Phoronix

One of the engine upgrades to Vulkan we have been looking forward to the most has been usage by the X-Plane flight simulator to ultimately succeed their long-standing OpenGL pipeline. Laminar Research shared on Christmas day that the X-Plane 11.50 release with Vulkan support is currently in private beta and will soon be available publicly...

Unigine developers have delivered a nice Christmas present in delivering Unigine 2.10 as the latest version of their 3D engine used by few games but an increasing number of simulation systems...

The digiKam photo management software is closing in on its v7.0 release and over the weekend issued their first beta...

With Mesa 20.0 expected to ship the "Iris" Gallium3D driver as the default Intel OpenGL Linux driver for Broadwell hardware and newer, I've been ramping up my testing of this open-source driver in recent weeks. For adding to the various generations of CPUs tested, here are some numbers of the latest code when using the UHD Graphics 630 off the high-end Core i9 9900KS processor...

Most KDE users are probably happy with the current state of the Plasma desktop and the state of the KDE applications. There's certainly less bugs in recent releases, KWin and the overall desktop is in better standing (though still improvements to be made such as showcased by the likes of KWin low-latency) with reliable Wayland support, and most would probably agree that the work out of this open-source project matured rather well in recent years with their focus on enhancing usability and other areas...

First of all, Merry Christmas for those of you celebrating today or Happy Holidays regardless...

While the GNU Hurd microkernel is still woefully behind in hardware support and hasn't even seen a new release in three years, at least a lot of the other GNU projects experienced a great decade -- especially with the likes of the GNU Compiler Collection, GNU Octave, GRUB, and other components critical to modern Linux systems...

While the open-source Radeon Linux graphics stack has made some remarkable improvements this year not only from AMD but also the likes of Valve, unfortunately not as much can be said about the state of the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver. The Nouveau Linux graphics driver remains much slower than the proprietary driver, the hardware with the best support is several generations old, and due to the lack of signed firmware images there still isn't yet any open-source 3D for the Turing GPUs that have been shipping for months. But there may be hope in 2020.

Western Digital has been contributing a lot more to the Linux kernel in recent years from RISC-V architecture bits to storage enhancements. The most recent code they have been working on in recent weeks is a brand new Linux file-system...

Since March of this year I began benchmarking various open-source video encoders every other day in our lab. Here is a look at how Intel's SVT encoders and other popular options saw their performance evolve over the course of the year...

In going through the AMDGPU kernel driver changes currently queuing ahead of the Linux 5.6 cycle, "virtual DCN" support is coming in working on SR-IOV display support...

Not only has LLVM's Clang compiler proven to become a viable alternative to C/C++ and is now widely used by many different vendors for building production software and nearly at parity for performance to GCC, but the LLVM compiler infrastructure has proven to be a huge success. Beyond Apple as one of the original stakeholders, LLVM is also used by multiple software projects within Intel, AMD is making extensive use of it for their graphics compiler and other purposes, and many other companies leveraging the LLVM projects for various often innovative purposes -- Microsoft is even using it within select projects...

While not attracting as much interest as Linux in the cloud, AI, and other growing markets, the BSDs have seen their share of adoption in many of these areas too as well as the likes of powering some of today's video game consoles. FreeBSD is also well known for powering much of the networking infrastructure of Netflix and other large enterprises. The BSDs advanced a lot from hardware support to new security features and other capabilities this decade setting them on a good trajectory as we get into the 2020s...

After many delays, and seemingly as a Christmas miracle, Eric S Raymond now believes his Reposurgeon utility is officially ready to convert GCC's SVN repository over to Git...

Announced last month was the Athlon 3000G as a ~$49 processor based on Zen and featuring two cores / four threads and Vega 3 graphics. This 35 Watt TDP processor has finally begun appearing at more Internet retailers in stock last week and I was able to pick up one of these budget CPUs for $55 USD. Here are benchmarks of the Athlon 3000G on Ubuntu Linux compared to other low-end and older processors.

Purism has shared an update on their software work for the Librem 5 Linux smartphone over the course of last month...

For those looking for some fresh reference numbers on the impact of using GCC's Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO), here are some benchmark runs looking at the GCC 10 PGO performance on an Ubuntu 19.10 workstation built around the Ryzen Threadripper 3960X...

Fedora continued serving at the forefront of many Linux distribution innovations over the past decade and the largely Red Hat driven platform continued contributing their work back upstream from countless GNOME features to hardware improvements/fixes, UEFI "flicker-free boot" crossing the finish line, good hardware firmware updating support, and much more...

For open-source photographers, there is an exciting new present under the Christmas tree... The huge Darktable 3.0 software package with almost three thousand commits over Darktable 2.6. The Darktable 3.0 RAW photography software suite comes with several big improvements to help in managing your holiday photos or for any occasion...

Back in October we reported on work done by Google on FSCRYPT inline encryption support for allowing the Linux file-system encryption framework to handle the encrypt/decrypt more optimally for modern mobile SoCs with inline encryption hardware. It's looking like that work might be ready to go now for Linux 5.6 after missing out on the 5.5 cycle...

We've been covering Intel's Tiger Lake hardware enablement for Linux since the early patches were posted this summer and that quickly followed with

In a rather unusual twist, the Hyperbola GNU/Linux distribution that is approved by the Free Software Foundation for being free software and making use of the Linux-libre kernel has now decided they are going to fork OpenBSD and become a BSD...

Intel's open-source graphics driver team responsible for their kernel graphics driver (the i915 Direct Rendering Manager driver) have sent out their first (big) batch of new material to DRM-Next for collection ahead of the Linux 5.6 merge window opening in just over one month's time...

For those still running a GeForce 8 or 9 series graphics card, you really ought to consider upgrading this holiday season. Even the cheapest of recent generation NVIDIA GPUs should deliver better performance and far better efficiency over those older GPUs, but in any case, NVIDIA released the 340.108 Linux driver as part of their legacy maintenance support...

A month ago I posted benchmarks looking at the performance of Linux 4.16 through Linux 5.4 kernels using an Intel Core i9 workstation. Stemming from that was a request for an AMD EPYC kernel comparison, so I carried out said tests. Due to the Rome support being newer, this round of testing is looking at the EPYC 7642 performance on Linux 5.0 to Linux 5.4...

The Ethernet driver for supporting Cavium's Octeon SoCs is slated for removal in the Linux 5.6 cycle...

The latest in our series of interesting year-end benchmarks -- made more interesting by also looking at the Linux performance over the 2010s -- is looking at the performance of Ubuntu Linux over the past roughly seven years by re-testing all the releases. Ubuntu 19.10 stable and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS development builds were tested along with the Ubuntu releases going back to Ubuntu 13.04, the initial release where the Intel Sandy Bridge support was in good shape for the Core i7 2700K platform being used for this round of benchmarking. It's quite a wild ride looking at the Ubuntu performance over this long span with dozens of different workloads.

AMD's official Vulkan driver team has pushed a new code drop of their open-source Linux "AMDVLK" derivative for those wanting to give it a whirl for some holiday gaming...

So far this calendar year on Phoronix has been more than 3,400 original news articles on Linux/open-source and more than 260 featured multi-page articles / Linux hardware reviews. From 2010 to date that count becomes more than 27,950 original news articles and more than 2,800 featured articles. But due to the continued use of ad-blockers by much of our audience, it becomes an increasingly tight ship to continue operating and producing new content each and every day. So for the Christmas / Hanukkah / end-of-year holidays, here is a way you can show your support while enjoying a great deal...

F2FS is the latest Linux file-system gaining transparent data compression support for saving on-disk space. With F2FS there are two compression algorithms supported so far plus the support of making the data compression opt-in per file or applying the compression to select file extensions(s)...

The LLVM Clang compiler continues becoming increasing competitive against the long-standing GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) on Linux x86_64 systems... With tests done on Intel Ice Lake using the Core i7-1065G7, the Clang 9.0 stable performance is delivering over 95% the performance of GCC 9 stable based on over 40 C/C++ benchmarks...

While there still is at least a full month to go before seeing the Linux 5.5 stable release and that marking the opening of the Linux 5.6 merge window, already a fair amount of HID subsystem work is queuing in its "-next" tree ahead of the first full kernel cycle of 2020...

Linux 5.5-rc3 is out following a week of seeing many bug/regression fixes landing as we approach the half-way point of the Linux 5.5 kernel...

For the latest of our year-end tests is a look at how the RadeonSI OpenGL driver and RADV Vulkan driver performance has evolved since the end of 2018 for Linux gaming.

TrueAudio-Next is AMD's solution for advanced GPU-accelerated audio effects and other capabilities by leveraging OpenCL compute rather than any dedicated DSP audio hardware. While developed as open-source the past three years, there hasn't been official Linux support but that seems to finally be changing...

While the Linux 5.5 kernel with its many new features isn't even launching as stable until around the end of January, the number of reasons to get excited over the next kernel (5.6) continues to grow. Linux 5.6 will be headlining with WireGuard support and other features while the newest big-ticket item is USB4 support...

On Friday Intel released SVT-AV1 0.8 with more AVX2/AVX-512 optimizations for this one of the fastest CPU-based AV1 open-source video encoders (and growing decoding support too). Here are some benchmarks of SVT-AV1 0.8 compared to the previous v0.7 release on various Intel and AMD systems...

KDE developers haven't let up ahead of the holidays in their relentless work for improving the KDE desktop and contained applications...

For those looking for some family-friendly Linux gaming this holiday season, a release candidate of the Mario Kart inspired SuperTuxKart 1.1 is now available for your enjoyment... err testing...

Disclosed back in November was the Intel Jump Conditional Code (JCC) erratum affecting Skylake and newer CPUs that could lead to "unpredictable behavior" when jump instructions cross cache lines. Intel issued a CPU microcode update to address the problem at a performance cost, but with some compiler toolchain magic, it's possible to mitigate a good portion of that impact...

Adding to the interesting list of proposed features for Fedora 32 would be update-alternatives handling of /usr/bin/cc and /usr/bin/c++ to more easily and seamlessly allowing pointing them at alternative compilers...

Intel contributions to Wayland/Weston aren't as frequent as years ago, but they continue volleying interesting work to keep pace with their graphics driver and Direct Rendering Manager subsystem advancements. Their latest work is on adding scaling filter support to libweston in order to supporting filters like nearest-neighbor for yielding less blurry outputs when upscaling...

Soft-announced earlier this week was the Kubuntu Focus as a high-end Linux laptop pre-loaded with the KDE flavor of Ubuntu. The Kubuntu Focus produced in cooperation with Mindshare Management, Kubuntu itself, and German manufacturer Tuxedo Computers will officially launch in January and begin shipping shortly thereafter while a review sample arrived in our lab today...

While the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X is delivering better raw Linux performance in a far majority of workloads compared to the Intel Core i9 10980XE, one of the areas where the Cascadelake-X platform and Intel CPUs still have an advantage is when it comes to the BSD support. Intel actively supports the BSDs more than AMD and in turn leads to the latest hardware generally working out fine on the latest BSDs. Here are some DragonFlyBSD and FreeBSD tests against Linux with the i9-10980XE.

The AMD machine check exception (MCE) code fix for Linux has landed ahead of this weekend's anticipated 5.5-rc3 release. This AMD MCE fix allows for the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3900 series processors introduced last month to boot the Linux kernel without hangs or other workarounds...

Announced last month at SuperComputing 19 in Denver was Radeon Open Compute 3.0 (ROCm 3.0) but it didn't end up shipping until last night. ROCm 3.0 is a big update to AMD's open-source Linux compute stack for ending out 2019...

Joining the NIR driver bandwagon recently was LLVMpipe adding support for this new intermediate representation. Now with that support having matured, Mesa 20.0-devel's LLVMpipe software OpenGL driver is switching to NIR by default in place of TGSI...

Jolla has announced Sailfish OS 3.2.1 "Nuuksio" as their mobile operating system update to end out 2019...

Rebased off yesterday's Wine 5.0-RC2 source tree is now Wine Staging 5.0-RC2 as this testing/experimental variation of Wine with some 830+ patches on top...

Sadly there still is no release plan for getting the long overdue X.Org Server 1.21 out the door and at this point is looking increasingly unlikely that it would land for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. But at least this extra time for X.Org Server 1.21 has allowed more XWayland changes to flow in...