the GNU user-land but replaces the Linux kernel from that of FreeBSD 9.0...

The Best Features Of The Linux 3.10 Kernel

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 18:47:47 EDT

The Linux 3.10 kernel is slowly getting ready for release in the coming weeks. If you haven't been closely following Phoronix in the past few months of Linux 3.10 feature development, here's a brief overview of some of the best and most interesting features to be found in the next version of the Linux kernel...

LLVM / Clang 3.3 Is Running Late, But It's Good

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 16:06:26 EDT

For those that didn't realize, the LLVM/Clang 3.3 release is running a bit behind schedule, but the wait should be worth it with this hefty upgrade...

Core i7 4770K - HD Graphics 4600 On New Linux Kernels

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 14:30:25 EDT

For the past week on Phoronix since the public debut of Intel's Haswell processors there has been a lot of coverage. The CPU performance is generally great but the Haswell Linux graphics support is still a work-in-progress even though its performance has already evolved a lot. This Sunday are some extra Core i7 4770K benchmarks...