Phoronix

While we aren't even half-way through the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS development cycle yet, Ubuntu's Trello board provides a look at some of the changes and new features being at least considered for this next Ubuntu long-term support release...

Debian 11 "Bullseye" isn't expected to be released until well into 2021 but out today is the first alpha release of the Debian Installer that will ultimately power that next major Debian GNU/Linux release...

Start looking forward to March when NVIDIA looks to have some sort of open-source driver initiative to announce -- likely contributing more to Nouveau and we're crossing our fingers they will have sorted out the signed firmware situation to unblock those developers from delivering re-clocking support to yield better driver performance...

Purism announced today a Librem 5 USA model of their smartphone that has the same specifications and features of their Librem 5 Linux smartphone but manufactured in the US. That pushes the 720x1440 display, i.MX8M, 3GB RAM, 32GB eMMC, 802.11n device from $699 USD to $1,199 USD. Update: Errr the price was raised now apparently to $1999 USD...

Back at SC19 Intel released a beta of their oneAPI Base Toolkit for software developers to work on performance-optimized, cross-device software. Complementing that initial software beta is now the oneAPI Level 0 Specification...

Since the AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" series launch in August we have continue to be captivated by the raw performance of AMD's Zen 2 server processors across many different workloads as covered now in countless articles. The performance-per-dollar / TCO is also extremely competitive against Intel's Xeon Scalable line-up, but how is the power efficiency of these 7nm EPYC processors? We waited to deliver those numbers until having a retail Rome board for carrying out those tests and now after that and then several weeks of benchmarking, here is an extensive exploration of the AMD EPYC 7002 series power efficiency as well as a look at the peak clock frequencies being achieved in various workloads to also provide some performance-per-clock metrics compared to Naples.

The open-source Haiku operating system project working off inspirations from BeOS continued to be quite active over the past two months in adding various modern features and fixes to their platform...

Even with the holidays fast approaching Mesa developers continue to be quite busy in landing new features ahead of next quarter's Mesa 20.0 release. The Lima Gallium3D driver and Turnip Vulkan driver are the latest benefiting from the Git code...

Peter Hutterer has been preparing libinput 1.15 as the next update to this open-source input handling library used by Linux systems both on X.Org and Wayland...

In addition to the discussion over potentially dropping non-Gallium3D drivers from Mesa or otherwise potentially forking a portion of the code, AMD's Marek Olšák made a separate proposal about renaming the Gallium3D "state tracker" concept to being "API" implementations...

The Flash-Friendly File-System continues to be refined and with the forthcoming Linux 5.5 kernel are more improvements albeit largely bug fixes...

For years there has been work on a Wayland back-end to Ozone, the Google component for abstracting user-interface elements and input/window handling among other tasks across platforms. It looks like in 2020 the Ozone Wayland support will be in good standing and promoted out of beta...

With each new release of Firefox we set out to see how the performance is looking on the Linux desktop. One discovery we've made is that when using Intel's Clear Linux the Firefox performance is a lot more competitive to Google Chrome than we traditionally see on Ubuntu Linux. But with Firefox 71 we're seeing the performance trending lower compared to Firefox 69 and 70...

Mesa 19.3 continues running behind schedule but stands chances for releasing next week if the lingering blocker bugs are closed...

For those looking to spend less than $200 USD on a graphics card, the recently launched NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER offers great value starting at $159 USD and working well with the NVIDIA Linux driver for providing decent 1080p Linux gaming performance as well as OpenCL / CUDA support. Here are benchmarks of the GTX 1650 SUPER alongside a total of 18 lower-end/mid-range AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on Ubuntu Linux.

While missing the original release target of the end of November, The Qt Company is buttoning up Qt 5.14 for debut next week. Today, however, marks the release candidate availability for those wanting to test out this forthcoming Qt5 release prior to more of the development efforts shifting to Qt 6.0...

AMD's GPUOpen team has released their first official update to the open-source Vulkan Memory Allocator project in nearly one year...

Looking to further capitalize upon the popularity of Ubuntu in the cloud, Canonical today announced Ubuntu Pro premium images for Amazon's EC2 cloud...

Longtime open-source AMD graphics driver developer Marek Olšák has kicked off a discussion over the possibility in the not too distant future of either dropping non-Gallium3D drivers from Mesa (and moving them off to a maintenance branch or the like) or forking some of Mesa's existing code to allow it to be better optimized for Gallium3D use-cases. Due to raised concerns, other possibilities are also being expressed like simply moving ahead with optimizing the Mesa code-base for Gallium3D at a cost of potentially hitting dead code more often with the classic drivers...

The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has finally landed SDMA copy support for Vega/GFX9 graphics hardware, which should principally benefit compute shaders and other cases...

With the PowerPC changes for the Linux 5.5 kernel comes the initial infrastructure work on preparing to be able to handle a Secure Boot implementation for POWER9 hardware...

ASPM can be a big boost to help power-savings on Linux laptops and desktops as shown by a prominent kernel regression a number of years ago. However, a number of Linux drivers are forced to disable Active State Power Management (ASPM) due to quirky/buggy hardware where it ends up not being sane to enable that power-saving feature by default. But with the Linux 5.5 kernel is support for toggling ASPM link states via sysfs as an easy-to-perform manner for achieving better power-savings with friendly devices...

Taking place back in September at Google and Facebook facilities was the Open-Source Firmware Conference (OSFC 2019). For those not able to attend, video recordings of those talks are now freely available online...

xf86-video-sis 0.12.0 is available this week as a new version of the SiS display driver for X.Org systems in supporting Silicon Integrated Systems' display hardware...

Following last week's big batch of DRM graphics driver updates for the Linux 5.5 merge window, AMD and the community engaging in Linux 5.5 testing have now sent in their first round of fixes for this next version of the Linux kernel...

The beta release of Linux Mint 19.3 "Tricia" is now available for testing in the default Cinnamon desktop flavor as well as MATE and Xfce spins...

The GNOME developers were particularly busy last month with various improvements to GNOME Shell and Mutter for increasing the usability of the desktop and optimizing its performance / power-savings...

Mir 1.6 is out today with the latest batch of features for this Ubuntu-focused display server that offers Wayland client compatibility...

We weren't too enthusiastic about the performance of Amazon's initial Graviton ARM-based CPU cores offered via their Elastic Compute Cloud, but their next-gen Graviton2 CPUs that are "coming soon" should be much more capable for good ARM Linux performance...

DXVK 1.4.6 is out this morning as the first update in two weeks for this widely-used project allowing Direct3D 10/11 games to run atop Vulkan on Linux systems with Wine/Proton...

Phoronix Test Suite 9.2-Hurdal is available today as the newest quarterly feature release to the Phoronix Test Suite for automated, cross-platform and open-source benchmarking...

AMD today announced the Ryzen V1000 and Ryzen R1000 series embedded processors intended for mini PCs and other small form factor PCs...

Today marks the last Mozilla Firefox feature update of 2019 with the release of Firefox 71.0...

The Panfrost Gallium3D driver that is the open-source OpenGL community-led driver for supporting Arm Mali Midgard/Bifrost architectures now has stable support for the T720 GPU...

OmniOS, the Illumos/OpenSolaris-derived platform focused on delivering an enterprise-quality open-source OS, is out with a new update today...

The kernel livepatching infrastructure that allows applying kernel patches (primarily security fixes) to a running kernel without the need to reboot in order to avoid downtime is seeing a big improvement with Linux 5.5...

The XFS file-system is seeing a large number of changes for the in-development Linux 5.5 kernel...

Imagination today announced the IMG A-Series as their next-generation GPU cores and architecture that deliver 2.5x faster performance for the same area and same power to their current-generation PowerVR graphics processors...

While originally Intel planned to transition their OpenGL driver default to the modern "Iris" Gallium3D driver rather than the longstanding "i965" DRI driver for Mesa 19.3, that was pushed back to Mesa 20.0 for introduction in Q1'2020. In aiming to make that revised milestone a reality, a new option has been added to Mesa 20.0 with the Meson build system for being able to indicate the Intel OpenGL driver preference...

While there has been the Libre RISC-V community-driven effort to create a RISC-V graphics processor that basically amounts to a RISC-V core with vector extensions/improvements and running a Vulkan software implementation (though they are now reportedly eyeing POWER instead of RISC-V), Think Silicon has announced the first actual RISC-V ISA based 3D graphics processor...

For those of you interested in AMD's new Ryzen Threadripper 3960X/3970X processors with TRX40 motherboards for running FreeBSD, the experience in our initial testing has been surprisingly pleasant. In fact, it works out-of-the-box which one could argue is better than the current Linux support that needs the MCE workaround for booting. Here are some benchmarks of FreeBSD 12.1 on the Threadripper 3970X compared to Linux and Windows for this new HEDT platform.

NetBSD 9.0 is around the corner and finally presenting 64-bit Arm (AArch64) support as well as other long overdue hardware support like Intel Kabylake graphics...

While there is the KDE Frameworks that offers a wonderful set of complementary extensions/add-ons to the Qt5 tool-kit, for those looking for more Qt5 extensions, The Qt Company has launched "The Qt Marketplace" as a source for both free and paid extensions...

With the Linux 5.4 cycle we saw mainline support beginning to come together for some Qualcomm ARM Linux laptops while with Linux 5.5 another milestone is being achieved. There has been out-of-tree support in the works for getting the various consumer Snapdragon laptops working with Linux while those changes are slowly getting into the mainline kernel...

With the IOMMU updates for the Linux 5.5 kernel there is a major rework to the AMD IOMMU driver to make use of more common DMA IOMMU code for implementing the DMA API but with an admitted risk of potential new regressions...

With approaching another year closer to the Year 2038 problem, where on 19 January 2038 the number of seconds for the Unix timestamp can no longer be stored in a signed 32-bit integer, Linux 5.5 is bringing more Y2038 preparations...

With the start of a new month always comes the excitement of seeing what Valve's Steam Survey is pointing at for gaming trends as to the percentage of Linux gamers...

While there still is a week to go in the Linux 5.5 merge window with more feature code still landing, due to scheduler changes and other work already having landed, I already started running some Git benchmarks. Linux 5.5 at this stage appears quite volatile with some really nice improvements in some workloads but also regressions in others...

A month ago at the Open-Source Summit Europe 2019 in Lyon, France, Intel's Kelly Hammond who serves as the company's Senior Director of System Platform Software talked up their open-source contributions with a particular emphasis on performance. The video from that keynote was recently published for those curious about Intel's open-source work in the name of performance, including Clear Linux...

It's not often there are features to report on with regard to GNU Debugger (GDB) performance, but a new feature in place is multi-threaded symbol loading...