Phoronix

AMD developers have a miraculous Christmas present for their open-source Linux users, particularly Linux gamers with FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync displays... This last major feature missing from AMDGPU DRM driver that's long been sought after is finally set to land in the mainline Linux kernel!..

In addition to Linux 4.21 set to land Adiantum as the crypto algorithm backed by Google following the company's falling out with the NSA's Speck crypto for low-end data encryption, Streebog is also set to be introduced as a cryptographic hash function developed in large part by the Russian government...

Released yesterday was Qt 5.12 RC2 while on track for next week is the official release of this tool-kit under its latest long-term support banner...

Mesa 18.3 release manager Emil Velikov announced the release of Mesa 18.3-RC5 on Thursday as this cycle enters overtime due to an active blocker bug...

Adding to the list of new features for GCC 9 due out early next year is a new -flive-patching= flag to help with scenarios like live Linux kernel patching...

Now queued in the networking subsystem's "-next" branch ahead of the Linux 4.21 cycle is the Aquantia AQtion driver, which is for new hardware supporting USB-based 2.5Gb and 5Gb Ethernet support...

For those sticking to the Wine stable releases, Wine 3.0.4 is out today as the latest stable point release...

AMD has just dropped a new Family 17h "Zen" microcode file for Linux users...

As it has been a while since last running some Linux I/O scheduler benchmarks, here are some fresh results while using the new Linux 4.19 stable kernel and tests carried out from a 500GB Samsung 860 EVO SATA 3.0 SSD within a 2P EPYC Dell PowerEdge R7425 Linux server...

As a smashing early Christmas gift to the open-source community, Blender 2.80 is now in beta for this widely-used open-source 3D modeling software...

While AMD is able to reproduce the Radeon RX 590 Linux failure and is currently investigating the necessary Linux driver fix(es) for getting this latest Polaris refresh graphics card working correctly, if you already upgraded and don't have the luxury of switching to another graphics card until a solution is in place, there is a workaround to getting the RX 590 on Linux with working hardware acceleration but very slow performance...

Most of those wanting an open-source, GNU/Linux-based smartphone have been looking forward to Purism's Librem 5 that will hopefully be shipping in 2019. But now a new option appears to be jumping on the scene: the Necunos Mobile developed by Necuno Solutions in cooperation with the KDE camp...

Stemming from the recent proposal about a libre GPU using a RISC-V chip running a Rust-based software renderer like a software-based Vulkan implementation, the developer appears to be ready to take on designing a quad-core RISC-V libre SoC that he believes can be competitive for mobile devices...

Adiantum is the new crypto algorithm Google is backing for disk encryption on low-end (Android) devices following their change of course regarding the controversial NSA-developed Speck algorithm earlier this year...

While Stoney Ridge was AMD's 2016 APU platform with Excavator CPU cores and GCN 1.2 graphics, the Linux support in some regards is still being settled in some areas...

While GNU Hurd is designed to go hand-in-hand with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), there is now upstream compiler toolchain support with the more liberally licensed LLVM Clang C/C++ compiler...

QEMU 3.1.0 will be out within the next week or two depending upon any last minute blocker bugs...

It looks like open-source AMD driver developer Marek Olšák is finishing out the month by working on a few remaining extensions to benefit not only their RadeonSI driver but also the old R600g and other Mesa drivers...

For those that may have been wanting to try out Clear Linux of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center on desktops/workstation, it's now easier to do thanks to a new "desktop live" image accompanied by a new OS installer to make it more akin to conventional desktop Linux distributions...

Valve managed to ship their latest game today as planned and without any major delays...

NVIDIA has updated their Vulkan Linux beta driver series and with that finally re-based onto their current 415 release stream...

While Mesa 18.3 is due to be released in the days ahead, the Mesa 18.2 bi-weekly stable point releases are continuing for the time being and today marks the v18.2.6 release...

Monday night Amazon announced the new "A1" instance type for the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) that is powered by their own "Graviton" ARMv8 processors. Since then I have been running benchmarks on Amazon's first-generation 64-bit ARM processors and seeing how these ARM cloud instances compare to their Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC performance on EC2 in both raw performance as well as performance-per-dollar.

Last month ODROID announced an Intel-powered single board computer after their experimenting with a Ryzen SBC hadn't panned out for this company known for their high-performance ARM SBCs. The ODROID-H2 has begun shipping as this $111 USD Intel x86_64 quad-core board while for your viewing pleasure today are some initial performance benchmarks of this board...

Adding to the headaches around Linux 4.19 stable is an EXT4 file-system corruption issue that has yet to be sorted out...

When the Radeon RX 590 launched two weeks ago, Linux support wasn't anticipated to be a problem with it being yet another Polaris graphics card and largely unchanged from a driver perspective compared to the RX 580 and other Polaris cards the past few years. Sadly at least for some AIB RX 590 cards, that hasn't turned out to be the case...

For several months now the mainline LLVM Clang compiler code has offered Speculative Load Hardening (SLH) for the compiler-based approach for Spectre Variant One protection for critical software that might not be mitigated by hand against Spectre V1 vulnerabilities that can be picked up by Smatch and other utilities. The Clang compiler now has support for SLH on a function-by-function basis...

It looks like the mainline Linux 4.20 kernel within a few days will be playing nicely on more AMD hardware. In particular, the Raven Ridge Zen+Vega APUs that have been rather troublesome depending upon the BIOS/motherboard since their launch almost one year ago...

The SDL2 library commonly used by Linux/cross-platform games now has support for the Razer Raiju Mobile gaming controller...

Intel's Maarten Lankhorst has sent out another pull request of drm-misc-next changes slated for the Linux 4.21 kernel. This pull includes updates to the smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers as well as some core changes...

At the end of last year Intel announced the Stratix 10 FPGA with HBM2 memory for HPC workloads. With the Linux 4.21 kernel cycle, the support for this hardware will be further improved upon for FPGA programming with the mainline kernel...

Similar to the GCC patch for Intel Cascade lake CPU support that was posted last week, the LLVM Clang compiler stack now supports these forthcoming Intel server CPUs...

The Linux Foundation and RISC-V Foundation are announcing a joint collaboration effort today to promote open-source development and adoption around this royalty-free CPU instruction set architecture...

Making the rounds this morning is an ASRock forum post about a motherboard accidentally and repeatedly wiping out Linux Software RAID meta-data. A few Phoronix readers have also reported similar issues such as in the forums and Twitter. This appears to stem from an UEFI issue...

In the benchmarks earlier this month looking at the Talos II POWER9 dual 22-core performance its performance was compared to various AMD Threadripper and Intel Core i9 CPUs. They were used as comparison points since all of those CPUs sport four memory channels, including the Sforza POWER9 CPUs, while IBM caters the larger LaGrange/Monza POWER9 modules with eight memory channels as competition to Xeon and EPYC. But for those wondering how the POWER9 Sforza performance compares to Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC processors, here are some benchmarks.

LunarG has shipped the latest version of the Vulkan SDK that pulls in support for the many recently introduced extensions from VK_NV_ray_tracing to VK_EXT_pci_bus_info and VK_EXT_transform_feedback, among other recent vendor extensions. There is also bug fixes and improved validation coverage for this Vulkan SDK...

Following the plan to cancel or significantly delay Fedora 31 to work on extensive tooling of the Linux distribution, there is a separate proposal that was volleyed suggesting Fedora move to an annual release cadence...

Fresh out of the US holiday weekend, the Intel Iris Gallium3D driver that is forming as the company's future OpenGL Linux driver with better performance potential and modern design, saw a number of new code commits...

Red Hat's oVirt virtualization management platform, which is used by Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and an alternative to VMware vSphere, is working on their next feature release as version 4.3...

For the past year the Btrfs file-system in the mainline Linux kernel has supported Zstd as one of its file-system compression options. With the very latest GRUB boot-loader code, it can now deal with your Zstd-compressed Btrfs file-systems...

The UBports community is in the process of rolling out the release candidate for their next Ubuntu Touch Over The Air update...

With the interest coming about today from a RADV tweak after bisecting the Linux 4.20 kernel speed-up for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver with the AMDGPU DRM driver, here are some benchmarks from Linux 4.16 through 4.20 looking at the performance on Polaris and Vega graphics cards...

Here is a look at how the Linux kernel performance has evolved since Linux 4.10, which was released back in February of 2017, up through the current Linux 4.20 development cycle ahead of its debut at the end of December or early January. All of the Linux kernel benchmarks were done on the same venerable Intel Core i7 5960X system.

Following the release of Fedora 30 in May, there might not be another major Fedora Linux release for about one year's time...

Phoronix Test Suite 8.4 is now available as the latest quarterly feature update to our cross-platform, open-source and fully-automated benchmarking software for Linux, macOS, Windows, Solaris, and BSD operating systems...

Fresh out of our Radeon Vulkan Driver Benchmarks: AMDVLK 2018.4.2 vs. AMDGPU-PRO 18.40 vs. Mesa 18.2/19.0, RADV driver co-founder Bas Nieuwenhuizen has posted a patch to help further the performance of the Mesa RADV driver...

Vulkan 1.1.94 is out today as the latest update to this graphics and compute API. This latest refinement to Vulkan introduces two new extensions...

One of the most passionate topics by readers in the Phoronix Forums is the Rust programming language. For about one year now "RLSL" has been in the works as a Rust-based shading language that can compile into SPIR-V. While initially I held off on writing about it to see if it would be just another small toy project, RLSL has continued maturing and seeing new functionality added in...

While GCC 9 is releasing in early 2019, for those still depending upon last year's GCC 7 compiler series, the GCC 7.4 point release will soon be out...

Built off Friday's release of Wine 3.21, which is the last expected development release ahead of the upcoming code freeze for Wine 4.0, Wine-Staging 3.21 is now available with its hundreds of extra testing/development patches...