Phoronix

FreeBSD had a very busy first quarter with a status report out today providing a look at to all of the ongoing development activities for this leading BSD platform...

If you have an external keyboard that features a backlight, particularly on some gaming keyboards, some issues can come up with the current Linux stack if you unplug the keyboard...

We've been quite eager to see what happens around Ubuntu 19.10's ZFS support with their plumbing this out-of-tree file-system into their new desktop installer and a lot of other Ubuntu happenings around ZFS. There is now at least a public TODO list/board outlining some of their ZFS work for the Ubuntu 19.10 Eoan Ermine cycle...

It's not often the National Security Agency (NSA) can be thanked for their contributions to society, but in the case of one of their public open-source projects it's going to be used to help the Coreboot folks in reverse-engineering system firmware...

If you want an easy way to go through the AMD Radeon GPU register descriptions, they are now storing them in a JSON format within Mesa following more than ten thousand lines of code/headers being shifted around today...

This week marks one month since the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 while the community rebuild of RHEL 8.0 in the form of CentOS 8.0 will hopefully be out within a month or so...

Oracle today announced the general availability release of their Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 5 Update 2 that pairs with their RHEL-derived Oracle Linux for offering a Linux 4.14 based kernel with various features on top...

Back in March we wrote about industrial-grade PC manufacturer Logic Supply announcing the Karbon 300 as a compact and rugged Ubuntu/Windows system. Fast forward to last month, Logic Supply sent over the now-shipping Karbon 300 system to put it through our tests at Phoronix. This passively-cooled PC has passed our tests after weeks of benchmarking and is running great.

Mozilla developers working on the Servo browser engine code have begun implementing hardware-accelerated video playback for Linux...

AMD today announced a new licensing deal with Samsung around low-power, high-performance graphics technologies...

The Qt Company has released Qt Design Studio 1.2, the newest version of their commercial-focused software package aimed at both designers and developers for rapidly prototyping user-interfaces...

Three months after the release of Sway 1.0, Sway 1.1 is now available as the next feature update for this i3-inspired and increasingly popular Wayland compositor...

Mesa 19.1 had been aiming to ship before the end of May but blocker bugs once again have dragged out the release cycle. The current plan is to now issue a fifth release candidate this week with hopes of the final release being in store for next week...

Intel's "ICE" Linux kernel driver for supporting their high-end network cards has new features on tap come Linux 5.3 later this summer...

NVIDIA issued the 418.52.10 Linux beta driver this weekend (and version 425.62 for Windows) that offers their latest Vulkan API support...

Usually for a Linux kernel cycle's third weekly release candidate, it tends to be a bit noisy with a fair amount of regressions getting noticed and ultimately addressed. That's really not been the case with Linux 5.2-rc3 that Linus Torvalds noted is a rather calm release...

A Phoronix reader pointed out to us this weekend that Intel support for live migration with their graphics virtualization technology is nearing mainline support...

Vulkan 1.1.110 made it out today as a small update to this graphics/compute API specification and this minor update does bring with it two new extensions...

Canonical's Daniel van Vugt continues doing a lot of interesting performance investigations and optimizations around improving the experience of GNOME not only for Ubuntu but the upstream components. His latest focus has been on NVIDIA enhancements and now for the X.Org session there is a merge request pending to provide for a smoother experience...

Next month will be two years since Mageia 6 shipped while the long Mageia 7 release cycle is just about over with the availability this weekend of the release candidate...

KDE developers were busy as ever as they closed out their work in May on prepping KDE Plasma 5.16 and other improvements to KDE Frameworks and KDE Applications...

With the start of a new month, Valve has published their software/hardware survey numbers for the month prior. For May 2019, the Steam Linux usage did tick-up slightly on a percentage basis...

Most Linux distributions allow unfettered access to dmesg for seeing the kernel log outputs, but seeing as kernel addresses can be dumped to this output and could be exploited by bad actors, Clear Linux is joining the select few Linux distributions so far blocking non-root users from seeing this output mostly used for debugging purposes...

The 5th of June marks 15 years since the start of Phoronix.com and 11 years since the Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 release, so let's celebrate!..

If there's one Arm hardware launch I am looking forward to this year of known products in the pipeline, it would certainly be SolidRun's ClearFog mini-ITX workstation product...

While there is Godot and other 2D game engines out there, nCine has been quietly developed since 2011 as an interesting 2D cross-platform game engine...

As good news considering how much longer it takes to perform a full context switch on Intel CPUs due to various vulnerability mitigations, the Go programming language run-time now has the ability for performing cheaper context switches...

While we've seen a lot of performance optimizations land in GNOME over the past year or two, we're likely to see more optimizations come now that Sysprof integration for GNOME Shell and Mutter has been merged that will allow profiling closely for missed frames and other performance metrics...

The second weekly beta of FreeBSD 11.3 is now available for testing...

This month on Phoronix there were 316 original news articles and 25 featured/multi-page hardware reviews and benchmark articles. There was a lot of interesting happenings this month from the release of Linux 5.1 to the 5.2 kernel cycle then kicking off, MDS / Zombieload as the latest major Intel CPU vulnerability, GCC 9 saw its first stable release, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 was finally christened, and my personal favorite this month was the Intel Open-Source Technology Summit (OSTS) 2019 event...

For the past number of months Linux PC maker System76 has been beginning to work on Coreboot support for their products and over the course of May they addressed more obstacles in order to begin having this open-source firmware implementation work on some of their laptops...

WireGuard lead developer Jason Donenfeld has released a new snapshot of this secure network tunnel software to close out May...

DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has been working on a big VM rework in the name of performance and other kernel improvements recently. Here is a look at how those DragonFlyBSD 5.5-DEVELOPMENT improvements are paying off compared to DragonFlyBSD 5.4 as well as FreeBSD 12 and five Linux distribution releases. With Dillon using an AMD Ryzen Threadripper system, we used that too for this round of BSD vs. Linux performance benchmarks.

The Linux kernel will likely soon see a lot of old ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) subsystem/driver code deprecated and ultimately removed considering there aren't even many (or any in some places) ISDN public data networks...

As I've been saying for weeks now since the initial AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end support was posted and based upon the release cadences for the various projects: AMD's next-gen "Navi" GPU support is likely to come with Linux 5.3 and Mesa 19.2. That's now been further firmed up and does appear AMD will be posting those kernel and Mesa/OpenGL driver changes in early to mid June for meeting those release windows...

AVX-512 is being further extended with future Intel CPUs. LLVM Clang is now the first open-source compiler seeing support for Tiger Lake's VP2INTERSECT instructions...

With hardware these days from Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory to HBM being stacked on chips for specialized use-cases, the Linux kernel has been preparing support for the new EFI Special/Specific Purpose Memory specification for knowing about such specialized memory use-cases it shouldn't be treating as normal RAM...

Christian Hergert of GNOME Builder IDE fame has been working on a round of improvements recently to the Sysprof tool he also leads development on for system profiling in determining the hot functions of a program and related profiling mostly around GNOME components...

Support for Qualcomm's Adreno 540 series display/graphics could potentially be on the table for the Linux 5.3 kernel series. Patches are at least being reviewed for this A540 open-source support...

It's been very fascinating to watch the speed improvements of Intel's SVT-AV1 open-source AV1 video encoder since in February when being made aware of Intel's new SVT video projects. The SVT-AV1 project is ending out May with another step-up in performance for what is already one of the fastest CPU-based AV1 video encoders...

As it's been a while since our last comparison of the two AMD Vulkan drivers for Linux gaming and with getting the Radeon VII situation straightened out here are some fresh benchmarks of the latest AMDVLK and RADV Vulkan drivers when running various Ubuntu gaming benchmarks with Radeon RX Vega 64 and Radeon VII graphics cards.

With no X.Org Server 1.21 release being imminent, Red Hat's Adam Jackson today issued xorg-server 1.20.5 as a very small point release to the existing 1.20 stable series...

For those using the Unity game engine wishing to develop on Linux, the new Unity Editor for Linux is now deemed ready for game development on Ubuntu and CentOS...

Fedora has been using XZ-compressed RPMs for the past decade but with the Fedora 31 release due out later this year they are currently evaluating a switch over to Zstd compression...

Next week will mark 11 years since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 (and 15 years since the start of Phoronix.com) while out today is version 8.8.1 for our open-source, cross-platform automated benchmarking software...

If you have begun disabling Intel Hyper Threading on your systems over security concerns in light of MDS/Zombieload and other vulnerabilities making HT look increasingly unsafe, you may have noticed your system doesn't resume properly after hibernation. Fortunately, a fix is on the way...

Intel's Sapphire Rapids is the Icelake successor not looking to be released until 2021 but thankfully the open-source compiler support is already seeing initial work on enabling the new instruction set extensions...

At the start of May Dell announced an Ubuntu Linux option for their entry-level ~$700 Precision laptop while now they are closing out May by offering up Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on their higher-tier Precision laptop models...

While the Linux 5.2 kernel won't see its debut until July followed by the opening of the Linux 5.3 kernel cycle, the AMD developers sent in today their initial set of staged changes to DRM-Next for queuing their preliminary AMDGPU/AMDKFD driver changes they want to get into this next kernel cycle. There are some notable additions but what we are expecting/hoping for and haven't seen yet is the Navi support...

While Oracle has control of DTrace following their acquisition of Sun Microsystems, it turns out Oracle developers are quite interested in adding eBPF support to the GNU toolchain with GCC support as an alternative to the LLVM-focused path currently relied upon for targeting this in-kernel Linux virtual machine...