Phoronix

Catalin Marinas who oversees the 64-bit ARM (ARM64 / AArch64) architecture code within the mainline kernel has already submitted his pull request early for the Linux 5.5 kernel cycle beginning tonight or early on Monday...

In addition to Oracle having shipped a Solaris update this past week, prior to calling it a weekend their virtualization crew released VirtualBox 6.1 RC1...

With the Jump Conditional Code (JCC) Erratum that was made public earlier this month and ushered in new Intel microcode to mitigate this Skylake to Cascade Lake design defect, compiler/toolchain patches have been in the works to help offset the performance cost incurred from the updated microcode. Besides the GNU Assembler work we've talked about several times since JCC came to light, the LLVM folks have also been reviewing their comparable changes...

Over the years at Phoronix we have easily close to forty if not more Rosewill 2U and 4U sever cases... Rosewill's server cases have been among the best value enclosures when not needing any extra features like hot-swap bays, etc. For under $100 USD, their Rosewill 4U cases have been a favorite due to the cost yet good quality, fan filter, etc. A new revision out this summer is the Rosewill RSV-4310 that appears to have replaced the likes of the RSV-R4000. The RSV-4310 4U enclosure does bring some nice minor updates to the base enclosure we've come to know and appreciate though is more costly.

David Sterba sent in his pull request early of the Btrfs file-system changes that are ready for merging into the Linux 5.5 merge window next week...

We have done a lot of benchmarks on Intel/AMD x86_64 for Ubuntu 19.10 for seeing how its performance is looking, but what about IBM POWER9 with the likes of the libre Raptor Blackbird? Here are some Ubuntu 19.04 vs. 19.10 POWER benchmarks I recently carried out...

A few weeks back I wrote about NVIDIA's Nitin Gupta working on proactive memory compaction for the Linux kernel to more proactively compact memory rather than doing so on-demand when it can lead to high latencies for applications needing lots of huge-pages...

While it's taking painfully long to get X.Org Server 1.21 organized for release, at least in the interim there continues to be new xorg-server 1.20 point releases that back-port many of the prominent fixes...

While the Linux 5.5 cycle begins next week, looking ahead to early next year when the Linux 5.6 cycle will begin, there is expected to be another power management improvement coming for AMD Radeon graphics cards...

A few days ago 7 Days to Die saw a performance boost on Mesa Git from its "glthread" threading implementation while now a number of game emulators have seen similar whitelisting...

Ending out the week is an exciting development in the Intel open-source graphics driver space... Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support! This is another step towards their upcoming discrete Xe GPUs and ultimately their exciting oneAPI conquest...

The inaugural release of Glimpse is now available, the fork born out of calls for renaming The GIMP project to something not considered offensive...

It's been almost two months since last looking at the RADV ACO performance for this shader compiler back-end alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM code. ACO is making its debut in the upcoming Mesa 19.3 release while since the last round of testing have been more optimizations and fixes as well as getting the Navi/GFX10 support in place. In this article are some fresh benchmarks of the Vulkan RADV ACO support for not only Polaris and Vega but also the Radeon RX 5700 Navi graphics cards.

The Linux 5.4 kernel is to be released on Sunday and that will in turn kick-off the Linux 5.5 merge window. Here is a look at some of the changes on the table for what will in turn be the first major stable kernel release of 2020...

It looks like a big new systemd release will be out in time for Christmas...

Building off the NVIDIA 440 stable Linux driver release from earlier this month, the NVIDIA 440.36 Linux driver is out today as a small update...

With the big PHP 7.4.0 release due out next week, yesterday we published our PHP 7.4.0 benchmarks using the near-final build for this annual update to PHP. Those benchmarks compared previous releases as far back as PHP 5.6. But out of curiosity after that article I went to do some benchmarks going back to PHP 5.3 through PHP 7.4 and PHP 8.0-dev...

Arm engineers have been working to speed-up the open-source Chromium web browser on 64-bit ARM (AArch64) and ultimately to flow back into Google's Chrome releases. Their focus has been around Windows-on-Arm with the growing number of Windows Arm laptops coming to market, but the Chromium optimizations also benefit the browser on Linux too...

Released at the end of October to little fanfare was webOS Open Source Edition 2.0, the open-source Linux OS currently in development by LG for use on their Smart TVs and other digital products. With webOS Open Source Edition 2.0, they began setting their sights on automobiles and other potential use-cases. That was then extended by this week's release of webOS OSE 2.1...

Universal Bandwidth Compression is now enabled for the open-source "TURNIP" Mesa Vulkan driver...

Mesa 19.2.5 was just released earlier this week but now v19.2.6 has already been released due to the previous point release breaking IBM POWER builds...

Coming up this weekend with the Linux 5.4 kernel is emulation/spoofing of the SGDT/SIDT/SMSW instructions around UMIP for allowing newer 64-bit Windows games to run on Wine and Steam Play (Proton). With newer CPUs like the AMD Ryzen 3000 series that support UMIP, these instructions are not allowed to run in user-space with Wine due to UMIP. So while the first stable kernel release is about to land with this support, some Wine-based emulation not contingent on the kernel patches is also in the works...

Linux for years has supported monitoring NVMe drive temperatures when installing the nvme user-space utility and run as root, etc. But now finally with Linux 5.5 the kernel is supporting NVMe drive temperature reporting through the hardware monitoring "HWMON" infrastructure alongside other hardware sensors...

For those wondering if it's worthwhile for performance recompiling your key Linux binaries with the microarchitecture instruction set extensions and tuning for Ice Lake, here are some GCC compiler benchmarks looking at that impact for the Core i7 1065G7 on the Dell XPS 7390.

Blender 2.81 is now available as the latest minor yet significant update to this open-source 3D modeling software following the major Blender 2.80 release earlier this year...

While releasing the game on time might be more of a challenge, Valve did deliver in announcing Half-Life: Alyx as scheduled as their new flagship virtual-reality game...

The Khronos Group has officially confirmed Intel's new "Iris" Gallium3D driver as being a conformant OpenGL 4.6 implementation...

PHP 7.4 is due to be released next week as the annual major iteration to PHP7. Like we have seen through the PHP7 releases, while new features continue to be tacked on for this popular web-based programming language the performance has continued evolving. Here are the latest benchmarks of PHP 5.6 through PHP 7.4 while also looking at the PHP 8.0-dev performance that is in development on Git master.

Thanks to work done by 9elements Cyber Security for an unnamed client, there is now working open-source Intel TXT support for Coreboot with the patches under review for upstream inclusion...

While the official NVIDIA Linux driver has worked well with DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport (DP MST) setups for years now for driving large displays, audio hasn't worked under Linux for NVIDIA's driver in this combination. But with the upcoming Linux 5.5 cycle that will be addressed...

The long-awaited WireGuard secure VPN tunnel functionality looks like it will land with the Linux 5.6 kernel cycle happening in early 2020. Linux 5.5 is kicking off next week but the necessary crypto subsystem changes have yet to take place as well as a final sign-off on the new WireGuard code...

With the initial Navi 14 support to be found in the Linux 5.4 kernel releasing this weekend the GPU ASIC (along with Navi 12) have been marked as experimental and thus not enabled by default unless passing a special module parameter to the kernel. But now at the last minute this support has been deemed non-experimental for Navi 14...

Wednesday marked the v1.0.2878 update to Intel's "IGC" Graphics Compiler that is used by their graphics hardware compute stack...

Mesa 19.3 had been expected for release next week per their original release calendar, but as we are used to seeing for these quarterly feature releases, at least one if not more weekly release candidates tend to be needed for ironing out bugs. As such, Mesa 19.3.0 is now solidly looking like at least an early December release while Mesa 19.3-RC4 shipped on Wednesday...

The "Data Streaming Accelerator" (DSA) is a new block on future Intel CPUs that hasn't been talked about much publicly... Until now. Intel's open-source crew has begun detailing DSA for future Intel CPUs that will offer high-performance data movement and transformation operations. The Linux driver enablement has begun...

Mesa 19.2.5 is out today as the latest bi-weekly stable update to the current Mesa 19.2 series...

With Linux 5.4 due to be released this coming Sunday, 24 November, one of the big "winners" of this next kernel are AMD Radeon customers. Linux 5.4 brings support for new GPUs as well as better performance for existing graphics cards. Here are some fresh benchmarks of the performance wins as a result of the LRU bulk moves functionality.

Last week ago we provided a number of benchmarks looking at the performance impact from Intel's Jump Conditional Code (JCC) Erratum that required a CPU microcode update to mitigate but that comes with a performance hit. At least Intel has pending GNU Assembler patches to help offset that performance hit. In time for last week's articles I didn't have a chance to perform Skylake Xeon Scalable (1st Gen) benchmarks but now here are some metrics alongside Cascade Lake...

NVIDIA has released CUDA 10.2 for SuperComputing 19 week. CUDA 10.2 comes with some interesting changes, including to be the last release that will support Apple's macOS and the introduction of a standard C++ library for GPUs...

Intel's SVT-AV1 video encoder for AV1 is currently the fastest AV1 CPU-based encoder we have seen but it's looking like in due time Rav1e could be closing in on it if they continue with their current trajectory...

The latest enterprise push by Ubuntu maker Canonical is Charmed OSM as their own commercial flavor of Open-Source MANO...

The Intel "Gen11" Iris Plus Graphics on Ice Lake are a big upgrade over earlier Intel graphics generations but the gains are even more enticing if making use of their new Gallium3D OpenGL Linux driver...

The long overdue X.Org Server 1.21 still hasn't been organized for release but at least the extra time is allowing more XWayland bits to land...

While there is no sign of Solaris 11.5 or Solaris.Next (last year was a road-map pointing to Solaris 11.Next in H2'19 or H1'20 that has since been removed), Oracle does continue putting out more updates to the Solaris 11.4 series...

It's been three weeks already since the last DXVK update but that was succeeded this evening by DXVK 1.4.5 as another notable update to this project mapping Direct3D 10/11 onto Vulkan for speeding up the Wine/Proton-based Windows gaming experience on Linux...

With the many Intel Ice Lake Linux benchmarks we began publishing over the past month since picking up a Dell XPS with Core i7-1065G7, there have been many benchmarks compared to the likes of the Core i7 Whiskey Lake and Kaby Lake processors. For those curious how the performance stacks up going further back, here are some Ubuntu 19.10 laptop benchmarks putting it up against the likes of Core i7 Haswell and Broadwell processors.

A few days ago Debian Project Leader Sam Hartman laid out the proposals for the upcoming Debian General Resolution vote concerning "init system diversity" and just how much Debian developers still care in 2019 about supporting non-systemd init systems within the Linux distribution...

The open-source vkBasalt project was started as a layer implementing Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (akin to Radeon Image Sharpening) for any Vulkan-using GPU/driver/software. The vkBasalt project then picked up FXAA support for this Vulkan post-processing layer while now a new release is out with more functionality added...

Coreboot 4.11 was released today as the tagged autumn build of Coreboot that is used as an alternative to proprietary BIOS/firmware on motherboards...

Mainlining of the WireGuard secure VPN tunnel was being held up by its use of the new "Zinc" crypto API developed in conjunction with this network tech. But with obstacles in getting Zinc merged, WireGuard was going to be resorting to targeting the existing kernel crypto interfaces. Instead, however, it turns out the upstream Linux crypto developers were interested and willing to incorporate some elements of Zinc into the existing kernel crypto implementation...