Phoronix

Arriving earlier this month was a Dell PowerEdge R7425 server at Phoronix that was equipped with two AMD EPYC 7601 processors, 512GB of RAM, and 20 Samsung 860 EVO SSDs to make for a very interesting test platform and our first that is based on a dual EPYC design with our many other EPYC Linux benchmarks to date being 1P. Here is a look at the full performance capabilities of this 64-core / 128-thread server compared to a variety of other AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon processors while also doubling as an initial look at the performance of these server CPUs on Ubuntu 18.10.

Just ahead of Ubuntu 18.10, Solus 4, and Fedora 29 among other forthcoming Linux distribution releases, Elementary OS 5 "Juno" has been released for a polished desktop experience that aims to compete with macOS and Windows for desktop usability...

More Linux storage drivers have been converted to the "blk-mq" interfaces for the multi-queue block I/O queuing mechanism for the 4.20~5.0 kernel cycle...

NVIDIA has released the 410.66 Linux graphics driver today as their first stable release in the 410 series and comes with support for the new GeForce RTX 2070 graphics card...

While CodeWeavers' developers have been busy with improvements to Wine and Valve's downstream "Proton" for allowing a great Windows-on-Linux gaming experience, they haven't parted ways with their core business and today they announced the availability of CrossOver 18...

NVIDIA's embargo for reviews on the GeForce RTX 2070 graphics cards has now expired ahead of the expected retail availability on Wednesday...

Adding to the long list of new features for what will be Linux 4.20 or likely renamed to Linux 5.0 per Linus Torvalds' numbering preferences is a new wireless networking subsystem within the kernel's networking code... Meet LoRa...

With the Linux 4.19 kernel set to be released next weekend, here's a recap of the most prominent features to be found in this next kernel release...

Just two weeks after the Qt 5.12 beta release, a second beta is now available for testing of this forthcoming tool-kit update...

While Ubuntu 18.10 is set to roll out this week with its new theme and an assortment of package updates and other enhancements, there is one feature Canonical previously talked about for the Ubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish" cycle that we have yet to see made public...

Going in hand with their work on display stream compression for dealing with next-generation displays, the Intel Direct Rendering Manager driver developers are working on "FEC" support to deal with any errors that come up in the stream...

Solaris 10, what may will argue as the last "good" Solaris operating system release before Sun Microsystems fell under control of Oracle, may soon see its support deprecated by the GCC compiler stack...

With this weekend's release of Vulkan 1.1.88 stealing the show was the Vulkan transform feedback capability to allow projects like DXVK to support Direct3D's Stream Output functionality. But besides VK_EXT_transform_feedback, there are other extensions also being worked on for Mesa ANV / RADV Vulkan driver coverage...

Purism has shared the latest details on their efforts to deliver the open-source Linux Librem 5 smartphone to market in 2019...

The Qualcomm/Atheros "Ath10k" Linux driver coming up in the Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel merge window is picking up two prominent features...

AMD's GPUOpen group today released CodeXL 2.6 as the newest version of their GPU developer suite...

FUSE file-systems in user-space are set to be running faster with the upcoming Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel thanks to several performance optimizations...

It's almost been a half-year already since the release of the long delayed X.Org Server 1.20, but with no signs of X.Org Server 1.21 releasing soon, xorg-server 1.20.2 was announced today as the latest stable point release...

FreeDesktop.org is already effectively part of X.Org given the loose structure of FreeDesktop.org, the key members/administrators being part of both projects, and FreeDesktop.org long being the de facto hosting platform from the X.Org Server to Mesa and much more. But now they may be officially joining forces...

As the latest of our benchmarks using the newly re-released Microsoft Windows 10 October 2018 Update, here are benchmarks of this latest Windows 10 build against seven different Linux distributions on the same hardware for checking out the current performance of these operating systems.

Existing Intel graphics hardware already supports SIMD32 fragment shaders and the Intel open-source Linux graphics driver has supported this mode for months, but it hasn't been enabled. That though is in the process of changing...

As a new alternative over XScreenSaver or using other desktop environments' screensaver functionality, xfce4-screensaver has out its first release albeit of alpha quality...

With the Linux 4.19-rc8 kernel release overnight, one change not to be found in this latest Linux 4.19 release candidate are any alterations to the new Code of Conduct. The latest proposal forbids discussing off-topic matters while protecting any sentient being in the universe...

DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has been quite impressed with AMD's Threadripper 2 processors particularly the Threadripper 2990WX with 32-cores / 64-threads. Dillon has made various optimizations to DragonFly for helping out this processor in past months and overnight he made another significant improvement...

KDE Frameworks 5.51 is out today as the latest monthly update to this collection of KDE libraries complementing Qt5...

Greg Kroah-Hartman went ahead and released Linux 4.19-RC8 as the last test release of the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel...

In addition to Ubuntu 18.10 releasing soon, Fedora 29 is set to be release by month's end if all goes well...

GNOME's Geoclue library that provides a D-Bus service for location information based on GPS receivers, 3G modems, GeoIP, or even WiFi-based geolocation has been baking a lot of changes...

If you are in the market for a dual monitor desk arm/mount that clamps to your desk, the HUANUO HNDSK2 is a surprisingly suitable contender...

A new ISO spin is available of the KaOS Linux distribution that is closely aligned with shipping the upstream KDE desktop experience...

After cracking 2,000 projects referencing Vulkan on GitHub earlier this year, this week it passed the milestone of having more than 2,500 projects...

It has been a very exciting weekend for Linux gamers relying upon Wine for running Windows titles under Linux... There was the routine bi-weekly Wine 3.18 development release on Friday but yesterday brought transform feedback to Vulkan and in turn Stream Output to DXVK to fix up a number of D3D11 games. Today is now the Wine-Staging 3.18 release...

If all goes well, the Ubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish" release will happen on 18 October but for that to happen they could use your help this weekend testing their release candidate spins...

Fixing a seven year old bug since the KDE4 days, KDE will now spin down external hard drives unmounting the drives to help stave off possible data loss / corruption...

Hot off merging transform feedback into DXVK for supporting Direct3D 11 Stream Output, Philip Rebohle released DXVK 0.90...

Today is certainly a very exciting day in the Vulkan space...

The GCC9 compiler code as of Friday has an initial implementation of the C++ networking technical specification...

With the newly-announced Vulkan 1.1.88 that brings VK_EXT_transform_feedback, the DXVK Direct3D-on-Vulkan layer has already implemented the transform feedback support...

Vulkan 1.1.88 is out this morning and it's an exciting Vulkan update. Say hello to Vulkan transform feedback!..

Recently there's been more improvements for LibreOffice with its Qt5 integration to allow this open-source office suite to jive better with Qt5-based desktops like KDE Plasma and now LXQt...

As a possible performance win, Jason Ekstrand as the lead developer of the Intel ANV open-source Vulkan driver has been developing a NIR cache...

A new bi-weekly Wine development release is out for those wanting to try the latest Windows gaming on Linux experience (outside of Steam Play / Proton) or running other Windows applications on Linux and other operating systems...

The UBports community that continues to maintain Ubuntu Touch for a range of mobile devices will soon be rolling out Ubuntu Touch OTA-5...

As the first of our Linux vs. Windows benchmarks coming around Microsoft's Windows 10 October 2018 Update, today we are exploring the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) performance to see if they have finally managed to improve the I/O performance for this Linux binary compatibility layer and how the WSL performs compared to Ubuntu and Clear Linux.

Especially with TrueOS once again taking a new direction, one of the few current BSDs focused on a great desktop experience is MidnightBSD that is about to mark its 1.0 release...

The recently posted patch for Intel Whiskey Lake support in Mesa has now been merged for Mesa 18.3...

Version 6.5 of the GNU Compiler Collection will soon be released to end out the GCC6 series...

The folks at the Libre Computer Project who have successfully released the Tritium, Le Potato, and other ARM SBCs while being as open-source friendly as possible have now announced La Frite...

The Ubuntu developers continuing to work on the Mir display server stack have made headway in their NVIDIA driver enablement effort...

GNOME 3.31.1 was released on Thursday as the first step towards the GNOME 3.32 desktop update due out in March...