Phoronix

As part of our end-of-year benchmark comparisons, the latest results are looking at how the GNU Compiler Collection has evolved with the past five years of performance in testing GCC 5 through GCC 9 stable and the latest GCC 10 development compiler from the same system.

While Ubuntu, openSUSE, and numerous other Linux distributions make use of FSTRIM by default for helping with performance and wear-leveling on NVMe/SSD/SD-card storage, Fedora notably has not enabled the support by default but that could change next year in F32...

While Alpine Linux has traditionally been a lightweight Linux distribution focused on use within containerized environments, with yesterday's release of Alpine Linux 3.11 brought GNOME and KDE support for those wanting to use this distribution as a desktop/workstation OS. Curious, I had to give it a try and of course run some general Alpine Linux 3.11 benchmarks up against Clear Linux and Ubuntu 19.10 for seeing how its performance is on bare-metal hardware.

Flatpak 1.6 was released today as the culmination of the Flatpak 1.5 development series...

Systemd got its start in 2010 in providing a better init system and expanded its scope from there. As part of our year-end and end-of-2010s articles, here is a look at the top systemd stories from the past distribution controversies to new features and other highlights...

A Phoronix Premium reader recently inquired about the performance impact of LUKS LVM-based disk encryption that continues to be offered by Ubuntu's Ubiquity installer on new installations and if it's worthwhile. As I've said for many years, it's certainly recommended for production systems -- particularly laptops where there are greater chances of theft -- and the performance impact isn't generally all that bad with modern CPUs and the likes of AES-NI...

Back in October 2018 came the initial patches for providing per-process GPU usage reporting to be exposed to user-space for interesting metrics akin to the top command or other system monitoring utilities but for detailed GPU statistics. In October that interesting work finally saw a revision but went dark after that and didn't make it into the recent Linux 5.5 merge window. Now a new spin of that code has been sent out for review...

Huawei isn't known as much of an upstream contributor to the GNU toolchain and as far as GNU C Library (glibc) commits go prior to Thursday had just authored three patches from a Huawei emailing address. But that count more than doubled thanks to some optimizations they have successfully landed upstream...

Under the continued guidance of Satya Nadella, Microsoft made more interesting open-source / Linux moves in 2019 most notably with allowing exFAT support to be introduced into the mainline Linux kernel and also introducing Windows Subsystem for Linux 2...

While much of the lure to Gentoo Linux is on being a source-based distribution and assembling your system packages from source, some Gentoo developers are toying with the idea of providing some new kernel binary options similar to that of the more conventional binary Linux distributions...

Following last week's release of Chrome 79, the Chrome 80 web browser has been promoted to beta,..

Just in time for those taking advantage of Valve's annual Steam Winter Sale, a new release of the Wine-based Proton software is now available that powers Steam Play for running Windows games generally very well on Linux...

Alpine Linux is a distribution that prides itself on being "small, simple and secure" with being a lightweight distribution built off Musl libc and Busybox and popular for use within containers. But with today's Alpine Linux 3.11 release they are seemingly pursuing desktop Linux support...

The Mesa RADV Vulkan driver paired with the Valve-funded ACO compiler back-end is yielding an incredibly power competitor to AMD's own AMDVLK Vulkan driver that is derived from the source-code of their shared Windows Vulkan driver code-base. Here are some year-end benchmarks looking at the RADV vs. RADV ACO vs. AMDVLK Vulkan driver Linux gaming performance on Ubuntu with several generations of Radeon graphics hardware.

NVIDIA's PhysX SDK physics implementation, which NVIDIA has been providing open-source code drops on, will soon see a 5.0 release...

As expected, Feral Interactive this morning released the complete season of Life Is Strange 2 for Linux and macoS...

Compared to the inaugural Rav1e 0.1 release just over one month ago, Rav1e 0.2 was released on Wednesday with 40~70% better performance depending upon the encode settings...

With 2019 quickly drawing to a close, similar to yesterday's look at the most viewed Radeon Linux/open-source stories from 2010 through 2019, here is a similar look at NVIDIA's open-source/Linux news highlights...

GTK 4.0 isn't expected until autumn 2020 but a lot of work remains for that to happen as the next big update to GNOME's toolkit...

CERN, The European Organization for Nuclear Research that is home to the Large Hadron Collider and much more, has been working on alternatives to Microsoft software and recently some of their recommended options for various tasks / application replacements was published...

While Mesa 19.3 was just released last week, Mesa 19.3.1 is now available rather than on its bi-weekly release cadence in order to avoid the Christmas and New Year's holidays...

Coinciding with the release of Linux Mint 19.3 is the debut of the MintBox3 Linux Mint pre-loaded small form factor desktop computer that is fan-less...

It was just last week that Canonical released Multipass 0.9 as their means of easily spinning up Ubuntu virtual machines across Linux / Windows / macOS. Today Multipass 1.0.0 made the surprisingly fast debut and marks their first stable release...

After recently taking some time off of work, Canonical's Daniel van Vugt has been back on the GNOME bug hunt in the continuing quest of optimizing its performance. This GNOME 3.36 cycle is particularly important considering the upcoming Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release...

New AMD Family 17h (Zen) CPU family microcode was merged today into linux-firmware.git...

In meeting their plans for shipping Linux Mint 19.3 "Tricia" before Christmas, the Xfce / MATE / Cinnamon editions of this updated Linux distribution shipped this morning...

A few weeks back having done Threadripper 3970X Windows vs. Linux benchmarks for seeing how the competing operating systems are performing, following the recent i9-10980XE 11-way Linux distributions tests I loaded up Microsoft Windows 10 Pro November 2019 Update... Here are those benchmarks for those wondering how the Cascadelake-X platform is running in Windows vs. Linux performance.

Excluding the Linux hardware reviews, here is a look back at the most-viewed Radeon Linux/open-source graphics driver news of the 2010s...

NVIDIA announced the new DRIVE AGX Orin last night as their software-defined platform for robots and vehicles. Besides the DRIVE AGX itself, making it very notable is the use of their new Tegra "Orin" SoC...

While it's normally recommended switching to the P-State/CPUFreq "performance" governor for the optimal Linux gaming experience and the preferred default of Feral's GameMode Linux gaming daemon, in the case of Intel integrated graphics you may find better results in using the "powersave" governor...

With the new GNOME GLib 2.63.3 library release is a new "GMemoryMonitor" API for allowing notifications of when an application should attempt to free any non-critical system memory in an effort to help the system cope with memory pressure...

There's still nothing on Solaris past the v11.4 series, but Oracle is ending out 2019 with a last stable release update for the year...

A Kubuntu laptop is launching soon that is aiming for a high-end Linux laptop experience atop the KDE flavor of Ubuntu...

It looks like the FLANG Fortran compiler (also previously referred to as f18) could soon be landing in the LLVM source tree and in time for the LLVM 10.0 branching...

One year and one week since announcing the Deep Learning Reference Stack built atop Intel's open-source technologies like Clear Linux and Kata, the Deep Learning Reference Stack 5.0 was released today...

Canonical is soliciting desktop and server users to participate in a brief survey for helping to focus their work on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and moving forward...

If Purism didn't already have their hands full enough in working on the Librem 5 to make a fully functional Linux smartphone, the company announced today a forthcoming price hike for the device while also announcing their expansion into the server space.....

The latest in our series looking at various Linux performance metrics for end of year 2019 as well as for larger comparisons in ending out the 2010s, the latest is an always fun benchmarking topic... Looking at the course of Intel's Clear Linux performance over the course of the year. Here is a look at the performance of Clear Linux over the span of 2019 for 80 different tests.

Feral Interactive has announced they are releasing the complete season of Life Is Strange 2 for Linux (and macOS) this Thursday...

NetworkManager 1.22 is out today as the last update of this widely-used Linux network manager software for 2019...

More Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) material is queuing ahead of the Linux 5.6 kernel cycle in early 2020...

One of many features not yet in place for Purism's Librem 5 smartphone is working convergence where one can plug-in a display and keyboard/mouse to the phone and have a working system, along the lines of what was originally envisioned by Canonical with Ubuntu Touch. But some progress is being made with at least getting their phone-focused "Phosh" Wayland compositor working on the desktop form factor...

With most all-in-one water cooling setups I am used to seeing no Linux support at all either from the vendor themselves or any third-party/community reverse-engineered support, but in the case of the NZXT Kraken X series with the independent GKraken open-source software is easily the best experience I've had to date in managing water cooling setups from the Linux desktop...

MoltenVK has now caught up against the latest Vulkan upstream specification for the time being in supporting Vulkan translated to Apple's Metal API on macOS and iOS...

While the Raspberry Pi folks have been making thermal/power improvements to the Raspberry Pi 4 firmware, running this budget-friendly ARM single board computer with a heatsink or some form of cooling is certainly recommended if you want to sure it operates at the optimal clock frequencies. A Phoronix reader devised the CooliPi 4B and it's wound up being one of the best Raspberry Pi 4 cooler we have tested to date.

Under the planned time-line for transitioning to a Git workflow for the GNU Compiler Collection that was established back at the GNU Tools cauldron conference, 16 December was to be the cut-off for deciding which Git conversion program to use for translating their massive SVN repository into Git. That puts today as the deadline in order to meet their goal of switching over to Git at the start of 2020, but it looks like it could take several more days to decide their SVN-to-Git approach...

NVIDIA's "VideoProcessingFramework" is an open-source set of C++ libraries that are wrapped around by Python bindings for interacting with their closed-source Video Codec SDK. The function of this framework is to make it easy to exploit GPU-accelerated video encode/decode from Python...

Making Mir's XWayland support much more usable now is initial server-side decoration support in order to handle window resizing and window movements...

Last week AMD launched the Radeon RX 5500 XT graphics card as the sub-$200 Navi 14 graphics card in versions with either 4GB or 8GB of GDDR6 video memory. In our launch-day Radeon RX 5500 XT Linux testing the benchmarks of this budget 7nm graphics card was done using the 4GB review sample, but with Phoronix readers being curious about the 8GB version, I bought the GIGABYTE Radeon RX 5500 XT GV-R55XTOC-8GD for some additional Linux testing. Here are those results.

Well, here is some interesting M+A activity a week ahead of Christmas... Intel just announced they are acquiring AI chipmaker start-up Habana Labs...