Phoronix

While initially queued as a work-in-progress feature for Linux 5.5, AMD has now submitted a batch of "fixes" to the current Linux 5.4 cycle that include enabling of the LRU bulk moves performance-boosting functionality...

Igalia is working on supporting OpenGL ES' GLSL marking of variables as "mediump" when the precision involving those variables can be lowered to half-float 16-bit registers. That in turn can help with performance when honoring that precision marking, which to date Mesa has ignored...

One of the contributions Google is working on for the upstream Linux kernel is a new "sanitizer". Over the years Google has worked on AddressSanitizer for finding memory corruption bugs, UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer for undefined behavior within code, and other sanitizers. The Linux kernel has been exposed to this as well as other open-source projects while their newest sanitizer is KCSAN and focused as a Kernel Concurrency Sanitizer...

Here is our recap of the most popular content on Phoronix for Q3. This is also the first time any one vendor has nearly dominated the charts thanks to multiple successful product launches and growing embrace for Linux/open-source...

The Linux kernel will begin doing a basic sanity check of x86_64 CPUs with the RdRand instruction to see if it's at least returning "random looking" data otherwise warn the user at boot time. This stems from a recent issue where AMD's RdRand behavior with some hardware (particularly, buggy motherboards) could have borked RdRand issues...

Samba 4.11 was just released a few weeks back with big scalability improvements, but looking ahead to Samba 4.12 will be some big performance improvements for those leveraging encryption...

Given the recent AMD "ABBA" Ryzen 3000 boost fix, the upcoming release of Ubuntu 19.10 powered by Linux 5.3, here is a fresh round of AMD Ryzen 9 3900X vs. Intel Core i9 9900K benchmarks in a side-by-side matchup . It's just not any comparison but our largest i9-9900K vs. 3900X comparison ever: 112 gaming benchmarks and 321 system/CPU benchmarks carried out for our most extensive look yet at how these ~$500 CPUs are competing in this fierce race.

Tomorrow is when PostgreSQL 12.0 should meet the world for this popular open-source SQL database server...

Details have emerged on Intel's forthcoming Core i9 10900 X-Series processors...

At last month's GNU Tools Cauldron was an update on the Radeon GCN back-end state for the GCC compiler, which is likely to see more code land around year's end...

One of the benefits of upgrading to Ubuntu Server 19.10 this month is for a newer version of PHP7 providing new features and better performance. While that took close to one year to land PHP 7.3 in Ubuntu 19.10, it looks like next spring's Ubuntu 20.04 LTS will be pulling in PHP 7.4 that is shipping later this year...

While there hasn't been too much to write on it in recent weeks, the Panfrost Gallium3D driver within Mesa for Arm Midgard/Bifrost graphics continues chugging along. The latest work on it is switching over to a new scheduler for Midgard...

The Steam Linux marketshare measurement for September ticked up slightly and to the highest point we have seen in a a number of months...

Last week we began our belated NVIDIA GeForce RTX SUPER benchmarking by looking at the RTX 2060 / 2070 / 2080 SUPER Linux gaming performance in a 26-way graphics card comparison. For those more interested in the RTX SUPER graphics cards for their OpenCL compute performance potential, these benchmarks today are for you.

While announced some months ago, today in-step with the OSPray 2.0 Alpha ray-tracing release is the inaugural development release of the Open Volume Kernel Library (OpenVKL)...

Intel open-source engineers have sent out their initial patches wiring up USB 4.0 support for the Linux kernel...

Sadly not making it for the just-closed Linux 5.4 merge window but hopefully something we could see in Linux 5.5 is recent patches on "frequency invariance" in optimizing the Schedutil frequency scaling governor that will really benefit Intel CPUs and improve their performance by double digits...

As a minor update following last month's Phoronix Test Suite 9.0 release, version 9.0.1 is now available and also for all PTS users are a number of new/updated test profiles via OpenBenchmarking.org...

It was another busy September on Phoronix with 298 original Linux/open-source news articles and 22 featured articles / hardware reviews written by your's truly. There was an interesting combination of both hardware and software happenings over the past month, so here is your convenient recap...

Over a year ago the AMD APU support in the Radeon Open Compute (ROCm) stack was quietly removed and has yet to be re-enabled in the upstream ROCm packages. But should you be wanting to use ROCm for their compute APIs or OpenCL on APUs, unofficial Ubuntu packages are now available to provide this capability...

Ahead of the oneAPI beta expected this quarter, Intel's OSPray ray-tracing engine that is set to be part of the oneAPI rendering tool-kit is embarking on its next major release...

For those that had been interested in GNOME 3.34 for Intel's Clear Linux when running their developer-focused, performance-optimized desktop those packages have now landed...

It's coming one day late due to the last minute entropy/RNG patches to improve the random behavior during boot time (among other late patches), but Linus Torvalds has just tagged Linux 5.4-rc1 as what will be the last major stable kernel release of 2019...

Raspbian 2019-09-26 is out as the latest version of this Debian-based Linux distribution that leads the default OS experience for Raspberry Pi devices...

Following last month's release of Xfce 4.14 that transitioned from GTK2 to GTK3 as its tool-kit, old remnants of GTK2 support are now being nuked...

LuxCoreRender, the open-source physically based renderer for execution on CPUs as well as OpenCL accelerators / GPUs, is out with version 2.2 and now integrates Intel's open-source Open Image Denoise...

With Intel seemingly ramping up work on their open-source OSPray portable ray-tracing engine now that they have pulled it under their oneAPI umbrella as part of a forthcoming rendering tool-kit, I figured it would be the latest interesting candidate for benchmarking of AMD EPYC 7742 vs. Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 performance. In addition, the Embree ray-tracing kernels are also being benchmarked as part of this performance comparison.

Intel in cooperation with Facebook have announced they are releasing a Firmware Support Package (FSP) to allow Xeon Scalable "Skylake-SP" to boot with Coreboot...

Linux 5.4-rc1 didn't end up being released on Sunday night as is tradition but instead there were some last-minute critical patches that landed around the kernel's handling of the random number generator / entropy at boot-time...

Seven years after the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) developers began transitioning their codebase from C to C++, they are now discussing the prospects of adopting C++11 as their allowed C++ standard revision for developing this open-source compiler...

OpenMandriva is one of the few Linux distributions (and arguably the only prominent one) that uses LLVM Clang as its default compiler toolchain over GCC for building its packages and the preferred C/C++ compiler exposed to its users. One of the last hold outs for this Clang'ed Linux distribution has been the kernel build but that is now no longer a blocker...

The virtual GPU/display landscape particularly for having accelerated guest graphics was once non-existent and then suffering for the open-source Linux virtualization stack around QEMU, but that is no longer the case. There are options these days to rival the GPU/display offerings of VirtualBox and VMware albeit to newcomers may not be so clear...

It turns out Linux 5.3 shipped with potentially subpar performance for the allocation of hugepages but that should be rectified in the now open Linux 5.4 cycle for trying to provide a sane default allocation strategy on NUMA boxes...

Wine-Nine-Standalone is the project making it easier to make use of Gallium3D's Direct3D 9 state tracker within Wine. Wine-Nine-Standalone 0.5 is out as the first new release since March for this project making it easier to use the Direct3D 9 Gallium state tracker within Wine...

Joining DXVK 1.4.1 with a new release this weekend is D9VK 0.22 as the similar project achieving faster Direct3D 9 performance over Wine/Proton via translating the API calls to Vulkan...

The Linux 5.4 merge window is set to end today with the release of Linux 5.4-rc1. With the major pull requests in, here is a look at the prominent changes and new features coming with Linux 5.4. As is standard practice, there will be about eight weekly release candidates of Linux 5.4 prior to officially releasing this kernel as stable in late November or potentially early December depending upon how the cycle plays out.

A second batch of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes for the Linux 5.4 kernel have landed...

Intel's SNA "Sandybridge New Acceleration" for 2D acceleration via their deprecated xf86-video-intel X.Org driver has seen some improvements, which is rare these days considering the for this driver that has been in perpetual version 3.0 development for the past six years...

With all of the CPU security bugs over the past two years and heightened concerns about hardware vulnerabilities in general, the upstream Linux kernel has been working to create a formal process for dealing with the disclosure process and addressing said issues within the kernel code...

With Plasma 5.17 releasing soon, developers have begun pushing changes targeted for Plasma 5.18. The KDE Plasma 5.18 release isn't set to arrive until next February but if any of the recent releases are an indication, it should be another exciting and solid release...

While CPU speculative execution has caused a lot of frustrations over the past two years due to the likes of the Spectre vulnerabilities, it turns out CPU speculative execution can be exploited to be a viable source of random entropy for random number generators...

It was just two days ago that Richard Stallman said he would continue as head of the GNU project after last week having resigned as head of the Free Software Foundation (as well as his post at MIT), but this afternoon he reportedly has stepped down from his GNU leadership role...

Given recent updates to the Intel Scalable Video Technology (SVT) open-source video encoders as well as other open-source video encoders/decoders, here is a fresh look at the performance of the AMD EPYC 7742 2P server against the Intel competition with the dual Xeon Platinum 8280...

While yesterday Linus Torvalds was still undecided on whether to pull in the long-revised "LOCKDOWN" kernel patches and wanted to review them patch-by-patch, following that lengthy examination he has decided to indeed land this opt-in restricted functionality for Linux 5.4...

For those running the GNOME Wayland session and having issues with windows not grabbing keyboard input after a child window is closed with Java applications like IntelliJ, Mutter has landed a fix...

Wine 4.17 was released yesterday that merged the DXTn support and other improvements from Wine-Staging. Meanwhile Wine-Staging 4.17 is out today to re-up their game with now more than 850 patches in total against upstream Wine...

Added back during the Linux 5.1 cycle was IO_uring for fast and efficient I/O. This new interface allows for queue rings to be shared between the application and kernel to avoid excess copies and other efficiency improvements over the existing Linux AIO code. With Linux 5.4, IO_uring is in even better shape...

AMD released Radeon Open Compute 2.8 (ROCm 2.8) for ending out September. But to some surprise and sadness, this open-source Radeon GPU compute stack still isn't supporting the Navi GPUs...

RPM 4.15 is officially out this week as the newest version of the RPM Package Manager most often associated with Red Hat / Fedora systems...

Oracle has reaffirmed their "long term commitment to deliver innovation on Oracle Solaris" though it still doesn't look like anything past Solaris 11 will materialize...