Phoronix

Last year Amazon began offering AMD EPYC options for their EC2 public cloud and last week extended the line-up of EPYC cloud options with the new "M5ad" and "R5ad" instance types with greater performance potential while being built on the AWS Nitro System.

The Qt Company today announced the release of Qt 3D Studio 2.3, the latest feature release for this development environment for creating 3D user interfaces that started out from code open-sourced by NVIDIA albeit since then it has evolved in its own right...

Last week I wrote about NVIDIA contributing a fix to KDE/KWin for avoiding high CPU usage when using the proprietary GeForce graphics driver. That fix ended up being due to the KWin compositor making incorrect assumptions about GLX swap buffers behavior. It turns out GNOME also needs a similar fix...

Edge computing solutions vendor SolidRun is working on "ClearFog" as an ITX-based ARM64 workstation platform. They hope for an early bird launch price later this year of around $500~500 USD for this board that has 16 ARMv8 cores, multiple 10 GbE SFP+ connections, Gigabit Ethernet, multiple USB 3.0 and 2.0 ports, 2 x mPCIe, four SATA ports, and can handle up to 64GB of laptop DDR4 memory...

The latest bit of Icelake "Gen 11" graphics enablement for the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver is supporting the performance counters/queries for exposing them through the OpenGL driver for the debugging/analyzing of performance bottlenecks...

A student is proposing parallelization improvements to the GCC code compiler this year as part of Google's Summer of Code initiative...

During March on Phoronix was 299 original news articles and 22 featured Linux hardware reviews / benchmark specials in quite an exciting month, though looking ahead to April and Q2'2019 should be quite exciting as well...

It's been a while since last having any major news to report on Sabayon Linux, the once quite popular Gentoo-based Linux distribution, but they ended out March with a big update as version 19.03...

This weekend the Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org crossed its latest milestone... Serving more than 39 million test profile / test suite downloads to those using our open-source, cross-platform benchmarking software!..

Linus Torvalds has just announced the third weekly release candidate of the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel...

Tomohiro Kusumi has contributed an initial FUSE implementation to DragonFlyBSD for implementing file-systems in user-space support...

Back in February the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) was celebrating having served more than five million firmware files over the duration of this service for providing BIOS/firmware files to Linux users for different hardware components from different vendors ranging from mice/peripheral firmware to new system/motherboard BIOS from major hardware vendors. That count is quickly shooting up these days and they are now serving 500k files per month...

LLVM has merged a very useful feature for the Clang 9.0 release this autumn: the -ftime-trace feature allows producing time trace profiling data in a friendly format that is useful for developers to better understand where the compiler is spending most of its time and other areas for improvement...

While spring has arrived, KDE developers remain as busy as ever on improving their open-source desktop environment and related components...

While Wine-Staging 4.4 was at 770 patches compared to upstream Wine for running Windows programs/games on Linux and elsewhere, this weekend's Wine-Staging 4.5 is down to 759 patches thanks to more of these improvements being deemed ready for upstream...

OpenMandriva has been toying with some performance optimizations in recent times like preferring the LLVM Clang compiler over GCC, spinning an AMD Zen "znver1" optimized version of the OS/packages, and apparently now exploring possible Profile Guided Optimizations...

As we've been expecting for the past month, Trinity Desktop R14.0.6 as a fork of KDE 3.5 was just released and its first for 2019...

It was widely expected that PHP 8 would introduce JIT (Just In Time) compiler functionality while now that experimental work has been approved...

One of the exciting product launches for this month has been the introduction of the NVIDIA Jetson Nano as a $99 Arm developer board offering four Cortex-A57 cores that isn't too special itself but packing in a 128-core Maxwell NVIDIA GPU makes this board interesting for the price. Out-of-the-box the Jetson Nano is just passively cooled by a small aluminum heatsink, but does it work any better if actively cooled to avoid any potential thermal throttling? Here are some thermal benchmarks.

With the first quarter wrapping up, here is a look back at the most popular content of our 903+ original news articles in Q1 as well as 70 featured Linux hardware reviews / featured benchmark articles...

While we have been quite looking forward to ZFS On Linux 0.8 with its many additions, this next release will be even better as it now supports SSD TRIM...

With the Linux 5.1 kernel there is Arm's new "Komeda" direct rendering manager driver while patched in as new material for Linux 5.2 is support for the Mali D71 display processor with this new driver...

It's been a while since last hearing anything about the GNOME/GTK Broadway back-end that provides HTML5-based user-interfaces for rendering within web browsers. The HTML5 Broadway work has been revived ahead of the GTK 4.0 tool-kit release...

While Valve has long been collaborating with HTC and others on VR headsets and other ecosystem work to enhance virtual reality gaming as well as bringing VR support to Linux, the company is finally preparing to release its own high-end VR headset: the Valve Index...

Wine 4.5 is out today as the latest bi-weekly development release of this program for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other non-native platforms...

With now having WebDriver/Seleneium integration in PTS for carrying out browser benchmarks, we've been having fun running a variety of web browser benchmarks in different configurations. The latest is looking at the Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web browser performance across eight Linux distribution releases (or nine if counting Fedora Workstation on both X.Org and Wayland) for looking at how the web browsing performance compares.

GCC 9 release manager Richard Biener of SUSE has provided a status report concerning the state of getting the GNU Compiler Collection 9.1 shipped...

Ampere Computing and Packet announced on Thursday that eMAG servers will now be available through this public cloud/server provider. The initial configuration allows for 32 Arm cores at 3.3GHz and 128GB of RAM and 480GB of SSD storage for just $1 USD per hour on-demand access. I have run some initial benchmarks from this new compute instance for those interested...

The AMD developers working on their official Vulkan driver today pushed out updated sources for their "AMDVLK" open-source Linux driver. For this week's worth of activity, there aren't many notable changes but a few...

It's been on the project's TODO list for more than one decade but finally support for the "REINDEX CONCURRENTLY" command was added today to the PostgreSQL database server...

Longtime Linux input expert Peter Hutterer has released version 1.13 of libinput, the input library used both by Wayland and X.Org Linux desktops for unified input handling...

While X.Org and FreeDesktop.org are already closely related, administered by many of the same people, and FreeDesktop.org provides the hosting for much of the infrastructure, there isn't many formalities around FreeDesktop.org and the X.Org Foundation formally doesn't have control of FreeDesktop.org. But there's now a vote on whether the X.Org Foundation will formally accept FreeDesktop.org...

With BUS1 not to be found (or rather, very infrequently seeing any code commits let alone any clear trajectory yet for getting into the mainline kernel), Dbus-Broker that's worked on by most of the same developers continues maturing as a high-performance D-Bus compliant user-space implementation...

Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco Dingo" beta images have begun surfacing this evening as the first official test release (sans the generally great daily ISOs) for those wanting to begin testing this next six-month installment of Ubuntu Linux ahead of its official mid-April debut...

Joining the DRM-Next party with the Intel driver feature work is now the initial batch of the AMDGPU Radeon driver changes for Linux 5.2...

Just days after Intel sent in their first feature pull request to DRM-Next destined for the Linux 5.2 cycle, another round of feature work is ready for queuing...

Following the release this week of Sailfish OS 3.0.2, Jolla has released Sailfish SDK 2.0 as a big update to the mobile Linux platform's software development kit...

We knew it was coming and now it's been made official: the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) has formally become a Linux Foundation project...

With the Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco Dingo" release less than one month away, we are getting ready for rolling out more tests of this next six-month installment to Ubuntu Linux. For those curious about the direction of Ubuntu 19.04's performance, here are some very preliminary data points using the latest daily state of Ubuntu 19.04 right ahead of the beta period. Tests were done on a high-end Intel Core i9 9900K desktop as well as a Dell XPS Developer Edition notebook when comparing Ubuntu 19.04 to Ubuntu 18.10 and also tossing in Clear Linux as a performance reference point.

As expected, Feral Interactive has officially released the DiRT 4 racing game for macOS and Linux this morning...

Add CloudFlare to the list of companies interested in WireGuard as an open-source, next-gen secure network tunnel solution. CloudFlare even ended up writing their own user-space implementation of WireGuard in the Rust programming language, meet BoringTun...

Last week marked the release of Wayland 1.17 but at the time the Weston compositor update wasn't ready to ship, but overnight it has now set sail. Weston 6.0 is the latest Wayland reference compositor release with many improvements over its predecessor...

POCL, the "Portable CL" implementation for allowing OpenCL kernels to be executed on CPUs among other use-cases, is closing in on its version 1.3 release...

The second development release of Phoronix Test Suite 8.8-Hvaler is now available for your Linux / Windows / macOS / BSD benchmarking needs...

For those trying to keep to a systemd-free system, Gentoo developers have GNOME once again working without being dependent on systemd. The developers have managed with GNOME 3.30 the ability to use any init system desired, well, primarily OpenRC as is popular with Gentoo users...

Earlier this month the Intel open-source developers sent out their initial Linux kernel patches for "Elkhart Lake" graphics support. Elkhart Lake is a SoC successor to Geminilake based on Icelake and will feature Gen11 graphics...

For being the first point release of a new series, today's Mesa 19.0.1 is abnormally quiet as a pleasant update...

The Rust-written gfx-rs portability initiative that has similar goals to MoltenVK for allowing the Vulkan API to be supported/translated on non-native platforms can now run the Vulkan-ized Quake game...

Yesterday Valve released Proton 4.2 as a big step forward for this Wine-based software that is integral to their "Steam Play" for running Windows games on Linux. CodeWeavers, which is working on Proton/Wine improvements under contract for Valve, provided a look today at the massive amount of patches that have been upstreamed already from Proton to Wine...

While Purism is engaging with several different open-source communities for supporting different operating systems and interfaces with their in-development Librem 5 smartphone, by default they are planning to use assets from GNOME for their default user experience to jive with their GNOME-based Pure OS desktop Linux distribution. Here are some new mock-ups on the GNOME side for this privacy-minded Linux smartphone...