Phoronix

The Turbostat utility that lives within the Linux kernel source tree for reporting various power/frequency metrics on x86_64 processors saw some late updates merged last weekend for the upcoming Linux 5.3 kernel...

For those excited by the prospects of running Linux on Arm-based laptops, with the upcoming Linux 5.4 kernel will be better mainline support for the Lenovo Yoga C630 laptop...

Landing Thursday within Mesa 19.3 Git but marked for back-porting to the stable 19.1 and 19.2 series is an Intel driver fix to address an issue with KDE's KWin sometimes crashing...

Roman Gushchin of Facebook's Linux kernel engineering team has proposed a new slab memory controller for the Linux kernel...

GNOME Shell and Mutter today saw their v3.33.92 releases as their second and final release candidates ahead of next week's GNOME 3.34 stable release. While usually things are very quiet at this stage, there have been some prominent last minute performance fixes...

The current AMD EPYC 7742 2P benchmarking that is happening at Phoronix is an interesting Linux/BSD operating system performance comparison. That's in the works while so far are some Ubuntu and Clear Linux numbers. Yes, Intel's open-source Clear Linux platform does run fine generally on AMD hardware -- including the new AMD "Rome" processors -- and generally does still run damn fast. Here is a look at Clear Linux on this 128 core / 256 thread server with Clear Linux against Ubuntu 19.04 as well as the upcoming Ubuntu 19.10.

As we approach the end of Q3, Purism has been quiet whether they will make their revised target of shipping the Librem 5 Linux smartphone this quarter after passing their original plan to ship at the start of 2019. Well, Purism has just published an update and they will begin shipping the phones in batches beginning at the end of the month but the quality isn't yet up to scratch...

A Phoronix reader recently pointed out a little known kernel tunable option to adjust the number of I/O polling queues for NVMe solid-state drives that can potentially help improve the performance/latency. Here are some benchmarks from the NVMe poll_queues option...

One interesting nugget of news from this week's Open-Source Firmware Conference is that some Intel firmware binaries pertaining to their Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) will be more liberally licensed under their simpler microcode/firmware license...

The open-source minded PinePhone is sitll on track for shipping in the months ahead and its software side is coming along nicely with the ability to run UBports Ubuntu Touch, Sailfish OS, postmarketOS, KDE Plasma Mobile, and other options...

X.Org Server 1.21's XWayland implementation has added support for the xdg-output-unstable-v1 version 3 protocol to help the likes of KDE and compositors like Sway based on WLROOTS...

Mesa 19.2 fell off the release train and is now likely to be released more towards the end of September rather than the middle of the month or even the end of August as was their original time-table...

Longtime open-source AMD Linux driver developer Christian König on Wednesday sent out a set of patches providing "graceful" page fault handling support for Navi and Vega graphics processors...

You may recall that back in July Intel's Clear Linux team was looking for feedback on Linux developer workflows and other developer preferences. This survey wasn't limited to Clear Linux users and the results are now published which provide for some interesting data points...

Due to the US Labor Day holiday, Valve was slow in updating their monthly figures for their controversial Steam Survey of hardware/software data by polled users. At least for their initial batch of August numbers they are reporting a small increase in the Linux gaming population...

The Software Guard Extensions (SGX) support for the Linux kernel around the memory enclaves continues to be worked on by the open-source Intel team and is now up to their twenty-second revision but it's not clear that this code is ready yet for the upcoming Linux 5.4 cycle...

Intel announced at IFA 2019 in Berlin that their Core i9 9900KS processor will be releasing next month...

Given the recent talk about the Schedutil CPU frequency scaling governor and its future along with CPU frequency scaling behavior in general on AMD Zen 2 processors, here are some benchmarks of the Ryzen 9 3900X when tested with the different Linux "CPUFreq" governor options.

While most games/engines and software in general are moving from OpenGL to Vulkan, NVIDIA is still investing in their OpenGL driver stack and even adding new multi-GPU/SLI functionality to their driver and as part of that introducing new extensions...

While not officially released yet, support for the ASpeed AST2600 is coming to the Linux 5.4 kernel...

Not included as part of our original EPYC 7742 / EPYC 7002 "Rome" Linux benchmarks was the NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB) developed by NASA. While an MPI testing favorite, there were build issues with the older version of NPB packaged by the Phoronix Test Suite. But with recently having updated that test profile against the latest NPB upstream, here are some results for the EPYC 7742 2P, EPYC 7601 2P, and dual Xeon Platinum 8280 benchmark results. Separately, there's also results now for NeatBench 5 with this video editing plug-in test case now part of the Phoronix Test Suite...

Red Hat's David Airlie has been refocusing efforts recently on improving the state of the LLVMpipe driver that implements OpenGL / OpenGL ES on top of CPUs using LLVM. In the past few weeks he's been wiring up more GL4 / GLES 3.1 extensions and this morning the latest achievement is supporting OpenGL compute shaders!..

The Schedutil CPU frequency scaling governor has been around for a few years and has gotten better over time but in our own tests we still find it frequently not being as competitive to the "performance" governor and others. However, in the future Schedutil might become the default and perhaps only governor...

Next year's GNU Compiler Collection 10 (GCC 10) compiler release is doing away with support for IBM's Cell Broadband Engine SPU support...

While atomic mode-setting has been around for several years now and to provide a modern mode-setting interface that can test modes prior to the actual operation and reduce possible flickering during mode-setting events and also being faster, the common xf86-video-modesetting driver has at least temporarily disabled the support by default...

Following the recent hype of Intel's Windows graphics driver introducing integer mode scaling support, their open-source Linux graphics driver is receiving similar treatment with nearest-neighbor integer scaling support...

Go 1.13 was released today as Google's latest update to their language and run-time/toolchain...

Google has officially released Android 10 today, what formerly was known as "Android Q" during development...

As expected after Intel provided Thunderbolt 3 to the USB Promoter Group royalty-free earlier this year, the USB 4.0 "USB4" specification was published today and indeed based on the Thunderbolt protocol specification...

Continuing on from last week's testing that found the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X + ASUS CROSSHAIR VIII HERO WiFi consuming more power on Linux compared to Windows 10, here are some additional metrics after spending a good deal of time over the weekend on further tests...

There has been a lot of talk recently of AMD Ryzen 3000 series processors reportedly not hitting their boost clock frequencies, whether stock coolers are adequate for hitting the boost frequencies, and other concerns around the boost behavior on these new Zen 2 processors. AMD issued a statement today they are rolling out a new BIOS/firmware update to help with boost clock frequency optimizations...

Adding to the growing list of features for Linux 5.4 with its cycle officially kicking off in mid-September is a kernel scheduler optimization designed to improve load balancing on AMD EPYC servers...

Oreboot has been in development for a number of months now and while at first may have sounded like a novelty downstream of Coreboot is now proving its usefulness and taking shape...

The third and likely final development milestone release ahead of this month's Phoronix Test Suite 9.0-Asker release is now available for cross-platform, fully-automated benchmarking...

Systemd 243 finally shipped this morning as the latest major update to this widely used Linux init system...

Even as we approach 2020, many Linux distributions and various desktop programs still isn't fully optimized for today's modern HiDPI screens. Fortunately for users of Ubuntu-based Linux Mint, their next update will further improve its HiDPI support...

UPower is the abstraction layer around batteries and other power devices on Linux. Even with it being years since it was known as DeviceKit-power and seeing many 0.99 updates, the UPower 1.0 release isn't there yet but at least UPower 0.99.11 is now available as their first release since February...

An interesting new addition to FFmpeg's avformat library is ZeroMQ protocol support for enhancing its streaming abilities...

In addition to Mutter seeing today an important last minute performance fix for the NVIDIA proprietary driver, Mutter also saw a long-standing performance optimization finally land for GNOME 3.34 that benefits all hardware/drivers...

It appears Linus Torvalds is spending some time away from his computers this US Labor Day weekend with the Linux 5.3-rc7 kernel test release coming one day late...

Firefox 69.0 is set to be officially released tomorrow but for those eager to upgrade the release binaries have now hit their FTP server...

The increasingly used Godot open-source game engine has been working on porting to Vulkan as part of Godot 4.0. With much of the lower-level and 2D bits in good standing, work on their 3D rendering support with Vulkan has begun...

There isn't any AV1 video decode/encode built into the video engines of today's GPUs, but the DAV1D project CPU-based AV1 decoder is experimenting with offloading some aspects of the process to current generation hardware with OpenGL ES and Vulkan...

For those with extra time on their hands this US Labor Day, the Kodi team behind this open-source HTPC software issued their 18.4 Leia release...

GNOME 3.34 is expected for release next Tuesday while squeezing into Mutter this morning is an important performance fix for those running GNOME on X11 with the NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver...

Based off Friday's Wine 4.15, Wine-Staging 4.15 is now available that has its 800+ existing patches while adding a number of new patches and updating functionality for some of the existing feature patches...

LLVM 9.0 is past due for release but it looks like this compiler stack along with sub-projects like Clang 9.0 could be released in the coming weeks...

Linux 5.4 will be a big kernel on the file-system front as in addition to introducing the new VirtIO-FS and exFAT file-system support, Huawei's EROFS file-system will be graduating from staging...

When looking back over the 270 original news articles on Phoronix during August and our 17 featured Linux hardware reviews / benchmark articles, the majority of the most popular content came down to our continued testing of the AMD Ryzen 3000 series processors and the newly-launched AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors...

Ghidra is the open-source reverse engineering tool published by the US National Security Agency as an alternative to existing decompilers/disassemblers and other reverse engineering utilities. As noted earlier this summer, a Google Summer of Code project has been creating Ghidra plug-ins for helping with firmware reverse engineering...