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Updated 2024-11-29 10:30
The Many Features Coming To The Wine 4.0 Stable Release From Vulkan To New Input Devices
January should bring the release of Wine 4.0 as the annual stable release of this software for running Windows applications/games on Linux. As Wine 4.0 continued to be developed over the course of bi-weekly development releases all year, here's a look back at the notable features to find with this upcoming Wine 4.0.0 release...
Fedora Had A Killer 2018, But It Will Be Interesting To See What Comes Next Year
It was a very exciting year for Red Hat's Fedora Linux distribution process with the successful releases of Fedora 28 and 29, each of those new Fedora releases adding in plenty of new features, achieving the long-desired flicker-free polished boot experience, and Fedora Silverblue taking shape for what was formerly their Atomic Workstation initiative. Next year though could be even more radical for the project...
The Linux Kernel In 2018 Summed Up: Spectre/Meltdown, CoC, Speck Fears, New Features
It was a very busy year in kernel space from mitigating security vulnerabilities to preparing new features. Here is a look back at the most popular kernel topics of this year...
OPTPOLINES - Formerly Relpolines, Lower Overhead To Retpolines For Spectre Mitigation
It's been nearly one year to the day since the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities were made public. While the security vulnerabilities were quickly buttoned up in the Linux space, kernel developers continue working to offset the performance overhead introduced by these mitigations. They made a lot of overhead reductions in 2018 while still there are some patch-sets pending still for bettering the experience. One of these patch-sets was known as "Relpolines" but now has been updated and morphed into what is being called Optpolines...
Linux 4.20-ck1 Released With An Updated Version Of MuQSS Scheduler
Con Kolivas has announced a New Year's Eve release of his Linux 4.20-ck1 kernel patch-set and the newest MuQSS scheduler...
NetBSD Working On Better LLVM Toolchain Support
While a number of BSDs already have great LLVM toolchain support and are generally quite fond of this liberally licensed compiler alternative to GCC, the NetBSD support has lagged behind a bit for LLVM but that is continuing to improve...
OpenBSD Security, DragonFly + Threadripper, TrueOS Topped Out BSD News This Year
For those not following the BSD operating systems on a daily basis, here is a look back at the biggest highlights in the BSD land for 2018 ranging from OpenBSD's continued security conscious decisions, NetBSD 8.0 bringing USB 3.0 and other hardware support improvements, DragonFlyBSD running great on Threadripper 2, FreeBSD 12.0 making its highly anticipated debut, and much more...
KDE Plasma, GNOME Shell, Xfce, LXQt & MATE Linux Gaming Benchmarks, Including X.Org/Wayland
One of the recent leading requests by new Phoronix Premium members was to see some current Linux gaming benchmarks across a variety of desktop environments and with Wayland and X.Org where applicable. Here are those tests with KDE, GNOME, Xfce, LXQt, and MATE when testing with a Radeon RX Vega 64 graphics card.
NVIDIA's 2018 Linux Highlights Included Some Open-Source Milestones, But Not Many
Besides the launch of their successful RTX "Turing" graphics cards, releasing the exciting Jetson AGX Xavier board, and other hardware initiatives, the green giant continued work on their flagship Linux graphics driver that while proprietary continues offering effectively the same feature set and performance as their Windows driver. They did make some open-source surprises this year, but not nearly as many as many in the community would have liked to see...
Ubuntu Had A Very Busy 2018 But Not Everything Turned Out As Planned
There were a lot of accomplishments for Ubuntu users and developers in 2018 ranging from the successful 18.04 LTS release to Ubuntu shipping on more Dell systems to continuing to polish their GNOME Shell based desktop experience. But, also, there were a number of letdowns...
Linux KVM Continues Offering Much Better Performance Than VirtualBox
With the release earlier this month of Oracle VirtualBox 6.0, besides running some benchmarks of its VMSVGA 3D graphics support, I also ran some basic benchmarks to see how a similarly configured VM under both VirtualBox 6.0 with Linux KVM setup via virt-manager would compare for performance as we hit the end of 2018. This quick round of Linux virtualization tests was done on the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX system.
Linus Torvalds' New Helper Is Working Out Well For Linux 4.21
Initially rolled out in November, the Linux 4.21 merge window is the first time that Linus Torvalds' new helper has been pushed to its limits for assisting both him and those sending in pull requests to the kernel...
KDE Had A Darn Exciting Year With Better Wayland Support, Improved Kdenlive, Krita 4.0
This year was filled with accomplishments from the KDE camp ranging from the KWin/Plasma Wayland support maturing a lot, Krita 4.0 being released, the refactored Kdenlive video editor being in much better shape, a ton of polishing and bug fixing going into all of the different KDE components, continued work on Kirigami and Plasma Mobile, and also NVIDIA starting work on an EGLStreams back-end for KWin...
ETLegacy Continues Work On New Renderer 16 Years After Enemy Territory
This coming May will mark sixteen years already since the release of the legendary Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory game built atop the ioquake3 engine. Continuing to let this game live on and advance as open-source is ETLegacy, which continues work on its new renderer for this once popular first person shooter...
Clear Linux Ending Out 2018 With Even More Performance Optimizations
With the Windows Server 2019 vs. Linux benchmarks this week on a dual socket Intel Xeon Scalable server and testing six different Linux distributions and three Windows Server configurations, Intel's open-source Clear Linux was the winner in nearly half of the dozens of benchmarks carried out across these Linux and Windows operating system tests. But the results did yield some areas they could improve upon for better performance and as a result have already landed some more performance optimizations.
Intel Linux Graphics Driver Developers Working On More Efficient Display Presentation For GVT
Local Display Direct Flip is a feature being worked on by the Intel developers working on the GVT-g graphics virtualization technology for Linux for more efficient display handling...
A Lot Of AMDGPU DC Fixes, New VegaM PCI ID Line Up For Linux 4.21
A few days back the DRM feature updates landed in Linux 4.21 with AMDGPU FreeSync support and a variety of other improvements. With all of the AMDGPU changes at play, it's now time to fix up the code with some early fallout...
Linux 4.21 Staging Updates Have "Lots & Lots Of Tiny Patches"
Greg KH on Friday submitted the staging changes for the Linux kernel where many drivers and other code continues maturing before being elevated to the normal area of the kernel...
Gentoo-Based Calculate Linux 18.12 Adds Btrfs Install Support With Zstd Compression
The Gentoo-based Calculate Linux distribution is out with a final release before ringing in the new year...
NVIDIA's Linux Driver Saw Some Nice Performance Gains In 2018
The open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver stack saw some nice RADV Vulkan performance improvements over the course of this year as well as to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver performance, but how did the NVIDIA Linux driver stack perform this year for gaming? Here are some benchmarks showing it too saw some nice Linux gaming performance boosts this year with subsequent driver updates.
PulseEffects: A System-Wide Equalizer For PulseAudio
Should you not be familiar with it already, PulseEffects is a program that provides an equalizer and other effects controls for Linux systems running on PulseAudio...
The Biggest GNOME Stories Of 2018
The GNOME desktop environment advanced in 2018 especially when it came to its rather mature Wayland compositor support plus a lot of minor usability fixes ("paper cuts"), the PipeWire remote desktop/recording capabilities, continuing to mature Flatpak, performance improvements, and other changes to polish off the "GNOME 3" experience this year...
Unigine 2.7.3 Released With Rendering Improvements But No Vulkan Support Yet
The high-end, Linux-friendly Unigine engine for powering games but seemingly more industrial/simulator applications these days is out with their last feature release of 2018...
Linux 4.21 Picking Up New Console Font For HiDPI / Retina Screens
While there are existing ways of manipulating Linux console fonts/sizes from user-space, with the upcoming Linux 4.21 kernel there is a new in-tree console font...
F2FS Gets More Fixes In Linux 4.21 With The File-System Now Supported By Google's Pixel
The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) has some new features for the current Linux 4.21 development cycle but it's mostly fixes stemming from increased testing with Google now supporting this flash-focused file-system for their Pixel device line-up...
GCC 9.0 Compiler Benchmarks Against GCC7/GCC8 At The End Of 2018
In early 2019 we will see the first stable release of GCC 9 as the annual update to the GNU Compiler Collection that is bringing the D language front-end, more C2X and C++ additions, various microarchitecture optimizations from better Znver1 support to Icelake, and a range of other additions we'll provide a convenient recap of shortly. But for those wondering how the GCC 9 performance is looking, here are some fresh benchmarks when benchmarking the latest daily GCC 9.0 compiler against GCC 7.4 and GCC 8.2 atop Clear Linux using an Intel Core i9 7980XE Skylake-X system.
Linux CoC, Debian, Speck & Kernel Happenings Rounded Out Q4-2018
Taking a break from our various year-end recaps, here is a look at the most popular Linux/open-source news from the quarter that's about to wrap up. So far there were more than 1,200 original news articles on Phoronix over the past three months and topping out reader interest in this time has been the latest Linux kernel happenings, various community controversies, new hardware fun, and several prominent new software releases...
Wine 4.0-RC4 Is Out For Testing While The Official Release Expected Next Month
Lead Wine developer Alexandre Julliard has just posted the fourth weekly release candidate of the upcoming Wine 4.0 stable release for running Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms...
Mesa RadeonSI Lands FreeSync / Adaptive-Sync Support That Pair With Linux 4.21
With the FreeSync support for AMD GPUs having been merged this week into Linux 4.21, the associated user-space patches are landing now for rounding out this AMD Radeon FreeSync / Adaptive-Sync / VRR support as we enter 2019...
Taking Radeon ROCm 2.0 OpenCL For A Benchmarking Test Drive
Last week AMD officially released ROCm 2.0 as the newest major release of the Radeon Open Compute stack. Here are some initial benchmark figures for that Radeon Linux compute component on Polaris and Vega hardware.
Binderfs Sent In For Linux 4.21 Plus Thunderbolt Updates, Intel Stratix10 Additions
Greg Kroah-Hartman began sending in his pull requests on Friday morning for the kernel code he maintains. With the char/misc changes does come the Binderfs file-system...
The X.Org Server Continues Cruising Along As We Approach 2019
While it's been ten years now that Wayland has been in development, a majority of the Linux desktops at the end of 2018 are still relying upon the X.Org Server. In 2018 we saw much better Wayland support out of GNOME Shell and KDE Plasma, but many Linux distributions -- including Ubuntu -- haven't transitioned over (or in the case of Ubuntu, back-over) to running a Wayland session. While the xorg-server remains at the heart of most Linux desktops, its development pace remains very slow...
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti vs. TITAN RTX In 82 Linux Graphics / Compute Benchmarks
Complementing our initial NVIDIA TITAN RTX Linux benchmarks and follow-up collection of more GPU compute benchmarks on the TITAN RTX compared to other NVIDIA hardware going back to the GeForce GTX 680, here is an expansive collection of side-by-side tests to the RTX 2080 Ti in more workloads...
Systemd Hits A High Point For Number Of New Commits & Contributors During 2018
With the end of the year upon us, the latest project we're looking at the GitStats on and most popular milestones of the year is for systemd...
Andes NDS32 Architecture Seeing Many Additions With Linux 4.21
Early in the year with Linux 4.17 the kernel saw a port to the Andes NDS32 CPU architecture. With Linux 4.21, that CPU architecture is seeing a number of improvements...
HAMMER2 File-System Performance On DragonFlyBSD 5.4.1
With the newly released DragonFlyBSD 5.4.1 having a lot of HAMMER2 file-system work on top of all of the changes introduced by DragonFlyBSD 5.4 at the start of December, here is a fresh look at the HAMMER versus HAMMER2 file-system performance on this BSD operating system...
Cage Is A New Wayland Compositor For Kiosk/Full-Screen-One-App Deployments
Jente Hidskes, the developer who last year overhauled the Piper mouse configuration utility as part of libratbag via GSoC 2017, announced that he recently began developing his own Wayland compositor to fill a void...
XFS RAID0 Benchmarks Across Twenty SSDs vs. EXT4 & Btrfs On Ubuntu Linux
Earlier this month were the FreeBSD ZFS vs. Linux EXT4/Btrfs RAID With Twenty SSDs. Besides interest in seeing ZOL tests (they're already planned upon the ZFS On Linux 0.8 release), there was also some interest by readers in seeing some XFS RAID tests side-by-side. Here are some of those XFS RAID benchmarks up against Btrfs and EXT4 from Ubuntu Linux...
Apache NetBeans 10.0 Released With JDK 11 & PHP7 Support
The Apache NetBeans 10.0 release is now available as the latest release for this integrated development environment under the Apache incubator umbrella...
Mesa 18.2.8 Released With Driver Fixes To End Out The Series
Mesa 18.2.8 was released today as what is the final planned point release for the Mesa 18.2 series. In order to continue receiving OpenGL/Vulkan open-source driver updates, users are encouraged to transition to Mesa 18.3...
NXP PowerPC Processors Finally Being Mitigated Against Spectre V2 With Linux 4.21
Nearly one year after the Spectre vulnerabilities were first published, Freescale/NXP PowerPC processors are being mitigated against Spectre Variant Two with the in-development Linux 4.21 kernel...
Banana Pi Might Be Rolling Out A 24-Core ARM Board
Making the rounds overnight has been word that the folks at Banana Pi are preparing to release a 24-core ARM board. On the surface it's exciting for ARM Linux enthusiasts, but the pricing has yet to be announced and that will largely determine the success of this reported next BPi product...
Windows Server 2019 Performance Benchmarked Against Linux On An Intel Xeon Server
A few days back I delivered the first of our Windows Server 2019 benchmarks against Linux (as well as FreeBSD). That initial testing was done with a dual socket AMD EPYC server while in this article the tables have turned with using a dual Intel Xeon Scalable server while benchmarking Microsoft Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2019 with its new Windows Subsystem for Linux, Windows Server 2016, and an assortment of Linux distributions including Fedora Server 29, openSUSE Leap 15, Ubuntu 18.10, CentOS 7.6, Debian 9.6, and Intel's own Clear Linux.
Nouveau Picks Up NV_shader_atomic_float For Fermi/Kepler GPUs
Longtime Nouveau contributor Ilia Mirkin has done some holiday hacking on this open-source NVIDIA driver and enabled support for another OpenGL extension in NVC0 Gallium3D...
ECC Support For The ZynqMP DDR Controller Coming With Linux 4.21
On a niche hardware note for Linux 4.21, should you be using a ZynqMP DDR controller, there will now be Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) ECC support...
GNU Highlights Of 2018 From Hurd To GCC
It was another busy year for the GNU with its massive collection of software projects. Of the 124 "GNU" original news articles on Phoronix during 2018, here is a look at the most popular ones...
The x86 Platform Driver Updates Land In Linux 4.21
The platform-drivers-x86 was one of the first pull requests that landed into the now-open Linux 4.21 kernel tree. This area is primarily about various Intel laptop drivers and other x86 (x86_64) hardware bits...
WireGuard Is Now Available From Apple's App Store
While the WireGuard kernel module still hasn't been mainlined, it is becoming easier to use on other platforms. After some trialing outside of the app store, WireGuard for iOS devices is now available through the Apple App Store...
The Most Popular AMD/Radeon Linux News Of 2018
After looking yesterday at the most popular Intel Linux news of 2018, the tables have turned and this article is looking at the most popular AMD/Radeon news for the year on Phoronix...
Adiantum & Streebog Sent In For Linux 4.21 Along With Various Crypto Performance Boosts
The crypto subsystem changes for the Linux 4.21 kernel were sent in this morning and they are quite exciting...
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