on (#43P3K)
Linus Torvalds has announced the fourth weekly test release of the in-development Linux 4.20 kernel...
Phoronix
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| Updated | 2024-11-29 12:15 |
on (#43NYJ)
Thomas Gleixner on Sunday sent out the second version of the cleaned up patches around lowering the overhead of STIBP "Single Thread Indirect Branch Predictors" and the related IBPB "Indirect Branch Predictor Barrier" for Linux 4.20...
on (#43NHX)
Released this week was AMDVLK 2018.4.2 having been released this past week as the newest open-source AMD Vulkan driver code derived from their official Vulkan driver code-base but with using the AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end over their proprietary shader compiler. For your latest Vulkan benchmark viewing pleasure is a look at this newest AMDVLK release compared to AMDGPU-PRO 18.40 (the same fundamental Vulkan driver but with the closed-source shader compiler) and then the RADV Vulkan drivers in the form of Mesa 18.2 stable and the now in-development Mesa 19.0. These four AMD Radeon Vulkan driver combinations were tested on Fiji, Polaris, and Vega graphics processors.
on (#43NHY)
Just a friendly reminder if you enjoy our original daily open-source/Linux news, benchmarks, and hardware reviews, Monday (26 November) is your last day to participate in our holiday special for snagging a great deal on a annual or life-time subscription to the site that helps support our testing efforts while allowing you to view the site ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits...
on (#43NHZ)
With KDE Frameworks 5.53 due out in December there is a significant performance fix in the KIO slaves code...
on (#43N80)
Wine founder and lead developer Alexandre Julliard has laid out the release plans around the upcoming Wine 4.0 stable release for delivering a year's worth of improvements for running Windows games/applications on Linux, BSDs, and macOS...
on (#43N81)
It turns out AMD quietly pushed out a public preview release of their upcoming Radeon Software 18.50 Linux driver (also referred to as AMDGPU-PRO 18.50). The public change-log is light, but there are references to the initial bring-up for next-generation Navi graphics...
on (#43N68)
BOLT is the Binary Optimization and Layout Tool that is a Facebook Incubator project for speeding up Linux x86-64/AArch64 ELF binaries...
on (#43N69)
FreeBSD 12.0 Release Candidate 2 is now available for testing ahead of the official release in December...
on (#43MWB)
For those with an ASUS Tinker Board, the Debian-based TinkerOS has an updated operating system release...
on (#43MWC)
Should you be using the Meson DRM/KMS Linux driver for Amlogic hardware support, HDMI 2.0 4K @ 60Hz support is on the way...
on (#43MHS)
Yet more fallout from the Linux 4.20 development kernel is over the newly-added Logitech "high resolution scrolling" functionality that is now being disabled until a better solution is in place...
on (#43M32)
Released on Thursday was PHP 7.3 RC6 as the last planned pre-release for the upcoming PHP 7.3. Here are some benchmarks looking at the PHP 7.3 performance compared to PHP releases going back to the v5.5 series on a Linux server...
on (#43KSZ)
With Feral Interactive's modern Linux game ports that rely upon the Vulkan graphics API for rendering, the company usually lists the Radeon R9 285 as the minimum requirement. That's generally because the R9 285 "Tonga" is the first graphics card officially supported by the AMDGPU kernel driver, which is necessary for RADV Vulkan driver support, but with non-default options it's possible to get AMDGPU+RADV working on GCN 1.0 Southern Islands and GCN 1.1 Sea Islands graphics cards. Here are some benchmarks of that experimental GCN 1.0/1.1 Vulkan support using Feral's newest Linux game port, Total War: Warhammer II, in a 25-way AMD/NVIDIA graphics card comparison for Linux gaming.
on (#43KQ8)
On Friday marked the release of the Linux 4.19.4 kernel as well as 4.14.83 and 4.9.139...
on (#43KN1)
With the Linux 4.20 kernel there is the initial display code for NVIDIA's Tegra194 "Xavier" SoC while the next kernel cycle, Linux 4.21, will bring the rest of the display enablement code and enough to light up the HDMI output on the Jetson AGX Xavier...
on (#43KJA)
Release preparations continue for DragonFlyBSD 5.4 that will officially premiere in the days ahead...
on (#43KJB)
AMD's Marek Olšák known for his many additions and performance optimizations to RadeonSI and who is leading Mesa development this year with the most commits has been working on some AMDGPU winsys optimizations...
on (#43KGP)
For those doing some US holiday weekend gaming or testing out any new Steam Play games from the Steam Autumn Sale, DXVK 0.93 is out today as the project's latest feature release for mapping Direct3D 10/11 to Vulkan on Linux...
on (#43JX7)
At the start of October, Raptor Computing Systems announced Blackbird as a lower-cost POWER9 motherboard built on a micro-ATX footprint. We now have the firm specs on this motherboard as well as the current pricing as the pre-order window has just opened...
on (#43JV6)
Due to the performance fallout from the introduction of STIBP for cross-hyperthread Spectre Variant Two mitigation in the Linux 4.20 kernel, the stable Linux kernels are reverting those patches after originally being quickly back-ported to those branches. For Linux 4.20, STIBP on by default for all processes remain in place until the revised STIBP code is ready for merging that is still expected to happen before the stable Linux 4.20 debut in about one month's time. Here are some initial benchmarks of those preliminary improvements.
on (#43JNA)
Wine 3.21 is out today as the latest bi-weekly development release for running Windows games and applications on Linux and other operating systems...
on (#43J6X)
Merged last month for the Linux 4.20 kernel was The Cedrus VPU driver for Allwinner SoCs that was developed by Bootlin. Initially the video format supported with this kernel is MPEG-2, but H.264 and H.265 support is moving closer to mainline too...
on (#43J0A)
Unity Tech recently presented at their Unite LA conference about their 2019 road-map. There is a ton they are planning for both gamers and developers utilizing their cross-platform game engine over the next year...
on (#43HS3)
Released last week was the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ as their latest ARM SBC coming in at the $25 USD price point and their last board release before doing a redesign. I was able to snag a Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ for $25 with availability appearing to be better than some of the past Raspberry Pi releases. Here are some initial benchmarks of the RPi 3 Model A Plus compared to a few other ARM boards.
on (#43HPE)
It's been a busy week in GNOME's Mutter space as in addition to the GPU hot-plugging and DisplayLink improvements, Mutter when running as a Wayland compositor will now behave correctly when setup for non-60Hz display refresh rates...
on (#43HPF)
Following their first DRM-Next feature pull request submitted at the start of November, Intel's Open-Source Technology Center developers have mailed out their second batch of feature changes ahead of the Linux 4.21 kernel cycle...
on (#43HPG)
With DragonFlyBSD 5.4 releasing in the days ahead, its code has been branched while now open on Git master is the DragonFlyBSD 5.5 development tree...
on (#43HPH)
A set of patches posted today enable support in the upstream open-source Freedreno-aligned MSM DRM driver to support the original Qualcomm Adreno 200 series. That was the first Adreno series offering a programmable function pipeline and clock speeds up to 133MHz...
on (#43H37)
Now with having more time to test this week's release of Total War: Warhammer II on Linux, here is a large 14-way graphics card comparison of various AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce GPUs. With more time plus an updated version of the pts/tww2 test profile to address a resolution scaling issue, tests are done at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K resolutions as well as providing performance-per-dollar metrics for this latest Vulkan-powered high profile Linux game port.
on (#43GQG)
The Linux stable trees that recently received STIBP "Single Thread Indirect Branch Predictors" after back-porting from Linux 4.20 are seeing the code reverted. This is the change that recently caused major slowdowns in Linux performance for workloads like Python, PHP, Java, code compilation, and other workloads like some games...
on (#43GMP)
Just in time for some holiday entertainment, the Kodi team has put out the first release candidate of their upcoming Kodi 18 "Leia" release...
on (#43G6M)
The fourth weekly release candidate of Mesa 18.3 is now available for testing while the official release could be coming in the days ahead...
on (#43FV0)
As likely the last development milestone before officially releasing Qt 5.12 LTS, the release candidate was issued this morning...
on (#43FV1)
If you currently have a Cougar 700K gaming keyboard or possibly picking one up over the holidays, it should work better with the next Linux kernel cycle...
on (#43FV2)
Those wanting to get Phoronix Premium to enjoy ad-free browsing and multi-page article viewing on a single page can do so for just $25 USD, a nearly 30% savings! Or there's an even better deal if you want lifetime access...
on (#43FPZ)
Elivepatch is a distributed live kernel patching mechanism developed by the Gentoo crowd during GSoC 2017 and has continued to be developed. While it is still centered around Gentoo, there are ambitions to bring this open-source live kernel patching tech to other distributions...
on (#43FQ0)
When it comes to letdowns for Mesa in 2018, sadly OpenGL 4.6 support didn't reach mainline. Another unfortunate feature not making it into the Mesa 18.x release series is the "soft FP64" support to allow some older GPUs to work with OpenGL 4.x. While we haven't seen any new soft FP64 patches in a while, not all hope is lost...
on (#43FKW)
While the Intel Open-Source Technology Center invests heavily into the GNU/Linux toolchain in ensuring their future processors will have their full feature set and performance potential exploited, when it comes to the GNU C Library "glibc" in particular it can be quite a while before Linux distributions pull in a new release that contains various Intel performance optimizations. As a result, Intel Linux veteran toolchain developer H.J. Lu has laid out a new proposal...
on (#43FKX)
Another batch of drm-misc-next changes has been staged ahead of the Linux 4.21 kernel merge window that will open at the end of December or early January...
on (#43FHB)
After working on the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver for nearly a decade, Ben Widawsky of the Intel Open-Source Technology Center shifted roles to focus on Intel enablement for FreeBSD. In this role over the past several months he has been focusing on FreeBSD power management improvements for Intel hardware...
on (#43EVP)
GNOME's Mutter compositor native back-end will now deal with GPU hot-plugging at run-time and begin managing its display outputs...
on (#43EVQ)
The FreeBSD desktop with NVIDIA graphics driver support is about to become more viable for gaming with the 64-bit Linux compatibility layer...
on (#43EVR)
It was just two months ago that the VideoLAN/VLC crew announced the DAV1D AV1 video decoder and already it's becoming quite feature complete and super fast...
on (#43DKN)
Yesterday Feral Interactive released their much anticipated port of Total War: Warhammer II for Linux. This latest Linux game port is yet another Vulkan-powered game. Here are some initial benchmark results of Warhammer II running natively on Ubuntu Linux with a variety of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.
on (#43DB4)
While this year Oracle was successful in getting DTrace working well on Linux assuming you apply their patches or (more easily) using their Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel on Oracle Linux, they are looking at enhancing DTrace with the increasingly-used eBPF framework / in-kernel JIT...
on (#43D7J)
Version 7 of the task property based options to enable Spectre V2 userspace-userspace protection patches, a.k.a. the work offering improved / less regressing approach for STIBP, is now available for testing and code review...
on (#43D1V)
Intel developers have submitted their GCC compiler enablement patch for the Cascade Lake 14nm CPUs due out starting in early 2019...
on (#43D1W)
At the start of 2018 there was early work on Cgroups support for DRM drivers. That early work was done by Intel developers on using cgroups to allow restricting the GPU priority. AMD is now looking to build a more extensive DRM cgroup controller support for monitoring and restricting GPU resources...
on (#43D1X)
Years ago there was much interest in the ability to build the mainline Linux kernel with the LLVM Clang compiler as an alternative to using the GCC compiler in order to ensure better code portability, shaking out GCC'isms, possible build speed improvements, and other benefits. But in recent years it seems to have waned in interest but now things are heating up again...