Phoronix

With last week's release of Chrome 75 I have now wrapped up some benchmarks seeing how the performance of the updated Google web-browser compares to that of the current Firefox 67 stable release as well as Firefox 68 beta, including with WebRender activated. Here are those latest Linux web browser benchmarks.

The AMDVLK 2019.Q2.5 driver was released this morning as the newest open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems wishing to use this official driver as an alternative to the Mesa RADV driver...

For those running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with the default GNOME Shell desktop experience, the latest stable release update of Mutter now fixes the support for running on high refresh rate (above 60Hz) displays...

Released for E3 week is Vulkan 1.1.111, but it's not particularly exciting...

Continuing on from the story a few days ago about R300 Gallium3D seeing a big performance fix after being regressed in recent years, another potential bonus is in store...

Using the Zstd compression algorithm to compress the Linux kernel image has been brought up again with new patches expected in the coming weeks...

Why not start off your morning with a waffle? Waffle 1.6 was just released as this long-running but recently silent project providing a library that allows deferring OpenGL and windowing system selection until run-time for making software more portable across today's mobile systems and desktops and supporting both X11 and Wayland, among other possible options...

Following KDE's 2017 goals, they are now looking to revise their goals or double-down on their current goals, so they could use your help in determining their road-map moving forward...

With KDE Plasma 5.16 soon to be released, development is heating up for KDE Plasma 5.17. As such, it's been another busy work in KDE development land...

GL_MESA_EGL_sync is a new OpenGL extension for extending EGL's KHR_fence_sync synchronization behavior into the desktop OpenGL space...

While waiting on a flight delay yesterday, I was trawling through GitHub checking out different open-source projects, in this case Vulkan projects, and pleased to see that Chamferwm still exists. For those that missed our earlier coverage of Chamferwm months ago, it's a Vulkan-powered X11 compositor / window manager...

In addition to SUSE continuing to advance the Btrfs file-system, Western Digital has also been working on a big patch series around providing native support for zoned block devices...

A new addition to the LLVM code-base this week is initial support for IBM's MASS vectorization library...

At the end of May I wrote about Intel's Iris Gallium3D driver achieving performance optimizations with new NIR I/O vectorization functionality. The open-source Arm Mali "Panfrost" Gallium3D driver has now wired into this code too for better performance...

Linus Torvalds released Linux 5.2-rc4 about twenty-four hours early due to travel plans. But even with the shortened week, Linux 5.4-rc4 is coming in light...

The Haiku operating system that is the open-source inspiration from BeOS continues with a busy 2019 following their R1 beta towards the end of last year...

Another month brings another update to the KDE Frameworks that complement the functionality provided by the Qt5 tool-kit...

For years most BSDs have supported a "TTY keyboard status request" to display status information at the terminal about the current foreground process and its CPU time consumed among other possible metrics. After being talked about in the past as a possible feature candidate, this functionality is now available in patch form to debate...

For those using Virgl to enjoy Gallium3D-based OpenGL acceleration to guest virtual machines on Linux, the Mesa 19.2 release paired with the latest Virgl renderer library should provide a very significant speed-up...

Version 2.5 of the Radeon Compute Stack (ROCm) was released on Friday as the newest feature release to this open-source HPC / GPU computing stack for AMD graphics hardware...

Those at UBports continuing to independently advance Ubuntu Touch have put out a fresh status update on their work, including the long-awaited Unity 8 and Mir upgrade...

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) that introduced an "AMDGCN" GPU back-end in the compiler with the new GCC9 release is now prepping Vega 20 support in the GCC 10 development code...

On Friday the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) signed off on the plan to upgrade RPM for Fedora 31...

Another weekend, another new FreeBSD test release is now available for evaluation...

Git 2.22 was released today as the newest release of this highly popular distributed revision control system...

For the past months we've been aware of CodeWeavers/Wine developers exploring a possible Vulkan back-end to WineD3D as an alternative to their long-standing approach of taking Direct3D calls and mapping it to OpenGL. This WineD3D Vulkan back-end would be akin to DXVK, VK9, D9VK, and others of ultimately using Vulkan to accelerate an alternative API. While the code has just been started, it appears the upstream Wine developers believe in their approach...

An updated firmware configuration should help some GeForce GTX 1000 "Pascal" users with their limited open-source driver support, but the situation remains a mess. Besides the fact of being binary blobs, it's more complicated this time around with the interfaces changing for what is expected by the Nouveau DRM kernel driver...

With next-generation EPYC processors expected to be released next quarter, it's a good time to see how the performance of the original EPYC 7601 32-core / 64-thread processor's performance has evolved on Linux since its 2017 launch. This article is looking at the performance of an AMD EPYC 7601 Tyan server when running Ubuntu 17.04 as the newest stable Ubuntu release when EPYC was originally introduced in June 2017 compared to the performance when running the new Ubuntu 19.04 as well as jumping ahead to running the in-development Linux 5.2 kernel release. Additionally, the Ubuntu 19.04 + Linux 5.2 kernel configuration when also disabling Spectre mitigations.

The LLVM 9.0 compiler code in development along with the Clang 9.0 C/C++ front-end now have support for the -march=cooperlake target for optimizing the generated code for next-generation Intel Cooper Lake processors...

The Mesa 19.2 Git code as of today now has support in the RADV Vulkan driver for the VK_EXT_sample_locations extension that can be used for potentially enhancing anti-aliasing quality...

With Phoronix having turned 15 years old this week we've been running a special on Phoronix Premium to enjoy the site ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, among other benefits. Here's the last call for those wishing to support our Linux testing operations by going premium at a heavily discounted rate...

SUSE continues to back the Btrfs file-system and as part of that investing in new/improved functionality around this Linux file-system once billed as the competitor to ZFS. This week one of the SUSE developers sent out a set of patches implementing a new "DRW" lock and wiring that into the file-system driver...

Going back to last year we've been watching the progress of an open-source Amlogic video decode driver for the likes of the Amlogic GXBB/GXL/GXM chipsets. That driver has yet to be mainlined but is now up to its ninth round of public review...

The folks maintaining Proton as Valve's flavor of Wine for use by Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux just released Proton 4.2-6...

Earlier this year the LLVM Foundation formally approved making the f18 compiler part of the LLVM project to serve as a modern Fortran compiler for this effort led by NVIDIA, Arm, and others. The F18 compiler leverages modern C++ code and in pretty much all ways superior to the earlier LLVM Fortran compiler effort dubbed Flang...

Arriving yesterday coincidentally on the Phoronix 15th birthday was the beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7..

Back at GDC 2019 Google unveiled Stadia as their cloud gaming service powered by Linux, AMD graphics, and using the Vulkan API. More details were just revealed at their live broadcast event prior to next week's E3 gaming conference in Los Angeles...

With falling memory prices, there's multiple solid-state drives available for around the $30 USD price point that offer 240~256GB capacities. Here are benchmarks of five such drives, four of which are SATA 3.0 SSDs and even one NVMe SSD. There are also comparison points to more premium SSD products.

The newest feature arriving in Mesa 19.2 is the long in development EGL platform device code worked on by Emil Velikov...

Up to now the GNOME desktop has offered mouse accessibility support using the long-standing Mousetweaks program that allows for different actions to take place all from the lone input device for those that may be limited to manipulating only one button or other limitations around this primary input device. But GNOME's Mousetweaks only works with X11 so now Mutter has picked up mouse accessibility support itself that works on both X11 and Wayland sessions...

Last month Clear Linux rolled out new kernel options as bundles for those wanting to run a mainline/vanilla kernel build on this Intel open-source distribution without their extra patches applied as well as other options. Here are some benchmarks of those different kernel flavors available to Clear Linux users...

Ubuntu will begin compressing its kernel image / initramfs using the LZ4 compression scheme to improve the experience around their installer and for cloud/core/classic devices. There is some concern over the performance to which they may do additional tweaking...

The Qt5 tool-kit continues entrenching into new areas for The Qt Company and one of those areas is IoT deployments. With Qt 5.13, a new "QtCoAP" component is being introduced in supporting a protocol designed for the Internet of Things...

Excellent KDE blogger Nate Graham has blogged about the work done over the past roughly two years be he and others on improving the usability and productivity of this Linux desktop. Long story short, a lot of progress has been made by the KDE development community but more work remains...

After ending out 2019 by seeking the successful removal of a package over its name and logo, the Debian Anti-Harassment Team saw initially a busy 2019 but work has leveled out while they are working on making it easier to bring them aware of situations via a web-based form...

The lead developer of the Panfrost open-source graphics driver stack, Alyssa Rosenzweig, has joined open-source consulting firm Collabora to continue work on this Arm Mali reverse-engineering adventure...

With recently seeing a deal on the Intel Core i5 9400F processor, I picked it up for testing as part of our Spectre / Meltdown / Foreshadow / Zombieload testing since it features some hardware mitigations and is otherwise quite similar to the unmitigated Core i5 8400 that I also have in the benchmarking farm. Here are some results when benchmarking the Core i5 8400 and Core i5 9400F with and without the current Linux mitigations for these CPU vulnerabilities.

After sending in an initial batch of AMDGPU DRM driver changes last week to DRM-Next for queuing until the Linux 5.3 merge window next month, a second batch of feature updates were sent in today...

Purism is still promoting their Librem 5 Linux smartphone as coming next quarter despite not seeing any production design yet and the software stack being incomplete. While the software is still under development, they are at least promoting it as booting faster than Android...

Mesa 19.1 is in overtime and today marks the fifth weekly release candidate as the developers try addressing the last two blocker bugs to get out this quarterly feature release...