Phoronix

With CompuLab's incredibly well engineered Airtop 3 fan-less computer that is built to meet rugged industrial requirements while being loaded with an 8-core/16-thread Xeon CPU, NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 graphics, 64GB of RAM, and NVMe solid-state storage, here is an interesting benchmark comparison of Ubuntu 19.04, Clear Linux, and openSUSE Tumbleweed. Given the interesting system under test, not only is the raw performance being looked at but also the performance-per-Watt / AC power consumption and CPU thermal differences between these Linux operating systems.

After a month worth of delays, Mesa 19.2 is now officially available as the latest quarterly feature update to this collection of open-source graphics driver components...

Fwupd is gaining the ability to update firmware on Synaptics/Conexant CX audio devices commonly used by laptops...

While the Linux 5.4 merge window doesn't even end until this weekend, as is usual traditional with the DRM-Next cutoff having been weeks ago, the open-source DRM driver developers are already working on their changes for what will ultimately go into Linux 5.5. On the AMD side, the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver already has some interesting work accumulating...

While the Linux 5.4 cycle just officially began last week and its feature merge window not even over until this weekend, given there are AMD EPYC load balancing improvements and many other kernel improvements in general, I was eager to fire up the in-development kernel on the EPYC 7002 "Rome" series to see how the performance is looking...

Arm has outlined their architecture enhancements being introduced in ARMv8.6-A as their 2019 ARMv8 architecture update...

On top of many other changes for Fedora Workstation 31, this next release of Fedora Linux continues to improve the experience for proprietary multimedia codecs where the patents have lapsed...

The WireGuard open-source secure network tunnel won't be mainlined for Linux 5.4 but there finally is an action plan for getting this promising network security tech into the kernel...

The Qt Company has announced the availability of the Qt 5.14 Alpha release ahead of this half-year tool-kit update due out before year's end. Qt 5.14 is also the second to the last in the Qt5 series with an increasing amount of work shifting to Qt6 that is expected to debut towards the end of 2020...

The SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface) pull requests to the Linux kernel normally don't get us excited, but they do when it comes with word of big performance enhancements. There are several SPI performance improvements this round but exciting us the most is the work done on the Broadcom SPI driver for Raspberry Pi hardware...

Moving towards their oneAPI beta release next quarter, the Intel developers are as busy as ever advancing their LLVM-based SYCL compiler and run-times for Windows and Linux...

Epic Games' Brandon Schaefer (and in fact former Canonical developer working on Ubuntu's Mir display server) has contributed a new SDL2 video driver back-end for offscreen rendering...

In squeezing to shipping in Q3, Purism announced today their first batch of Librem 5 Linux smartphones are beginning to ship. In the process, we see the first actual photos of the Librem 5...

The Nim programming language now has a stability guarantee with this statically-typed, general purpose programming language hitting its 1.0 release...

D9VK 0.21 is out today as the newest feature release for this project implementing the Direct3D 9 API over Vulkan...

It's looking like RSEQ support might be added to the GNU C Library with the Glibc 2.31 release in a few months time. The "restartable sequences" support was added last year to the Linux kernel and the numbers have been quite promising for the performance benefits...

CentOS 8.0 is now available as the long awaited community rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0...

CentOS Stream is a new forward-looking distribution running in parallel with CentOS 8 and in cooperation with Red Hat and the CentOS Project...

AMD's AMDVLK open-source Vulkan Linux driver recently fell off its weekly release wagon with the last release being nearly one month ago. But today they finally tagged their next milestone and given the time that's lapsed there are a number of new features and improvements...

The Apache Software Foundation today announced that Rya has been promoted as the organization's newest top-level project...

Released yesterday was The Surge 2 third-person action RPG game by Deck13 and sequel to the earlier The Surge game. While only released for Windows and consoles, thanks to Valve's Steam Play there is same-day support on Linux...

Sent in and already landed on Monday were the PCI changes for Linux 5.4 and includes an interesting feature addition...

Longtime X11 developer Keith Packard -- who these days is focused full-time on RISC-V while working for SiFive -- has released Picolibc 1.0 as a new libc implementation for embedded systems...

With Ubuntu 19.10 one of the changes we have been looking forward to the most is the planned Ubuntu desktop installation support atop ZFS as a root file-system and Canonical's related work around the new ZSYS daemon. It's looking like the basic ZFS root installation support will make it in time for next month's Ubuntu 19.10 release but more advanced installation features won't be ready in time...

Traditionally with the Linux graphics drivers there are PCI ID tables littered in multiple places throughout the driver stack from the DRM/KMS kernel drivers to the Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers but also the potential for other areas like the increasingly less common DDX drivers and other components. AMD is looking to address the proliferation of PCI IDs throughout the stack and the maintenance burden of having to keep the list of IDs in sync across the different components...

Just a week past the previous Proton update, Proton 4.11-6 is out today from Valve as the latest version of their Wine downstream powering Steam Play...

Fedora Workstation 31 when it debuts at the end of October should be another great release for the Fedora project and continuing to ship with the bleeding-edge yet stable packages and latest upstream innovations...

After last week making waves by open-sourcing their C++ standard library and opening up their new console/IDE font, this week was kicked off by releasing .NET Core 3.0...

Similar to their Deep Learning Reference Stack for delivering better AI / deep learning performance on Xeon Scalable CPUs, Intel has now released the Database Reference Stack 1.0 for optimizing performance on their DC Persistent Memory...

A majority of our benchmarking of Intel's new Gallium3D OpenGL open-source driver is done with various "Gen9" graphics hardware given its proliferation and not yet having any Icelake Gen11 graphics hardware for Linux benchmarking. But with the Iris Gallium3D going back to supporting Broadwell "Gen8" graphics, here is a fresh look at how that oldest supported Intel hardware is working for this new Linux open-source OpenGL driver compared to the current default "i965" Intel OpenGL driver too.

Red Hat's Andrea Arcangeli sent out an interesting patch series on Friday to micro-optimize the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to enhance the VMEXIT performance in wake of Spectre mitigations...

While AMD has provided open-source Radeon RX 5700 series (Navi 10) support since launch and that code since worked into the various mainline code-bases from the Linux kernel to Mesa, one kink in their support has been their binary microcode images not being available from the reference linux-firmware.git location as needed to initialize the hardware. That Navi 10 firmware/microcode issue has finally been rectified with the images landing this morning...

Jiri Kosina on Sunday sent out the HID subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 5.4 kernel. The HID pull once again features support for several new devices particularly on the Logitech side...

The Lima Gallium3D driver for supporting Arm Mali 400/450 graphics hardware within Arm SoCs has picked up a few performance optimizations...

Back in August I noted that Wireless USB and Ultra Wideband would be deprecated within the Linux kernel and that is indeed happening for Linux 5.4...

DragonFlyBSD's now-default HAMMER2 file-system now has initial file-system checking "fsck" support...

Following the February release of Video Codec SDK 9.0, NVIDIA recently did a quiet release of the Video Codec SDK 9.1 update that furthers along this cross-platform video encode/decode library...

While sadly this is another year not out at Oktoberfest for the once annual Phoronix reader gathering/pilgrimage, there is another Phoronix Premium sale for those interested. With Oktoberfest kicking off this weekend in Munich, here's the start of our premium sale if wishing to support our daily news and benchmarking operations while enjoying features like ad-free viewing and multi-page articles on a single page...

SilverStone recently sent over their CS381 chassis that has proven to be quite a versatile micro-ATX enclosure that can accommodate up to twelve hard drives (eight of which are hot-swappable) all while coming in at just 400 x 225 x 316mm. The SilverStone CS381 could work quite well as a Linux HTPC / DIY Steam Linux gaming living room PC or SOHO file server system with its compact size while offering immense storage potential. Here's more on the SilverStone CS381 and our build with using a Ryzen 5 3400G that is playing well under Linux with an ASUS B450 motherboard.

The "char/misc" changes for the Linux 5.4 are as eventful as ever...

While FreeBSD doesn't see much in the way of game ports besides compatibility with open-source games/engines, FreeBSD's Linux binary compatibility layer for years has allowed running Linux games on FreeBSD and there is also Wine support for FreeBSD to handle Windows software. Thanks to those efforts, it's possible to make a FreeBSD gaming box...

In addition to announcing systemd-homed for better user home directories, Lennart Poettering also used this year's All Systems Go conference to drum up support for systemd's boot efforts around SD-Boot and the Boot Loader Specification...

Following last week's Akademy 2019 developer conference in Milan, KDE developers this week not only released the Plasma 5.17 beta but they've been busy with a ton of other bug fixing and improvements...

The input driver updates for the Linux 5.4 kernel include the addition of an interesting, budget-friendly RC receiver that can be used for home-built drones and other use-cases while now the driver allows the receiver when paired with a supported RC controller to serve as a traditional Linux joystick input...

Not only is FOSDEM one of the best open-source/Linux events in the world for those who make the journey each February to Brussels, but they also for years now have done a masterful job at recording the different talks and developer room sessions. Each year gets better both for the event itself as well as the video recordings even with FOSDEM operating on a very limited budget due to the event being free to attend. For those curious about the hardware/software setup powering their video setup, here's an interesting blog post...

SHADERed is a cross-platform utility designed for creating and testing HLSL and GLSL shaders. This week marked the version 1.2 release of this Windows/Linux program for helping to test and evaluate shaders...

Added to the device mapper (DM) code with the Linux 5.4 kernel is an interesting addition that benefits those wanting to carry out some interesting use-cases around remote replication of block devices...

ReactOS, the open-source operating system still striving for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows as a drop-in replacement, has version 0.4.12 now available as its first big alpha update in six months...

Seven years after the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO-1.75 Arm-based laptop entered production or nearly one decade since development began, it's now seeing mainline kernel support...

In time for any weekend gaming is the release of DXVK 1.4 as the latest big update to this Direct3D 11 over Vulkan implementation to boost the D3D11 Windows gaming performance with the likes of Wine and Valve's Steam Play (Proton)...