26 March

Linux 4.6 Set To Bring A Significant Number Of New Features

Linus Torvalds ended up tagging the Linux 4.6-rc1 kernel on Saturday night rather than opting for Sunday. While we tend to get excited about every major update to the Linux kernel, Linux 4.6 is coming in particularly heavy with new functionality and notable improvements to existing features. Linux 4.6 is arguably looking like the most exciting release in a few kernel cycles.

26 March 08:16 PM EDT - Software - 5 Comments
Benchmarking The Low-Cost PINE 64+ ARM Single Board Computer

As an alternative to the Raspberry Pi 3 for a low-cost 64-bit ARM (AArch64) development board is the PINE 64, which was successfully Kickstarted as a "$15 64-bit single board super computer" that generated more than 1.7 million dollars. The PINE 64 is still shipping out in limited quantities for now, but the folks behind this project were kind enough to send over a sample of their PINE 64 1GB SBC for some benchmarking.

26 March 10:34 AM EDT - Computers - 19 Comments
HD Vulkan Videos From GDC Now Available

Earlier this month was the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. While there were the Khronos session recordings available shortly thereafter -- including the Vulkan talks -- they were of low quality. Fortunately, the higher-quality recordings are now available.

26 March 07:31 AM EDT - Vulkan - Vulkan GDC Videos - Add A Comment

25 March

The CompuLab Airtop Continues Hitting Expectations As A High-Performance, Fanless PC

At the end of February I posted my initial hands-on with the passively-cooled Airtop PC that's been exciting many readers over its unique design and being Linux-friendly. As I hadn't written anymore about it in the past few weeks, some Phoronix readers had emailed me and tweeted, curious what the deal was and if it wasn't living up to expectations. That's not the case at all and the Airtop PC continues to exhibit great potential and is yet another solid offering from CompuLab.

25 March 11:30 AM EDT - Computers - 13 Comments
More Power Management Updates Queue Up For Linux 4.6

Last week was the big ACPI and power management updates for Linux 4.6 that included a redesign of CPUFreq and P-State to support callbacks invoked by the kernel's scheduler. A few more feature changes have now been queued up for pulling of the ACPI+PM work for Linux 4.6.

25 March 08:41 AM EDT - Linux Kernel - Linux 4.6 ACPI+PM Round 2 - 3 Comments

24 March

Power-Saving FBC For Intel Skylake Is Still Baking On Linux

While the Linux 4.6 kernel is enabling FBC and PSR by default in the Intel graphics driver, it's only for select generations of Intel hardware for these power-saving Frame-Buffer Compression and Panel Self Refresh features. With Intel Skylake, FBC support remains a work in progress.

24 March 08:26 PM EDT - Intel - Frame Buffer Compression - 4 Comments
AMD GPU-PRO vs. NVIDIA Linux OpenCL Compute Performance

Following this week's AMD vs. NVIDIA Linux OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks, you may be wondering about the performance of OpenCL GPGPU performance particularly around AMD's new hybrid Linux driver stack. So for your viewing pleasure today are some OpenCL benchmarks on AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce hardware using the newest drivers.

24 March 03:15 PM EDT - Display Drivers - 31 Comments
Linux 4.6 Will Fix A Bug Where Some Laptops Are Always Throttled With Bad Performance

The thermal updates were submitted today for the Linux 4.6 kernel merge window and there's a very important fix for at least some newer Lenovo laptops. The fix should end up getting backported to current stable series, but if you have a Lenovo laptop and have been seeing slower performance on recent Linux kernel versions, you'll want to upgrade.

24 March 10:17 AM EDT - Hardware - Thermal Throttling Fix - 17 Comments
Keystroke Fingerprinting Is Raising Concerns, Possible Kernel/Wayland Solution

With companies like Google and Facebook having developed keystroke fingerprinting technology to identify users based upon how long they press keys on the keyboard and the time between key presses, this poses new challenges for those wanting to stay completely anonymous on the Internet. A developer is trying to come up with a solution down to the display server or kernel level.

24 March 08:12 AM EDT - Free Software - Anti-Keystroke Fingerprinting - 31 Comments
GLVND GLX Support Being Worked On For The X.Org Server

Red Hat's Adam Jackson has taken to working on X.Org Server patches for supporting GLVND within a GLX world (rather than just EGL) via the GLX_EXT_libglvnd extension. GLVND, of course, is NVIDIA's OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library.

24 March 07:32 AM EDT - X.Org - GLX_EXT_libglvnd - 3 Comments
KDE Applications 16.04 Beta Released

The KDE community today released KDE Applications 16.04 Beta with this next spin of the KDE application set now under a feature freeze ahead of next month's release.

24 March 07:20 AM EDT - KDE - KDE Applications 16.04 - 13 Comments

23 March

Dell & Alienware Laptop Improvements Coming For Linux 4.6

There are already many new features for the Linux 4.6 kernel but with the two week merge window not being over yet, new pull requests are still trickling in. The latest pull is the x86 platform driver updates that offer improvements to various Intel-powered laptops.

23 March 08:08 PM EDT - Hardware - Linux 4.6 Laptop Improvements - Add A Comment
96Boards Updates Site With EE, HuskyBoard Details

AMD's HuskyBoard still isn't shipping even though it was originally supposed to launch last year as a developer board powered by their ARMv8-based Opteron SoC. While the LeMaker Cello is moving forward as an ARM developer board using the Opteron A1100, 96Boards recently updated their web-site with new Enterprise Edition (EE) board details.

23 March 07:44 AM EDT - Hardware - HuskyBoard - 20 Comments

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