Phoronix

It was another busy September on Phoronix with 298 original Linux/open-source news articles and 22 featured articles / hardware reviews written by your's truly. There was an interesting combination of both hardware and software happenings over the past month, so here is your convenient recap...

Over a year ago the AMD APU support in the Radeon Open Compute (ROCm) stack was quietly removed and has yet to be re-enabled in the upstream ROCm packages. But should you be wanting to use ROCm for their compute APIs or OpenCL on APUs, unofficial Ubuntu packages are now available to provide this capability...

Ahead of the oneAPI beta expected this quarter, Intel's OSPray ray-tracing engine that is set to be part of the oneAPI rendering tool-kit is embarking on its next major release...

For those that had been interested in GNOME 3.34 for Intel's Clear Linux when running their developer-focused, performance-optimized desktop those packages have now landed...

It's coming one day late due to the last minute entropy/RNG patches to improve the random behavior during boot time (among other late patches), but Linus Torvalds has just tagged Linux 5.4-rc1 as what will be the last major stable kernel release of 2019...

Raspbian 2019-09-26 is out as the latest version of this Debian-based Linux distribution that leads the default OS experience for Raspberry Pi devices...

Following last month's release of Xfce 4.14 that transitioned from GTK2 to GTK3 as its tool-kit, old remnants of GTK2 support are now being nuked...

LuxCoreRender, the open-source physically based renderer for execution on CPUs as well as OpenCL accelerators / GPUs, is out with version 2.2 and now integrates Intel's open-source Open Image Denoise...

With Intel seemingly ramping up work on their open-source OSPray portable ray-tracing engine now that they have pulled it under their oneAPI umbrella as part of a forthcoming rendering tool-kit, I figured it would be the latest interesting candidate for benchmarking of AMD EPYC 7742 vs. Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 performance. In addition, the Embree ray-tracing kernels are also being benchmarked as part of this performance comparison.

Intel in cooperation with Facebook have announced they are releasing a Firmware Support Package (FSP) to allow Xeon Scalable "Skylake-SP" to boot with Coreboot...

Linux 5.4-rc1 didn't end up being released on Sunday night as is tradition but instead there were some last-minute critical patches that landed around the kernel's handling of the random number generator / entropy at boot-time...

Seven years after the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) developers began transitioning their codebase from C to C++, they are now discussing the prospects of adopting C++11 as their allowed C++ standard revision for developing this open-source compiler...

OpenMandriva is one of the few Linux distributions (and arguably the only prominent one) that uses LLVM Clang as its default compiler toolchain over GCC for building its packages and the preferred C/C++ compiler exposed to its users. One of the last hold outs for this Clang'ed Linux distribution has been the kernel build but that is now no longer a blocker...

The virtual GPU/display landscape particularly for having accelerated guest graphics was once non-existent and then suffering for the open-source Linux virtualization stack around QEMU, but that is no longer the case. There are options these days to rival the GPU/display offerings of VirtualBox and VMware albeit to newcomers may not be so clear...

It turns out Linux 5.3 shipped with potentially subpar performance for the allocation of hugepages but that should be rectified in the now open Linux 5.4 cycle for trying to provide a sane default allocation strategy on NUMA boxes...

Wine-Nine-Standalone is the project making it easier to make use of Gallium3D's Direct3D 9 state tracker within Wine. Wine-Nine-Standalone 0.5 is out as the first new release since March for this project making it easier to use the Direct3D 9 Gallium state tracker within Wine...

Joining DXVK 1.4.1 with a new release this weekend is D9VK 0.22 as the similar project achieving faster Direct3D 9 performance over Wine/Proton via translating the API calls to Vulkan...

The Linux 5.4 merge window is set to end today with the release of Linux 5.4-rc1. With the major pull requests in, here is a look at the prominent changes and new features coming with Linux 5.4. As is standard practice, there will be about eight weekly release candidates of Linux 5.4 prior to officially releasing this kernel as stable in late November or potentially early December depending upon how the cycle plays out.

A second batch of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes for the Linux 5.4 kernel have landed...

Intel's SNA "Sandybridge New Acceleration" for 2D acceleration via their deprecated xf86-video-intel X.Org driver has seen some improvements, which is rare these days considering the for this driver that has been in perpetual version 3.0 development for the past six years...

With all of the CPU security bugs over the past two years and heightened concerns about hardware vulnerabilities in general, the upstream Linux kernel has been working to create a formal process for dealing with the disclosure process and addressing said issues within the kernel code...

With Plasma 5.17 releasing soon, developers have begun pushing changes targeted for Plasma 5.18. The KDE Plasma 5.18 release isn't set to arrive until next February but if any of the recent releases are an indication, it should be another exciting and solid release...

While CPU speculative execution has caused a lot of frustrations over the past two years due to the likes of the Spectre vulnerabilities, it turns out CPU speculative execution can be exploited to be a viable source of random entropy for random number generators...

It was just two days ago that Richard Stallman said he would continue as head of the GNU project after last week having resigned as head of the Free Software Foundation (as well as his post at MIT), but this afternoon he reportedly has stepped down from his GNU leadership role...

Given recent updates to the Intel Scalable Video Technology (SVT) open-source video encoders as well as other open-source video encoders/decoders, here is a fresh look at the performance of the AMD EPYC 7742 2P server against the Intel competition with the dual Xeon Platinum 8280...

While yesterday Linus Torvalds was still undecided on whether to pull in the long-revised "LOCKDOWN" kernel patches and wanted to review them patch-by-patch, following that lengthy examination he has decided to indeed land this opt-in restricted functionality for Linux 5.4...

For those running the GNOME Wayland session and having issues with windows not grabbing keyboard input after a child window is closed with Java applications like IntelliJ, Mutter has landed a fix...

Wine 4.17 was released yesterday that merged the DXTn support and other improvements from Wine-Staging. Meanwhile Wine-Staging 4.17 is out today to re-up their game with now more than 850 patches in total against upstream Wine...

Added back during the Linux 5.1 cycle was IO_uring for fast and efficient I/O. This new interface allows for queue rings to be shared between the application and kernel to avoid excess copies and other efficiency improvements over the existing Linux AIO code. With Linux 5.4, IO_uring is in even better shape...

AMD released Radeon Open Compute 2.8 (ROCm 2.8) for ending out September. But to some surprise and sadness, this open-source Radeon GPU compute stack still isn't supporting the Navi GPUs...

RPM 4.15 is officially out this week as the newest version of the RPM Package Manager most often associated with Red Hat / Fedora systems...

Oracle has reaffirmed their "long term commitment to deliver innovation on Oracle Solaris" though it still doesn't look like anything past Solaris 11 will materialize...

Just a friendly reminder in case you wanted to help support our open-source/Linux news coverage, Linux hardware reviews, and benchmarking work...

DXVK lead developer Philip Rebohle has done another weekly update to DXVK for helping weekend gamers have the best Steam Play / Proton experience...

Wine 4.17 has been uncorked for weekend testing as the newest bi-weekly feature development release of this open-source project for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms...

The Linux 5.4 kernel merge window is set to close this weekend and as of writing it's still yet to be decided by Linus Torvalds whether to accept the kernel "lockdown" functionality feature for this release...

In addition to adding Intel Icelake support to the kernel's processor thermal / int340x code, there is an interesting change with the thermal management updates for Linux 5.4 to potentially boost the performance on Intel platforms...

With this week's release of the much anticipated CentOS 8.0 as the community/free rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 as well as the surprise announcement of the bleeding-edge, rolling-release CentOS Stream, we have begun benchmarking these enterprise Linux distribution releases. Up today are our first tests of CentOS 7.7 against CentOS 8.0 and the early CentOS Stream state on Intel Xeon Cascadelake and AMD EPYC Rome servers.

For owners of recent Lenovo laptops that find frequent thermal throttling and ultimately lower performance compared to Windows, the company has formally acknowledged the issue and is working towards addressing the issue...

It has surprisingly taken until the Linux 5.4 kernel in 2019 to potentially have a single unified way for calculating the size of a member of a struct within the kernel: Linux 5.4 is looking at adding a new sizeof_member macro for handling this purpose...

One of the lesser known Vulkan drivers within Mesa is TURNIP but at least this week it's been seeing new activity after a recent lull of activity...

The Ubuntu 19.10 "Eoan Ermine" is now available in beta form with the official release being less than one month away...

ZFS On Linux 0.8.2 is out with fixes in order to provide compatibility with the brand new Linux 5.3 stable kernel while retaining support still going back to the Linux 2.6.32 days...

The engineers maintaining Intel's open-source Scalable Video Technology (SVT) encoders today released SVT-AV1 0.7 as the newest feature update to their speedy AV1 video encoder...

While Richard Stallman resigned as president of the Free Software Foundation last week, he just announced he'll be continuing as head of the GNU Project...

While Windows itself has begun offering Tar and OpenSSH support among other integration improvements for traditional Linux administrators, it's possible to seamlessly integrate Linux commands within the PowerShell thanks to some features of PowerShell intermixed with Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux...

We finally have our hands on NVIDIA's current RTX 20 SUPER graphics card line-up and have been putting the RTX 2060/2070/2080 SUPER cards through their paces under Linux. For the first of our long awaited NVIDIA RTX SUPER Linux benchmarks, first up is a look at the Linux gaming performance under a variety of native OpenGL/Vulkan games as well as Steam Play (DXVK+Proton) titles while testing a total of 26 graphics cards this round on the very latest AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce drivers.

A Steam beta update out today is notable for Linux gamers to avoid possible GPU crashes and corruption of the Steam overlay...

Today marks the release of Rust 1.38 as the latest stable update for this increasingly popular, memory-safe programming language...

VirtIO-FS as a better approach for sharing folders/files with guest VMs is set to debut in Linux 5.4...