Phoronix

Intel's new OpenGL Linux driver, their Gallium3D-based "Iris" implementation that is aiming to be the default before year's end, continues making striking progress...

Debian Project Leader Sam Hartman has shared his August 2019 notes where he outlines the frustrations and issues that have come up as a result of init system diversity with some developers still aiming to viably support systemd alternatives within Debian...

Samba 4.11 is out as the latest big feature update to this SMB/CIFS/AD implementation for offering better Windows interoperability with Linux and other platforms. The changes in Samba 4.11 are aplenty that we are a bit surprised it wasn't called Samba 5.0...

Barely a week since the release of Proton 4.11-4, Valve's stellar Linux crew in cooperation with CodeWeavers have issued Proton 4.11-5 as the latest update to this Wine 4.11 downstream that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

Greg Kroah-Hartman began volleying his Linux 5.4 kernel pull requests today of the subsystems he oversees. The most significant of this morning's pull requests are the staging area changes that include the Microsoft exFAT file-system support...

For those wondering how well FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD are handling AMD's new Ryzen 3000 series desktop processors, here are some benchmarks on a Ryzen 7 3700X with MSI MEG X570 GODLIKE where both of these popular BSD operating systems were working out-of-the-box. For some fun mid-week benchmarking, here are those results of FreeBSD 12.0 and DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 up against openSUSE Tumbleweed and Ubuntu 19.04.

From Rome, Italy this afternoon AMD not only announced more than 100 world records have been broken with their new EPYC "Rome" processors, but there is also a new SKU! Meet the EPYC 7H12...

The Linux 5.4 power management changes have been submitted for this next version of the Linux kernel...

The RADV "ACO" shader compiler announced by Valve back in July for the fastest compilation speeds and best possible code generation may soon be hitting mainline Mesa for the open-source AMD Linux graphics stack...

The Linux 5.4 x86/cpu changes are as busy as always on the Intel side...

Sadly not currently queued as a fix for the Linux 5.4 kernel, re-enabling the LRU bulk moves functionality can be a significant boost for helping with the Radeon graphics driver performance for Linux gaming...

In addition to submitting the FS-VERITY file authentication code for Linux 5.4, Google's Eric Biggers has sent out his big update to the fscrypt file encryption framework for this next kernel revision...

While NVIDIA doesn't contribute much open-source Linux driver code as it concerns their desktop GPUs (though they have been ramping up documentation), when it comes to Tegra/embedded is where they have contributed improvements and new hardware support to Nouveau and associated driver code in the past several years. NVIDIA's open-source Tegra/embedded contributions come as a result of customer demand/requirements. Their latest work is preparing to finally bring-up the "GV11B" Volta graphics found within last year's Tegra Xavier SoC...

In an interesting change of course, the open-source driver support for AMD Radeon Navi 12 and Navi 14 GPUs is being flagged as experimental and hidden behind a feature flag...

Based off AMD's GPUOpen HIP as part of their ROCm stack, researchers at Tampere University in Finland have created HIPCL as leveraging HIP as well as POCL for routing CUDA codes to run on any hardware supporting OpenCL+SPIR-V...

Mozilla announced today they are tightening up the Firefox release cycle even more... Expect to see new Firefox releases monthly...

Last month we provided launch-day benchmarks of the AMD EPYC 7502 and 7742 under Linux in both 1P and 2P configurations for these exciting "Rome" Zen 2 server processors. For your viewing pleasure today is a fresh look at not only the EPYC 7502 and 7742 processors under the latest Linux 5.3 kernel but we've also expanded it to looking at the EPYC 7302 and EPYC 7402 processors as well with those processors recently being sent over by AMD. Under Ubuntu 19.04 with Linux 5.3, these four different AMD EPYC 7002 series SKUs were benchmarked along with some of the older AMD Naples processors and Intel Xeon Gold/Platinum processors for a fresh look at the Linux server performance.

CentOS 8.0 is coming next week as the long-awaited community rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0. But for those currently maintaining CentOS 7 / EL7, CentOS 7.7 is out today...

Fedora 31 beta has released on time! It's not only on-time but it's also coming with many exciting updates...

Earlier this year Canonical announced they would be pulling 32-bit support from Ubuntu ahead of next year's 20.04 LTS. But following public backlash, they stepped back to provide 32-bit support for select packages. Today they announced the 199 32-bit packages that will continue to be supported through Ubuntu 20.04 LTS...

Phoronix Test Suite 9.0 is now available as the latest quarterly feature release to our cross-platform, open-source automated benchmarking framework. With Phoronix Test Suite 9.0 comes a rewritten result viewer to offer more result viewing functionality previously only exposed locally via the command-line or through a Phoromatic Server (or OpenBenchmarking.org when results are uploaded), new offline/enterprise usage improvements, various hardware/software detection enhancements on different platforms, and a variety of other additions.

Microsoft has begun their next open-source expedition by open-sourcing an important piece of MSVC / Visual Studio... STL, their C++ standard library...

Richard M Stallman has resigned as president from the Free Software Foundation and from his Board of Directors post...

Linux 5.4 will sound better. Well, at least provide audio support on more hardware with this next kernel release thanks to the latest batch of open-source sound improvements...

TrueOS changing direction was a disappointment back in 2018 with having done away with their desktop version that had been around for years since formerly being known as PC-BSD. But at least there are a few viable alternatives that continue advancing for a nice out-of-the-box BSD desktop experience like GhostBSD and MidnightBSD...

The ARM SoC platform and driver changes landed on Monday during the first full day of the Linux 5.4 merge window. There is some exciting ARM hardware support improvements for this kernel while doing away with some older platforms...

While Linux 5.4 is bringing a new driver to help SGI systems back to their Origin boxes, this kernel meanwhile dropping support for the SGI Altix that is newer than the some of the Origin systems. SGI Altix being removed from the Linux kernel is the latest in the path for winding down Itanium (IA64) support...

It looks like CentOS 8.0 as the community and cost-free re-spin of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 will finally ship next week...

The Linux 5.4 scheduler changes are fairly exciting on multiple fronts...

While PipeWire may be seeing a lot of investment by Red Hat for improving audio/video streams on Linux, PulseAudio isn't letting up yet as the de facto Linux desktop sound server. Quietly released last week was PulseAudio 13.0 as the newest feature update and their first big update in some fifteen months...

Given the interest last week in how Clear Linux dropped their kernel boot time from 3 seconds to 300 ms, here are some fresh boot time benchmarks of Clear Linux compared to Ubuntu 19.10 on both Intel and AMD hardware...

Vulkan 1.1.123 is the latest weekly update to this high performance graphics API and it's formally introducing two more extensions...

When it comes to ARM-powered workstation boards there hasn't been a whole lot to get excited about with the likes of the Socionext 96Boards Developerbox being quite expensive and not yielding good performance or featureful boards compared to alternative Intel/AMD/POWER workstation/enthusiast boards. One of the more promising ARM workstation boards we have been following is the HoneyComb LX2K (formerly the "ClearFog" board) and it's looking like it could end up being a decent offering in this space...

A kernel patch from CodeWeavers is landing in the Linux 5.4 kernel and will help some 64-bit Windows games run nicely under Wine (and the likes of CrossOver / Valve's Proton) with newer Intel and AMD systems...

Hot off last night's Linux 5.3 release, the GNU folks have this morning released GNU Linux-libre 5.3-gnu as their downstream flavor of the kernel that strips out support for loading proprietary kernel modules and the ability to load binary-only microcode/firmware files, among other steps for aiming at a pure free software kernel...

One of the areas the RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV/AMDVLK Vulkan drivers have had a challenging time promptly support with AMD Navi GPUs has been the NGG (Next-Gen Geometry) functionality but it's slowly getting worked out...

WireGuard sadly isn't slated for the now-open Linux 5.4 merge window, but lead developer Jason Donenfeld has put out a new development snapshot of this open-source secure VPN tunnel...

Linux kernel engineer Eric Biggers of Google has sent in a pull request adding FS-VERITY support to the Linux 5.4 but it remains to be seen if Linus Torvalds is content with pulling the code at this stage...

Of the exciting changes so far for Qt 5.14, one of the big ticket items on the path to Qt 6 is the experimental implementation of Qt's new graphics API independent scenegraph renderer. Rather than being limited to OpenGL, Qt 5.14+ can target Vulkan, Direct3D 11, and even Apple's Metal API for rendering...

One of the early pull requests for the just-opened Linux 5.4 kernel merge window is the hardware monitoring "hwmon" subsystem changes. This time around the notable change is CPU temperature reporting for Ryzen 3000 series processors...

Linus Torvalds just went ahead and released the Linux 5.3 kernel as stable while now opening the Linux 5.4 merge window...

Last month I did some fresh benchmarks of Intel's new open-source OpenGL Linux driver with Mesa 19.2 and those results were looking good as tested with a Core i9 9900K. Since then, more Intel Gallium3D driver improvements have landed for what will become Mesa 19.3 next quarter. In taking another look at their former/current and new OpenGL drivers, here are fresh benchmarks of the latest code using a Core i7 8700K desktop as well as a Core i7 8550U Dell XPS laptop.

The Linux 5.3 kernel is expected to be released as stable today and that will mark the opening of the two-week Linux 5.4 merge window. Here is a look ahead at some of the material expected to make it into this next version of the Linux kernel that will also be the last major stable release of 2019...

KDE's annual Akademy developer conference took place this past week in Milan, Italy. But even with that in-person event the development of the KDE desktop environment didn't let up in landing new improvements...

Currently the Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers have relied upon matching executable names for applying game/application-specific workarounds. But with Vulkan as part of the instance creation information and VkApplicationInfo it's possible to optionally advertise the rendering engine and version in use. The Mesa Vulkan drivers are now making use of that information to allow for more uniform workarounds...

While the Linux kernel is well known for not offering a stable API/ABI, Google and other enterprise Linux distribution vendors tend to aim at providing their own stable ABI for the lifespan of their products. Google engineers talked in Portugal this week at Linux Plumbers Conference 2019 about some of their means to maintaining a stable API/ABI for Android's Linux kernel...

If you are running the likes of the Raptor Blackbird for a POWER open-source desktop and wanting to run Fedora on it, currently you need to use the Fedora "server" CLI installer and from there install the desired packages for a desktop. But moving forward, Fedora is beginning to spin Workstation and Live images for PPC64LE...

One of the steps Intel's open-source developers continue working on for Linux is supporting "execute only memory" that will already work with some of today's processors and serve as another defense for bettering the security of systems particularly in a virtualized environment...

While the upcoming Linux 5.4 kernel cycle is finally bringing a driver for Microsoft exFAT file-system read/write support, it's dated on an old Samsung code drop that has seen little public work over the years. Since queued for staging-next, there has been a big uptick in clean-ups and other activity, but there also exists another alternative out-of-tree exFAT Linux driver...

Borislav Petkov has taken to improve the Linux kernel's memset function with it being an area previously criticzed by Linus Torvalds and other prominent developers...