Phoronix

With Ubuntu 19.10 bringing some CPU/system performance changes compared to earlier Ubuntu releases as a result of compiler/toolchain upgrades, the newer kernel, and more, here is a quick weekend look at how the Ubuntu 19.10 performance compares across ten different AMD Ryzen and Intel Core systems...

As an alternative to PulseAudio's existing RTP implementation, a new GStreamer-based Real-Time Transport Protocol has been introduced...

Taking place this past week in San Francisco was the annual OpenZFS Developer Summit. As usual, Matthew Ahrens as the co-founder of Sun ZFS and current OpenZFS contributor at Delphix talked about the state of the open-source ZFS efforts in his keynote...

Among other EXT4 file-system changes en route for the upcoming Linux 5.5 kernel is a new direct I/O read implementation...

Coming out Friday night was a series to address a "critical" scheduler issue with the Linux kernel...

While the Linux 5.4 cycle is quickly winding down and with DRM-Next's cut-off crossing, AMD has sent in a last minute batch of changes it's targeting for the upcoming Linux 5.5 merge window...

Intel's HMEM DAX driver is being added to Linux 5.5 for use-cases like their Optane DC Persistent Memory...

Rav1e has been in development for more than one year now as the "safest and fastest AV1 encoder" thanks to being written in Rust while now their first official release is available...

Radeon Software for Linux 19.30 has been the driver release branch since July for the AMD Linux packaged driver stack. That 19.30 driver was introduced with the AMD Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" support while now a slightly updated stack was released...

Valve earlier today pushed out Proton 4.11-8 as the newest update to their Wine-based software powering Steam Play for handling Windows games on Linux...

Not nearly as exciting as the recent NVIDIA 440 Linux driver series going stable but for those with older Fermi graphics cards and wanting to use the latest NVIDIA binary driver experience, their 390 series legacy driver series has been updated...

AMDVLK 2019.Q4.2 is out today as AMD's second open-source Radeon Vulkan Linux driver update for the fourth quarter...

Project Trident made some waves last month when this lesser-known BSD distribution derived from TrueOS/FreeBSD decided to switch to becoming a Linux distribution that they decided would be based upon Void Linux. Now the very preliminary alpha images of Project Trident as a Linux operating system are available for testing...

The initial release candidate for the upcoming QEMU 4.2 is now available as a sizable update to this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

Last year it was decided that FreeBSD's ZFS code would be re-based on OpenZFS (ZFS On Linux) code for ultimately better support and functionality as well as largely unifying the open-source ZFS ecosystem. While still transitioning towards the OpenZFS code-base, for FreeBSD it's still looking to be a positive move and one that will pay off for all parties involved...

A surprisingly controversial proposal for Fedora 32 is to shift from dynamically linking Python 3 with the libpython3.X.so library to static linking. The change can yield double digit percentage improvements to Python scripts but at the cost of larger on-disk space...

The OGRE open-source 3D graphics engine that is used by many games as well as different simulation / educational / interactive / visualization software is working on enabling Vulkan API support...

The Free Software Foundation's "Respect Your Freedom" program has tended to mostly endorse products like old motherboards re-flashed with Coreboot/Libreboot along with dated networking products and obscure products like USB microphones and USB to parallel printer port cables. But today comes the Free Software Foundation's most prominent RYF endorsement...

Rust 1.39 is out today as the latest stable update for this popular programming language...

While the processors are not shipping until later this month, AMD is today making known their next batch of CPUs being released...

Approaching ten years old, OpenIndiana is still kicking as one of the few platforms derived from the former OpenSolaris (now "Illumos") code-base as a Linux/BSD alternative...

GNU Binutils with its "Gas" assembler has now added the rest of the instructions supported by the AMD Zen 2 microarchitecture that previously were unsupported by this piece of the GNU toolchain...

Jolla has outed Sailfish OS "Torronsuo" or more easily known as the version 3.2 update for this mobile Linux-based largely proprietary operating system...

The second weekly release candidate to Mesa 19.3 is now available for testing ahead of the official release in the weeks ahead...

Released earlier this week was Git 2.24, which pardon for not punctually covering due to being extra busy this week, but this revision control system update is nevertheless an interesting update...

NVIDIA announced today the newest member of the Jetson family: the Xavier NX as "the world's smallest supercomputer" coming in at smaller than the size of a credit/debit card. This mini supercomputer can deliver 21 TOPS for modern AI workloads while consuming less than 10 Watts or optionally a higher-performance 15 Watt mode...

Red Hat continues hiring developers to work on the open-source upstream graphics stack and other Linux desktop innovations...

Mesa 19.3 is expected to be out around the end of November as the next feature update to Mesa3D, but in the interim Mesa 19.2.3 has been released as the newest bi-weekly bug-fix release...

Valve open-source developer Samuel Pitoiset has landed his work enabling the Vulkan VK_EXT_subgroup_size_control extension that for GFX10/Navi is being used to expose Wave32 capabilities...

The latest of LLVM's "sanitizers" being ported for the GCC compiler stack is the hardware-assisted address sanitizer (HWASAN)...

While Ubuntu Touch has run on AArch64 hardware, to date their builds have been focused on 32-bit mode support. Fortunately, for select devices, they are now spinning 64-bit images...

Complementing the earlier Intel Ice Lake "Gen11" graphics comparison and the Windows vs. Linux Ice Lake graphics driver numbers, here are some additional Vulkan data points in different Linux and Steam Play games...

With GCC 10 due to be released in just a few months, GCC 7.5 is being prepared for release as what will be the last of the GCC7 stable series...

FreeBSD's Bhyve hypervisor has had a wild ride over the past half-decade of development for advancing BSD virtualization support. Bhyve is mostly used on the server front but can also fill some desktop use-cases now that there is GPU pass-through support working albeit not yet polished...

Rob Clark and his gang working on the Freedreno/MSM driver stack have prepared their kernel driver changes slated for the upcoming Linux 5.5 cycle...

Joe Maloney of iXsystems has lifted the wraps on FuryBSD, a new desktop BSD focused on tight integration with FreeBSD. FuryBSD joins the likes of MidnightBSD and GhostBSD on providing a sane and easy-to-use desktop experience out-of-the-box along similar lines to the former PC-BSD (TrueOS)...

Feral Interactive has just shipped their Linux (and macOS) port of Shadow of the Tomb Raider Definitive Edition...

Facebook has released Zstd 1.4.4 today as the newest implementation of their increasingly used Zstanard compression algorithm...

With yesterday's article about the NUMA improvements to FreeBSD's network stack made by Netflix in their quest to serve 200Gb/s encrypted video content per server, in no time the forum comments were quick to theorize whether those changes would work their way back upstream to all FreeBSD users or due to the BSD license would be held as a guarded secret by the company. Fortunately, Netflix continues to impress when it comes to their open-source contributions...

Microsoft announced at their Ignite conference in Seattle that their Edge web-browser will see a Linux release...

Red Hat this morning announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1, the first update to RHEL8 since its general availability in May...

The Linux 5.5 kernel due out as stable in early 2020 will finally have mainline support for the MIPS-powered SGI Octane and Octane II workstations that originally ran with SGI's IRIX operating system about two decades ago...

Several weeks ago we wrote about a kernel fix for Linux 5.4 to address performance issues for highly-threaded Linux software running under CFS quotas. The fix can yield up to a 30x improvement in performance and one company estimated the impact of the bug cost them at least $1.5 million USD in extra resources/hardware. But now it looks like it will soon appear in a Linux 5.3 point release and possible back-ports to earlier kernels...

With more cameras moving their image processing operations from micro-controllers to the CPU to save on manufacturing, libcamera was started last year to serve as an open-source camera support library across Linux / Android / ChromeOS for supporting these modern cameras...

While Ubuntu 19.10 just shipped two weeks ago with its initial desktop install support to a root ZFS file-system option, feature work is already happening of ZFS changes destined for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Ubuntu's Zsys daemon being built around ZFS' advanced feature set...

Drew Gallatin of Netflix presented at the recent EuroBSDcon 2019 conference in Norway on the company's network stack optimizations to FreeBSD. Netflix was working on being able to deliver 200Gb/s network performance for video streaming out of Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC servers, to which they are now at 190Gb/s+ and in the process that doubled the potential of EPYC Naples/Rome servers and also very hefty upgrades too for Intel...

With DXVK in remarkably good standing for translating Direct3D 10/11 to Vulkan for use by Steam Play (Proton) and Wine, Philip Rebohle who started that project is now contributing more to Wine's VKD3D initiative for mapping Direct3D 12 on Vulkan...

Beyond GCC 9 having deprecated Solaris 10 support and that code now removed ahead of the GCC 10 release in a few months, the GNU Debugger (GDB) is also moving forward with its plan to obsolete Solaris 10...

FreeBSD 12.1 has released on-time as the first incremental update to last year's FreeBSD 12...

Last week NVIDIA announced the GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER as their newest Turing "SUPER" graphics card coming in at $229+ USD and delivering around 1.5x faster performance than the GeForce GTX 1060. For those wondering about the Linux gaming performance potential for this graphics card, here are our initial tests of this new graphics card using the EVGA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER.