Phoronix

Next week on 5 June already marks sixteen years since I started Phoronix.com as well as twelve years since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0!..

One of the interesting new happenings in the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver space is a Generic USB Display stack including a USB gadget driver that together allow for some interesting generic USB display setups. This work was motivated by being able to turn a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero into a USB to HDMI display adapter...

KDE Plasma 5.19 is due for release very soon (9 June) but that hasn't kept KDE developers from already working on Plasma 5.20 and other components for this open-source desktop...

Valve developers have been working on Vulkan shader pre-caching with their latest Steam client betas to help in allowing Vulkan/SPIR-V shaders to compile ahead of time, letting them be pre-cached on disk to allow for quicker game load times and any stuttering for games that otherwise would be compiling the shaders on-demand during gameplay, especially under Steam Play...

One of the latest performance optimizations being pursued by Intel on the open-source Linux side is providing an AVX-512-optimized container for Golang usage...

Monado as the leading open-source OpenXR implementation for AR/VR headsets is out with a new release...

Version 3.12 of the Alpine Linux lightweight distribution built around musl libc and Busybox is now available for this platform popular with containers and other embedded use-cases...

Following the Xeon Gold 6250 vs. EPYC 7F32 benchmarks from earlier this month, here is a look at the latest x86_64 server CPUs we have our hands on with the EPYC 7F72 and Xeon Gold 6258R being benchmarked against a lineup of other competing AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon processors under the new Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

Adding to the expected changes for Linux 5.8 is improved EXT4 and XFS file-system direct access "DAX" support...

The FSGSBASE Linux kernel patches that have the potential of helping performance going back to Intel Ivy Bridge era CPUs in select workloads have now hit their 13th revision to the series in the long-running effort to getting this support mainlined...

OpenSUSE Leap 15.2 has progressed to its release candidate phase ahead of the official release planned for the first week of July...

While we have been eager for Godot 4.0 as the open-source game engine update bringing big renderer improvements and initial Vulkan support, it also turns out there will be a new offering on the editor front.....

Assuming no last minute concerns, the Linux 5.7 kernel is set to debut as stable this weekend. Given all the weeks since the merge window and our many articles covering all the feature activity at that point (and not to be confused with our activity of new work being queued for the upcoming Linux 5.8 cycle), here is a look back at some of the top features of the Linux 5.7 kernel...

In addition to the AMD Zen "amd_energy" driver coming for Linux 5.8, another late change now queued into hwmon staging is introducing notification support for the hardware monitoring subsystem...

While the Tegra X1 SoC (Tegra210) has been available for several years, finally with the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel is a mainline driver contributed by NVIDIA for the video input support...

Following the recent Chrome 83 release, Chrome 84 has now been promoted to beta...

In aiming to promote freedom-respecting video conferencing at a time when other platforms like Facebook and Zoom are exploding in popularity as a result of the coronavirus crisis, the Free Software Foundation is offering a video conferencing system for its associate members...

Android Studio 4.0 is out today with this IDE bringing a number of improvements for developing Google Android apps...

Following our initial Core i5 10600K and Core i9 10900K Linux benchmarks last week, here is a much larger comparison I have been working on since then in looking specifically at the Ryzen 9 3900X and 3950X against the Core i9 10900K. It's the largest to date with nearly 400 benchmarks being tested, most of them real-world test cases.

As the first open-source code drop in two weeks, AMDVLK 2020.Q2.4 is out today as the latest update to this official open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver stack for Linux...

It's been a while since hearing of OpenVG as The Khronos Group's hardware-accelerated 2D vector graphics API. But today they announced a "Lite" version of OpenVG 1.1...

Version 20.05 of the Genode open-source operating system framework is now available with many improvements...

For those making use of the Subversion centralized version control system as an alternative to Git, SVN 1.14 LTS is now available...

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced a new Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB of RAM...

With the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel merge window one of the features you still won't find in the mainline kernel is the VC4 DRM kernel driver supporting the Broadcom BCM2711 SoC and in turn the Raspberry Pi 4 open-source display support...

Following recent announcements, Red Hat is now ready in fully supporting Quarkus to enhance its Kubernetes support...

As a result of at least "a few AArch64 platforms" lacking firmware support for mitigating Spectre Variant Two, Google engineers are evaluating the possibility of Retpolines for the 64-bit Arm architecture...

Linux 5.8 features for the Radeon "AMDGPU" kernel driver include the likes of Navi soft recovery and better handling of critical thermal faults on Radeon GPUs as well as enabling TMZ support. With feature work being capped off already on the DRM graphics front for Linux 5.8, AMD developers have been tidying up the code and readying more fixes for all of the new code set to premiere with this imminent merge window...

Mesa 20.1 has managed to release on time today as this quarter's feature update to this collection of open-source user-space graphics driver components...

Of the many features coming for Linux 5.8 one of the new drivers we are very much looking forward to is the AMD energy driver for finally exposing per-core and per-socket/package energy reporting of Zen/Zen2 CPUs under Linux. It's working out well so far in my evaluation...

Statsfs is a new RAM-based file-system proposal by a Red Hat engineer that is designed for exposing kernel statistics to user-space...

Given the release last week of GraalVM 20.1 as well as last month's release of Eclipse OpenJ9 0.20, here are some fresh JVM benchmarks up against multiple OpenJDK releases.

The release of Mesa 20.1 is imminent as the latest quarterly feature update to this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers predominantly in use by Linux systems. Here is a look at the many exciting improvements with Mesa 20.1...

For input devices on some laptops that are a combination of a pointing stick and touchpad, the Linux kernel's multi-touch driver will finally begin handling them correctly...

While AMD has been working on AOMP for Radeon OpenMP offloading as their downstream of the LLVM/Clang compiler suited for GPU compute offloading to their hardware, at least some of that work is beginning to appear back in upstream LLVM...

Following yesterday's release of Qt 5.15 LTS as the last series before Qt 6.0, The Qt Company has now released a new Qt Online Installer...

Announced at the end of April was Micron's HSE as a new open-source storage engine designed for offering speedy performance and lower latency on modern solid-based storage, especially for systems employing 3D XPoint technology. Version 1.7.1 of HSE was released today as their first open-source release since going public with this technology...

NVIDIA has been quite aggressive recently with their new Vulkan beta drivers for Windows and Linux with today marking another such release...

If all goes well Linux 5.7 should reach stable this weekend and that in turn will mark the start of the Linux 5.8 merge window. With our monitoring of the various "-next" branches for weeks already, here is a look at some of what is on the table for this next version of the Linux kernel...

Arm today announced the Cortex-A78 as their SoC for next-generation smartphones with up to 20% sustained performance improvements. Arm also announced today the Cortex-X Custom program...

Following the GCC 10.1 compiler optimization benchmarks posted this weekend, a number of readers were wondering about the impact of Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) on the new GCC 10 compiler. Here are some preliminary data points on that front...

It's coming a few days late but The Qt Company's Lars Knoll just announced the official release of Qt 5.15.0...

Reiser5 was announced back on New Year's Eve with support for local volumes and supporting parallel scaling out and other improvements over the long-in-development but never mainlined Reiser4. While Reiser5 was not met with enthusiasm, Edward Shishkin has continued working on this next-generation file-system and today announced the latest round of improvements...

The crew working on the MSM DRM driver from Freedreno / Google / Code Aurora (Qualcomm) have an interesting batch of changes for this open-source GPU driver for Qualcomm Adreno hardware come Linux 5.8...

With the upcoming Linux 5.8 cycle a quirk is being added to be able to reboot the 2009 era Apple MacBook without needing to boot with any special flags...

Currently if wanting to use Adaptive-Sync/FreeSync variable refresh rate support of the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver you need to be using the xf86-video-amdgpu X.Org driver for proper handling as well, but a port of the DDX bits to the generic xf86-video-modesetting driver is in the works...

One month after the big Phoronix Test Suite 9.6 release, Phoronix Test Suite 9.6.1 is out as the first and only planned point release to this quarter's feature series...

Announced over one month ago was KWinFT as a fork of KDE's KWin with an emphasis on improving the Wayland support and better embracing modern technologies. A beta of KWinFT is now available...

Landing this weekend in hwmon-next ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel cycle is the recently reported on "amd_energy" driver for supporting AMD Zen/Zen2 core and package energy sensors...

For several years now GCC has offered a embeddable JIT compiler that for GPL applications can serve as a bytecode interpreter, an experimental Python compiler, and other possible use-cases with this libgccjit library. There now are patches pending for bringing libgccjit to Windows...