Phoronix

When Spectre and Meltdown came to light, there was some frustrations in the BSD community that it took time for them to be briefed and ultimately handling the mitigations for these CPU security vulnerabilities. Fortunately, with the new Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS, also dubbed "Zombieload") vulnerabilities, the key BSDs have seen punctual patches...

Right now the low-end Allwinner ARM SBC boards featuring a SATA port have been running at a measly 36~45MB/s but with changing around a single line of kernel code, that can jump to 120MB/s...

For those wondering how Intel's new Gallium3D-based OpenGL driver is performing relative to various NVIDIA and AMD discrete graphics cards, here are some quick tests of older/lower-end parts...

While formally the X.Org Server aimed to put out a new feature update every six months, in recent years they have been well off that trajectory with not much feature activity going on especially now that GLAMOR / XWayland / xf86-video-modesetting have stabilized and many Linux distributions eyeing Wayland by default. But there is now at least some little bit of interest in what's going into X.Org Server 1.21...

While no flashy features like EXT4's case-insensitive option with Linux 5.2, the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) did see a good amount of fixes and other improvements for this new kernel round...

Red Hat is hiring for their open-source graphics driver team...

Intel is running their once internal-only Open-Source Technology Summit (OSTS) in Washington this week but for a first time they have begun inviting customers and industry stakeholders and others to this annual open-source shindig. We're out here for the very interesting event with Imad Sousou and Raja Koduri talking today and some highly interesting technical talks ahead tomorrow. Here is the initial slew of announcements...

Valve has just released Proton 4.2-4 as their newest downstream of Wine that is used by Steam Play for running Steam Windows games on Linux...

Following today's disclosure of the new MDS vulnerabilities affecting Intel CPUs, a slew of new Linux kernel stable releases have been issued...

We are coming up on the Mesa 19.1 quarterly feature release hopefully by the end of the month while out today is the second release candidate for evaluating this next big update to these OpenGL and Vulkan driver implementations...

Intel just disclosed a new speculative execution side-channel vulnerability in its processors similar to the existing Spectre/L1TF vulnerabilities. This new disclosure is called the Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS)...

NVIDIA released the 430.14 Linux driver today as their first non-beta driver build in this 430 branch...

Longtime Red Hat developer Hans de Goede who has been responsible for many Linux desktop improvements over the years from laptop support fixes to open-source GPU driver fixes to most recently flicker-free boot has a new area of hacking: taking care of the pain points under Wayland...

Merged today to the mainline Clang compiler front-end is the initial C2x language mode support as what will eventually be the successor to the C18 programming language...

Since the release of the GCC 9 stable compiler suite earlier this month we have begun firing up a number of compiler benchmarks for this annual feature update to the GNU Compiler Collection. For your viewing pleasure today is looking at the performance of GCC 8 against GCC 9 compared to LLVM Clang 8 as the latest release of this friendly open-source compiler competition. This GCC 8 vs. GCC 9 vs. Clang 8 C/C++ compiler benchmarking was done on an Intel Core i9 7980XE and AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX high-end desktop/workstation systems.

Intel "Comet Lake" CPUs look like they will be well supported when running on the in-development Linux 5.2 kernel or later...

If you make use of BCache as a Linux block cache so that an SSD cache for a slower HDD, watch out as there is an active corruption bug...

Could 2019 be the year that SYCL really takes off for this single-source C++-based programming model? There's certainly a lot of interesting projects going on around SYCL...

Not only has the Linux 5.2 kernel been exciting on the x86_64 and ARM front, but there is also a fair amount of new IBM POWER architecture updates that landed for this summer 2019 kernel update...

Input subsystem maintainer Dmitry Torokhov sent in his pull request on Monday with various touch controller additions as well as the new GPIO vibrator driver...

Christian Gmeiner, one of the leading contributors to the Etnaviv Gallium3D code for providing open-source OpenGL driver coverage for Vivante graphics IP, has posted a series of patches for "EIR" as a new back-end IR based on NIR and other modern open-source driver graphics compiler back-ends...

Now that Microsoft's Build conference is over where last week they announced Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL), they have now posted a FAQ to address other common questions about this new implementation for running Linux binaries on Windows 10...

Intel's Clear Linux platform is preparing some new alternative kernel options and they are quite interesting from a testing/benchmarking perspective...

The latest monthly update to the KDE Frameworks collection of add-on libraries complementing Qt5 is now available...

Phoronix Test Suite 8.8-Hvaler is now officially available as the newest quarterly feature release to our open-source, fully-automated benchmarking software for Linux / BSD / macOS / Windows systems...

Just two weeks after the corrected DXVK 1.1 re-release debuted and DXVK 1.2 is now available...

Merged today for the Linux 5.2 kernel are the IOMMU changes that contain some interesting Intel additions...

Continuing on from the initial Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 benchmarks last week, now having had more time with this fresh enterprise Linux distribution, here are additional benchmarks on two Intel Xeon servers when benchmarking RHEL 8.0, RHEL 7.6, Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS, and Clear Linux. RHEL 8.0 is certainly delivering much better out-of-the-box performance than its aging predecessor but how can it compete with Ubuntu LTS and Clear Linux?

It's been almost a month since the last Vulkan spec update with Vulkan 1.1.107, which is a long time considering they go through some periods of almost weekly updates, but out today is v1.1.108 and it introduces two new extensions...

It's been a few weeks since AMD developers last updated the public source trees making up their official open-source "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver but out this morning is v2019.Q2.3 as their newest update...

Karol Herbst of Red Hat who has been working for more than the past year on providing OpenCL support in Gallium3D's "Clover" state tracker via SPIR-V so it can easily work with drivers like Nouveau seems to be approaching the finish line...

One of the latest Fedora 31 change proposals is for shipping the very latest MinGW environment and toolchain in this next Fedora Linux release for ensuring a great experience for those building Windows applications on Linux...

Both Intel and AMD laptop hardware are seeing various improvements coming with the in-development Linux 5.2 kernel...

Released this weekend was IWD 0.18 as the latest version of the Intel-developed wireless daemon for Linux systems...

While we have endless passion and fun for Linux (and BSD) benchmarking, with Phoronix Test Suite 8.8 being released there are yet more improvements for our open-source, automated and repeatable benchmarking on Microsoft Windows...

D9VK as a reminder is the open-source project implementing Direct3D 9 over Vulkan for accelerating Windows games running under Wine/Proton on Linux. D9VK today had its second release...

It seems to be the season of open-source Solaris operating system updates... In addition to a new OmniOS LTS release for that Illumos-derived platform, OpenIndiana Hipster has issued its newest quarterly update...

Following their success in stripping out the remaining Python 2 bits, the release candidate of OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 is now available...

It's been a particularly busy start to May for KDE developers...

The Intel Gallium3D OpenGL driver performance is now in good shape for this new open-source Intel Linux GL driver compared to its "classic" Mesa driver, but there are still various other features to be ironed out before this "Iris" driver can become the new default. One of the items now crossed off the list is GPU hang recovery...

While open-source operating system projects derived from the former "OpenSolaris" code now maintained by the Illumos community aren't exactly prolific these days, one of the projects that does continue cranking through and seeing commercial success as well is OmniOS. OmniOS r151030 was released this week in its "Community Edition" flavor with various improvements...

As part of the first week of changes for the Linux 5.2 merge window, a patch series providing some x86 FPU optimizations were merged though there is some concern there could be regressions on older hardware...

At first there was some concern over the practicality and use-cases for this driver, the NULL TTY driver has been merged for the Linux 5.2 kernel as part of the TTY/serial updates...

If you make use of Linux kernel live-patching or even just have CONFIG_LIVEPATCH enabled, when switching to Linux 5.2 and building with GCC 9, the performance may be impacted in select workloads...

The big GDB 8.3 feature release was just announced by Joel Brobecker. This update to the GNU Debugger comes with many improvements and new features for assisting developers...

While many other Linux distributions are still in the process of demoting Python 2 packages out of their main archive / base OS ahead Python 2 being EOL'ed at the start of 2020, OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 has now joined the class of Linux distributions having already succeeded in that tangled effort...

The change in Linux 5.0 that initially broke ZFS On Linux compatibility ends up being pretty nasty for the ZFS encryption performance... A NixOS developer reports that the functions no longer exported by Linux 5.0+ and previously used by ZoL for AVX/AES-NI support end up dropping the ZFS data-set encryption performance to 200MB/s where as pre-5.0 kernels ran around 1.2GB/s...

For those that wait until the first point release before switching over to a new stable series, Linux 5.1.1 is out this morning...

Not only does Intel's Clear Linux distribution offer stellar out of the box performance, but they seem to be making it increasingly user/desktop friendly at this stage. There's been new GUI installer work as well as the launching of their own support forums...

AFS, the Andrew File-System that serves as a distributed file-system and used by the likes of Carnegie Mellon University and has seen ports to different operating systems, can now handle more programs running on top of the file-system like Firefox and GNOME...