Phoronix

While it's been ten years now that Wayland has been in development, a majority of the Linux desktops at the end of 2018 are still relying upon the X.Org Server. In 2018 we saw much better Wayland support out of GNOME Shell and KDE Plasma, but many Linux distributions -- including Ubuntu -- haven't transitioned over (or in the case of Ubuntu, back-over) to running a Wayland session. While the xorg-server remains at the heart of most Linux desktops, its development pace remains very slow...

Complementing our initial NVIDIA TITAN RTX Linux benchmarks and follow-up collection of more GPU compute benchmarks on the TITAN RTX compared to other NVIDIA hardware going back to the GeForce GTX 680, here is an expansive collection of side-by-side tests to the RTX 2080 Ti in more workloads...

With the end of the year upon us, the latest project we're looking at the GitStats on and most popular milestones of the year is for systemd...

Early in the year with Linux 4.17 the kernel saw a port to the Andes NDS32 CPU architecture. With Linux 4.21, that CPU architecture is seeing a number of improvements...

With the newly released DragonFlyBSD 5.4.1 having a lot of HAMMER2 file-system work on top of all of the changes introduced by DragonFlyBSD 5.4 at the start of December, here is a fresh look at the HAMMER versus HAMMER2 file-system performance on this BSD operating system...

Jente Hidskes, the developer who last year overhauled the Piper mouse configuration utility as part of libratbag via GSoC 2017, announced that he recently began developing his own Wayland compositor to fill a void...

Earlier this month were the FreeBSD ZFS vs. Linux EXT4/Btrfs RAID With Twenty SSDs. Besides interest in seeing ZOL tests (they're already planned upon the ZFS On Linux 0.8 release), there was also some interest by readers in seeing some XFS RAID tests side-by-side. Here are some of those XFS RAID benchmarks up against Btrfs and EXT4 from Ubuntu Linux...

The Apache NetBeans 10.0 release is now available as the latest release for this integrated development environment under the Apache incubator umbrella...

Mesa 18.2.8 was released today as what is the final planned point release for the Mesa 18.2 series. In order to continue receiving OpenGL/Vulkan open-source driver updates, users are encouraged to transition to Mesa 18.3...

Nearly one year after the Spectre vulnerabilities were first published, Freescale/NXP PowerPC processors are being mitigated against Spectre Variant Two with the in-development Linux 4.21 kernel...

Making the rounds overnight has been word that the folks at Banana Pi are preparing to release a 24-core ARM board. On the surface it's exciting for ARM Linux enthusiasts, but the pricing has yet to be announced and that will largely determine the success of this reported next BPi product...

A few days back I delivered the first of our Windows Server 2019 benchmarks against Linux (as well as FreeBSD). That initial testing was done with a dual socket AMD EPYC server while in this article the tables have turned with using a dual Intel Xeon Scalable server while benchmarking Microsoft Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2019 with its new Windows Subsystem for Linux, Windows Server 2016, and an assortment of Linux distributions including Fedora Server 29, openSUSE Leap 15, Ubuntu 18.10, CentOS 7.6, Debian 9.6, and Intel's own Clear Linux.

Longtime Nouveau contributor Ilia Mirkin has done some holiday hacking on this open-source NVIDIA driver and enabled support for another OpenGL extension in NVC0 Gallium3D...

On a niche hardware note for Linux 4.21, should you be using a ZynqMP DDR controller, there will now be Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) ECC support...

It was another busy year for the GNU with its massive collection of software projects. Of the 124 "GNU" original news articles on Phoronix during 2018, here is a look at the most popular ones...

The platform-drivers-x86 was one of the first pull requests that landed into the now-open Linux 4.21 kernel tree. This area is primarily about various Intel laptop drivers and other x86 (x86_64) hardware bits...

While the WireGuard kernel module still hasn't been mainlined, it is becoming easier to use on other platforms. After some trialing outside of the app store, WireGuard for iOS devices is now available through the Apple App Store...

After looking yesterday at the most popular Intel Linux news of 2018, the tables have turned and this article is looking at the most popular AMD/Radeon news for the year on Phoronix...

The crypto subsystem changes for the Linux 4.21 kernel were sent in this morning and they are quite exciting...

Each year it's been quite fascinating to see the advance of NVIDIA's Tegra-powered Jetson developer boards with their increasing GPU and CPU capabilities. With the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier that began shipping at the start of this quarter (as well as the AGX Xavier Module now shipping as of this month), there is a tremendous performance upgrade compared to the previous-generation Jetson TX2. I have been benchmarking the Jetson AGX Xavier the past number of weeks and continue to be surprised by its performance potential for relatively low power that makes it suitable for robotics and other AI applications. Here is a bulk of the initial benchmarks I've been running on the NVIDIA Jetson AGX with its 512-core Volta GPU and eight ARMv8.2 Carmel CPU cores.

Mesa had another wild year with countless improvements to the multiple vendor OpenGL/Vulkan drivers, continued improvements by Valve and other companies to make these drivers better for Linux gaming, the Meson build system support took shape, new Intel and AMD Radeon graphics support was punctually added, and many other milestones achieved...

On Christmas Eve marked the long-awaited release of the OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 Alpha and with that new version of the Mandrake/Mandriva-derived operating system came an AMD Zen "Znver1" optimized Linux build. Of course that caught my interest and I was quickly downloading this first Linux distribution with an AMD Ryzen/EPYC optimized binaries to see how it compares to its generic x86_64 operating system installation.

Linus Torvalds began honoring pull requests on Christmas for the in-development Linux 4.21 kernel. Among the initial pull requests were the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver updates that for this cycle most notably has the long-awaited FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync support...

This year was interesting for Wayland with the compositor support continuing to mature for both GNOME Shell and KDE Plasma, the smaller but very interesting i3-inspired Sway nearing its 1.0 release, NVIDIA working on EGLStreams support for the KWin compositor, and other advancements. But at the same time the year was unfortunate in that Samsung let go of their Wayland developers as part of their OSG restructuring, which had contributed heavily to the upstream project. Here's a look at Wayland/Weston 2018 by the numbers...

Similar to the XFS changes for Linux 4.21, the EXT4 file-system is just seeing code clean-ups and fixes...

While already in use by Android's version of the Linux kernel, the ARM-developed Energy Aware Scheduling support is set to finally be mainlined for the Linux 4.21 kernel...

With less than one week until the new year, here is a look back at the most popular Intel Linux/open-source news of 2018, among all of our other end-of-year articles...

Mesa 18.2.8 is expected to be released before the week is through as what will likely be the final point release for the 18.2 series now that Mesa 18.3 is stable...

Zchunk is the file format announced earlier this year for delivering good compression while being delta-friendly and based upon Zsync and Casync while compression handling is done by Zstandard...

A few days back we posted initial Linux benchmarks of the NVIDIA TITAN RTX graphics card, the company's newest flagship Titan card shipping as of a few days ago. That initial performance review included a look at the TensorFlow performance and other compute tests along with some Vulkan Linux gaming benchmarks. In this article is a look at a more diverse range of GPU compute benchmarks while testing thirteen NVIDIA graphics cards going back to the GTX 680 Kepler days.

The past few years have been filled with rather big surprises by Microsoft as it pertains to Linux/open-source. During 2015 they began supporting VP9, open-sourcing more of their projects and began embracing LLVM/Clang while in 2016 they bought out Xamarin, launched SQL Server for Linux, and kept on open-sourcing. Last year was very interesting as well with Microsoft joining the OSI, continuing to advance Windows Subsystem for Linux, and doing more about .NET on Linux. But this year was arguably their most surprising year yet...

A month ago there was word that Intel wanted to contribute their Parallel STL implementation for this C++17 functionality to GCC's libstdc++ and LLVM libc++. As a wonderful open-source Christmas present, Intel's Parallel STL implementation saw its initial commit now under the LLVM umbrella...

When AMD Zen CPUs originally rolled out, the ability to monitor the CPU core temperatures under Linux didn't roll out until months later. Fortunately, for Zen 2 the AMD Linux CPU temperature driver looks like it will be ready in time...

As Linus summed it up well when he released Linux 4.20 this weekend, "have a Merry Christmas or other holiday of your choice." 2018 was certainly great for Linux and open-source at large while 2019 should be even more exciting...

The folks behind the Ruby programming language have rolled out their version 2.6.0 release for Christmas. Most notable about Ruby 2.6 is that it brings an experimental JIT compiler...

If you are still running a pre-GCN AMD graphics card and unfortunately didn't find a new graphics card under any Christmas tree this year, AMD's Michel Dänzer does have a present for you with some improvements to the xf86-video-ati driver that continues serving as the common X.Org driver for pre-HD7000 series graphics cards...

The "hwmon" hardware monitoring changes for the Linux 4.21 kernel were sent in this past weekend. There isn't any major changes for the vast majority of users, but there is a lot of smaller happenings...

The MIPS CPU architecture has suddenly become a bit more interesting now that the processor ISA will be open-sourced in 2019. With the in-development Linux 4.21 kernel there are a number of MIPS support changes inbound...

Debootstrap, the tool for bootstrapping a basic Debian system and can be done within a subdirectory of an existing system installation, is now a heck of a lot faster...

While a few months back there was what ended up being a test version of the OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 Alpha, for Christmas this distribution that tracks back to Mandriva/Mandrake is out with their first official alpha release...

The in-development Iris Gallium3D driver that is being developed as Intel's next-gen, open-source OpenGL Linux graphics driver started out with supporting Skylake graphics and newer. But now with the latest Iris driver code, the hardware support has been extended to cover Broadwell graphics...

If you have some downtime during the holidays and looking to setup a Linux HTPC/multimedia system, the first beta of LibreELEC 9.0 is now available as the lightweight Linux distribution built around the Kodi HTPC media playback software that also has picked up Retroplayer gaming support and other recent features...

With CPU microcode updates having become increasingly important over the past year in light of the Spectre vulnerabilities and other security updates, the Linux 4.21 kernel is bringing several improvements to the AMD CPU microcode update handling...

When Microsoft rolled out their Windows 10 October 2018 Update they also released Windows Server 2019. Now over the slower holiday period I am finally getting caught up in benchmarking Windows Server 2019. For this initial benchmark comparison is a look at the Microsoft Windows Server 2019 performance against a handful of Linux distributions as well as FreeBSD 12.0 for seeing how this latest Windows Server performance compares on a dual AMD EPYC 7601 server.

Released at the start of December was DragonFlyBSD 5.4 that brought a number of new features and improvements while now v5.4.1 is available that collected a few weeks worth of fixes...

The FreeBSD project is out with their latest status report spanning from January to September 2018. This report covers the bulk of their project changes this year granted not their very latest Q4 happenings, including the release earlier this month of the long-awaited FreeBSD 12.0...

Just in time for managing and enhancing any holiday photos, Darktable 2.6.0 was released this Christmas Eve as the latest feature release for this leading open-source RAW photography workflow software...

Alexandre Oliva on the behalf of the GNU Linux-libre folks has announced the release of GNU Linux-libre 4.20-gnu as their fresh re-spin of the newly released Linux 4.20 that removes support for loading binary-only modules and disabling driver code that tries to load non-free firmware/microcode...

XFS file-system maintainer Darrick Wong has submitted the latest work for the Linux 4.21 kernel. The XFS changes for Linux 4.21 are overall light and predominantly focused on fixes and other low-level code improvements...

A new open-source tool for helping to debug Wayland protocol messages is now available thanks to Canonical's Mir team...