Phoronix

The Software Guard Extensions (SGX) support for the Linux kernel around the memory enclaves continues to be worked on by the open-source Intel team and is now up to their twenty-second revision but it's not clear that this code is ready yet for the upcoming Linux 5.4 cycle...

Intel announced at IFA 2019 in Berlin that their Core i9 9900KS processor will be releasing next month...

Given the recent talk about the Schedutil CPU frequency scaling governor and its future along with CPU frequency scaling behavior in general on AMD Zen 2 processors, here are some benchmarks of the Ryzen 9 3900X when tested with the different Linux "CPUFreq" governor options.

While most games/engines and software in general are moving from OpenGL to Vulkan, NVIDIA is still investing in their OpenGL driver stack and even adding new multi-GPU/SLI functionality to their driver and as part of that introducing new extensions...

While not officially released yet, support for the ASpeed AST2600 is coming to the Linux 5.4 kernel...

Not included as part of our original EPYC 7742 / EPYC 7002 "Rome" Linux benchmarks was the NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB) developed by NASA. While an MPI testing favorite, there were build issues with the older version of NPB packaged by the Phoronix Test Suite. But with recently having updated that test profile against the latest NPB upstream, here are some results for the EPYC 7742 2P, EPYC 7601 2P, and dual Xeon Platinum 8280 benchmark results. Separately, there's also results now for NeatBench 5 with this video editing plug-in test case now part of the Phoronix Test Suite...

Red Hat's David Airlie has been refocusing efforts recently on improving the state of the LLVMpipe driver that implements OpenGL / OpenGL ES on top of CPUs using LLVM. In the past few weeks he's been wiring up more GL4 / GLES 3.1 extensions and this morning the latest achievement is supporting OpenGL compute shaders!..

The Schedutil CPU frequency scaling governor has been around for a few years and has gotten better over time but in our own tests we still find it frequently not being as competitive to the "performance" governor and others. However, in the future Schedutil might become the default and perhaps only governor...

Next year's GNU Compiler Collection 10 (GCC 10) compiler release is doing away with support for IBM's Cell Broadband Engine SPU support...

While atomic mode-setting has been around for several years now and to provide a modern mode-setting interface that can test modes prior to the actual operation and reduce possible flickering during mode-setting events and also being faster, the common xf86-video-modesetting driver has at least temporarily disabled the support by default...

Following the recent hype of Intel's Windows graphics driver introducing integer mode scaling support, their open-source Linux graphics driver is receiving similar treatment with nearest-neighbor integer scaling support...

Go 1.13 was released today as Google's latest update to their language and run-time/toolchain...

Google has officially released Android 10 today, what formerly was known as "Android Q" during development...

As expected after Intel provided Thunderbolt 3 to the USB Promoter Group royalty-free earlier this year, the USB 4.0 "USB4" specification was published today and indeed based on the Thunderbolt protocol specification...

Continuing on from last week's testing that found the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X + ASUS CROSSHAIR VIII HERO WiFi consuming more power on Linux compared to Windows 10, here are some additional metrics after spending a good deal of time over the weekend on further tests...

There has been a lot of talk recently of AMD Ryzen 3000 series processors reportedly not hitting their boost clock frequencies, whether stock coolers are adequate for hitting the boost frequencies, and other concerns around the boost behavior on these new Zen 2 processors. AMD issued a statement today they are rolling out a new BIOS/firmware update to help with boost clock frequency optimizations...

Adding to the growing list of features for Linux 5.4 with its cycle officially kicking off in mid-September is a kernel scheduler optimization designed to improve load balancing on AMD EPYC servers...

Oreboot has been in development for a number of months now and while at first may have sounded like a novelty downstream of Coreboot is now proving its usefulness and taking shape...

The third and likely final development milestone release ahead of this month's Phoronix Test Suite 9.0-Asker release is now available for cross-platform, fully-automated benchmarking...

Systemd 243 finally shipped this morning as the latest major update to this widely used Linux init system...

Even as we approach 2020, many Linux distributions and various desktop programs still isn't fully optimized for today's modern HiDPI screens. Fortunately for users of Ubuntu-based Linux Mint, their next update will further improve its HiDPI support...

UPower is the abstraction layer around batteries and other power devices on Linux. Even with it being years since it was known as DeviceKit-power and seeing many 0.99 updates, the UPower 1.0 release isn't there yet but at least UPower 0.99.11 is now available as their first release since February...

An interesting new addition to FFmpeg's avformat library is ZeroMQ protocol support for enhancing its streaming abilities...

In addition to Mutter seeing today an important last minute performance fix for the NVIDIA proprietary driver, Mutter also saw a long-standing performance optimization finally land for GNOME 3.34 that benefits all hardware/drivers...

It appears Linus Torvalds is spending some time away from his computers this US Labor Day weekend with the Linux 5.3-rc7 kernel test release coming one day late...

Firefox 69.0 is set to be officially released tomorrow but for those eager to upgrade the release binaries have now hit their FTP server...

The increasingly used Godot open-source game engine has been working on porting to Vulkan as part of Godot 4.0. With much of the lower-level and 2D bits in good standing, work on their 3D rendering support with Vulkan has begun...

There isn't any AV1 video decode/encode built into the video engines of today's GPUs, but the DAV1D project CPU-based AV1 decoder is experimenting with offloading some aspects of the process to current generation hardware with OpenGL ES and Vulkan...

For those with extra time on their hands this US Labor Day, the Kodi team behind this open-source HTPC software issued their 18.4 Leia release...

GNOME 3.34 is expected for release next Tuesday while squeezing into Mutter this morning is an important performance fix for those running GNOME on X11 with the NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver...

Based off Friday's Wine 4.15, Wine-Staging 4.15 is now available that has its 800+ existing patches while adding a number of new patches and updating functionality for some of the existing feature patches...

LLVM 9.0 is past due for release but it looks like this compiler stack along with sub-projects like Clang 9.0 could be released in the coming weeks...

Linux 5.4 will be a big kernel on the file-system front as in addition to introducing the new VirtIO-FS and exFAT file-system support, Huawei's EROFS file-system will be graduating from staging...

When looking back over the 270 original news articles on Phoronix during August and our 17 featured Linux hardware reviews / benchmark articles, the majority of the most popular content came down to our continued testing of the AMD Ryzen 3000 series processors and the newly-launched AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors...

Ghidra is the open-source reverse engineering tool published by the US National Security Agency as an alternative to existing decompilers/disassemblers and other reverse engineering utilities. As noted earlier this summer, a Google Summer of Code project has been creating Ghidra plug-ins for helping with firmware reverse engineering...

It's been a number of months since last seeing a new release of GreenWithEnvy or hearing anything out of the project, but this weekend is finally a new version of this open-source overclocking panel for NVIDIA graphics cards on Linux...

KDE had a busy final week to August...

In addition to the new hardware support and other features queued already in DRM-Next for the upcoming Linux 5.4 merge window, on Friday AMD sent in a final pull request to DRM-Next of new material ahead of this upcoming kernel cycle...

In addition to NetBSD seeing better DRM ioctl support for its Linux compatibility layer (as part of an effort towards possible Steam support) thanks to Google Summer of Code 2019, there were also Wine improvements as a result of this Google programming initiative...

The Intel Icelake Linux support has largely been squared away for months but one lingering important feature for many is the Thunderbolt support and that's now set to be introduced with the upcoming Linux 5.4 version...

The EOMA68 computer card design was novel when first talked about for interchangeable Arm-based computer cards that could also be installed within laptops and other devices. But even after being worked on for years and raising more than $234k USD, it's still not ready yet to see the light of day...

This past week was GNOME's annual developer conference, GUADEC. Video recordings from all the presentations at this event in Thessaloniki, Greece are now online...

In addition to the initial exFAT driver landing for Linux 5.4, also slated to land for this next kernel cycle is the VirtIO-FS file-system driver...

Wine 4.15 is out for testing this US holiday weekend. With Wine 4.15 it brings an initial implementation of Windows' HTTP.sys as the HTTP protocol stack that is a kernel-mode driver that lists for HTTP requests and passes it onto Microsoft's IIS...

Back on the AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" launch day I wrote about how AMD is working to return to open-source BIOS / Coreboot support and now there's further confirmation of their work in that direction...

The Linux 5.4 kernel merge window will kick off in September and with this next kernel cycle the initial open-source exFAT file-system driver is set to be mainlined for supporting this Microsoft file-system, but it will premiere within the kernel's "staging" area for code of lesser, yet-to-be-proven quality...

The ACRN hypervisor that was open-sourced by Intel last year as a small footprint virtualization hypervisor focused on real-time computing and safety-critical applications for IoT and related embedded use-cases is up to version 1.2...

While we are often testing Intel's Clear Linux on high-end desktop and server hardware, it turns out even on the opposite end of the spectrum that their performance-optimized distribution can offer meaningful performance advantages on low-end SoCs for IoT-type devices. When testing Clear Linux with an Apollolake platform, it came out to being about 20% faster than the likes of Fedora and Ubuntu Linux.

Frequently brought up following our various Ryzen 3000 "Zen 2" benchmarks like the Ryzen 9 3900X vs. Core i9 9900K gaming benchmarks is how the Ryzen 9 3900X is pulling considerably more power than the similarly equipped Intel Core i9 system and those numbers are higher than what is often cited by Windows reviewers as the difference. I've begun investigating that power difference and indeed quite quickly could see Linux power usage being higher than Windows 10...

Waypipe is off to the races as the newest network transparency effort in the Wayland space. Waypipe provides a network transparent Wayland proxy for running native Wayland programs/games over a network similar to X11's capabilities and forwarding X over an SSH connection...