Phoronix

For the past months we've been aware of CodeWeavers/Wine developers exploring a possible Vulkan back-end to WineD3D as an alternative to their long-standing approach of taking Direct3D calls and mapping it to OpenGL. This WineD3D Vulkan back-end would be akin to DXVK, VK9, D9VK, and others of ultimately using Vulkan to accelerate an alternative API. While the code has just been started, it appears the upstream Wine developers believe in their approach...

An updated firmware configuration should help some GeForce GTX 1000 "Pascal" users with their limited open-source driver support, but the situation remains a mess. Besides the fact of being binary blobs, it's more complicated this time around with the interfaces changing for what is expected by the Nouveau DRM kernel driver...

With next-generation EPYC processors expected to be released next quarter, it's a good time to see how the performance of the original EPYC 7601 32-core / 64-thread processor's performance has evolved on Linux since its 2017 launch. This article is looking at the performance of an AMD EPYC 7601 Tyan server when running Ubuntu 17.04 as the newest stable Ubuntu release when EPYC was originally introduced in June 2017 compared to the performance when running the new Ubuntu 19.04 as well as jumping ahead to running the in-development Linux 5.2 kernel release. Additionally, the Ubuntu 19.04 + Linux 5.2 kernel configuration when also disabling Spectre mitigations.

The LLVM 9.0 compiler code in development along with the Clang 9.0 C/C++ front-end now have support for the -march=cooperlake target for optimizing the generated code for next-generation Intel Cooper Lake processors...

The Mesa 19.2 Git code as of today now has support in the RADV Vulkan driver for the VK_EXT_sample_locations extension that can be used for potentially enhancing anti-aliasing quality...

With Phoronix having turned 15 years old this week we've been running a special on Phoronix Premium to enjoy the site ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, among other benefits. Here's the last call for those wishing to support our Linux testing operations by going premium at a heavily discounted rate...

SUSE continues to back the Btrfs file-system and as part of that investing in new/improved functionality around this Linux file-system once billed as the competitor to ZFS. This week one of the SUSE developers sent out a set of patches implementing a new "DRW" lock and wiring that into the file-system driver...

Going back to last year we've been watching the progress of an open-source Amlogic video decode driver for the likes of the Amlogic GXBB/GXL/GXM chipsets. That driver has yet to be mainlined but is now up to its ninth round of public review...

The folks maintaining Proton as Valve's flavor of Wine for use by Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux just released Proton 4.2-6...

Earlier this year the LLVM Foundation formally approved making the f18 compiler part of the LLVM project to serve as a modern Fortran compiler for this effort led by NVIDIA, Arm, and others. The F18 compiler leverages modern C++ code and in pretty much all ways superior to the earlier LLVM Fortran compiler effort dubbed Flang...

Arriving yesterday coincidentally on the Phoronix 15th birthday was the beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7..

Back at GDC 2019 Google unveiled Stadia as their cloud gaming service powered by Linux, AMD graphics, and using the Vulkan API. More details were just revealed at their live broadcast event prior to next week's E3 gaming conference in Los Angeles...

With falling memory prices, there's multiple solid-state drives available for around the $30 USD price point that offer 240~256GB capacities. Here are benchmarks of five such drives, four of which are SATA 3.0 SSDs and even one NVMe SSD. There are also comparison points to more premium SSD products.

The newest feature arriving in Mesa 19.2 is the long in development EGL platform device code worked on by Emil Velikov...

Up to now the GNOME desktop has offered mouse accessibility support using the long-standing Mousetweaks program that allows for different actions to take place all from the lone input device for those that may be limited to manipulating only one button or other limitations around this primary input device. But GNOME's Mousetweaks only works with X11 so now Mutter has picked up mouse accessibility support itself that works on both X11 and Wayland sessions...

Last month Clear Linux rolled out new kernel options as bundles for those wanting to run a mainline/vanilla kernel build on this Intel open-source distribution without their extra patches applied as well as other options. Here are some benchmarks of those different kernel flavors available to Clear Linux users...

Ubuntu will begin compressing its kernel image / initramfs using the LZ4 compression scheme to improve the experience around their installer and for cloud/core/classic devices. There is some concern over the performance to which they may do additional tweaking...

The Qt5 tool-kit continues entrenching into new areas for The Qt Company and one of those areas is IoT deployments. With Qt 5.13, a new "QtCoAP" component is being introduced in supporting a protocol designed for the Internet of Things...

Excellent KDE blogger Nate Graham has blogged about the work done over the past roughly two years be he and others on improving the usability and productivity of this Linux desktop. Long story short, a lot of progress has been made by the KDE development community but more work remains...

After ending out 2019 by seeking the successful removal of a package over its name and logo, the Debian Anti-Harassment Team saw initially a busy 2019 but work has leveled out while they are working on making it easier to bring them aware of situations via a web-based form...

The lead developer of the Panfrost open-source graphics driver stack, Alyssa Rosenzweig, has joined open-source consulting firm Collabora to continue work on this Arm Mali reverse-engineering adventure...

With recently seeing a deal on the Intel Core i5 9400F processor, I picked it up for testing as part of our Spectre / Meltdown / Foreshadow / Zombieload testing since it features some hardware mitigations and is otherwise quite similar to the unmitigated Core i5 8400 that I also have in the benchmarking farm. Here are some results when benchmarking the Core i5 8400 and Core i5 9400F with and without the current Linux mitigations for these CPU vulnerabilities.

After sending in an initial batch of AMDGPU DRM driver changes last week to DRM-Next for queuing until the Linux 5.3 merge window next month, a second batch of feature updates were sent in today...

Purism is still promoting their Librem 5 Linux smartphone as coming next quarter despite not seeing any production design yet and the software stack being incomplete. While the software is still under development, they are at least promoting it as booting faster than Android...

Mesa 19.1 is in overtime and today marks the fifth weekly release candidate as the developers try addressing the last two blocker bugs to get out this quarterly feature release...

For those still running decade and a half old ATI Radeon graphics hardware like the Radeon Xpress 200M found in numerous notebooks back in the day, a performance regression in the R300 Gallium3D driver is being sorted out after concerned users on this vintage hardware began bisecting and testing patches for a regression to this old ATI open-source driver that appears to have been adversely affected back in 2017...

While Bzip2 compression is still widely used by Linux systems, it hasn't seen an official update since 2010 and has rather stagnated as different Linux distributions have resorted to carrying their own patches and other maintenance work on this long used data compression tool. But now there is a new maintainer looking to take Bzip2 into the next decade...

When it comes to HDR display support on Linux we've seen a lot of infrastructure work being pursued by the developers at NVIDIA going back a few years while more recently Intel's open-source developers have been on it too with Icelake Gen11 graphics supporting HDR. We haven't seen much publicly on the AMD Linux front but with the upcoming 5.3 kernel cycle one of their HDR DC patches will be merged...

A change merged to Mesa 19.2 last month has the R600 Gallium3D driver officially advertising OpenGL 4.5 support...

Today marks fifteen years since I started Phoronix.com that began with a case review and some other peripheral reviews on a system running Knoppix. This day, 5 June, also marks 11 years now since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0-Trondheim. For those interested in numbers/data like I, here are some current statistics...

NetBSD 8.1 is out today as the latest feature update to this popular BSD operating system...

The very ambitious project working on an open-source RISC-V architecture to serve as a Vulkan accelerator for 3D graphics secured a minor victory last week with receiving $50k EUR from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet initiative. They will be using these funds to allow for full-time engineering work and bounty-style tasks to work on this "100% libre RISC-V + 3D GPU chip for mobile devices."..

Qt 5.13 will hopefully be released next week while for now a release candidate is available for testing...

Google today rolled out the stable release of their Chrome 75 web-browser with the newest feature additions and improvements for your summer enjoyment...

Since the Intel Cascade Lake launch in early April, the platform we've been using for our Xeon Platinum 8280 Linux/BSD testing has been the Gigabyte S451-3R0 Storage Server. Now having tested this Gigabyte server on a number of different Linux distributions as well as the BSDs and in an assortment of software configurations, we're quite confident in its abilities for those needing an Intel Xeon Scalable server platform that can accommodate a great deal of drives.

ClearFog was the name for that 16-core mini-ITX workstation development board/platform that we've been eager to learn more about with its $500~750 USD price point, extensive networking connections, M.2, SATA, socketed DDR4 memory support, and other features we've been long desiring to see out of an affordable yet powerful ARM workstation. It turns out that dream board is being renamed to the HoneyComb LX2K and its performance is increasingly competitive with AMD/Intel x86 enthusiast offerings...

The UEFI Forum today announced the release of the UEFI 2.8 specification...

Remember the Smach Z from 2015 as the portable AMD-powered Linux Steam gaming system? It went back to the drawing board but now it looks like it will actually ship in 2019...

Following last month's LibreOffice 6.3 alpha milestone, the first beta images of LibreOffice 6.3 are now up for testing...

FreeBSD had a very busy first quarter with a status report out today providing a look at to all of the ongoing development activities for this leading BSD platform...

If you have an external keyboard that features a backlight, particularly on some gaming keyboards, some issues can come up with the current Linux stack if you unplug the keyboard...

We've been quite eager to see what happens around Ubuntu 19.10's ZFS support with their plumbing this out-of-tree file-system into their new desktop installer and a lot of other Ubuntu happenings around ZFS. There is now at least a public TODO list/board outlining some of their ZFS work for the Ubuntu 19.10 Eoan Ermine cycle...

It's not often the National Security Agency (NSA) can be thanked for their contributions to society, but in the case of one of their public open-source projects it's going to be used to help the Coreboot folks in reverse-engineering system firmware...

If you want an easy way to go through the AMD Radeon GPU register descriptions, they are now storing them in a JSON format within Mesa following more than ten thousand lines of code/headers being shifted around today...

This week marks one month since the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 while the community rebuild of RHEL 8.0 in the form of CentOS 8.0 will hopefully be out within a month or so...

Oracle today announced the general availability release of their Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 5 Update 2 that pairs with their RHEL-derived Oracle Linux for offering a Linux 4.14 based kernel with various features on top...

Back in March we wrote about industrial-grade PC manufacturer Logic Supply announcing the Karbon 300 as a compact and rugged Ubuntu/Windows system. Fast forward to last month, Logic Supply sent over the now-shipping Karbon 300 system to put it through our tests at Phoronix. This passively-cooled PC has passed our tests after weeks of benchmarking and is running great.

Mozilla developers working on the Servo browser engine code have begun implementing hardware-accelerated video playback for Linux...

AMD today announced a new licensing deal with Samsung around low-power, high-performance graphics technologies...

The Qt Company has released Qt Design Studio 1.2, the newest version of their commercial-focused software package aimed at both designers and developers for rapidly prototyping user-interfaces...