Phoronix

When looking for a heatsink with a small stature for an AMD APU mini PC build for HTPC / file storage use-cases (more on that build in the next day or two), the Noctua NH-L9a-AM4 fit the criteria and so I went with that given the success with the many Noctua heatsinks we have used over the years. For those potentially interested in the NH-L9a-AM4 for an AMD APU like the new Ryzen 5 3400G or for lower-end Ryzen CPUs, I ran some benchmarks with this cooler.

While most of the other Linux file-systems are seeing mostly mundane changes for the Linux 5.4 feature work, the F2FS activity is fairly notable...

Little is publicly known about stealth networking startup Pensando Systems, which is founded by former Cisco executives. They've been ramping up efforts since early 2018 but to date their web-site hasn't launched nor formally introduced any products, but they now have a networking driver in the mainline Linux kernel...

Going back to December 2017 we've been tracking the Red Hat led effort on improving Nouveau's OpenCL compute support that involves adding NIR/SPIR-V support and improvements to the Clover Gallium3D state tracker. To much surprise, this morning the SPIR-V support for this open-source NVIDIA driver was merged for Mesa 19.3...

FreeBSD 12.0 is already approaching one year old while FreeBSD 12.1 is now on the way as the next installment with various bug/security fixes and other alterations to this BSD operating system...

Canonical's Mir developers since re-shifting focus to serving as a Wayland compositor have been working with the likes of the GNOME2-forked MATE desktop environment to implement Wayland support using Mir. For helping those interested in porting MATE applications from X11 to Wayland, one of the Mir developers has now issued a porting guide...

Google on Friday released the Chrome 78 web-browser beta following last week's release of Chrome 77...

NVIDIA this week released Nsight Graphics 2019.5 as the newest feature update to their proprietary developer tool for graphics profiling and debugging across multiple APIs...

The PowerPC/POWER architecture changes were sent in today for the ongoing Linux 5.4 merge window. This time around are some interesting POWER changes with work on their means of secure virtual machines...

While the Ryzen 9 3950X and 3rd Gen Ryzen Threadripper processors were reportedly on track for launching in October with updates as of a few weeks ago, today AMD announced a slight delay in launching these new processors...

Kicking off today in Berlin is the annual All Systems Go conference focused on systemd and other user-space components. Systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering presented on systemd-homed as a new component to systemd that is focused on improving home directory handling...

Since the AMD EPYC 7002 series "Rome" launch at the beginning of August, it's been known how AMD's top-end (aside from the newly-announced EPYC 7H12) EPYC 7742 easily outperforms the Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 in most real-world benchmarks. The EPYC 7742 not only outperforms the Xeon Platinum 8280 in raw performance but also at a significantly lower cost and it gets even better with the EPYC 7642. We have been testing the EPYC 7642 48-core processors and even there the performance is generally ahead of a Xeon Platinum 8280 while being about half the cost of that flagship non-AP Intel Xeon Scalable Cascadelake processor.

NetworkManager has shifted its threshold for a weak WiFi signal for when to begin searching for other WLAN networks. Up to now NetworkManager used a -80dBm threshold for when to roam for other network signals while now that has changed to find hopefully stronger network signals sooner...

Often when doing cross-distribution benchmarks, readers often comment on the performance of Clear Linux particularly for video encoding use-cases as surprisingly different from other distributions. Some argue that it's just over the default CPU frequency scaling governor or compiler flag defaults, so here is a look at that with Ubuntu 19.10 daily benchmarked against Clear Linux...

While just yesterday the big DRM feature pull was sent in for Linux 5.4, AMD has also volleyed out their initial batch of fixes for this next version of the kernel...

For those anxious to make use of GNOME 3.34 with its many own performance improvements atop Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux rolling-release distribution, it looks like the wait is still going on for a few more days but is coming "soon-ish" to the platform...

The OpenZFS file-system could soon be seeing better data deduplication support...

Like the mostly mundane Btrfs and XFS changes with the Linux 5.4 merge window, the EXT4 file-system activity is mostly focused on fixes too but also new debugging ioctls...

Haiku as the open-source operating system that still maintains BeOS compatibility continues tacking on modern features and support for software well past the days of BeOS...

While we've known about the many features for a while if you are a faithful Phoronix reader, today the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics driver changes were sent in for the Linux 5.4 kernel...

It's coming almost one month behind schedule, but LLVM 9.0 is out today along with the Clang 9.0 C/C++ compiler and associated sub-projects for this open-source compiler infrastructure...

The beta release is out today for KDE Plasma 5.17...

Creative Assembly revealed Total War Saga: TROY on Wednesday for release next year. Feral Interactive has announced they are porting this latest Total War game to macOS and Linux...

Last week AMD's AGESA "ABBA" update began shipping with a fix to how the boost clock frequencies are handled in hopes of better achieving the rated boost frequencies for Ryzen 3000 series processors. I've been running some tests of an updated ASUS BIOS with this adjusted boost clock behavior to see how it performs under Linux with a Ryzen 9 3900X processor.

It was just two days ago that Valve's performance-focused "ACO" shader compiler was submitted for review to be included in Mesa for the "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver. Just minutes ago that new shader compiler back-end was merged for Mesa 19.3...

Most Linux gamers these days should be running at least quad-core systems so Mesa 19.3 has been updated to reflect that reality with the number of CPU threads used by their disk cache...

This week Microsoft not only open-sourced their C++ standard library (STL) but they have also now shipped Cascadia Code...

The Linux 5.4 block subsystem changes brings the new blk-iocost model...

Back in July of last year the RADV Vulkan driver enabled primitive binning and DFSM for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver. Well, it thought it enabled DFSM support and paired with the binning did yield a minor performance benefit at the time for Raven Ridge APUs. But now it turns out the DFSM support wasn't properly wired up and is now addressed but is currently introducing a performance regression...

The mature XFS and Btrfs file-systems continue seeing more fixes and cleaning with the now in-development Linux 5.4 kernel...

Intel's new OpenGL Linux driver, their Gallium3D-based "Iris" implementation that is aiming to be the default before year's end, continues making striking progress...

Debian Project Leader Sam Hartman has shared his August 2019 notes where he outlines the frustrations and issues that have come up as a result of init system diversity with some developers still aiming to viably support systemd alternatives within Debian...

Samba 4.11 is out as the latest big feature update to this SMB/CIFS/AD implementation for offering better Windows interoperability with Linux and other platforms. The changes in Samba 4.11 are aplenty that we are a bit surprised it wasn't called Samba 5.0...

Barely a week since the release of Proton 4.11-4, Valve's stellar Linux crew in cooperation with CodeWeavers have issued Proton 4.11-5 as the latest update to this Wine 4.11 downstream that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

Greg Kroah-Hartman began volleying his Linux 5.4 kernel pull requests today of the subsystems he oversees. The most significant of this morning's pull requests are the staging area changes that include the Microsoft exFAT file-system support...

For those wondering how well FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD are handling AMD's new Ryzen 3000 series desktop processors, here are some benchmarks on a Ryzen 7 3700X with MSI MEG X570 GODLIKE where both of these popular BSD operating systems were working out-of-the-box. For some fun mid-week benchmarking, here are those results of FreeBSD 12.0 and DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 up against openSUSE Tumbleweed and Ubuntu 19.04.

From Rome, Italy this afternoon AMD not only announced more than 100 world records have been broken with their new EPYC "Rome" processors, but there is also a new SKU! Meet the EPYC 7H12...

The Linux 5.4 power management changes have been submitted for this next version of the Linux kernel...

The RADV "ACO" shader compiler announced by Valve back in July for the fastest compilation speeds and best possible code generation may soon be hitting mainline Mesa for the open-source AMD Linux graphics stack...

The Linux 5.4 x86/cpu changes are as busy as always on the Intel side...

Sadly not currently queued as a fix for the Linux 5.4 kernel, re-enabling the LRU bulk moves functionality can be a significant boost for helping with the Radeon graphics driver performance for Linux gaming...

In addition to submitting the FS-VERITY file authentication code for Linux 5.4, Google's Eric Biggers has sent out his big update to the fscrypt file encryption framework for this next kernel revision...

While NVIDIA doesn't contribute much open-source Linux driver code as it concerns their desktop GPUs (though they have been ramping up documentation), when it comes to Tegra/embedded is where they have contributed improvements and new hardware support to Nouveau and associated driver code in the past several years. NVIDIA's open-source Tegra/embedded contributions come as a result of customer demand/requirements. Their latest work is preparing to finally bring-up the "GV11B" Volta graphics found within last year's Tegra Xavier SoC...

In an interesting change of course, the open-source driver support for AMD Radeon Navi 12 and Navi 14 GPUs is being flagged as experimental and hidden behind a feature flag...

Based off AMD's GPUOpen HIP as part of their ROCm stack, researchers at Tampere University in Finland have created HIPCL as leveraging HIP as well as POCL for routing CUDA codes to run on any hardware supporting OpenCL+SPIR-V...

Mozilla announced today they are tightening up the Firefox release cycle even more... Expect to see new Firefox releases monthly...

Last month we provided launch-day benchmarks of the AMD EPYC 7502 and 7742 under Linux in both 1P and 2P configurations for these exciting "Rome" Zen 2 server processors. For your viewing pleasure today is a fresh look at not only the EPYC 7502 and 7742 processors under the latest Linux 5.3 kernel but we've also expanded it to looking at the EPYC 7302 and EPYC 7402 processors as well with those processors recently being sent over by AMD. Under Ubuntu 19.04 with Linux 5.3, these four different AMD EPYC 7002 series SKUs were benchmarked along with some of the older AMD Naples processors and Intel Xeon Gold/Platinum processors for a fresh look at the Linux server performance.

CentOS 8.0 is coming next week as the long-awaited community rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0. But for those currently maintaining CentOS 7 / EL7, CentOS 7.7 is out today...

Fedora 31 beta has released on time! It's not only on-time but it's also coming with many exciting updates...

Earlier this year Canonical announced they would be pulling 32-bit support from Ubuntu ahead of next year's 20.04 LTS. But following public backlash, they stepped back to provide 32-bit support for select packages. Today they announced the 199 32-bit packages that will continue to be supported through Ubuntu 20.04 LTS...