Linux 4.0 & LLVM vs. GCC Yielded Much Interest This Month

Written by Michael Larabel in Phoronix on 28 February 2015 at 08:16 PM EST. 1 Comment
PHORONIX
This month on Phoronix the most popular news articles were about the Linux 4.0 kernel (formerly known as Linux 3.20) but also popular were LLVM-related stories, Raspberry Pi 2 news, and the usual Linux graphics coverage.

Published on Phoronix.com over this month were 256 original news articles published by your's truly and 11 featured-length articles... To avid Phoronix readers, you likely noticed a drop in numbers as usually there's around 10 news articles per day and one featured length article everyday or every other day. This lower count wasn't due to finally taking a holiday/break or anything like that, but the dip this month was rather due to being busy building the new Linux benchmarking test farm (and update #2 at The Quest For Decent, Low-Priced Server Cases & Racks/Cabinets). At least I'm nearing the end of construction on that (drywalling finished, painting and flooring this weekend) so within a week or two should be back to my usual pace while enjoying the expanded work area.


Anyhow, the most popular Phoronix news in February 2015 ended up being:

Eric S. Raymond Calls LLVM The "Superior Compiler" To GCC
Joining in on the heated discussion that originated over Richard Stallman voicing concerns over adding LLVM's LLDB debugger support to Emacs, Eric S Raymond has come out to once again voice his support in favor of LLVM/Clang and express his feelings that GCC's leading days are over.

GL_AMD_pinned_memory Lands In Mesa
Support for the GL_AMD_pinned_memory OpenGL extension has landed within Mesa and is implemented for the R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers. This patch series also lands the Userptr support for the open-source AMD graphics drivers on the user-space side.

Linux 4.0-RC1 Tagged, Linux 4.0 Will Bring Many Notable Improvements
Linus Torvalds has decided to go ahead and rename the Linux 3.20 kernel to Linux 4.0 per his polling last week. Torvalds released Linux 4.0-rc1 on Sunday night and this release comes with many significant updates.

Raspberry Pi 2 Linux Benchmarks: Arch, Raspbian & Overclocking
Thanks to the open-source Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org, there's already many benchmarks of the new quad-core Raspberry Pi 2.

VLC 2.2 Has Many Features Coming, But VLC 3.0 Will Be Even More Exciting
For those not closely following the development of the VLC open-source, cross-platform media player, the VLC 2.2.0 release is coming soon while further out is VLC 3.0 and it will be even more magical.

RMS Feels There's "A Systematic Effort To Attack GNU Packages"
Richard Stallman has come out against support for basic LLVM debugger (LLDB) support within Emacs' Gud.el as he equates it to an attack on GNU packages.

GNOME's Mutter Updated For Latest Wayland Support
For those wishing to experiment with the latest Wayland technologies, short of running the Weston compositor, the bleeding-edge development GNOME stack continues to serve as an excellent alternative with quickly adopting support for new functionality.

Xfce 4.12 Planned For Release In A Few Weeks
It looks like the release of Xfce 4.12 is finally about to materialize!

The One Hardware Company Hammering Linux The Most
There's one company hammering for more Linux hardware test data even more than myself...

Linus Torvalds Still Deciding Linux 3.20 vs. Linux 4.0
Linus Torvalds is still deciding when to bump the kernel version to Linux 4.0.

If you appreciate all of the content produced at Phoronix be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. If you really appreciate Phoronix.com as the leading destination for Linux hardware news, Linux hardware reviews, and open-source benchmarks, please subscribe to Phoronix Premium or make a PayPal tip.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week