Making the rounds this morning is an ASRock forum post about a motherboard accidentally and repeatedly wiping out Linux Software RAID meta-data. A few Phoronix readers have also reported similar issues such as in the forums and Twitter. This appears to stem from an UEFI issue...
In the benchmarks earlier this month looking at the Talos II POWER9 dual 22-core performance its performance was compared to various AMD Threadripper and Intel Core i9 CPUs. They were used as comparison points since all of those CPUs sport four memory channels, including the Sforza POWER9 CPUs, while IBM caters the larger LaGrange/Monza POWER9 modules with eight memory channels as competition to Xeon and EPYC. But for those wondering how the POWER9 Sforza performance compares to Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC processors, here are some benchmarks.
LunarG has shipped the latest version of the Vulkan SDK that pulls in support for the many recently introduced extensions from VK_NV_ray_tracing to VK_EXT_pci_bus_info and VK_EXT_transform_feedback, among other recent vendor extensions. There is also bug fixes and improved validation coverage for this Vulkan SDK...
Following the plan to cancel or significantly delay Fedora 31 to work on extensive tooling of the Linux distribution, there is a separate proposal that was volleyed suggesting Fedora move to an annual release cadence...
Fresh out of the US holiday weekend, the Intel Iris Gallium3D driver that is forming as the company's future OpenGL Linux driver with better performance potential and modern design, saw a number of new code commits...
Red Hat's oVirt virtualization management platform, which is used by Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and an alternative to VMware vSphere, is working on their next feature release as version 4.3...
For the past year the Btrfs file-system in the mainline Linux kernel has supported Zstd as one of its file-system compression options. With the very latest GRUB boot-loader code, it can now deal with your Zstd-compressed Btrfs file-systems...
With the interest coming about today from a RADV tweak after bisecting the Linux 4.20 kernel speed-up for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver with the AMDGPU DRM driver, here are some benchmarks from Linux 4.16 through 4.20 looking at the performance on Polaris and Vega graphics cards...
Here is a look at how the Linux kernel performance has evolved since Linux 4.10, which was released back in February of 2017, up through the current Linux 4.20 development cycle ahead of its debut at the end of December or early January. All of the Linux kernel benchmarks were done on the same venerable Intel Core i7 5960X system.
Phoronix Test Suite 8.4 is now available as the latest quarterly feature update to our cross-platform, open-source and fully-automated benchmarking software for Linux, macOS, Windows, Solaris, and BSD operating systems...
Fresh out of our Radeon Vulkan Driver Benchmarks: AMDVLK 2018.4.2 vs. AMDGPU-PRO 18.40 vs. Mesa 18.2/19.0, RADV driver co-founder Bas Nieuwenhuizen has posted a patch to help further the performance of the Mesa RADV driver...
One of the most passionate topics by readers in the Phoronix Forums is the Rust programming language. For about one year now "RLSL" has been in the works as a Rust-based shading language that can compile into SPIR-V. While initially I held off on writing about it to see if it would be just another small toy project, RLSL has continued maturing and seeing new functionality added in...
While GCC 9 is releasing in early 2019, for those still depending upon last year's GCC 7 compiler series, the GCC 7.4 point release will soon be out...
Built off Friday's release of Wine 3.21, which is the last expected development release ahead of the upcoming code freeze for Wine 4.0, Wine-Staging 3.21 is now available with its hundreds of extra testing/development patches...
Thomas Gleixner on Sunday sent out the second version of the cleaned up patches around lowering the overhead of STIBP "Single Thread Indirect Branch Predictors" and the related IBPB "Indirect Branch Predictor Barrier" for Linux 4.20...
Released this week was AMDVLK 2018.4.2 having been released this past week as the newest open-source AMD Vulkan driver code derived from their official Vulkan driver code-base but with using the AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end over their proprietary shader compiler. For your latest Vulkan benchmark viewing pleasure is a look at this newest AMDVLK release compared to AMDGPU-PRO 18.40 (the same fundamental Vulkan driver but with the closed-source shader compiler) and then the RADV Vulkan drivers in the form of Mesa 18.2 stable and the now in-development Mesa 19.0. These four AMD Radeon Vulkan driver combinations were tested on Fiji, Polaris, and Vega graphics processors.
Just a friendly reminder if you enjoy our original daily open-source/Linux news, benchmarks, and hardware reviews, Monday (26 November) is your last day to participate in our holiday special for snagging a great deal on a annual or life-time subscription to the site that helps support our testing efforts while allowing you to view the site ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits...
Wine founder and lead developer Alexandre Julliard has laid out the release plans around the upcoming Wine 4.0 stable release for delivering a year's worth of improvements for running Windows games/applications on Linux, BSDs, and macOS...
It turns out AMD quietly pushed out a public preview release of their upcoming Radeon Software 18.50 Linux driver (also referred to as AMDGPU-PRO 18.50). The public change-log is light, but there are references to the initial bring-up for next-generation Navi graphics...
Yet more fallout from the Linux 4.20 development kernel is over the newly-added Logitech "high resolution scrolling" functionality that is now being disabled until a better solution is in place...
Released on Thursday was PHP 7.3 RC6 as the last planned pre-release for the upcoming PHP 7.3. Here are some benchmarks looking at the PHP 7.3 performance compared to PHP releases going back to the v5.5 series on a Linux server...
With Feral Interactive's modern Linux game ports that rely upon the Vulkan graphics API for rendering, the company usually lists the Radeon R9 285 as the minimum requirement. That's generally because the R9 285 "Tonga" is the first graphics card officially supported by the AMDGPU kernel driver, which is necessary for RADV Vulkan driver support, but with non-default options it's possible to get AMDGPU+RADV working on GCN 1.0 Southern Islands and GCN 1.1 Sea Islands graphics cards. Here are some benchmarks of that experimental GCN 1.0/1.1 Vulkan support using Feral's newest Linux game port, Total War: Warhammer II, in a 25-way AMD/NVIDIA graphics card comparison for Linux gaming.
With the Linux 4.20 kernel there is the initial display code for NVIDIA's Tegra194 "Xavier" SoC while the next kernel cycle, Linux 4.21, will bring the rest of the display enablement code and enough to light up the HDMI output on the Jetson AGX Xavier...
AMD's Marek Olšák known for his many additions and performance optimizations to RadeonSI and who is leading Mesa development this year with the most commits has been working on some AMDGPU winsys optimizations...
For those doing some US holiday weekend gaming or testing out any new Steam Play games from the Steam Autumn Sale, DXVK 0.93 is out today as the project's latest feature release for mapping Direct3D 10/11 to Vulkan on Linux...
At the start of October, Raptor Computing Systems announced Blackbird as a lower-cost POWER9 motherboard built on a micro-ATX footprint. We now have the firm specs on this motherboard as well as the current pricing as the pre-order window has just opened...
Due to the performance fallout from the introduction of STIBP for cross-hyperthread Spectre Variant Two mitigation in the Linux 4.20 kernel, the stable Linux kernels are reverting those patches after originally being quickly back-ported to those branches. For Linux 4.20, STIBP on by default for all processes remain in place until the revised STIBP code is ready for merging that is still expected to happen before the stable Linux 4.20 debut in about one month's time. Here are some initial benchmarks of those preliminary improvements.
Merged last month for the Linux 4.20 kernel was The Cedrus VPU driver for Allwinner SoCs that was developed by Bootlin. Initially the video format supported with this kernel is MPEG-2, but H.264 and H.265 support is moving closer to mainline too...
Unity Tech recently presented at their Unite LA conference about their 2019 road-map. There is a ton they are planning for both gamers and developers utilizing their cross-platform game engine over the next year...
Released last week was the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ as their latest ARM SBC coming in at the $25 USD price point and their last board release before doing a redesign. I was able to snag a Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ for $25 with availability appearing to be better than some of the past Raspberry Pi releases. Here are some initial benchmarks of the RPi 3 Model A Plus compared to a few other ARM boards.
It's been a busy week in GNOME's Mutter space as in addition to the GPU hot-plugging and DisplayLink improvements, Mutter when running as a Wayland compositor will now behave correctly when setup for non-60Hz display refresh rates...
Following their first DRM-Next feature pull request submitted at the start of November, Intel's Open-Source Technology Center developers have mailed out their second batch of feature changes ahead of the Linux 4.21 kernel cycle...
A set of patches posted today enable support in the upstream open-source Freedreno-aligned MSM DRM driver to support the original Qualcomm Adreno 200 series. That was the first Adreno series offering a programmable function pipeline and clock speeds up to 133MHz...
Now with having more time to test this week's release of Total War: Warhammer II on Linux, here is a large 14-way graphics card comparison of various AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce GPUs. With more time plus an updated version of the pts/tww2 test profile to address a resolution scaling issue, tests are done at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K resolutions as well as providing performance-per-dollar metrics for this latest Vulkan-powered high profile Linux game port.
The Linux stable trees that recently received STIBP "Single Thread Indirect Branch Predictors" after back-porting from Linux 4.20 are seeing the code reverted. This is the change that recently caused major slowdowns in Linux performance for workloads like Python, PHP, Java, code compilation, and other workloads like some games...
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