Phoronix

While just one week past the Linux 5.4 merge window cut-off and now with XDC 2019 out of the day, Intel's open-source graphics driver team sent in their first batch of new material they will be targeting for the Linux 5.5 cycle...

One of the areas of performance I had been meaning to look more at following the recent AMD EPYC 7002 series launch was for database servers. With the original EPYC 7000 series performance, the performance came up short in competing with Intel Xeon CPUs, but for the EPYC Rome processors it ends up being a very different story. Given the launch last week of PostgreSQL 12, I've been trying out this new database server release on both EPYC and Xeon processors.

In addition to The Cascadelake X-Series CPUs launching at a much lower price, Intel announced the Xeon W-2200 series today also at lower pricing while cutting prices on their existing Core 9000 F-series desktop CPUs too...

AMD today lifted the lid on the Radeon RX 5500 series as their first Navi 14 based graphics card. This is the soft launch with no units shipping yet but expected to starting in November...

For those wondering, NVIDIA is still pursuing a generic allocator / Unix device memory allocator that has been talked about for years and a potential successor to the likes of the Generic Buffer Manager (GBM). They now have an implementation of their proposed allocator working for the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver though there still is a lot of work ahead...

With RMS resigning as head of the FSF but ultimately is remaining as head of the GNU, the Free Software Foundation is now publicly re-evaluating its relationship with the GNU...

The GNU Debugger (GDB) now has support for the Compact C Type Format following support for this debugging information format having been added to the GCC compiler and Binutils...

While popularity in Solaris-based operating systems may be on the decline, for Meson to ultimately replace other build systems it will need good support for said operating systems where Automake, CMake, and others are well supported. As such, with this weekend's Meson 0.52 release comes with better support for Solaris and the OpenSolaris-derived Illumos platforms...

While Red Hat is pursuing Pipewire with plans to fill the use-cases provided by the JACK(2) low-latency audio server, JACK2 isn't letting up and Sunday marked version 1.9.13 for the project and their first release since December 2017...

Vulkan 1.1.124 is out this Sunday evening with two new extensions...

Linus Torvalds is back on his Sunday release regiment with having just declared the Linux 5.4-rc2 test release and also took the opportunity to have some fun by shifting the kernel's codename to be the Nesting Opossum, replacing the Bobtail Squid...

With the bit of a surprise this past week of AMD flipping LRU bulk moves back on as a "fix" for Linux 5.4 and this now having landed in Linux 5.4 Git, here are some preliminary benchmarks of this feature being enabled on the newest 5.4 kernel builds since Friday.

While we are eager to see Godot 4.0 with its new Vulkan renderer and other improvements, Godot 3.2 is coming out first and this weekend marks the alpha release for this latest update to this leading open-source, cross-platform game engine...

WFX is a new WiFi driver being added to the staging area with the Linux 5.5 cycle coming up in a few months...

While the GNAT Ada front-end for GCC is in quite good shape, AdaCore has been experimenting with bringing their GNAT front-end to LLVM for allowing Ada code compilation with the LLVM compiler stack...

In addition to the Tigerlake support being plumbed within the Linux kernel and other areas of the open-source Linux software stack, this week they pushed out their initial Gen12 Tiger Lake support into the NEO compute run-time that is for providing OpenCL support as well as the ongoing SYCL enablement and other work around their forthcoming oneAPI model...

The Qt Company this week released the public beta of the forthcoming Qt 3D Studio for this development tool focused on creating rich 3D user interfaces with the Qt tool-kit...

This week Intel released MKL-DNN 1.1 as their open-source deep learning library. They also rebranded the software project as the "Deep Neural Network Library" (DNNL) though its focus remains the same. I ran some initial benchmarks on MKL-DNN/DNNL 1.1 on AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon hardware for reference...

KDE developers spent the first week of October working on improvements to their Dolphin file manager, seemingly never-ending work on HiDPI support, and a variety of other enhancements for this leading open-source desktop...

This week the GTK 4.0 development code picked up support for making use of the VK_KHR_incremental_present extension with its Vulkan renderer in order to allow much more efficient behavior...

With the ACO shader compiler back-end merged for Mesa 19.3 as of mid-September and more improvements merged since then, it's now very easy to try out this alternative to AMD's longstanding AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end. ACO, which is developed by Valve and their contractors outside of AMD, is looking quite good not only for quicker shader compilation (more punctual game load times) but also helping the performance of some Vulkan-powered games. Here are our latest ACO benchmarks.

With the surprise code drop of Google developing a new open-source AV1 video decoder as "libgav1", I set out this Saturday to run benchmarks on various systems for seeing how the performance is looking for this CPU-based decoder in relation to the more well known DAV1D decoder...

Coming out of informal discussions from this week's X.Org Developers Conference in Montreal, a "liboutput" library has been proposed as a theoretical new library for helping to bring up Wayland compositors, X11 window managers, and anything else wanting to interface with DRM/KMS kernel interfaces...

We were alerted this morning to a CPU bug resulting in crashes for Intel Geminilake processors. At least Chrome and Firefox are affected but sounds like other software may be affected too, just that Google has enough engineering resources for investigating the issue...

Just one week after the release of Radeon Open Compute 2.8, AMD has now released ROCm 2.9 as the newest feature release for this open-source GPU Linux compute stack for Radeon hardware...

Just one week after the release of Radeon Open Compute 2.8, AMD has now released ROCm 2.9 as the newest feature release for this open-source GPU Linux compute stack for Radeon hardware...

With less than two weeks to go until the Ubuntu 19.10 release, on Friday the experimental ZFS root file-system install support was merged into the Ubuntu desktop "Ubiquity" installer...

With less than two weeks to go until the Ubuntu 19.10 release, on Friday the experimental ZFS root file-system install support was merged into the Ubuntu desktop "Ubiquity" installer...

Intel's open-source crew on Friday released version 19.39.14278 of their compute/OpenCL runtime...

Intel's open-source crew on Friday released version 19.39.14278 of their compute/OpenCL runtime...

While there exists DAV1D as one of the most promising AV1 decoders to date, Google has been developing libgav1 as its own AV1 decoder and focused on Arm-powered Android devices but also x86_64 desktop CPUs as well...

While there exists DAV1D as one of the most promising AV1 decoders to date, Google has been developing libgav1 as its own AV1 decoder and focused on Arm-powered Android devices but also x86_64 desktop CPUs as well...

For the past year "Zink" has been in development as the OpenGL API implemented over Vulkan and done as a Gallium3D driver. That code by Collabora's Erik Faye-Lund will likely be merged to Mesa 19.3 in the coming weeks...

For the past year "Zink" has been in development as the OpenGL API implemented over Vulkan and done as a Gallium3D driver. That code by Collabora's Erik Faye-Lund will likely be merged to Mesa 19.3 in the coming weeks...

Linux 5.4 is already exciting with its many new features and changes but was made even more so on Friday night with the honoring of the latest DRM fixes pull request that includes the "fix" of enabling LRU bulk moves for the AMDGPU DRM driver!..

Linux 5.4 is already exciting with its many new features and changes but was made even more so on Friday night with the honoring of the latest DRM fixes pull request that includes the "fix" of enabling LRU bulk moves for the AMDGPU DRM driver!..

DXVK 1.4.2 is out as another weekly update to this Direct3D 11 over Vulkan translation library used by Wine / Proton for accelerating Windows games on Linux...

DXVK 1.4.2 is out as another weekly update to this Direct3D 11 over Vulkan translation library used by Wine / Proton for accelerating Windows games on Linux...

AMD provided an update on their Linux FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync support at this week's X.Org Developers Conference event in Montreal. There's good news both for HDMI and Wayland Linux users with Radeon graphics...

AMD provided an update on their Linux FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync support at this week's X.Org Developers Conference event in Montreal. There's good news both for HDMI and Wayland Linux users with Radeon graphics...

Complementing the 18-way NVIDIA GPU compute comparison from earlier this week with now having our hands on the RTX 2060/2070/2080 SUPER graphics cards, this round of NVIDIA Linux testing is looking at the Blender 2.80 and LuxCoreRender 2.1/2.2 performance for these popular rendering programs that offer CUDA acceleration.

Complementing the 18-way NVIDIA GPU compute comparison from earlier this week with now having our hands on the RTX 2060/2070/2080 SUPER graphics cards, this round of NVIDIA Linux testing is looking at the Blender 2.80 and LuxCoreRender 2.1/2.2 performance for these popular rendering programs that offer CUDA acceleration.

In addition to Intel announcing their work on the new "IBC" compiler back-end for their OpenGL/Vulkan drivers, the developers working on the Radeon "ACO" in cooperation with Valve were presenting the latest work on their compiler back-end at this week's XDC 2019 event in Canada...

In addition to Intel announcing their work on the new "IBC" compiler back-end for their OpenGL/Vulkan drivers, the developers working on the Radeon "ACO" in cooperation with Valve were presenting the latest work on their compiler back-end at this week's XDC 2019 event in Canada...

The Logitech G15 keyboards and related gaming keyboards from the company are seeing a new open-source driver queued ahead of the Linux 5.5 kernel cycle...

The Logitech G15 keyboards and related gaming keyboards from the company are seeing a new open-source driver queued ahead of the Linux 5.5 kernel cycle...

Following the Spectre mitigations coming to light last year, the late microcode update process for CPUs was serialized. However, this has led to complaints from cloud vendors and other customers with large core count servers where downtime/disruptions need to be minimal. So now the CPU microcode update process is being parallelized again...

Following the Spectre mitigations coming to light last year, the late microcode update process for CPUs was serialized. However, this has led to complaints from cloud vendors and other customers with large core count servers where downtime/disruptions need to be minimal. So now the CPU microcode update process is being parallelized again...

Systemd has begun harvesting the automatic suspend rules from ChromeOS for determining which USB devices support automatic suspend well out-of-the-box on Linux...

Systemd has begun harvesting the automatic suspend rules from ChromeOS for determining which USB devices support automatic suspend well out-of-the-box on Linux...